How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity(joanwestenberg.com) |
How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity(joanwestenberg.com) |
The problem is that it would just be the same few message repeated ad nauseum:
- Treat it all like it's trying to sell you something
- Think for yourself
- Nothing is as simple as it seems
- One person does not represent an entire race/country/group (ie. anecdata is not truth)
etc.
As they say, however, a lie can travel the world twice before the truth has tied its shoe laces.
But that also means it's unprofitable, so why do it?
Which, in itself, is an interesting commentary on Influencers.
For your average city person:
The food you’re offered is sugar + preservatives, the water is either non-existent (Tehran) or poisoned with fracking gas (Flint), almost all local communities have collapsed into extreme versions of themselves, the rich and poor still don’t mingle, men fear women and women want nothing to do with men, there is no upside to having a family or children.
I just spoke at a HBS event in DC last night about robotics and on one side of the room were people starting AI companion services and in the other side people were saying AI was causing the rise of Tradwives. It was like looking at 50 “deer in headlights” when explaining how thoroughly they have already integrated third party algorithmic logic into their decision processes - and are totally unaware of it.
The real world is absurd and getting less coherent with more information available. Humans aren’t biologically equipped for the world we collectively built.
Given that we can't do that, I choose then to continue my hobbies, take more walks, try to declutter my place, improve my health, lose weight, look for comfortable chats with my daughters, wife, friends…
I'm not sure where you see men and women not trusting one another. If I had to guess it would be that you perceive this from things you have seen on the internet?
I find the internet is kind of like that silly cave in "The Empire Strikes Back"—where you find only what you bring with you. Try looking for positive things and people and see if you are not rewarded. (And if you cannot, just drop the internet completely. I have a friend that I think checks online for about 30 minutes in the morning and then he's done for the day.)
what exactly does this even mean?
Unfortunatly for many, HR lives in that "wrong timeframe", so you keep your more sane opinions bottled up.
Short term min/maxing leaves you in a local maximum (the opposite of what you said)
I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).
It starts of with enragment and denailism.
The piece is the polarization.
"Diversify your information" in no way cancels single events and single counter examples.
The idea that ingesting more diversified information will bring back the lives of dead children and delete what people have done and said is ludicrous.
The problem is that a certain kind of "intellectual" does not understand how constantly pivoting or turning to statistical aggregates to avoid the discussion around a single intervention is basically a vector of attack on a system.
To stay sane, one must parse data. Literally attempt to gather data from the government. Literally take notes tracking the incoherence of the media narratives. But then you will find that merely describing reality is enough to trigger certain types of people now into frothing mania.
If you think you are intelligent you MUST realize that social media is going to do importance sampling on the things they find usefull to the business.
The defense against importance sampling is to abandon experiential aggregates entirely and focus on factless truths like incoherent, or single examplars that are enough to prove your point or raise a grievance.
Focus on counter-examples. Focus on definitti style incoherence. Live in the meta.
Uh.... The vast majority of new stories from major outlets ARE manufactured consent.
I thought consent is a synonym of agreement or willingness. If so, what do they mean with "manufactured agreement" exactly?
I don't live in USA and English is not my mother language, so maybe I'm missing some alternative urban definition for this expression?
For example, the left media hypes the democrats and the right media hypes the republicans. You're encouraged to debate which is better, because it doesn't actually change anything. But if there's a candidate that says "corporations have too much power and are using to exploit labour", both sides of the media will attack them.
Because I think at this point ‘both sides ism’ Is easily recognizable as a dead end rhetorical strategy. At best it’s an ignorant position, at worst it’s low effort engagement bait / concern trolling that actively sabotages progress.
For example: the three fifths compromise. Turns out, bad. The correct answer was emancipation all along, and the 'centrist' answer was just bad. Because, well, one of the endpoints was slavery. If you 'halfway' slavery, that's still bad. There's no merits or 'well what about's when it comes to slavery.
That doesn't mean centrists or moderates are wrong - they're often right. But it DOES mean that just taking a middle of the road approach isn't reasonable. You need to actually understand why you're doing that, and why the middle makes the most sense. In some parts of the world, right now, as in right now right now, the 'both sides' argument is pro-genocide. In the past it's been pro-slavery, pro-colonialism, pro-holocaust, whatever. Plenty of really bad stuff.
