The American Brain
waitbutwhy.com
waitbutwhy.com
You're allowed to have "choice" in any of these heated micro-issues, but the national security surveillance state, the rule of the oligarchy, cheap labor, cultural atomization, the petrodollar and empire and eternal war are beyond question. I don't see anything changing short of an actual "fall of soviet union" style revolution or dissolution of the country.
And I'm not just referring to the disinformation campaigns of the previous presidential election cycle. I'm referring to the longer term trend of "wedge issues" that have been used to distract and divide.
For example, You can take a group of people who might be fairly homogenous in terms of, say, opposition to the U.S. military "adventures" around the world, but are very easily divide and distract them with abortion, guns, etc., thereby preserving the status quo with respect to the military issue.
The whole political and societal discourse then starts revolving around satisfying the individual interests of these groups, instead of looking at things integrally from a systematic point of view. If you optimise the system from above, you may even avoid the need of having those groups of people in the first place.
Which political privilege do I have, that prevents me from seeing these as identity politics?
To answer your question... it doesn't. It isn't a catch-all explanation for every single policy detail. That does not invalidate the generalization, however.
1) Almost only issues that are identity politics get discussed in the US.
2) Issues that aren't inherently identity politics (e.g. environmentalism or healthcare) get re-cast as such.
This doesn't get into details of issues. Our candidates that match our identities have their political inclinations that we probably agree with most of the time, due to our mutual identity.
This is a good takeaway; even though the fringes of any discussion are generally filled with bad ideas, enabling people to have the discussion is paramount in finding the ideas that turn out to be "diamonds". It also permits us to gauge the quality of ideas that are not good allows us to consider why they are not. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
As the obvious example: Germany in the 1920's had a really free and open marketplace of ideas, but also a lot of shitty ideas that resonated on an emotional level. In the 1930's those chickens^W ideas built the coop which they came home to roost in during the 1940's.
I don't think society as a whole has a good answer here yet (despite our large and sharp giant mind). There's universal agreement that some restrictions on free speech matter - yes, even the US has some. There's less agreement on how much. There's also not a lot of agreement if that's all it takes - I mean, Germany has taken a pretty aggressive stance on one particular kind of speech, and yet they see a recent rise in stances that sure look a lot like Nazis with subtle cosmetic changes.
Applying econ101 to that problem is a truly sophomoric approach, but it's not helpful in analyzing the actual phenomena.
I'll refer to Steven Pinker's excellent books for much deeper details on this.
But yes, that's the big question - does rational thought win in the long run? We don't know. And there are indications that some of the "fringe" thoughts that are irrational and harmful have the potential to collapse the marketplace of ideas before they get sorted into the mainstream. (In which case, we, at best, get to start from scratch)
You can look at the collapse of progress in the dark ages. You can look at how dangerously close the world was to a different outcome in WW2. You can look at authoritarianism to day and ask the question "if most of the world swung that way, how would we ever escape that grasp"
And even if it does win in the long run, is there some way we can bias the marketplace away from fringe ideas? Should we? What qualifies as fringe?
All of these are important questions. None of these can be addressed by pretending free expression is really econ101. (Just because we call it a marketplace doesn't really make it one)
As for the critique of Pinker... by focusing on the past few decades, rather than the past few millennia (as Pinker does), it greatly misses the point on many things. If you've read Pinker, you'll see how. If you're just reading critiques of Pinker, well. I have my gripes with him too, but that article is just strawman arguments for the most part.
Leaving it to "experts", and shushing the rabble, makes you vulnerable to the experts. At which point, you want experts you agree with and don't want those you disagree with, based on your lack of expertise. This is just a triumph of authoritarianism and ideology. Which, if it turns out to be correct, is awesome. But what if it's wrong?
This is where Dunning-Krueger shows up uninvited...
To ask "will they get it right?" is misleading - they won't even try.
The cigarette story is a story of the MPI doing its job. It’s a story of a needle of truth rising up from a haystack on the fringes of the big brain’s consciousness and piercing its way through a century-long barrage of gauntlet attacks until it had conquered the Thought Pile mountain and become the mainstream, status quo viewpoint.
Ignoring a bad idea does not make it go away.
Look up spoon theory for a practical explanation.
You'll never change the conversation if you don't engage with it - its perfectly fine to step away from time to time, but unplugging and living in your own reality serves no one.
If you're saying that people who feel a need to block threatening voices shouldn't do so, who's lecturing, exactly?
> In reality, there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the MPI—stuff like tribalism and virtue signaling and media manipulation and the cudgel of cultural taboo and other fun things in the pit of hell we’ll be descending into together later in the series. But we’re keeping things simple for now...
I believe the Ancient Greeks hated these mind control techniques. But in modern society, we are told it's a good thing.
I'm not sure what is good about being tricked to buy average products at expensive prices. Samsung/Apple are my two examples in the tech world.
Sure, but look who is telling you that.
What you're hinting at is discussed further in Manifacturing Consent, might be interesting to you if you have not heard of it yet[0][1]
It isn't enough for an idea to be "more wise" or "more correct" or whatever for it go from a fringe idea to a mainstream one. Someone needs to have some reason to bother pushing the idea. Any idea with a dedicated group pushing it is more likely to go from the fringe to the mainstream.
Depending on how dedicated that group is, and what kind of resources they have to push the idea, there is no reason to believe that some idea being "more wise" or "more correct" is even necessary for it to go from the fringe to the mainstream.
>But dictators aren’t the only ones who use mute buttons. Given all of the obvious benefits of free speech, when a culture or a movement or an individual citizen seems threatened by free speech, the first question you should ask is: “Why? What are they so scared of?” Free speech is a tool that helps us see what’s true versus false and right versus wrong—so if you believe truth and virtue are on your side, a vibrant, open discourse is your best friend. And if someone is trying to repress free speech—that tells us something important.
this does not seem to apply to social networks and YouTube. tons of ppl and content creators have been censored or terminated for making certain content and remarks outside of the overton window.
"If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious"
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
What this doesn't cover is the "history of bad ideas", and their virality. It's not enough to look at just America. For a full picture you'd have to look at Nazi Germany, Rwanda, etc. There are certain ideas which are popular, persistent, false, and dangerous; a classic example is the "blood libel", or the "protocols of the elders of Zion" hoax.
> "In 1959, almost every reasonable person in the U.S. thought interracial marriage was an immoral thing. Today, we see this as a failure of wisdom."
The thing is, this wasn't a position of blank ignorance; it was an ideology. It was something people had to be taught, and an idea that had to be fought. And there's no reason why it couldn't come back again if enough clever people promoted that idea.