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Political actors have massive incentives to be dishonest and manipulate information to be favourable so it's a bit of an outlier... but it can also leak into a lot of other areas.

The average person is up against a well paid army of influencers (PR, marketing, advertising) who's tools of subversion are becoming exceedingly advanced and complex.

I think it's more complicated than that.

Studies I have seen and first-hand experience suggests that people in positions of power are typically fairly competent and got to where they are because of their competence, so they often genuinely feel that people disagreeing with their position are just stupid or simply don't understand the problem adequately. Their first-hand experience backs up this assumption in most cases and fosters habits that end up de facto being "asshole behavior" in many situations.

As they accrue power, they get surrounded by yes men who massage their ego, either to curry favor or out of genuine fear or because they are sincere fans who recognize their leader's competence and aren't competent enough themselves to poke holes in anything their leader says.

It's inherently hard to figure out how to avoid that outcome. Powerful people often keep long-standing associations with people who knew them back in the day because those people may be the only ones who have any hope of giving them pushback that is actually constructive and not politically motivated (in an "office politics" sense of the word).

The world hasn't solved this problem yet.

I'd say the usual fix we apply for this is limiting term times. Maybe we should be more rigorous with that.

I mean we haven't found a fix more generally. We still have sayings like "Power corrupts" because we still don't have a terrific handle on how to avoid such outcomes for powerful people generally, having nothing to do with politics per se.

Probably mandatory, easy, and ranked voting plus improved education. To be honest I don't think even that's going to push people to care about their government. I think the average person sees it as too complex, too corrupt, and overall meaningless for them to be bothered to vote for, let alone learn about policies.

For example, you could ask 10 people on the street if they would like to get rid of corruption in government and most (probably all) would say emphatically "yes". I don't know how we translate that into action though and deal with the spin and whirlwind news cycle.

There are some rubrics that seem to be helpful, such as "Nothing about us without us." AKA representation matters.

But I'm not actually interested in discussing politics in this thread. I'm interested in social phenomenon, which politics happens to be a good example of.

Edit: Though I will go on record as saying I am not for mandatory voting. I have mostly not voted in my life because I have been overwhelmed by events and I am not comfortable randomly picking names at random when that act helps determine who holds positions of very real power in the world. I don't think forcing people like me to pick random names at random in any way improves anything in the world.

I think that's the problem though. It's too acceptable to say "I don't vote because it's too complicated, I'm too busy, or it's too hard". The reality is, in the U.S. at least, your country is involved in policing the world, subsidizing fossil fuels, and increasing the class gap globally (and some positive things too :)). It should be seen as a responsibility to express an opinion, even in private, by voting for or against your countries / states / regions policies to the best of your ability.

If you're working 2 jobs and barely making rent and voting is on a work day miles away... then OK. But if it's just "I can't be bothered to learn a little bit about really important shit" then you get to shoulder responsibility for your elected officials whether you like it or not.

I was a military wife. I raised and homeschooled two special-needs kids so they would have some hope of being functional. They are in their thirties and still live with me. I have an incurable medical condition that is, itself, an extremely huge burden to live with.

My plate is quite full, thank you. I wish my problems were as relatively minor as "I work two jobs." That requires a level of good health and energy I have never had and would have killed me had I ever tried it.

I stand by my opinion that it's amazingly stupid for the world to insist that everyone must give their opinion, even those who have extremely uninformed opinions for reasons largely beyond their control.

If people want to vote in spite of not doing a lot of research, I think that's fine. But please don't make me vote against my will.

OK then, I get it. Please don't take it as a personal attack. I was trying to explicitly point out that there are scenarios that make it very hard (2 jobs as an example) and I was picking on the "can't be bothered" attitude, which obviously isn't your case.

Personal comment. That's really rough, and make me feel pretty damn privileged. Kudos to you for putting in the extremely hard work!

Thank you for the kudos.