So, you can't hide behind 'both sides'. You need to justify WHY 'both sides' and why in the middle is best for this particular case.
There’s also the fact that not all positions are equally valid or evidence based. Nuance doesn’t mean treating each position as equally valid, but evaluating each on the evidence. Journalists almost uniformly mistake “both sides” for nuance. There’s nuance in discussions about global warming, but treating “global warming is not man made” as a valid position is not an example of that.
Nuance is definitely something we need more of, but we also need to call a spade a spade more often.
I'm a long time Jon Stewart fan and if I'm being honest, looked at the "other side" as if it was a bunch of retarded people isn't new and predate 2016. No doubt Trump and social media got conservative to embrace condescending and extreme rhetoric and pushed it to another level but let's not pretend they invented anything.
Yes, yes, look for truth beyond labeled groups, but pretending that the "sides" are equal is some utterly moronic "Fair and Balanced" bullshit.
> it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
Many issues really do have a bright dividing line. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are people who are currently fighting against releasing the Epstein files, documents that clearly incriminate pedophilic rape and sex trafficking.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent.
I think the author here doesn't actually understand what manufactured consent is, because believing otherwise demonstrates media illiteracy. Talking about our extreme filter bubbles (community/information homogeneity) in one breath and then denying the pervasiveness of manufactured consent in the next is otherwise a perfect demonstration of Gell-Mann amnesia.
What really smells bad here is the 'stupid and insane' theme - everyone who disagrees with my moderate position is living in stupid-world or lacks sanity is itself an extremist fundamentalist position held by many so-called centrists and institutional bureaucrats whose impartiality is questionable as they are economic beneficiaries of the status quo.
Relatedly, extremist positions arise from extreme conditions - a well-paid experienced factory employee who loses their job due to the corporation outsourcing manufacturing to India will likely adopt an extreme position of opposition to shareholder or venture capital control of corporate decisions, and start advocating for worker control of corporations. Does that make them stupid and insane? Or is that just the spin the shareholders and venture capitalists are trying to put on their reasonable moderate position about sharing wealth and power in a more democratic fashion?
For me, the tragedy of Substack isn’t that it consists of purely unserious people. It’s that fine journalists go there because, with the death of open-web blogging, there’s a feeling that there is no where else to go. And then, once there, they start to pick up all kinds of bad behaviors that both Substack the for-profit corporate owner and its culture of writers and commenters encourage.
That person is almost certainly a grifter. If I was dishonest enough to do it, I would to.
It isn't that difficult if you are reasonably articulate, look reasonably tidy and can upload a 20 minute video once day to get an audience. A lot of these people are simply choosing a "side" and then repeating the talking points.
There are people that make 10-20k a month just reading the news and many of them aren't even good at doing that.
Previously, parasites on society had to compete for resources among themselves. Now they can draw them directly. In other words, the existing system of "checks and balances" has collapsed, and there is no new one yet.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
Manufactured consent is a real thing, with mounting evidence that it's becoming increasingly prevalent. The ownership structures around major news outlets are worrisome and what many considered 'reliable' for years are now showing seriously problematic habits (like genocide erasure - lookin' at you, NYT.)
Liberalism has come under completely valid scrutiny as we've seen fiscal policies implemented by Clinton and Obama blow up in our faces. No, we don't think Reaganomics is anything but a grift, but many of us see the grift in NAFTA and the ACA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley and have begun to question the honesty of centrist liberal economic policies because we are seeing them fail catastrophically.
> The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.
Author is doing something subtle here - without making a defense or interrogation of the statement, they are saying "Not being liberal / centrist is extremism, and thus invalid". I call bullshit.
I have not profited or benefited from my "extreme" leftist views. If anything, I take a risk every time I talk about them out in the open. My comment history is going to be visible to all future employers. Should the government continue it's rightward slide I'll have a target painted on my back that I put there. I don't believe the things I believe because it's convenient, I believe them because in my estimation, we are operating on a set of failed systems and it's important that we fix them because they present a real and present danger.
We have Trump because Biden was utterly incapable of facing the actual problems people are having with the economic prosperity gap. If you don't address the actual hardship in people's lives, you leave the door open for a huckster to make those promises for you. Most will take the unreliable promise of a better tomorrow over being lied to about whether they even have a problem. You don't need a PhD in economics to know that whatever the GDP might be you're still broke and you can't afford to feed your kids.
