‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's not just anti-intellectualism, it is more like "anti-realityism", in which simple things aren't knowable, in which facts and opinions aren't different.
We've gone from corporate propaganda like "global warming isn't real", which is a lie but an understandable one, to this incomprehensible new state of "What is the murder rate? How high is unemployment? What is the purity of the drinking water? THESE THINGS ARE NOT KNOWABLE!!! ANY VALUE MAY BE ADVOCATED!!"
And literally not one problem on that list can be solved in such an environment...
This is a misrepresentation. They don't see it as a disconnect with reality, they see it as reality. Through all sorts of biases and rationalizations, people will still think their model of reality is true with lots of exceptions that keep getting in the way.
Once you take a belief to be true, you will go through incredible mental gymnastics to explain away any conflicting evidence without even realizing it.
This class structure worked well enough for generations, although lately it is running off the rails. The top pusher appears to actually believe the myth. The monkeys is now his own grinder and nobody knows what will come of it.
>People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths.
I'm stating that the public doesn't think what they believe is a myth.
It's really something which needs to be brought under control. Without healthcare we don't have a healthy American workforce.
This means that even after paying $8,400 per year in insurance premiums, a moderate illness automatically puts an average insured American family into a medical bankruptcy.
The honorable American corporate tradition to have company-wide fundraisers to support the families of (insured!) employees who have gotten sick is... terribly out of place in a 21st century / 1st world country.
For instance, even on HN people love to take potshots at nutritional guidelines that resulted in low-fat/high-sugar diets, or boneheaded regulation holding back [new cool disruptive thing]. It's not even relevant why (if the experts were just wrong, or bought off, or what), but the more examples you see, the less you'll just trust what "the establishment" tells you.
I think it's simpler than that. When anyone can pull out their smartphone and record someone or criticize someone in a blog post, it's hard to hide behind the naive notion that the authorities know what they are doing. For any given person or position you can find hundreds of examples of dishonesty, incompetence, or pure stupidity.
In that environment, why would anyone trust the traditional gatekeepers? They aren't the gatekeepers anymore and in a bid to remain relevant they often sacrifice objectivity in search of cheap gimmicks and entertainment.
Fareed Zakaria has put forward the notion that elites in the 50s and 60s used to see themselves as having a civic duty. That doesn't exist anymore. An easy comparison is the Ivy League generations of Bushes vs Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
...This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy....
It sounds WASPish on its face, but there are some good points.
Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated.
E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights.
He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't.
Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!"
I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc...
And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly...
I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense.
I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about.
It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...
And I suspect this is compounded by the fact that at least some people will see a highly proficient mechanical engineer/author/ex-playboy model and think 'Wow, that person is smart. There really must be something to this whole vaccine thing.'
or Stewart Alsop on the decline of the WASP elite (early 1970s)
For instance, we are certainly all much more exposed today to people ranting pure bullshit than we were in decades past. That seems likely to be part of it... seeing so many people spouting absurd nonsense, and then seeming to "win" the interaction, must normalize that behavior and encourage people to try it themselves.
But I think it is not just about "knowing fewer facts" but also about "having less ability to reason about things and derive a fact (or reasonable hypothesis) for yourself, even about simple matters".
It used to be the case that there was a non negligible barrier to get an idea published and in front of the eyes of millions of people. You had to find a publisher, pay for publication, and then convince stores to carry a book/magazine/whatever.
With the Internet, you can put up a blog post and share it on Facebook with a budget of $0 (or bus fare to the library).
It's just as simple to find websites that support a view of the moon landing not happening as it is to find websites that do. Both are just a Google search away.
And then before the printing press the barrier to entry was high again.
Obviously I don't believe this and I find it hard to empathize with these folks. I spent the holidays listening to my cousin tell me how naive I was for believing what I read in the New York Times, then rant for hours about how mass shootings are all staged hoaxes.
Most conspiracy theories start with a false premise to which logic is then applied -often correctly. A trivial example popular among geeky music lovers is that instruments and whole compositions sound better tuned to 432Hz rather than the more common 440Hz. Much effort i devoted to showing why 432 is more numerically interesting than 440, and since 99% of music is about the juxtaposition of numerically interesting frequency rations, the arguments are superficially quite convincing, especially from an aesthetic point of view.
Where it falls down is right at the beginning - not in the idea that 432 is an interesting number (it is) but in the idea that 432 cycles per second is important. People tend to forget that the second is a pretty arbitrary time division; we're just used to think about time as a fact because it is convenient in everyday life. Pro musicians and sound engineers are constantly thinking about frequencies to the quantity of a second comed to seem as real as the pull of earth's gravity to an aerospace engineer.
