Reality is just a game now

The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point>

I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume.

PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.

Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you like cats or dogs? Pepsi?

Or Coke?

So thirty years ago you were apolitical, sat in front of the TV, and didn’t take things so personally. Now you are pseudo-political (Culture Wars), sat in front of YouTube, and identify with nonsense. No change of major consequence has happened.

The TV was already The Matrix, you fool. Now you complain that at least you used to share one common Matrix instead of Red Matrix and Blue Matrix—at least we could all agree on what veal tasted like (which didn’t really exist) sighs

However... I feel like this relies on a narrow perspective of the past. Did people's belief systems not work this way in the past? I mean, the social internet is new, and that changes things, but what's our baseline?

Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism is similar to the political schisms cited here. Religion also sometimes encourages "alternate reality games" as described here. Find clues in scripture, the flight of birds or whatnot. See a deeper reality than all those fools. Religious devotees alway "produce and consume game materiel" in much the same way.

Your chances of convincing a MAGA, BLM or any other modern political devotee to reform might seem slim... but they're much better than with religion. In fact, they usually fizzle out naturally while religious beliefs are very resilient.

Anyway, my point isn't to bash religion, it's to say that maybe this is all just normal human behavior. Maybe the TV era was the unusual phenomenon. Maybe we're not all supposed to believe the same things.

Unfortunately, this may be a genuine barrier to further technological advancement of human race. If the majority of us can't tell what's real (often not because of inability, but because of mental laziness) how can we increase our connectedness even more? (with neural implants or other future gadgets).

I see a similar dynamic going on online, over on twitter and stuff. I think many people think those people who enter their online filter bubbles and rarely leave do so because they know their worldview is fragile or they're afraid to be proven wrong or whatever but actually it's primarily just that being inside the filter bubble and slowly building an argument that you just know will crush your enemies is really fun and actually leaving the bubble to go do that crushing isn't that fun, it's kind of a slog actually.

Anyways it points to at least one technological mitigating factor, which is that the engagement with those opposite you needs to be gamified in a similar way to make it more appealing to more people. Going on twitter or reddit and openly disagreeing with someone inside their bubble means I'm likely to soon be arguing with about 12 different people who all disagree with me, often in different ways (very unfair/unfun to fight on a dozen fronts) or going 30 comments deep with someone (you can never actually win so there is no reward.) I think technology has found a lot of easy wins in creating engagement by building bubbles but all the things we really want to do with those bubbles - merge them, pop them, slowly dissipate them, transplant them, etc. still remain unsolved problems.

And since the article asked: 1. T 2. T 3. F 4. F 5. IDK/C 6. F 7. F

How can you give definite answers for factual questions in which you don't have full information?

Reality is the objective truth. Perception is out individual mental models of reality, built up by our own past experiences and our limited information set.

Edit - I think this is actually a very important distinction to make. There IS an objective set of facts that can answer these questions definitively. And we need to remember that. By conflating terms like “reality” and “truth” with ideas of mental models and perception (or even using phrases like “my reality”), we’re already giving up before the game is even played. Reality and truth are must be defined as the objective, omniscient state, even if it is practically unknowable. They must be defined this way because we must acknowledge that those states exist at all so we can strive to get as close to them as possible. If we cease to acknowledge there is a real, objective truth, then everything is arbitrary and unmoored - we’re lost at sea with no bearing and no direction.

I do agree with the general premise of the piece, however - that perceptions of reality in society have been weaponized and manipulated on an industrial scale. But it’s super super important not to lose the idea that “reality” exists.

At least, that's my theory as to why the internet has increased polarization. People have always been able to think in odd ways, but the negative reinforcement from a conforming outside culture suppressed these thought patterns.

The internet gives your brain external stimuli that validate your thoughts, and this causes your brain structure to change moreso than had your thoughts not been reinforced.

The inability to communicate between those on opposite sides of society's divisions is not just a failure of imagination. In some cases the brain circuitry of the interlocutors is so different that being subjected to the same stimulus leads to wildly different responses and consensus is impossible without one or both parties altering their brain structure through sensory counter programming.

1) Possible but I don't know

2) Very likely

3) Very unlikely

4) Don't know what this means. What is the "American Project"?

5) Vague; is the assertion that the allegations were lies or the conclusions?

6) Very unlikely but I haven't looked at the data

7) His actions led to deaths, and none of the people that died deserved death for anything they did, so yes he did something wrong

I feel like these are just kind of common sense opinions? None of my answers to these questions feel partisan, at least not to me.