There is almost no diversity of thought here, simply due to the algorithm. The basis of acceptance is agreeing with the main ideology here.
When the algorithm of the platform is to banish those who disagree, tribal unity is the outcome.
The algorithm doesn't allow disagreement. The algorithm is wrong and part of the algorithm is to disallow commenting on the algorithm.
Where's the lie in that? Hasn't this lady read her Gramsci? Seems like she didn't.
> Tech writer (Wired, TIME, TNW), angel investor, CMO
I see now, for sure she hasn't read her Gramsci.
Mainstream media and social media polarize the fuck out of us and make everything so fucking toxic and tribal. Snap out of it!
We are all just people trying to make our way in this world with imperfect information and no instruction manual.
If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
It does not mean "both sides have a point".
It does not mean "both sides" are equally bad.
It does not even mean that there are necessarily two sides.
The term "centrist" is used to imply and reinforce these misconceptions, encouraging people toward extremes. When you see things in black and white, of course everything is a straight line from good to evil (with you at the far end of good), so if someone only partially agrees with you, they're in the "center" and that much closer to Hitler than you. It's hard to step outside of this fantasy. But I'll try to help you.
Imagine the following dialogue.
A: "Are you Hindu or Muslim?"
B: "Neither. I'm an atheist."
A: "Oh, so you are torn between Vishnu and Muhammad."
And yes, one of the political parties is significantly more deranged than the other right now. You don't need to be extreme to see that and it is possible to vote for the more reasonable party without drinking their kool-aid.
The problem is believing the other party has an alternative. The problem is belief in the other. Who we believe the other is.
The other isn't anyone who doesn't have power over you. The problem is believing people who say someone who doesn't have power over you is the other.
There is only the powerless and the powerful.
Across high schools in the US kids aren’t dating like they used to and are vocal about not just ambivalence but hostility toward having kids.
Oddly enough my kids want to get married and have kids and report on how it’s odd to them others positions, so if anything I’m biased the other direction from exposure.
I don’t care either way, not having kids is a valid approach, but it’s a fact that there’s going to be societal impacts.
If the global maximum is 10, minimum is 1, you could easily end up in a region with local maximum 2, minimum 1.
Both are significantly different but still fail to provide the most basic service: access to clean water
I can trivially get access to plenty of clean drinking water in most “wild” places in the world, in fact that’s like the third core thing you learn in survival schools (of which I’ve attended many).
The reader should deduce that any measure along the same linear map - which is effectively every city aka the “average city” - will eventually be subject to this condition (water insecurity)
You can trivially verify this by looking at issues of water insecurity and water quality issues across every size city. Notice that you will have non-trivial numbers of “boil water” events in the United States south. You may have significant periods of drought throughout your average city in sub-Saharan Africa, Sonoran desert or western China for example.
I think maybe your definition of “average” only includes modern metropolitan areas and not simply as cities where people are geographically clustering across the globe.
I lived in San Angelo Texas in 2009 and I did not have potable water in my home. I had to go to Walmart and fill 5 gallon jugs of Culligan water every few days. That’s not particularly abnormal
To be fair I offered a fairly complex/compressed way to approach this, so not easily interpreted, but nonetheless that’s the point
You can be against the Epstein files being released for numerous reasons that don't require supporting child abuse.
Here's an example:
"The files are likely inaccurate or manipulated and likely to be used for character assassination. I see numerous people on the left and right wings of the political spectrum accusing the other side of manipulating them."
That does not in any way support child abuse.
> If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
I'm unsure what you mean. This is a very emotional statement with little actual substance. If you're claiming that only Republicans participated in Epstein's child abuse ring, that doesn't seem to be true at all.
> Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Nobody is objectively a piece of shit, nor is an opinion objectively wrong. Opposing the release of the Epstein files is not objectively or obviously wrong. What "hivemind" are you talking about? A large number of Americans hate Trump.
> Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
This is a very angry, very Redditesque comment that is more emotional than it is logical.
Even when faced with villiany beyond belief, you cannot find the strength to condemn. Do you need see the poetic level of pathetic-ness in that?
