What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment.
This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources.
Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a huge conflict that engulfed most major powers in europe.
Truth is power. The institutions that that control the truth will fight to maintain their power.
We can only hope they win, else the Alex Jones', Tucker Carlsons', and Robert F Kennedys of the world will take us straight to climate destruction.
Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.
1. With your ballot: very small chance of changing policies (1 vote)
2. With your wallet: small chance of changing policies (n votes through political donations)
3. With your feet: guaranteed chance of changing policies
The internet facilities 100% democracy as it simplifies voting with your feet (remote work, social networks), allowing likeminded individuals to congregate and influence policy. Blockchain furthers this, unlocking the ability to have a referendum on every issue, which maximises consent.
I'm not sure how blockchains makes more frequent referendums easier. Maybe harder to game the system? Apart from that it seems like a platform for regular referendums could be built without blockchains. It's still relative early days on that tech though, and amidst "Blockchain" being attached to anything anyone wants to hype, I have ended up being a bit skeptical of claims they can fit a given purpose until it goes beyond the conceptual stage.
Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust.
1. Vote machines change votes - Great, the blockchain would allow people to verify their vote! Well, the software that sums up all blockchain votes could still miscount them, regardless of what the blockchain contains. Ok! So we can audit the results! Great, we can already do that with paper ballots.
2. Dead people voting - Again, same as the audit before. We see a John Smith voted on the blockchain. We can look up John Smith based on a paper ballot, just as we can with the blockchain.
3. Illegals voting - The same process used for identifying voters and giving out private keys can be used for verifying voters
But what about risks you have introduced?
1. By making everything electronic, you've shifted the risk from local elections, to state actors.
Signing keys are not magic. If a country found a solution to the factorization problem, or solving discrete logarithms, the scheme would collapse and they could forge massive amounts of votes.
2. Getting 300m people to manage cryptographic keys is impossible. Keys will be stolen, just as bitcoin wallets are. Now you need to deal with revocation of votes, and other controls that nobody has yet invented.
tldr: blockchains are dumb
> Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust
The choice of representative democracy was not because of the difficulty of counting votes. The founding fathers very clearly rejected what you're proposing. It's because most people are grossly ignorant about most things, and their opinion shouldn't be counted. If you can't pass a high school math class, I honestly don't care about your opinion on climate change.
The blockchain solves none of that.
If you mean an open ballot: hard no! It’s much too easy to coerce, bribe or intimidate voters.
Craigslist killed classified ads (in the US). Twitter and Substack replaced investigative pieces, leaving legacy media companies reduced to peddling outrage for clicks.
> Hollywood is thriving.
The Golden Globes are over. Last year's Emmys saw the lowest viewership of any Emmy ceremony in the Television Academy’s history[1]. COVID killed the cinema[2]. AI is diminishing any production advantages that remain.
> Blockchains have produced nothing of worth, especially if you consider anything outside of cryptocurrency (but let's be real, cryptocurrency is also worthless)
That's demonstrably untrue given Bitcoin has a market cap larger than all but 20 countries[3]. Blockchains allow, for the first time in history, humans to coordinate at scale without human intermediaries. Only dead weight bureaucrats, machiavellian statists, and the innumerate who have been sold lies from the former would argue that blockchains are worthless.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/21/emmys-2020-primetime-awards-...
The world isn't necessarily controlled by some illuminati-like organization. That belief comes from a cognitive bias called "Agent-detection bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection
It may simply be that free information created a bit of a power vacuum (perhaps the same as with the printing press?) so there's a scramble for power by all the people engaged in the culture war, not just existing powerful people but anyone who sees an opportunity.
Its a free for all. Winner takes all. High stakes in play
When Guttenberg made the press, access to it's output had a strong filter: most people couldn't read, and anyone who could read was highly educated for the times. Social media doesn't have a filter like that, and higher levels of education generally correlate to lower levels of belief in things like conspiracy theories.
Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.
So, yes, there is a lot in both situations about power struggles with the established order, but most people are being influenced more by emotionally charged arguments and tribal loyalties than they are by increased access to level-headed rational presentations of an issue.
That part seems very much apples-to-apples with what's happening now.