In my experience, the longer the argument between an initial false premise and the conclusion, the more firmly the proponent will resist attacks on the theory, perhaps because it has required a higher initial investment of work to validate all the logical steps.
There is plenty of criticism of mainstream media done by people who cite all their sources and have intellectually honest arguments. Don't conflate the absence of unfettered trust in the media with flat-earthers. Skepticism is healthy.
I'm on my phone now so I can't find the best examples but just take a look: https://twitter.com/kevinwglass/status/818465909996134400
> [Republicans are] going to blow up the deficit mainly by cutting taxes on the wealthy. ... Meanwhile, it will make the rich richer, even as cuts in social spending make the poor poorer and undermine security for the middle class. But that, of course, is the intention. [emphasis added]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/deficits-matter-a...
And as that tweet pointed out, he's now arguing that deficits matter (conveniently, at the same time Republicans took power), while just a few months ago, predicting Hillary would win, he argued that deficits don't matter.
> The good news is that elite discourse seems, finally, to be moving in the right direction. Five years ago the Beltway crowd was fixated on debt and deficits as the great evils. Today, not so much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/time-to-borrow.ht...
Has the economy really changed so much in a few months - or have only the politics changed?
The conclusion on Krugman is as follows:
> To my knowledge Krugman has not addressed his overt partisanship. Until he does so, it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt. Krugman has changed his tune in a significant way regarding the budget deficit when the White House has changed party.
> Now, government borrowing can still be justified if it serves an important purpose: Interest rates are still very low, and borrowing at those low rates to invest in much-needed infrastructure is still a very good idea, both because it would raise productivity and because it would provide a bit of insurance against future downturns.
Krugman has every right to express his political views, but it should be clear that he's doing so.
Any sources/links/examples?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/05/ireland-attrac...
> A major draw for US firms is Ireland’s low 12.5% corporation tax rate and numerous controversial tax breaks. The government has promised to phase out the latter.
> The corporate tax rate, which remains a sacrosanct part of Irish industrial policy, has been so successful in wooing US investment that the country’s neighbours across the border want it too. The Northern Ireland assembly passed legislation this week allowing for corporation tax powers to be devolved, with politicians at Stormont aiming for a similar rate.
I have however not seen any proof that it benefits the country other than employment (how are the salaries?).
If you look at tax revenue as percent of GDP it's almost had a freefall [1], which could be okay if the GDP is high enough.
In direct numbers however Ireland as of 2014 was not even back to 2007 levels in tax revenue (pre economic crisis) [2], and ignoring inflation. And only counting corporation tax, not even back to 2002 levels.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?locati...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...
Both of your observations address the latter, while I made the former.
Looking straight at GDP (even if it's a blunt instrument), Ireland hasn't reaped a lot of rewards there either [1].
And their growth over the past few years appears to be back to pre-crisis speed.
That page allows displaying both on the same graph (compare to "US GDP") and when placed by side by side it's easy to see that Ireland has grown at least twice as quickly since 1995.
Not saying that is definitely the case at any particular tax level, but it's not as easy as looking at the individual cases.
No, we know that some investments in infrastructure give a good return on investment. Some don't (bridge to nowhere, for example). The problem is that Congress can take useless make-work pork-barrel trash, and label it "investment in infrastructure". Don't automatically believe the labels that Congress applies to bills; they often are political smoke screens.
Note well: There is real infrastructure investment that is needed, and will give a good return. All the more reason to reject the waste - we need the money for real things; don't waste it on pork.
I highly recommend watching the whole thing.
There are of course plenty of kooks out there (like Alex Jones and his followers) who miss the point completely, but some of the anger and anguish coming from that direction seems genuine, even if it's misdirected at actually credible institutions like the NYT. (Not that NYT doesn't share some blame in propping up the establishment, but their elitism (which is not that egregious) is mostly a problem of monoculture, not politically reactionary ideals.)
What happened with the 2008 financial crisis is that a lot of people woke up to the idea that the very fabric of a large part of the US was a kind of conspiracy of wealthy elite versus everyone else, and this feeling was confirmed when almost nobody was punished for causing the largest economic upheaval in many decades. It came at a time when a wave of globalization made it apparent to people that "the American dream" was becoming pretty unrealistic.
At the same time, this apparent conspiracy is sufficiently elusive that it's hard for people to assemble in opposition to it, because who and what do you attack? Most people don't even understand how any of it works. Occupy Wall Street tried and failed because it didn't have a specific goal it could reach. It didn't surprise me that Trump was elected, because it was the one thing an ordinary person could do that could change anything (or at least feel like changing anything). For the worse, it turns out, but still.