You're allowed to just say 'these people suck'. Doing so doesn't make you anti-intellectual. You don't have to do backflips and contort your soul in unimaginable ways to defend people who do not deserve it.
> What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
Kind of, I'm saying their perspective is either not genuine or does not matter.
Right, again, when people are defending actual pedophiles, we have to take a step back.
Why are they doing it? It's probably not genuine. It's for political reasons. They probably know, deep down, that this is bad. They do. But they ignore their true feelings and argue the opposite, because they want to win in some political sense. They are cowards to their own beliefs.
Also, I never said objectively. I said obviously.
You can argue diddling kids is not objectively bad. Whatever. But it's certainly obviously bad, at least to the human beings I have met.
All are rational arguments
First off, there's nothing new about interviewing people who are in their early 20s and hearing moaning and groaning about how this world sucks and it's not worth bringing anyone into it. I'm not religious whatsoever, but there's something deeply spiritual about the human experience of family/kids. It's certainly not for everyone if you're mature enough to understand the downsides and decide not to--but the secondary point I want to make is that I think most people are naive/immature. They follow trends and take a lot of direction from social media. The endless short term dopamine hits from every corner of your life will definitely have anybody questioning -- "why would i make my life harder when i can live only for myself and continue tiktoking in the evenings for 3 hours" -- our society is fundamentally broken, and that's not just the USA. I've traveled to other places and have bumped into the social media zombies everywhere.
What exactly is wrong ("moaning and groaning", something that you "grew up" from), in your estimation, about that perspective?
> realized family is extremely meaningful
I believe that many people with the aforementioned perspective would agree with you, but would add that reducing further suffering is an overriding priority.
Saying that both sides are peddling absolute bollocks is not, in any way, a claim that we'd be better off with some sort of average of the two. Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
That DOES NOT mean that both sides can't do X or Y, or that moderates are wrong. What it means is there is a particular kind of person who will hide behind middle-road nothing burger perspectives, because they intuitively believe middle of the road must be reasonable.
It's not guaranteed to be reasonable. That's the fallacy. I didn't say YOU did the fallacy, I'm just explaining what 'both sides ism' is.
Now, on to you, specifically:
> Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
This is a nothing burger perspective. It's not interesting, or thoughtful, or intellectual, and it's barely worth the bits it's encoded in.
Yes, politicians lie. And? So what? That doesn't tell anyone anything about, well, anything.
Also, when certain politicians are lying about certain things and you say 'well everyone lies!' - you are making it worse.
You can bet your fucking ass that the reason people like Trump are able to railroad your constitutional rights is because there's droves of useful idiots who will say 'well democrats do the same thing!'
Okay? But they're not doing it right now, right? And that little tidbit doesn't magically make everything okay, right? So what have we achieved? In our quest to find the right answer, we've just justified and defended behavior that we know is bad for us. That's just self destruction.
1) The fallacy that averaging two wrong answers will somehow magically give you the correct answer.
2) The fallacy that the opposite of a wrong answer must be correct.
People who point out that partisans are committing the second fallacy are routinely accused (as you are doing here) of committing the first. This is a weaponized strategy which (somewhat ironically) employed by "both sides".
It is quite possible for A to be wrong, the "political opposite" of A to be wrong, and their "political average" to also be wrong. The correct answer, if any is to be found, may well be hiding outside of the framing that "both sides" have agreed to use. But anyone trying to point this out will be accused (again, by "both sides") of engaging in "both side ism" because it threatens their shared hegemony.
It's a stupid rhetorical trick, and adding more faux anger and swear words to your response isn't going to make me fall for it.
Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.
"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"
Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.
I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."
Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.
And they asserted that they were totally right the entire time. That's how. And the sheep kept on following them.
Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...
Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.
Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.
All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.
And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.
And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity.
I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.
The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.
I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.
Like religion
quite ironic, given that we're talking about cognitive dissonance amongst other things
> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.
I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.
On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.
And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?
Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.
Diversify your sources is a good start but without algos are a gravity well of sorts too - it pulls you into echo chambers - that are stronger than manual attempts to select diversity
I'm not 100% convinced every influencer _feels_ trapped in a world of their own making - but it's correct that truth this day is suffering a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
> The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true.
Here's a story. I'd guess there's at least a few HN folk with a similar tale.