Food for thought:

For the first 35 years of my life, I was called lazy.

For the last almost 19 years, my problem has been called a genetic disorder instead.

That's basically how medicine or AI works

To some degree, all sciences rely on the world respecting the views of "really smart people" who have PhDs or whatever. Most people aren't actually going to understand the science.

Medicine seems especially reliant on the social proof angle, but a lot of science is over the heads of a lot of readers and we basically latch onto experts we respect to help us decide which statements we don't understand but will essentially take on faith.

It’s a little different because those have negative feedback loops for punishing you for being wrong.

There is little punishment for being a steadfast communist/capitalist/whatever for your entire life.

> if "a billion people" say it's true, it must be true.

Religion is a great example of this. I have yet to see proof of a god.

Proof of god? We can't even prove gravity, or for that matter anything else in the physical world.

Okay. But we can demonstrate the existence of gravity. Let go of an apple and watch it drop.

I have yet to see a demonstration of divine intervention.

People like me probably invented religion. I have a son who absolutely doesn't believe in God and all that.

He was told growing up that he didn't have to believe, but he absolutely wasn't allowed to be derisive of his own mother and her beliefs -- or anyone else's, for that matter.

We were homeless for years and had quite a few bizarre experiences that could be interpreted as "miracles" or "divine intervention" if one is inclined that way. He occasionally would comment on that fact and observe that his belief system was being tested or mocked by life, then follow that observation with remarks about laws of large numbers and that really bizarre coincidences were bound to happen at times to someone.

People in both camps tend to see what they already believe in, kind of like the observation in The Sixth Sense about dead people only seeing what they want to see.

Please understand that I'm absolutely not suggesting you are wrong. I'm only suggesting that the status of being a believer or non believer seems to be self reinforcing.

Believers and non believers can experience the exact same thing and can both conclude at the end of the day that their current beliefs have been verified -- or at least not overturned.

(My position is that it's a simulation in 4D and the actual answer neither matters nor can be proven one way or the other.

I think people should be free to believe what they believe in that regard. I also think they should, ideally, respect the right of others to do the same.)

Believes rarely are the problem. It's usually the actions based on the believes generating the friction between the parties.

This is true. Studies show that people imagine they connect with people with similar beliefs because they believe similarly. In reality, they connect with people with similar activities and habits (because it causes them to spend time together).

Your observation gets run through my current set of beliefs and just reinforces my already existing opinion that, seriously, "Live and let live" is the best policy for such things. ;)

I think GrantZvolsky means we could be all living in a simulation, dude! (the word dude being obligatory for ending any sentence suggesting we could all be living in a simulation, dude)

What would make you think so? I was in fact alluding to fallibilism.

Nothing in particular, other than that is a pretty common argument nowadays for how you can't prove that existence is as it appears to be and anything that "proves" it can just be a function of the simulation tricking you.

OK, I'll bite.

Who or what created the universe?

Don't say "big bang" because something needed to create that.

Don't say "God" because something needed to create her/him/it.

I don't know. And I'm fine with that.

We don't yet have answers to every question.

Another universe did

What proof would you accept?

There are animals that navigate via sensing the geomagnetic field. Humans can't sense it (at least most can't, at least not reliably or strongly), but we have tools that sense it.

There are blind people. There are deaf people.

Failure by one person to sense a thing others sense isn't actually evidence it isn't real.

I long ago decided this is probably the best explanation for the divide between those who believe in some kind of God or spiritual force and those who think that's clearly Hokum.

Edited for typos, possibly due to autocorrect, aka autocorrupt, the bane of my online communication efforts.

To be clear, because I don't think I was, I am not saying "God exists and some people are just blind."

I'm saying different people have different perceptions (which includes mental models or thought processes) and relate differently to reality around them. It's usually a pretty pointless thing to argue about. Both sides are generally pretty adamant about their views, a la The elephant and the six blind men.

With enough definitions, God certainly exists.