I'm not sure, but there's a different dynamic at play. Both "revolutions" had (and have) great potential to allow individuals to make more informed choices, but in the case of Guttenberg the educational bottleneck to get there was still narrow... These days for some reason the bottleneck is more if a self-imposed barrier.
Although education is still a factor: I try to read news sources from the full range of points of view, but they all may report on something like the latest bit of research-by-PR release differently. I have enough of an education to know I should seek out the research publication itself and I understand how to approach a formal writeup of research to provide me with at least a low pass filter against poor quality work. I have enough of an education to be skeptical of simple solutions to complex problems and instead thing about edge cases and failure modes or poor incentive structure.
I can absolutely still be wrong, but if I'm wrong I will still have failed after going through a more rigorous process in an attempt to figure things out. I'm still more likely to ultimately accept a result that runs counter to my initial-- perhaps emotionally charged-- response on an issue as a result.
And perhaps of equal importance at a time where tribal loyalty often demands complete condemnation if anyone outside the group, I understand enough to realize that people with another viewpoint aren't inherently bad/evil/anti-patriotic because reasonable people can disagree, less reasonable people are still complex and not one-dimensionlly defined by a particular belief, and lines between spectrums if belief and just that-- on a spectrum rather than clear cut all or nothing lines in the sand.
I don't know... Maybe that's just me patting myself on the back. But even if educationally institutions can be inadvertently biased towards specific viewpoints, I still believe they expose people to many more ways of looking at something from multiple directions, in a less emotionally charged venue than social media in the internet. I've had teachers that I consider to be the model for how that should occur when I found out afterwards that the points of view they were encouraging me to consider went completely counter to their own strongly held beliefs.
Absent straw men, you aren't going to get anything near that approach from whatever talking head you're watching on TV or YouTube, or captioned meme photo that comes across your social media feed.
Propaganda used to only be achievable by nation states. Now anyone with money can play.
They aren't democratizing access to truth because search costs for finding accurate information are higher.
No, but mindless post-modernist drivel is annoying.
“Vaccines work” happens to be true. It’s not “the establishment” being afraid to lose power, it’s sane people taking an interest in others’ survival.
How do you measure and track it? What trends in the measurement have you noticed over time that makes you says it's increasing?
Also, can you say more about which groups think they are the single source of truth?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the fact checkers believe that there is an external source of truth (i.e. facts) which they are checking?
Ah, yes. I believe you are referring to the CDC.
They defer to the scientific consensus of people who specialize in understanding how viruses work, how pandemics work, and who have a process for learning facts by interrogating reality.
Consensus brought us an earth centric solar system and low fat heart healthy grains with an obesity epidemic and rampant heart disease.
I mean, I suppose the opposite of consensus is tyranny.
It sounds like your problem may be that people sometimes get it wrong, and not consensus or its opposites?
Science converged on heliocentrism as quickly as it possibly could once we had instruments precise enough for heliocentrism to be the simplest model. The only reason the Earth-centric system overtook previous heliocentric theories was that it was most consistent with observable facts.
Do you have some other system you'd like to propose that ignores observable facts? Maybe you'd like to consult a Shaman?
The obesity epidemic isn't created by science, it's created by economic and food policy. The root problem is essentially the same one as with Facebook: scientific information gets crowded out because people stand to profit from misinformation.
Seriously, what alternative to science are you suggesting? Political populism? Let a bunch of outrage-addicted conspiracy theory junkies determine the truth with no regard to whether it matches reality? Do you really think there's an alternative system that better arrives at the truth than making and checking your predictions against reality?
Very few fact checking organizations appear to actually use critical thinking of any kind. They claimed they would be but they're just journalism interns normally, so they just degrade to assuming that whatever the government or ideologically aligned academics say, is the truth, and anything else is wrong.
Virtual signaling and safetyism. Hilarious how the virtue signaling elite regularly close their conference calls with "everyone stay safe". Oh, I know you (don't) care about me.
Labeling something “virtue signaling” implies acceptance that the action in question is beneficial. So you agree that getting vaccinated is a good idea, but somehow manage to still take issue with people saying as much in a slightly more direct manner?