I've often thought of a Trump voter as akin to a Bernie Madoff investor. Madoff's investors were promised, and at least for a time, were delivered great returns. Trump supporters have been told that their good paying jobs will be restored, the government will be fixed, and a whole host of conservative ideals will be implemented, all immediately. Madoff's investors were unwilling to critically examine their investments, because that would be looking a gift horse in the mouth. Trump supporters seem willing to overlook any logistical concern with achieving Trump's plans, because the promised outcome is everything they've ever wanted, and must be preserved.
In both cases, a judgement has been made that the payoff is so irresistible, that any critic can be easily dismissed as someone who doesn't want the "mark" to receive what they believe they are about to receive.
In this context it is understandable why Trump supporters are so keen to accept a single correlation as causation, instead of cautiously evaluating why assertions might not be true. It is human nature to desire positive change in one's life. The more significant or positive that change, and more imminent that change appears, the less likely a person is to balance their emotional response with logical examination.
They were both outsider candidates, promising to fix Washington politics. Both made outrageously unrealistic promises, and had strong campaign slogans evocative of building a better future. "Make America Great Again" and "Hope and Change" / "Yes We Can" both hold very similar promise.
The last person to build a slogan on quiet good governance was George W. Bush with "Compassionate Conservativism" back in 2000. Promising significant change seems to be the path to success these days.
and so what seems especially insane to me about this election is that our president is indisputably part of that particular elite. he is, much more than HRC's early 90s inner-city bogeyman, the super-predator that his own constituents should fear.
> For example, racist bias of the kind exerted upon African-American citizens since the days of slavery is a kind of social, systemic, tacit conspiracy.
yes, just want to agree with that and say thanks for pointing out a fact that many still try to gloss over or deny.
I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences.
Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.
I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.
Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.
Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.
If the scientist says climate change will be a big problem with probability between 95% and 98%, what most people hear is that "We don't know if it will be a problem, so we might as well not do anything about it." It is as if it doesn't really matter if you say the chance is 0.01 to 0.99 or 0.99 to 0.999. It is all just probabilities and it comes out as not actionable.
In a binary mind, a 70% likelyhood of an outcome (more than 50%) means that if the opposite happens, everything that went into the prediction was wrong.
But all of these sources made more detailed predictions than a simple binary winner. For example, the probability that Hillary received <=232 electoral votes (as was her pledged total) was ~4.3% according to the New York Times.
Do you have any articles where the statisticians analyze what happened?
Consider a very simple model, where each person in the country has a probability `p_i` of the chance that they vote for party A, and `1-p_i` that they vote for party B.
Now if we have access to the values `p_i` of all `n` people in the population, then probability that party A wins can be calculated as
P = sum_{a \in {0,1}^n with |a| > n/2} product_{i = 1 to n} {p_i if a_i = 0 else 1-p_i}
Here we have assumed an underlying random model, which has a probability, and we can estimate that probability within error bounds. We could try to calculate
P* = sum_{way of sampling k people} (probability of sampling this way) * (probability A wins in this case)
(1) elevate their moderate mistrust of the establishment into total, exhaustive mistrust (i.e., they assume everything from the establishment is a lie with a malicious motive).
(2) place total, exhaustive trust into the anti-establishment (i.e., Trump is perfect, every cabinet pick is perfect, every EO is perfect, everything Spicer says is completely true, everything Trump says is completely true, etc.).
It's this extreme warping of trust which causes people to be so incredibly susceptible to genuine fake news.
When you combine (1) and (2), you end up with conspiracy theories and lots of people who sincerely believe them with no evidence. The idea that Clinton is/was running pedophilia and child sex trafficking rings out of pizza shops is a great example.
It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear.
We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma.
I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her.
Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business.
I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
In the short term, only by comparing an article under review to "trusted" sources. But if there were any such sources available to tell us the ground truth, we wouldn't need the AI.
The more difficult question, I think, is: why should an average Joe trust the (presumably government or corporate) AI over their favourite worldview-confirming sources?
Truth is not an inherent reality of the universe. There is matter and energy in various juxtapositions, but no 'truth', except if by truth we mean correctly describing a physical order of things. But that's hardly the interesting part or what we usually want to know when we speak of truth.
At best, truth in things like politics and such requires a definition first, and so the problem of what's true is just moved to "according to whose definition?". Is "wealthfare harmful", for example, is not about knowing or not knowing its cost, but more about whether you think the costs are justified. One can legitimately believe that poor people should be left to rot if they can't afford healthcare, for example.
Second, why would an "advanced AI" stick to the truth any more than a human would? Especially if distorting it brings large benefits for it?