I'm not a real believer in cryptocurrency, in its current popular form at least. Actual value would be delivered by fast transaction rates at (very) high speed, high assurance, and some kind of oversight or ability to reverse transactions (you can choose your cutoff anywhere from "convicted criminal behavior" to "I disputed a transaction on my Visa/Mastercard just because I could" but ultimately society and the law needs to be an effective backstop of the system). Yet I was introduced to the bitcoin paper sometime near its release by a PhD officemate, and was a specialist in high performance and GPU computing at the time, and resolved to go home and spend a few hours mining a coin, but instead I just chilled out when I got home. I could literally have hundreds of coins right now (or equivalent cash). For years I could have chosen to join the bandwagen, but resolved not to. Currently my parents are profiting - go figure.
So yeah the world offers some interesting trades from time to time!
In any case I found the article meaningful. I'm glad I live outside the US and its current polarization, but I feel we have the same problem growing here. Hopefully we all learn to deal with it and sort out our differences.
1) Always listen to your rational adversary, repeat their arguments back to them to their satisfaction rather than in caricature.
2) List facts; states of affairs that are not in dispute. Adduce no fact in isolation.
3) Form the strongest version of your rational counterparts' argument.
4) Apply reason faithfully to analyze.
5) Lather rinse repeat.
It seems the above is the best humans have every been able to do, it is child's play that we somehow forgot, maybe because we labelled it as something obscure like "the scientific method" or "legal process". I think this is as simple as "follow your nose".
what kind of world is this author living in where their social circle includes so many influencers that are cashing in on social media?
You also might be putting too fine a point on "influencer". A relative of mine on Facebook might be a kind of "influencer"—at least with regard to his small cadre of family and friends that follow him.
Perhaps, but many are. They just don't have much reach or don't use a digital platform.
they either get elected or appointment to the government
Exactly, and if people deem you to be insane, you cannot do anything about that. They will find reasons for why what you are saying is out of your insanity. There is a great movie about a woman being held against her own will at the locked up psychiatric ward and it explores this.
I thought people might argue that this could put an unfair burden on poor families or fixed income families, or maybe some reason to justify or not.
Nope. Lots of name calling, trying to dox me, ad hominem attacks on everyone from multiple sides.
I'm convinced that anonymity (or, more correctly, perceived anonymity) makes some people act in ways they never would face to face.
Eh this probably makes me a "Boomer" but I've seen it for years. Basically everyone's a troll now.
Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway. Just take a look at how the story around the Epstein files changes with the way the wind blows. It feels very familiar to the "Narcissist's Prayer."
This summer I started to write my thoughts an observations. Maybe you will find it helpful.
https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/the-middle-path-a-m...
The big Problem, is that one side has slid heavily into authoritarianism, and the other side is completely ill-equipped to fight it.
On any particular issue, the right will say whatever gets them more Power, and the left will bring out some sort of philosophy professor to try and pick apart the nuances of the conversation.
https://youtu.be/fuFlMtZmvY0?si=Jwtky2w0j41u4zLP
It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions.
Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative
The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes.
Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.
This is what faith used to provide. I say this as a not religious person: Maybe societies really need something like religion to channel irrationality?
We need something new.
Again, this come from someone without a religious affiliation.
The Nash equilibrium of public discourse on social media is extremism and polarization ...
... because for each individual, the way to get more clicks and influence is by becoming more extreme and polarizing.
Sigh.
But what’s polarized me isnt that. It’s just reading regular news and caring about the world.
Turtles all the way down.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
Plenty of timecube style ones, however.
This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.
The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.
Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.
This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?
Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?
What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?
To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.
My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.
Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.
Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.
I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?
If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205&ver...
You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.
Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.
But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).
Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:
“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”
Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.
Word of the Lord is basically sick fucking shit.
I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.
There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors
I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood
They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)
The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.
Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.
The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.
In actual tests, non-algorithmic feeds become similarly extremist: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-p...
Very different for your psyche in my experience.
Let me leave a comment on hacker news (both news and social media) that I don't consume news or social media.
Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.
And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.
There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.
People with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies should not be given a safe space.
We should make everyone who disagrees with baxuz where name tags on their chest in the real world too. So we can know who they are.
We can even put the names on a bright yellow six sided star. That way everyone can see them clearly.
It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.
> A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.
Glad others are noticing this, it deserves more attention than it gets and everyone should be aware it's happening.