Yes, the group of unvaccinated people, making up 99.5% of recent US deaths even though they only represent about 40% of the population is, almost tautologically, in need of protection. Considering the US has, once again, managed to neatly divide into the same ideological camps as on any other issue, there is no obvious selfish motive for people of the one group to care for the other. This leaves the latter group stumped, because they can’t think of any non-selfish motives, forcing them come up with I’ll-defined terms such as “safetyism”.
The term you’re grasping for is “altruism”, by the way. Although I’ll freely admit, limited to me, personally, that it’s supply is running low and I mostly want people to get vaccinated to finally get this over with.
At this point it's not even so much about protecting them anymore as it is about protecting them from continuing to mutate and spread a virus that kills people. The "anti-vaxxer" folk are choosing to not only be a danger to themselves but to potentially anyone they come in contact with. What's worse is that they're actively trying to spread their ignorance about vaccines to other people, thereby growing the danger and the problem.
Most people under the age of about 65 are being asked to take a vaccine for a disease that is extremely unlikely to hurt them, and the vaccine itself can have severe side effects, with deaths and injuries from these vaccines now greatly exceeding the deaths and injuries from every other vaccine programme in the last 10 years combined.
Over-simplifying this situation down to "people need to be protected [from themselves]" is exactly the sort of misinformation that Facebook believes it's fighting.
"This leaves the latter group stumped, because they can’t think of any non-selfish motives"
Non selfish motives? Their demands are incredibly selfish. They've convinced themselves, against all actual data and biological theory, that the unvaccinated people are dangerous to themselves, the vaccinated, and thus individual choice over people's own bodies must be removed by force. There is no basis for this belief but they apparently want to reach this conclusion via any means, fair or foul. Despite that they are the same people who are usually insistent that women be given choice over 'their own bodies' in abortion debates.
https://covid-101.org/science/how-many-people-have-died-from...
Yes, that's probably more than "all vaccine programmes in the last 10 years combined" because, contrary to popular believe, vaccines are incredibly save.
It's also 1/100th of daily COVID deaths, or about 15 minutes' worth.
In the years before, how often were you vaccinated? Exactly: you probably weren't. Millions of vaccinations were given ib the last few months, orders of magnitude more than usual. And while most are usually given to toddlers, now the 60 to 95 year-olds got most of the vaccinations.
You know what happens a lot to 80 year olds in the six months after they are vaccinated? They die.
You know what happens a lot to 80 year olds in the six months after eating ice cream? They die.
Also, as has been reported plenty of times, read by you (in, for example, the article above), and ignored because it doesn't fit your worldview, is that VAERS is, as the URL says, "open". It's a relic from a time where people tended to be sane, and wouldn't just submit all sorts of imaginary things to a medical database.
The article cited above summarises what the people collecting that data have concluded from it. How can you make an argument about the data they collect and publish, implying that you trust them, and then, in the very next breath ignore them and, I assume, next accuse them of being either too stupid or corrupt to say anything about that data?
It's not common sense, it's mass brainwashing. If you'd asked people two years ago what they thought about the idea of locking the whole country down indefinitely for a virus with a 99% survival rate (and over 99.9% for people under 50), the vast majority would have said it's a crazy idea.
>Calling getting vaccines and wearing masks indoors "locking the whole country down indefinitely" is definitely hyperbolic.
You can say that not everything is still locked down (some stuff still is), but don't pretend like 6 months ago you would have been against the lockdowns that actually happened.
20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away.
We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them, and unfortunately keep barking up the wrong tree, but you can't just refrain from sugggesting they not feed wildlife or it leads to mayhem.
Today we have so many humans defecating in the lakes near Maroon Bells that the park might close. For at least a decade that park has a "pack it out" policy, including your own poop. There are that many people pooping in the woods, and it's not good enough to dig holes. People so infantilized they lack the emotional coping skill to poop in a sack and pack it out, so they swim out in a lake with numerous "do not swim" signs and take a dump.
People are fucking stupid. If you don't tell them this, they think it isn't true, and the rules for for someone else.
