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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

This. Talking to people on both sides, it's all just regurgitation of headlines and pundits. Most people know how to deal with people who are "with" them or "against" them, but don't know how to react to someone who partially agrees, or agrees on issues, but not solutions. Anything outside of mainstream rhetoric is immediately labeled conspiratorial. Which is strange to me. Most people on both sides seem to recognize the media is rigged by big money, but they don't seem equipped or encouraged to form their own opinions that incorporate this knowledge.

Also I think experience has been devalued because its anecdotal. Only facts from an omniscient source are accepted, no matter their often dubious original.

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It seems crazy to say but I think it may all boil down to a massive influx of inexperienced readers. That plus the fact that most content on on the internet is not to be taken quite at face value.

Counterintuitively I believe there are more people reading and communicating textually than ever before. Way more! That would be good except they are doing it all via the Internet which is an absolute free for all of weaponized content, created for commercial or political purposes.

Critical reading and thinking skills are needed to navigate the internet.

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This book is kind of funny: [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind](https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicame...) ... but it is good for hypothesizing about how consciousness has evolved. The relevant part to this discussion is when he writes about people literally being driven insane by the birth of writing. They were just unable to integrate the new influx of information quickly enough. Imagine your dog for example, learning to read. It would be quite the experience for poor Fido.

The printing press, in time, caused the reformation, the enlightenment, etc. But it was a bumpy road along the way.

My point is that, everyone having the internet in their pocket will have a larger impact than anyone anticipates today.

>It seems crazy to say but I think it may all boil down to a massive influx of inexperienced readers.

Not that crazy. In fact, the idea about "inexperienced readers" becoming a nuisance has been around since the dawn of writing.

In fact even someone as old as Plato warned us about this, in parable form, when writing was introduced:

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/#:~:text=%E2....

I agree it's not crazy. To me the best explanation is that Facebook introduced many inexperienced people to political topics, and they had trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. Someone told me something similar happened when radio first got popular. Hopefully our societies will get better at filtering information as these technologies mature.

>>> Facebook introduced .. ppl to xyz topics ..

I possibly belong to this set. Could it be that this goes way back when people got hold of religous text and learn to read it and discuss about it?

It actually does make me wonder if we can see a connection between what's happening now and what happened when Protestant Christianity started spreading with the whole "priesthood of the believer" deal where everyone can read the Bible in whatever translation and interpret it just as well, supposedly, as those who are trained in Greek/Hebrew/Latin and actually studied the historical context of it. Seems very similar, in some ways, on a rough look.

> massive influx of inexperienced readers

I think you nailed it there. Forgot where I read it but there's a similar principle/observation of software devs where every year the number of new developers grows exponentially larger and so as we move into the future, the industry racks up an increasingly larger share of novices compared to experts.

Seems to be a similar phenomenon playing out in larger society - we who've been around the block know where the potholes are and how to deal with them appropriately but the flood of newcomers fall prey to them in increasing numbers every day.

I think it’s a function of information overload. It’s all just too much for people, so they look for the quickest “conclusion” in the truest sense of the word, i.e. the interpretation that allows them to end the discussion and no longer be bothered about it.

The internet, it seems to me, is the primary cause of this information overload. And it also makes it so much easier to just “swipe left” on people. In the real world, in a local community, you would not have been able to just walk away from conflict. But in the internet, you almost have to do it to stay sane.

I agree with this, and I would add that groups interacting under the influence of such rapid, impersonal dismissals, has the effect of removing all nuance and subtlety from their language. I have a fear that if I were to take a time machine forward, Jules Verne style, I would see emoticons have entirely supplanted the alphabet.

almost feels like there's no room for nuance, but I know that there is, just not in public. i have a conjecture that every public platform where people are even slightly concerned about their opinions being attached to their identity turns into an echo chamber dominated by the vocal group. its crucial that people understand that identity is not just about the opinions you hold and you can agree on some things but not on others. its very simple if you think about it, but that's precisely what's missing when you constantly consume content mindlessly. try consuming content you don't agree with at all. for a week. a month. a few months. then you'll find yourself surprisingly slipping into agreeing with the content. it happens. its happened to me when I purposely did this as an experiment. the only way out is to THINK and listen to all sides

> Anything outside of mainstream rhetoric is immediately labeled conspiratorial. Which is strange to me. Most people on both sides seem to recognize the media is rigged by big money, but they don't seem equipped or encouraged to form their own opinions that incorporate this knowledge.

I propose that if you think of a human mind as a neural network that is trained by the information it ingests, much of the mysteries of human behavior makes almost complete sense.

"people on both sides seem to recognize the media is rigged by big money" is a bit of a hanging chad, but I suspect that is explained by something like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

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