I'm not really in the loop, and I think I do a decent job of avoiding echo chambers.
Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.
I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.
I'm not talking about hot topics either.
I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.
It mainly "too much time of political social media". You can always tell.
What you find is that a lot of people will be repeating talking points and/or catch phrases without putting much thought into it. A lot of this is fed to them by people who are essentially evangelists and many of these people I am convinced are given they talking points, because they all say the same thing at roughly the same time.
> Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway
They can do that if they are getting a decent turnover of new viewers. That doesn't work too well when their fanbase is declining.
If you look into the UFO land which is the worst for this and the most obvious because often the claims are ridiculous. What often happens is that someone will be outright exposed for being a fraud e.g. someone proves that a video was fake. They will then disappear for a few months or maybe a few years. During that time, many more new people would have filtered into the community and many won't look into that person's background.
Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.
Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.
> The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed
If you measure returns by others' approval, then you are doomed as the world is fickle. Unfortunately, as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others.
The alternative is to sculpt a framework or scorecard largely independent of what others think - but this is hard, as we are social creatures.
and sometimes the disapproval of others, as we've seen with the sort of rage-baiting headlines many blogs, social media accounts, and even traditional media outlets, are writing
and the thing is... this approval/disapproval reaction isn't elicited to necessarily build coalitions, make friends, or change minds, it's often built to sell eyes-on-ads which is a completely perverse incentive that has eaten the mainstream internet
Grifting (which is what is often seen on social media platforms by many of the personalities) can give you large rewards quickly however you are always at risk at being found out. Once they are exposed, it is often usually over for them.
I really really want to believe it. You get to feel happy about humanity, smarter than all the hysterical people, etc,
It took so so so much evil from the Republicans to convince me that they are Not a reasonable side, do Not warrant any consideration, and that people who follow them Are morally corrupt.
How the hell can you even get a balanced view in terms of news/media you consume when one side is dominated by lunatics and bad actors.
Don't listen to Democrat party propaganda either of course, but there's much less of that and it's slightly more aligned with reality.
Also, there isn't one source that can represent the "conservative" viewpoint because there isn't one conservative viewpoint. There are many factions within the Republican party with sometimes shockingly different points of view. Just like the Democratic party representing the "liberal" agenda.
I could just as easily ask, where is the one source I go to get an understanding of the liberal agenda? (Just a rhetorical question, I actually don't follow the news and don't plan to.)
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it"
Can you put them into sentences, or give some context? How are they interpreted differently by different people?
The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?
Ecclesiastes 6:11
---
“We, and I personally, believe very strongly that more information is better, even if it’s wrong. Let’s start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer.”
Eric SchmidtMy guess is Alex Jones is actually a big enough personality to be able to have a brand independent of his ideas. Not every creator has that luxury.
The entire "media intended for voluntary casual consumption" industry is rife with these sorts of "gotta keep doing what you're known for" traps. Pretty much every industry with minimal product differentiation is like this to varying extents. Sorry my examples weren't completely devoid of exceptions <eyeroll>.
Anyway, two can play this stupid game. Why is it such a problem that I'm alleging this content is basically scratching the same itch in the same way as tabloids but for different demographics? Why do you feel the need to make this out to be an attack on everyone rather than a narrowly targeted "the world do be the way it is" criticism?
For everything else, sorry, I really don't know what you are saying, but your kind of righteous anger at the author is something I can certainly respect even if I am not quite sure what context you are coming from here. "Media intended for voluntary casual consumption" seems to be a pretty wide net.. what are you trying distinguish with that phrase? Media whose consumption is compulsory and not casual.. Maybe like educational/job training videos I guess? Instructional manuals? Also, what is the author here known for, that they have to keep doing? Really trying to parse here, is it maybe just "being intellectual"?
Small aside, but it's easier to talk to my cat recently then to try and use any form of prose to communicate something successfully on HN. The breakdown of communication is almost surreal these days and I don't even know what to point to. Threads get like 3 levels deep and it just becomes a mess! While never perfect, this used to be such a great place for deep discussion, whats changing?
