Hacker News Reader

Comment by MandieD | Hacker News Reader

You're not the only one - I've had this sense of a slow, but inescapably-accelerating epidemic for awhile now. Tuesday before last was not a shock.

It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.

View on HN

Two driving factors, I think: dominance of the advertising industry, and a rise of "wicked problems" with no good comfortable answers. Global warming leads this: would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?

Take a step further: Human attention has become a currency more than ever before, and pandering to human biases is one way media companies have learned to earn that currency.

You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.

Close. I'm not saying you're wrong but I am proposing a fork from your post in that the really important question isn't "would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"\

But for the people in charge its more like:

"would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"

Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness.

I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."

Exactly.

The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead".

Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race.

Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.

But that proposition, which is that the world will necessarily become a worse to a hyperbolic degree, is also misinformation. You can't, "predict" a future society 50 years from now with that level of precision.

Idiocracy is when the stupid prevail. The apocalypse is when only the lucky, tenacious and smart survive.

I'm not sure which is worse.

Ideas or memes buzz around like molecules in the air. If their average thermalized velocity exceeds gravitational escape velocity they gradually buzz away and no longer have any interaction with the Earth. Thats why hydrogen and helium are extremely common in the universe as a whole but there's not that much in our atmosphere. At least thats the astronomical analogy. If you atomize a culture and isolate and encourage subgroups to isolate and "other" each other, sort of divide and conqueror strategy on steroids, then you can end up with unconstrained groups that split into completely different cultures. Just like you take a population of one species, isolate two groups, and in evolutionary time (100K years?) you get two species that no longer care much about each other, might even eat each other. The Amish no longer have much if any common ground with the most extreme college SJWs. I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country, frankly. They've achieved escape velocity and will only wander further and further from the main culture and cluster of other cultures, like every other group thats achieved escape velocity from the main culture. Eventually interactions between people who are both foreigners in their own land will get really weird. Think of muslims with guns at FL nightclubs or with pressure cookers at marathons, my point isn't to be anti-muslim but to point out theres not much common ground anymore when the primary mode of interaction has declined to the level that it involves bloodshed. Once a group achieves cultural escape velocity, woosh, they're no longer part of the conversation, its us vs them yelling time at the best and kaboom bang bang time at worst.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore.

Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.

If you think the media is left leaning you're obviously not reading it.

Most newspapers, television and radio stations, along with the big new sites are controlled by a handful of companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...) that are far from left-leaning.

Rupert Murdoch, as but one example, is the driving force behind Fox News. Is that part of some grand left-wing conspiracy?

The number of left-leaning publications is pretty thin. The Huffington Post, parts of MSNBC, The Daily Show, and a case could be made for The Economist and The Guardian. For every one of those there's a dozen like The Daily Mail or USA Today.

> I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country...

"SJW" is a strawman pretty much by definition, but those who get slammed as being one are typically in the under 30 crowd which are generally more accepting and understanding of social justice issues. The so-called SJW group has more in common with their generation than "the majority of the country", but that's how things always are.

This "left vs right" stuff is all a distraction and wrong anyway. The major media outlets definitely are not right-wing biased: just look at Washington Post, NYTimes, etc. What they are is biased towards the establishment. This was especially obvious in the recent election, with things like WaPo posting dozens of editorials trashing Bernie and extolling Hillary, and the coverage of such outlets working to get Hillary elected at all costs. Of course, this is painted as "left wing" in the US because the Democrats are associated with "left", but Hillary was the Wall Street candidate, so unless you think that "left wing" equals "in bed with big corporate finance", the media outlets aren't really left-wing, they're pro-establishment.

Hillary is a center-right candidate which is why she's so difficult for progressives, the Bernie-backing crowd, to support.

She's also being painted as a communist by the extreme right which are so far to the one side of the political spectrum that everyone else is considered a "liberal" by comparison.

I agree that the left/right stuff is irrelevant when it's establishment and profit driven.

If you want actual left-leaning news you need to visit publications that don't give a fuck, like The Rolling Stone or Vice Magazine where they're not part of the establishment and have nothing to lose.

Instead of worrying about how young you are when it happens, wouldn't it make more sense to simply GTFO? I really wonder how many Americans now are thinking about this, esp. professionals who have the ability to fairly easily find work and live abroad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com