When I ask someone if "welfare is harmful", I ask for their opinion on the relative impact it has on various issues we want to optimize for, which mostly boil down to short and long-term happiness of people. It's a difficult question, but still a factual one. The list of things we want to optimize for is finite, there is some ordering to it, and the impact of various actions on those things is, in principle, calculable.
Even the question of "can welfare be justified" is an objective one. There is some model for "justified" that you have, and the data either lets you justify welfare or does not (and tells you the degree to which it is so, if your thinking process is worth anything).
It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".
--
Either way, I only said that a sufficiently smart AI could know the truth (or at least a good approximation of it). I didn't say it will necessarily tell it to people who ask. But an AI that can't correctly from data would be a pretty shitty AI. It's enough that human brains have this problem.
Your mistake is assuming the data is objective in the first place, and doesn't, a) contain the societal bias at the time it was written, b) contain the bias of the authors that made the study, and c) contain any inherent bias in the metrics used.
All the AI knows is the training set. This is given a necessary bias by the researchers in the process of creating the AI. The best an AI can do is exaggerate the biases that it learned from the training set (Which is, after all, the main point of using AIs -- to exaggerate favorable biases to produce data that the researches believe is valid).
[1]: www.badscience.net/2009/10/and-now-nerd-news/ [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/Negative-Data-in-Science [3]: http://www.nature.com/news/half-of-us-clinical-trials-go-unp...
The rise of far-right politicians in Europe indicates that America is not alone here.
External reality might. Reality of what people want, what we think is best, etc, doesn't.
And even the external reality part is close to impossible to access and convey to others whether it "adds to a coherent whole" in all situations or not.
I think you might be surprised at the diversity of answers you get for this, particularly if you actually get people's unfiltered opinions and not what they think you want to hear. Try it, sometime - ask 20 random people (not connected to yourself) what their biggest problem is and what they most care about in their life. You'll get some commonalities (earning a living is a big one, as is social acceptance & validation), but as soon as you start digging into how do you wish to earn a living and what do you consider an ideal world, it very rapidly diverges.
"It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult"."
That's called "being human". What would you rather they do, defer to your agenda?
I don't think it's calculable, even in principle. Except in trivial issues, people can (and do) disagree on very fundamental ideas about what we want to optimize for and which direction we should optimize them.
>It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".
Why wouldn't the people put their "personal interests in focus"?
Whose interests they should put to focus? And says who?
I think we're talking about different things: the current state of AI vs (what's currently) science fiction.
Half of my response still applies though. The thing with trust is that you can always call it into question. Give people a powerful AI-powered fact-finding engine, and there will still be those questioning whether you could trust the tool.
This isn't a greenfield.
There's been some research on this. I think I even saw at least one article about it here on HN, though I can't find a link any more.
What I remember seeing is a kind of world (?) map of the Internet with a set of different-colored interconnecting webs of sites.
There is one set that deals mostly in verifiable facts, usually based on genuine, usually academic research. Universities are major nodes in this net, but you get some overlap with "mainstream" news sources, Wikipedia and so on.
There's another major set that includes InfoWars, Collective Evolution, Natural News, Deepak Chopra, Mercola and other Anti-Vaxxers, various AGW deniers, and other well-known sources of bullshit.
Both of those networks have many more connections within themselves than to the other clouds, and have their own frequent-viewer audiences who will frequent the one set more than the other.
There were, as I remember, other sets that were less significant.
Purely on probability, a story will be dramatically more likely to be true if originated and/or propagated in the first of those clouds than the second.
Mapping these webs is a pretty mundane mechanical task, yet it can provide an excellent filter for some classes of information.
Other stuff is "squishier" because it's more opinion than fact. Politics and policies will be found here, and you're likely to see (I don't remember if the article I have in mind showed this) "conservative" vs. "liberal" networks rather than "fact" vs. "bullshit". On the other hand, there are experts on many aspects of politics, and if you're looking for ideas on policy that are informed by history and research, you're more likely to get them from professors of history, economics and law than from Fox News or televangelist channels.
I suspect there are a lot more inferences that can be drawn, via probability or Bayes, from the Internet sources of information, its propagation behavior, and the shape of the networks it travels.
Similarly, there's a wealth of information to be gained from analyzing the language of an individual page. Emotional words vs. dispassionate ones; weasel words like "probably" or "it was said" as opposed to "according to" or links to other sources. Bullshit is often simplified for consumption by simple people, while academics often carelessly lapse into "high-bred" or technical language.
Some of those features could be gamed, simulated, faked, and certainly will be. Many bullshit articles in the health, field, for instance, now link to "outlier" or discredited papers in PubMed to enhance their credibility. But like our grandparent poster, I think AI, working patiently and dispassionately, will be able to continue to find hints to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.
Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a
fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had
found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to
pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.
The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]:
Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was
sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to
criminal or civil authorities.
Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up?
Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency?
Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ...
Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn...
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey
[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...
One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?
Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.
I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.
There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.
I challenge you to find anything similar to Pizzagate, or Obama is a gay Kenyan, or denial of anthropogenic global warming, or similar that is widely believed and publicly supported by Democrats elected to national office. I'll admit some wackos on the left are vaccine truthers, but again: they do not hold national elective office. It's really all conservatives, and there aren't Democrats in national office speaking in glossolalia.
[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/trump-budget-priorities-speech-cong...
They are "conservative" but they assumed that Trump's continuous barrage of easily-debunked lies and blatant disrespect for the intelligence of his audience would prevent his victory.
Still, I will concede your point that the "conservative" population in the USA seems to be more greatly affected by this kind of "reality rejection syndrome". I don't think Trump really has any coherent political ideology; I think he just chose to pwn the Republican party because they had the most rubes susceptible to his brand of snake oil.
(I feel like that might just be because a big segment of that population is angrier than most people, but who knows.)
At some point you need to start including Pence, Preibus, Chaffetz, Mcconnnell, etc. While I fully agree that the Venn diagram doesn't include all conservatives in the reality-rejecting circle, there is a too large of an overlap to ignore.
I'm not including Miller and Bannon in conservatives, because they're clearly motivated by something else/worse.
But it's like Christians in America, or radical Muslims. Terrible things are neither inherently Christian nor Muslim, but it's not too difficult for atheists to lump those traits to bad actors.
TL;DR: I agree, to a point.
We each have echo chambers, to which we endow trust and allow the source material to be filtered and pre-judged for us. The internet didn't start that. It's embedded in our tribal natures. But it sure does act as an effective crowd-fueled amplifier.
Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.
That's partially due to laziness, but in a large part due to a sort of Pavlovian conditioning that has happened due to how bloated and ad-infested the internet at large is. Even with ublock origin/adaway on, I rarely click on links unless it's a domain that I positively associate with or something that really piques my curiosity. For all its flaws, I think Google's AMP is doing a good job, at least for me, since I click on things more often that I would without it. That is creating a different sort of bias too, but at least Google is creating some incentives for making simpler, more readable websites.
Also, how do we continue to trust whomever holds that power, given that such power will be abused eventually if not immediately? There is a common phrase about how power has a corrupting impact.
1. Look up H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippman, among others. Both were newspapermen and had tremendous insights, though they came from very different backgrounds.
2. I.F. Stone as well. His 1974 interview on "Day at Night" is on YouTube, and a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so. There's also a website devoted to his writings, highly recommended.
3. Changes in media and communications have profound influences on society, and always have. Look up Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). Her "Preliminary Report" (1968) is much shorter and gives the general spirit of the argument: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/240164 (Full text available via http://sci-hub.cc)
Regulating news, and carrying penalties for intentional disinformation, seems one approach.
The Vietnam War proved that our government cannot be trusted, and that happened before I was born. It hasn't gotten any better since then. What gives you the idea that this government is trustworthy and has moral goals?
That means you can convince them things they knew were incorrect, but they'll still believe incorrectly about certain aspects. ./flush_cache.sh
To me, whether in US or Europe, people start rejecting "facts" because the centrist people take them hostage with "vote reasonably, and we'll shove more illegal immigration down your throats, more Europe, more women rights, more Muslims, etc".
So people go up the chain of politics and reach back to journalism which allowed these politics to exist, namely every article titled "SCIENTISTS PROVE AGAIN THAT MEN ARE PAID 31% MORE THAN WOMEN!" where you had to dive deep in the text to notice that this wasn't for equal work.
It's not that they trust Trump, it's that parties from left to right have entirely abused this trust to exhaustion, and journalism has badly participated.
You want better people? Make parents sit down and talk to their children every single day: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/2...
Of course it will take at least one generation to undo the damaged that has been done. Don't keep searching for simpler reasons or solutions. I don't believe there are any.
The rest of this post is a repost from me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851:
We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet.
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
Not like "you cannot derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because you were unfortunately born without ability to do that", but more like "you refuse to derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because _________________."
The reasons aren't clear and are possibly complex and subconscious, but it seems more about refusing to do the basic mental processing, despite having the capability to do it.
The reason are emotions, many of them subconscious, like you said. Emotional patterns can be complex, but the solution isn't: Less pressure and fear mongering. More appreciation, time and space for children to grow into responsible adults.
I don't think we're able to steer the ship around though, unfortunately.