The quality I value in myself (and others when I find it) is a bias to doubt evidence of things I already believe, and to accept proof of things I do not believe. The bias isn't strong (that way lies madness!), but it makes your mental model of the world stronger. It's also a much better filter than "intelligent", "polite" or "articulate", which are all orthogonal to the kind of rational, open skepticism I advocate. The big downside is that such qualities are subtle and hard to judge. Tribal affiliation is, for all its faults, easy to measure.
Another point of optimism: being a persecuted (or neglected) minority can have some positive effects, if you can find your people.
We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
Normally I customize this a bit based on exactly where my audience is coming from, and sometimes what question was asked. For HN I guess I'll assume someone who is aware of the pop-culture version of Christianity (which honestly describes a lot of people who went to church as a kid), not an active Christian, dabbling a bit in philosophy, and capable of understanding big words.
(Technically, "The Bible" is plural meaning many books. But in English we usually treat it as a single book despite using "the book of X" for its componentse)
The Bible is not a novel, and it is a grave mistake to try to read it like one. The Bible is also not a textbook, though that's closer.
If we treat it as a philosophy book, I'd say the core theme would be "What is sin, what does that imply, and what can we do about it?", though this is often implicit, and much of the book is in the form of negative answers. I expect that if a reader doesn't ultimately "get" the mindset behind this question, the Bible will never make sense, never see it as anything more than arbitrary rules interspersed with random supernatural events. Yet, I also don't think approaching the Bible from this big-picture perspective is particularly useful - certainly, many people who read it are not into philosophy (as we now mean the word) at all.
Rather, the Bible is food. You need to eat it regularly or you'll starve, and you need to give it time to digest or you will expel it without it taking effect. Like food, you should have a variety; some parts are not meant to be taken alone, while a few favorite superfoods you could in fact survive on if you had to. Some parts are low-density and some are high-density.
=====
The "Sermon on the Mount" in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew is some of the highest-density content in the Bible, and (orthogonally) is designed for immediate practical use. It's even possible to spend a whole week studying a single verse for some of it (and ~3 verses per week for the rest), though I do not recommend this for newcomers. Even if you are missing 99% of the point and have no idea what you are doing, you can still get something out of these chapters if you're taking them at a rate of one chapter per week.
A rate of one chapter per week is sustainable throughout the gospels and several other frequently-read books; for some other books, maybe 5 chapters per week is appropriate. Note however that chapter size varies quite a bit (~15 and ~50 are common) and chapters are not in the original (so if you're doing this alone, feel free to split or merge chapters even if the density is right, and consider verses from the adjacent chapters for context). For the "per week", at least in the high-density parts, I suggest reading the whole thing one day, then on later days focusing on a few verses that jumped out at you, and keep them in your thoughts as you go out for your daily life.
From Matthew 8 onward, the content density isn't as extreme but it's still pretty high, and by now you're starting to get your feet under you.
For a first read, I actually recommend finishing Matthew without ever going back to the first 4 chapters (not that you can't, I just don't have a good place for them), then reading Luke (which includes an even more extended start than Matthew has), Acts (the explicit sequel to Luke), and John (the gospel according to, not the epistles of) in that order. At one chapter per week, this will take about 2 years (note that part of the reason for this order is because some people might not think they want to commit to that). After this, start poking around well-known books or parts thereof (see below), then come back to do Mark. After this it's open season. At some point, learn to use margin references to discover new chapters to study.
As a rule, in any given year, you should spend half your time in the gospels (which is common but sloppy shorthand for "the gospel according to {Matthew,Mark,Luke,John}"; strictly speaking "gospel" refers to "this is Jesus, the accessible and reliable solution for sin"), though not necessarily going chapter-by-chapter like the first time. When you eventually start reading the more difficult or low-density-food books, I suggest alternating on a more frequent basis, like every other week. Or, quite possibly if you're still here, you might be doing two independent study lines the same week - perhaps one assigned for a group, the other chosen by you personally.
Some good books to consider reading, but only after Acts (and in my plan also John) include: Ruth, Jonah, the first half of Daniel, any of the short epistles (some specifically suggest James). There are also many scattered famous chapters in other books but I keep failing to make a list thereof. You will usually find references to these in the margin so don't be afraid to follow them (I'd suggest gradually ramping up how often you do this as you go through your second or third gospel), just don't get distracted from going through the gospels until you've finished them all at least once. Hebrews 11, however, is remembered for being a chapter that many of the margin references are made from.