I definitely have different ways of determining truth than many other people, I suppose. I am absolutely certain, for example, that none of the creation myths or supernatural dieties that we have invented are real in any measurable way. I am pretty sure that most of the stories in, for example, the Bible were always meant to be read as metaphorical anyway. But the vast majority of the human race apparently disagrees with me on that, which blows my mind. How can they not see something so plainly obvious? It shouldn't even be a serious question. How do you deal with the fact that the majority of your fellow humans believe things that are obviously silly? I apparently just don't understand what normal people are doing when they say they are thinking. So the whole Qanon thing is on one level pretty much what you would expect from a species like us, and on another level it's still utterly baffling.

What really struck me was the kind of reporting. Where I live (or, in Europe in general) – and I'm not under the impression that it had been that different in the US – there was some kind of agreement of handling severe incidents respectfully. You would show any footage a couple of times, but then everybody would know and further repetitions were rather considered as some kind of cruel pornography. But here, watching CNN and similar outlets, the planes kept crashing and crashing, and the buildings kept collapsing and collapsing, over and over, exposing the moments that meant death for thousands mercilessly on the screens. It was the beginning of a new era in mass media. And I guess, this may be hard to convey to anyone who wasn't there to experience this.

I think rather than trying to find the “one true source of information”, which can be incredibly dangerous, the real “redpill” is learning to develop the meta skills of critical reading and research.

Who is the author of your piece? What are their motivations and biases? Can you find sources and citations for the research posted? At the same time, also recognize that it’s unlikely you’ll have the time/resources to fully deep dive into every piece of news or commentary that you read. That should come with it a certain level of humbleness and willingness to consider the alternative if (and when) you’re wrong.

If so, then over time power will shift to countries that heavily dictate allowable online discourse (China)

A bit off-topic, but I'm sad that this was politicized, as that's exactly what's required to stop global climate change.

There are too many geopolitical forces standing in the way of concerted efforts to stop it. And even if we could summon a multilateral front, the process is probably too far along to be stopped via centralized brute force anyway. As we've passed the inflection point, the next 20 years may bring 1.5 to 2 times the warming we've already had since 2000, tipping into a runaway positive feedback loop.

Somehow everyone's got to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go solar, drive electric cars, buy local, etc. We're probably conservatively talking $10,000-100,000 USD per household, or about $40,000 if we use the logarithmic mean. Times 2 billion households, perhaps $80 trillion USD to a first-order approximation to go sustainable tomorrow. But that financial burden alone would disrupt lifestyles in the short term..

Now that's what's needed, but of course we probably won't do that. We'll just double down on our current lifestyles as developing nations join the industrialized world and fire up a bunch of nuclear plants and start scrubbing CO2, then add fusion sometime in the 2030s. Maybe put sunshades in orbit at L1, pollute the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, seed algae blooms with iron to suck CO2, do all of the other things as we continue to deforest and desertify the planet as we finish out the 6th mass extinction of the holocene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

But hey, that's just an externality, who cares.

IMHO a distributed approach at the individual level is the only one that has a hope of succeeding. We could all choose to conserve and grow victory gardens as our patriotic duty like in WWI. But no matter how much proof is presented, people believe what they want to believe, for no other reason than to disagree with the environmentalists and academic community. Even here on this very site with some of the smartest people in the world, I suspect the opinion on this is split 50/50.

For all of those reasons, I think it's irresponsible for the article to call something like climate change a game. A nuisance we'll simply ignore to our detriment sure. But not a game.

The only one in that list that's of much interest is about the origins of the Covid pandemic, and even there the real question is whether or not to implement a global ban on gain-of-function research with infectious viruses and microbes. As far as the details on the origins of Covid and links to the Ecohealth-Alliance-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology, well, read a book (Viral by Chan & Ridley, 2021).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58647975-viral

Here's an alternative list of questions that I'd argue really matter, but which are typically avoided by corporate media:

1. Is the US economy overly controlled by finance, and does this have serious negative repercussions for the long-term health of the economy? Is finance really capable of long-term planning and basic infrastructure development?

2. Is the US military budget out of control? The (inflation-adjusted) size of that budget over the past few decades has certainly increased. Are those wasted resources? (A related question has to do with our military entanglements around the planet, such as with Saudi Arabia, Israel, NATO, etc.)

3. Do all of the free trade deals that the USA has pushed for over the past 40 years really help the US economy prosper, or are they the main reason for the huge wealth gap across American society and the destruction of the American manufacturing sector (and the rise of angry populist politics) ?

Now, those are interesting questions and I imagine views vary widely on those issues - but you won't see them addressed in our pathetic media system.

https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e...

I think modern society is in the bad attractor field of the left-hemisphere mode of thought (as opposed to the right-hemisphere attractor field.) You see a fragmented reality unaffected by evidence, fragments out of context becoming menacing and leading to paranoia, people operating in self-contained virtual worlds based on axioms simplified to the point of falsity, positive feedback loops where exposure makes you want more, rather than negative feedback loops where you get satiated.