I think the big point here is that reasoning, critical thinking and assorted mental disciplines are no longer taught, or at least downplayed in contemporary education. People won't practice, and certainly not enjoy, skills they've never been acquainted with.
Conspiracy theories say that this is something the Powers That Be inflict on us intentionally. I can't be sure but I think the blame could just as easily rest with simple bungled priorities and seemingly expedient cost-cutting measures.
For example if we were to talk about unemployment rate (e.g. discouraged workers vs total labour force participation vs e.g. push towards counting long term unemployed as disability, statistical corrections for season, definition of temporary versus permanent) it's possible to pick a metric which will satisfy almost any narrative.
Taking into account changes in definition, policy changes and then segregating by demographic to create factoids at will and yeah, I do think that's a real problem.
Just out of interest, do you believe unemployment is up or down compared to this time last year?
That does make things harder to know, and unemployment is a good example.
To answer your question, off the top of my head I think the unemployment rate is about the same (+/- 0.5%?) as it was this time last year, and rounds to 5%. However I am pretty sure that the reason I think that is because that's what the US Dept. of Labor says.
It's an interesting example because it's not a topic on which I have expertise, so I've (tentatively, maintaining some uncertainty) decided to go with what I perceive to be the most credible authority on the matter.
I've heard many of the alternate narratives, but haven't been convinced, probably because I usually perceive some ulterior motivation along with them (leaving aside candidate Trump's insane "42%" claim, which is something different).
This is exactly what makes me despair of the current environment; I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. I would much prefer it if society would promote achieving an accurate consensus on this kind of issue, by collectively punishing blatant liars and diminishing their credibility, and on the other hand reacting with outrage if the official government statistics were politicized.
That seems not to be the trendline we are on, though...
P.S. Am I wrong to place my trust in the official unemployment statistics? ;-)
Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to do that either. That's why most of these conspiracist stories boil down to either amateurishly misinterpreting existing measures - e.g. alleging that the unemployment rate must be 100% minus the employment/population ratio - or trying to spin conspiracy where it doesn't exist, say by alleging that the US government is fudging statistics by not reporting the higher/wider U-6 measure of unemployment more prominently (U-6 is about twice the "official" unemployment rate at any given time - and has been for ever).
Thanks for your reasoned response! In terms of trusting "offical" unemployment figures I actually think they're not too bad. At least compared to say, money supply and accessible economic metrics :)
For unemployment we can talk about things like "Oh, you mean U6 or U3?": http://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/12309/has-the-wa... - and then be prepared to understand changes in how they are measured, which are a little contentious but IMHO not too bad in U.S. over last 20 years.
In the end, questions like "how many jobs are there?" or "how much money is there?" are not really that simple to answer. From this perspective, the "current environment" is not really any different to how it's always been, but I think people are much more sensitive to difficulties in measurement and definition right now. It looks a lot like an environment where you get to make up facts.
Political candidates shouldn't get to make up facts. For example, if they rely on narrow definitions of employment increasing or decreasing in making arguments, the exact definition in use should be made clear and if an unusual or non-standard metric is used that should be highlighted. Unfortunately this looks increasingly like an unattainable level of political discourse.
Now it's perfectly fine to argue the points and definitions on any of these stats and measurements, but the average person has realized that stats are all like that. Any stat that includes the human experience across multiple dimensions is suspect.
I'm fortunate in that I remember back the "old days" of the net where we had the same amount of political BS but fewer sources of "facts". We'd argue for a while then somebody would take an hour or two and dig up an academic study and that would quiet things down.
This is no longer the case. What happens now is that no matter your opinion, there are studies and internet sites dedicated to providing you with supporting material. Add in a few rhetorical tricks you see on TV and you can carry on any argument based around "science" ad infinitum.
So I don't see this as some new form of anti-intellectualism. Rather I see it as people -- perhaps people who aren't so smart, admittedly -- figuring out what the game is and moving on to more personally important things in their lives.
Cory Doctorow in a recent Boing Boing article:
"we're not living through a crisis about what is true, we're living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We're not disagreeing about facts, we're disagreeing about epistemology."
https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact...
I see the problems as of limits and distributionalism, most fundamentally. That's a longer story.
In times when we're clearly in crisis (financial crisis of 2009, stagflation in the 70s, Vietnam & the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, and WW2 in 1941), the graph is dominated by a single issue that takes up greater than half the plot. In times when things are basically humming along smoothly, everybody complains about everything, and the poll reflects a huge variety of problems.