If someone were to bring their dog into the preserve and hunt and kill some rabbits, it would probably be quite obvious that they would be disturbing the natural balance that the nature preserve is supposed to protect. Leaving your excrements is prohibited for the same reason, although on a subtler level. Your excrement can contain germs not native to the area which could start an epidemic if stuff goes really bad.
Just today, there was news that the National Forest Service estimates half of all deer to already have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now thankfully, Covid-19 does not seem to be a dangerous disease in deer. Just imagine if it weren't that benign and a significant amount of deer had been wiped out by it nationwide (or even worldwide). That's the kind of low-probability-but-high-danger scenario that packing it out is supposed to prevent.
Here is another way of looking at things: the world is constantly changing. Do I advocate pooping on a crowded beach? No. Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No.
It is not like humans are some toxic alien not native to planet earth.
No. Humans are supranatural when it comes to our influence on the planet. While this power is not absolute, it's significant enough to make humans an edge case in nature.
>Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No.
In the example given, it's not occasional, but occurs a significant minority of the time that nature can't cope with the volume of human feces.
Humans are part of nature. Nature is never in balance. Change is the only constant. As pre-Socratic Heralcitus said you "never step in the same river twice."
If humans exceed the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, the system will reduce the number of humans.
I'm not sure that type of explanatory thing would work with most signs. Instead, we need:
1) people we trust to determine what the signs should say so that we are willing to listen to the signs.
2) Easy access to more details explanations of why/what the sign means.
3) An easy method of questioning the sign makers and and getting them changed or removed when they when either the sign maker was wrong or it's simply no longer needed.
#1 is probably the hardest.
1) The lawmakers problem. People in positions of power tend do be a mix of corrupt, biased and stupid. I'm afraid there's no solution to that either.
But people can be:
- educated about the importance of some things; - involved in the decision-making process.
Information is pretty easily available, especially as it pertains to things like the "don't feed the animals" sign in the GGP post, and it's not unreasonable to expect people to seek out an explanation (e.g. park staff) rather than just ignore the rule. The problem often comes down to people-- at all stations of society-- believing they shouldn't have to follow certain rules all of the time. People know that going 20mph/30kmh over the speed limit is more dangerous for themselves and others, but lots of people still do it. On more complex topics, explanation are available. But most people want simple answers, and complex issues don't have them. So when they disagree with something but don't have the full explanation to understand and determine things for themselves, they will listen a person who gives easy answers. And they'll tend to listen to whichever person gives an easy answer they already agree with. 99% of political rhetoric is about giving easy answers to complex problems, most of which would have been solved long ago if there was an obvious easy answer instead of countless details and edge cases and other factors to consider.
I don't know how you solve this problem. Human nature means most people don't spend a ton of time trying to understand all aspects of a problem that may only vaguely impact them personally. I don't expect anyone but a very small minority will study geopolitical history & current circumstance enough to have a well-informed opinion on something like whether the US should stay in, or withdraw, from a missile treaty. There's countless other examples of that sort too.
involved in the decision-make process
I'm not sure how you get around the lawmakers problem. Everyone can't weigh in individually on decisions made in a massively complex society. Being involved in the decision-making process means voting for people to handle those things. Are there other models of citizen involvement that better limit the impact of corrupt/biases/stupid lawmakers?
But people can also be very smart. I'm sure the people blatantly ignoring signs are the minority. There's so many people in the world that even a minority can cause issues (e.g. defecating in the woods), but it's still a minority.
It's different people, and moreover, different situations involving the same person. There are so many things considered "common sense" that basically everyone will miss at least one thing considered common sense.
So yes, you have to accommodate and prepare for the stupid people. You have to patrol the national parks to yell at people for doing things the signs right in front of them say not to. But you also have to accommodate and prepare for the smart people, and realize that you'll sometimes be stupid.
In Facebook's case, they think they're smarter than everyone else by choosing what content everyone can see. Flagging "vaccines are 5G microchips" was fine. But flagging official CDC guidelines implies Facebook is smarter than the CDC, which is probably not true.
Tragedy of the commons isn't caused by stupidity but by selfishness. It's different.
People don't always make the decision they know to be in their best interest. If they don't actually know what's in their best interest, then I'd say it's less an issue of stupidity and more about ignorance.