Note that the Bible is in part sorted by similarity. As a result, it is often a bad idea to go from one book to the adjacent books. This is particularly notable for Kings/Chronicles (two retellings of the same events) and several of Paul's epistles (same advice written to different people), but also applies within the Psalms (and Proverbs/Ecclesiastes, but they're shorter).
Some books that can be a bit of a slog, and/or with little food content in parts, yet are somewhat reliant on sequencing: Genesis through Joshua, Ruth through Nehemiah, and the two epistles to the Corinthians (other numbered epistles are more independent). To be clear, there absolutely are even large portions therein that are both easy to read and profitable, but you should still approach them with deliberation.
Some books to avoid for a while: Judges (full of negative examples), Job (much dreary philosophy which is immediately rejected), arguably Ecclesiastes (but other people like it), Song of Songs/Solomon, all of the prophets except sometimes when excerpted (Isaiah in particular is commonly cited), arguably Romans (I personally don't find nearly as hard as Hebrews, but others disagree), Hebrews (but chapter 11 is very notable to read on its own), Revelation (so many people go insane after reading it, it's not even funny).
This is not the only way to read the Bible, and certainly there are other good ways, but I do have reasons for my particular choices especially for someone with no foundation.
A brief note on Bible translations.
All translations are biased. Some translations have their bias obvious (which is good) or aimed at a target that is no longer applicable (also good); others are subtly problematic.
Avoid, at all costs, any translation that goes nuts with paraphrasing (moderate paraphrasing is usually okay). Mostly this means The Message. Also avoid any translation that is only used by a single denomination; semi-related to this, I also suggest avoiding any "study Bible", which inevitably consists more of third-party ideas telling you want to think about the passage rather than just reading it for yourself. I have nothing, however, against mere narrow-margin cross-references and rare single-word translation notes.
Other than that, for the gospels it doesn't matter much. Outside the gospels the differences become much more apparent.
The KJV (sometimes KJB or AV) has been highly influential on the English language (and, per its preface, the translators were very aware it would be). If you can stand the "thee"s and "thou"s (which do add important pluralization meaning in some places) and archaic spellings, it remains of excellent quality in most passages - better, even, than many modern translations. Its biases mostly fail to take hold of a modern audience. However, it does measurably suffer from the lack of modern linguistic scholarship in some passages (mostly, idiom-like things in the Old Testament, especially Job/Psalms/Proverbs and the prophets). Traditional editions do lack the quotation marks and paragraph flow that modern translations tend to use (though basic paragraph marks are usually present). Note that what people actually use is usually the 1769 edition, not (as some only-ists claim, the "original" 1611 which is unreadable), though there are some minor variations (such as "graffed" vs "grafted").
If you want something that keeps the KJV's advantages but is more modern, the ASV is mostly obsolete, but the NKJV is recent and pretty common (at the cost of giving up on the pluralization disambiguations). The KJ21, though much rarer, is quite useful because it does preserve the pluralization but modernizes the rest of the wording.
The NIV is popular, but I actually find it quite problematic. I have caught it on several occasions flat-out making something up, far beyond what can be explained by being a moderate paraphrase or even preferring different manuscripts. In particular, if someone in a debate cites the NIV, they're probably wrong. I think I've only once found a verse where the NIV gave a useful reading where other translations did not.
The ESV is not bad. It has its (unavoidable) biases but they are mostly of the obvious sort despite being aimed at a modern audience. However, I have found a few places where it introduces errors and ambiguities not in the KJV, such as Luke 22:31-32 (rigor summary for this verse: KJV/KJ21/NRSV/NASB good, NKJV bad as usual, NIV good for once, ESV bad for once). It is also prone to the problem of there being different editions in the wild with non-obvious differences.
The NRSV and NASB also seem relatively widely regarded, though I'm less familiar with them despite using them as parallels. They do succeed at the Luke 22 rigor test, at least in the versions I happen to have accessible (unfortunately, like the ESV, they do have non-obvious version differences).
There are a handful of other decent translations not mentioned here. But there are also a lot of low-quality translations, as well as minor variants of existing translations.
The YLT (not the Mormon "Young") is obscure but useful if you don't know enough Greek/Hebrew to efficiently use an interlinear directly, because it goes all in on literal translation, even for verb tenses that are unconventional in English.