This would tend to suggest that objectively, we're actually in pretty good times right now. This doesn't preclude us facing a crisis in the near future - notice how "Keeping out of war" was a relatively small but noticeable box in 1935, but absolutely huge in 1941 - but it is fairly likely that if a crisis does occur, it'll come from a box that isn't a huge problem right now. It's unlikely that "immigration" or "dissatisfaction with government" will be a massive crisis in 2021, but we could easily see "unifying the country", "environment", "unemployment", or "civil rights & race relations" become a huge issue in the next election.
I'd be interested to see the change from 2013-2016 for example.
I did a tally of issues, high was about 47, low was 7. Quite a range.
People's opinions are manipulated by either media (i.e. corporations) or government and they are told what to worry about. Just because economy seems to be doing well in this poll, it could be because people are told it is doing well. Now I haven't looked at any indicators, so maybe it is actually doing well, but I am using it as an example here.
Unemployment could be an exception here. People do feel that personally, it is a lot less abstract. So maybe that is closer to reality.
But even healthcare, so many think it is now "being fixed" so they stop worrying about it.
During Bush's time we see worrying about a moral decline, It is likely not because people were particularly immoral then but his rhetoric focused on religious groups (Evangelicals) and he used them as a block pretty much to vote for him.
Then guns. Look at that, in 2013 people were so worried about them. Why? Almost just as worried as the "Lack of money". It is probably not because people were shot left and right, but because the administration, the media, and various gun groups (NRA) picked that as a talking between them.
So this is just as much about what is really wrong with the country vs what people believe is wrong with the country and the two things don't have to be the same. It also shows how easy it is to manipulate people and changing their political agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs
I have a personal list of things I'd like to see in a new Constitution, but what I personally want is not very important. What is important is that the citizens of the USA realize what is the root cause of the many ills they complain of: the Constitution.
I don't know if that's in the US constitution (I'm French), but really, who thought that was a good idea.
It seems like a systemic issue easier to address than the whole constitution and electoral college system.
FYI: it's not, but it's been set by statute since 1845.
What we actually have is states that get to elect two Senators, even though they have much fewer people than other states that also get to elect two Senators. It's that way for a reason, and that reason still makes some sense in 2017.
I'd say we suffer far more from the opposite problem: Parts of the Constitution that have not been repealed, but which are no longer in force because various court decisions have gutted them. (The Tenth Amendment comes to mind.)
100 people surveyed. 80% of respondents think he has food poisoning.
Peter accepts this and endures several additional weeks of pain.
Peter finally goes to a hospital to get checked out.
He has colon cancer.
Peter dies three weeks later.
What people think has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
That's what this article is about, what people think, not reality.
That itself might reflect on a state of ignorance or knowledge, or on how well your Weapons of Mass Distraction campaigns are working.
If we switch to entrepreneurship for a moment, here's another case where public opinion is of little use: The crowds don't know what they want next. How many people wanted Instagram before it existed? Or Facebook? Amazon? eBay? How many people know that it is critical we switch to streamlined digital medical records?
People know and form opinions based on past events. As a mass they rarely know where to go in order to solve real rather than imagined problems. This is particularly true of uncomfortable long-term planning.
Take the situation we have in the US with Welfare and Social Security. By some accounts these programs might implode in as little as 10 to 20 years. They are the elephants in the room. The federal budget reveals this fact. Yet people are focusing on nonsense every day.
The masses are not talking about this. The surveys indicate nobody thought these issues were important for decades, even today. Yet, reality, if I were a parent guiding my kids, is that this is one of the most important issues. One requiring immediate attention. It is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of mathematical certainty.
Monitoring public opinion is also quite useful if your interest is in actually effectively delivering truthful infomration to the public. It allows testing and developing methods (or defenses, as necessary).
What's key is not confusing what the public believes with what is actually true.
The dynamics of why the public believes what it does, for both extrinsic (media, propaganda, manipulation) and intrinsic (educational levels, cognitive limits, messaging complexity) is hugely useful to understand. Actually, if you're looking for lower-level problems of governance, generally, I'd spend a considerable amount of time in that corner.
As ugly as politics have gotten today, at least the presiding concern for most Americans isn't "can I afford my mortgage/rent next month?".
One can argue that government is eventually to blame for employment anyway, but is one step removed from "I might not be able to pay my bills in a month or two".
In a way I am happy to see "Dissatisfaction with the government" be the top worry pushing economy to the side.
I've been wondering about that. What did he do specifically for the Black community who pretty much voted as a block for him. Are they able to get access to jobs, housing, education because of him. Do kids feels safer walking home from school? I don't really now, I am not asking because I know it is not, just curious if anyone has a better idea.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/politics/gonzales-lays-out...
In contrast, the Obama administration was seen to have "rebuilt" the civil rights arm of the Justice dept into its "crown jewel": http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-justice-department-tru...