Many places a proposition can be called into question, humans do so through whatever play they're allowed.

My first take on that article was that my answer to 5 of the 7 of the questions at the top are ambigious. For #1 for instance I think there is no real proof of the lab leak hypothesis but that it is also not implausible.

Let's state some known _facts_:

- Troll farms are operated on a massive scale in Russia, China and most G20 nations, operated by their respective governments. Their direct goal is to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media.

- Advertising that powers most social media to brainwash masses into buying products, has been weaponized to also spread disinformation and propaganda, brainwashing masses into believing conspiracy theories and being an active participant in rage culture.

Just these two facts alone are enough to destabilize communities, polarize political discourse and corrupt democratic processes.

The current sociopolitical climate in most countries with access to social media is a product of information warfare. It's the cheapest and most hands-off alternative to traditional and even cyber warfare. It's played over long timescales and doesn't produce immediate results, but it's extremely effective, and confuses the enemy into not understanding the state they're in, or how they got there. Precisely what this article is trying to determine.

It muses on the social creation of why people think differently, but fails to ask: How can we know something to be True?

I give an alternative: Seek Truth. Be humble.

We start believing things, and then make up stories around these beliefs. Facts do not usually make us re-evaluate the beliefs, but to just refine our stories.

The meta-narrative of the article is just a story. You cannot get around the human feature by reading or inventing new beliefs or stories.

If you want to free yourself from this conundrum, you need to learn to hack the beliefs and stop believing the stories you tell yourself.

So valid questions are

Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced.

Covid-19 did not escape from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced.

> To play an alternate reality game is to be drawn into a collaborative project of explaining the world. It is to lose, even fleetingly, one’s commitment to what is most true in the service of what is most compelling, what most advances a narrative one deeply believes.

(Or at least wants to believe.)

I do that, sometimes, quite quite consciously and even intentionally. In SF circles, it's called "suspension of disbelief".

>It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed.

>In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative.

>It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make.

Once you start to parse reality according to what feels right, embracing cognitive biases in the process, people will of course exploit that. Because its very profitable. There is a reason the advertisement industry is as big as it is

Why is the author confused about this? The people who are having fun are doing so because they see a correlation between the degree of fracture and their own wellbeing (political, economic, strategic). They don't feel invested in the status quo (perhaps quite legitimately) and see more opportunity in either a fragmented and chaotic polity or a new status quo in which they occupy a higher position.

Sure, you could say 'but this makes no sense, everyone will be worse off', but this is self-evidently not the case. Revolutions, civil wars, etc. have winners and losers. Most end up as losers, but some people make out like bandits. And people who are losing (or who just feel like they're not winning enough) under the current or foreseeable future systems feel incentivized to bet on something different.

The point of [role playing games] was not to beat your opponent but to share in the thrill of making up worlds and pretending to act in them.

No. The point of role-playing games is to experience freedom of action by making up worlds with fewer constraints - but with the validation that comes from sharing the process as opposed to daydreaming. For kids and teenagers the constraints might be structural ones like having to go to school and follow arbitrary-seeming conventions. For adult enthusiasts the constraints might be economic reality - without access to unusual resources or talent, the options and payoff horizons of everyday life may seem very unsatisfying.

You can see a sort of meta-argument about this in the rise of boring simulation videogames, which let you experience a dull job or social obligation in all its futility and tedium, with the payoff for the player being that when you get sufficiently bored, you are allowed to stop playing and nothing bad will happen - whereas rejecting things that seem dysfunctional or futile in normal life might be economically disastrous.

The main change wrought by the internet has been the widespread realization that political representatives and social elites are not the highly refined output of a meritocratic selection process, but often mediocrities that lucked into assortativity and network effects. Those who perceive social and economic institutions to be gamed in various ways are incentivized to rewrite the rules of the game in their favor, and are enthusiastic in proportion to their skill and expectations of success.

Think of the old not-really-a-joke about the two campers whose sleep is disturbed by a bear. One stirs up the fire with the plan of scaring the bear away, the other starts putting on shoes. 'Why are you putting on shoes? you can't outrun a bear' says the first camper, to which the second replies 'I don't have to - I only need to outrun you.' I describe it as not-really-a-joke because this sort of story can be a subtextual way of communicating that the teller prefers to minimize their own risk rather than pool it with someone else, and disavows any prior assumptions about teamwork or loyalty. Similar examples include the frog and scorpion (frog gives scorpion a lift across a river; scorpion stings him because 'it's in my nature' although this makes them bother worse off) and the woman who picked up the snake (which then bites her and says 'what did you expect, I'm a snake' and slithers off in search of another victim).