One of the more well-known initiatives of the Justice Dept. under Obama's administration is the police data initiative, something that was sparked after officer-involved shootings (Ferguson, etc.) revealed that the FBI was doing a shoddy job of tracking these incidents nationwide:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...
A non-justice example: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's work in looking at fairness in lending and housing:
- https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-f...
Incidentally, this initiative has led to one of the best government datasets: 9.2 GB of mortgage data: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/hmda/
Once a person publicly expresses an opinion, it is very hard to change. We just fight and rationalize from that point on, digging in deeper.
And no, we bay area NPR-listening NYT-reading folks are far from immune.
Global warming doesn't really affect the USA specifically and/or uniquely, so maybe that biases the answer? Also, dying of smoking is less a worry when you see a truck about to run you over. Maybe people preference immediate danger over longer term danger?
The issue of "country" is an interesting one in the other direction as well. If a state/city/county has 16% unemployment, but the country has low unemployment, some people may think it is a country-wide issue, and preference that. Ditto other issues that are state or local level issues.
In any case, I can see why almost any answer is valid, which kinda makes the whole question an odd one.
He suggests that phenomena on the scale of climate change - i.e quadrillions of gallons of water entering the ocean - are something that our brains have a hard time contemplating on a day to day basis, because we haven't evolved to think about things that happen on that scale.
His administration seems likely to kill constructive politics, increase distrust & conspiracy theories and spread racism.
> Meisenberg (2010) found that intelligence in the US was negatively related to the number of children, with age-controlled correlations of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males. This effect was related mainly to the general intelligence factor and was caused in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more "liberal" gender attitudes of those with higher intelligence. Without migration the average IQ of the US population will decline by about 0.8 points per generation.
Additionally, because of a lack of a data, they used means instead of medians on highly skewed data. A few individuals could have a much larger effect on results this way.
Finally, just because we measure good correlations between IQ and RT in modern times doesn't justify extrapolating these conclusions to the 19th century.
P.S. I find this a little dubious "The Victorian era was characterized by great accomplishments. As great accomplishment is generally a product of high intelligence. . ." Sure the 19th century had better innovation than came before, but so did the 20th and 21st century. This doesn't have much impact on the findings, but it still bugs me.
There are many good and important issues that didn't make the list, and I wonder if prompting or discussion would increase the breadth.
This seems to be the list of issues that many articles have been talking about for the last month. Things we're supposed to care about, because, social proof.
One can either believe news articles are crafted to deliver what we want to hear (appeal to our beliefs) or that we are remarkably adept consumers, champions and descerners of (unbiased!) truth.
9 out of 10 doctors agree!
It's depressing, but my experience was that most people simply do. not. care. about the environment, unless it's literally something they can see _in their front yard_. Hot this year? Turn up the AC! Even when it _is_ in their front yard, if they can't see it they don't care. Worrying about the health effects of pesticides and then going for a jog and inhaling auto exhaust is inconsistent, but not a rare behaviour.
The further back you go in this list you see things that we just accept as reality now.
What I mean to say is the boxes under the trump administration should be really huge in certain areas compared to other administrations
That's a problem in and of itself.
And the only reference to "environment" was someone asking why environment hadn't been mentioned, as of the time I started writing this.
I wonder how the graph would look if the same question was posed to a set of 'experts'. Say a set of economists at top business schools, or really a spattering of economists from reputable universities.
My suspicion is the issues would suddenly become much more consistent. Especially with a focus on institutions, economic growth, tangible quality of life metrics, and efficacy of government redistribution programs among others 'real' measures.
It's not to say that fears over government functioning, or the economy, or morals are irrelevant - these factors shape how we perceive the world and subsequently how we feel. This graph displays how resilient we are to these emotionally charged 'issues'. The average poll respondent will likely continue following the general sentiment from media, conversations, etc. Meanwhile, tangible issues will continue to be acknowledged by a very small sliver of the population.
These sorts of results make me cynical of voting in general. Our current system with the electoral college, special interests, lobbying, advertisements etc. is already a clusterfuck. Ignoring experts opinions and focusing on emotionally charged issues is probably worse off for the country as a whole.
I, for one, am glad that voter preferences currently represent the preferences of elites when it comes to contentious issues. (see Martin Giles' Affluence and Influence). Our 'every person gets an equivalent vote regardless of education for the minority that actually votes across varying demographics with messed up electoral colleges and voting districts and advertising influences' ... system seems inefficient to me. While a dystopian future of 'educated elites' controlling voting isn't the answer, neither is an equivalent, electoral college based system. It encourages appealing to the lowest common denominator, and a whole lot of people are unintentionally voting against their own interests.