Often, people are communicating their preferred or idealized outcomes quite clearly, but their audience are confused or unhappy about it and respond with appeals to decency, reality, science, orthodoxy and so on. Such appeals are often a coping mechanism to avoid the unpleasant implication that the communicator is going to bail on, sabotage, or attack them. Appeals to moral or existential authority are only forceful to the degree of mutual connectivity, and miss the fact that in these story examples the parties are isolated and there's nobody around to intervene.

To sum up, when people set out to reshape reality it's often because they see advantage in doing so, and disagreements about rationality often mask a conflict of values.

2. Almost certainly, but perhaps not necessarily.

3. Most likely false

4. IDK/C

5. It originated from lies, but found truths in the process.

6. Probably not, causal links are hard to establish

7. True

The "problem" with the questions they asked, is that short pithy statements like these lack all form of nuance and so cannot fully encapsulate what is actually reality. They only contain a distilled perception of that reality through a particular set of biases. For the most part, nothing in life is that simple, and therefore simple statements are often not actually factual, because they miss critical nuance and detail to make them so.

Ironically, if you read my answers above, you likely think I'm right-wing adjacent based on them, but in fact I am politically left-of-center, I either didn't have enough information to answer conclusively, or I have investigated these topics so thoroughly that I am aware that it's not very clear cut. For instance, several of these relate to recent issues from the former administration in the US... I've read the Mueller Report, somehow despite being rather thorough, very different pithy perspectives are arrived at from the contents by various partisans.

I think the article has a point, but I think the bigger issue is that most people only have the attention span and mental acuity necessary to deal in soundbites, whether that's from the Internet, cable news, or newspaper headlines doesn't really matter. It's not the medium that's the issue, it's that the average person expends no mental energy whatsoever on actually understanding the topics they hold forth opinions on. I've always tried to be someone with strong opinions, loosely held, and open to evidence and reason. Unfortunately the average person is somebody with weak opinions, strongly held, and closed to evidence and reason. The Internet didn't cause this, this is just how human beings generally are, the world over, and throughout history.

Now how to work within the VR world handed to us. That’s the next steps. Soon to become apparent I’m sure.

In an MMORPG, what kind of characters do not know they are in a game? Non-player characters?

I think a significant insight missing from it is that corporations, states, wars, and the like are also alternate reality games — as was the cultural wasteland of mass-media-manufactured consent whose loss it mourns. Not just the genesis of revolutions, but also their aftermath.

It does glance at this idea but doesn't seriously engage with it:

> the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, … But what matters here is that… [i]n an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.

Is that really what matters? Is it even a new phenomenon, or a process that was ever interrupted? I don't think that, in the bygone era of mass media, the narrative peddled on NBC converged with that of Iran's Guardian Council or Pravda; nor did Joe McCarthy's narrative ever converge with that of the Port Huron Statement. And there are times, like the murder of Kitty Genovese, where the narrative did converge, but it converged on utter falsehood.

If this doesn't convince you, reread the article carefully, thinking about how well or poorly each thing it says about modern alternate reality games applies to the historical persecution of Communists in the US, anti-Communists in the USSR and PRC, or heretics in the Spanish Inquisition. You will find it an uncomfortably tight fit.

To me it seems more important to be able to coexist with people with different beliefs, people who aren't playing the same alternate reality game you are. Lacking that ability, dissent yields mass bloodshed, so polities ruthlessly suppress dissent in order to survive, condemning themselves to self-defeating delusion. We have centuries of practice developing institutions (that is to say, alternate reality games) that can survive dissent: liberalism, capitalism, academia, pacifism, Gandhian nonviolent resistance, parliamentary procedure, and now free software and Wikipedia. Other cultures have other institutions I'm unfamiliar with.

All of them are under immense stress from the internet revolution, and it's anybody's guess how that will shake out.

In our day, the departure from consensus reality began in innocent fashion, and with a different genre of entertainment: with wizards and dice rolls in 1970s basements.

As cultlike and dogmatic as the Communist party became, I don't think this is a very apt comparison.

Pleasant revolutionaries we're starving and demanded land reform. Worker revolutionaries we're being burnt up like fuel and demanded relief. Whatever crank beliefs they had were not their primary motivator the way cultural political derangement seems to be the primary motivator of QAnon and hardcore MAGA.

Reality, beyond the local, unless you travel a lot, only exists as a media fiction.

The bigger reality, the world beyond the local, is more important than the local. Because the bigger reality is bigger.

We speak with certainty about things we never saw. We put our faith in the opinions of people we never met.

Now get back to work.

Structurally CNN could never claim to have video of "literal vampire pot-belly goblins" coming to steal their children like Jones has. When it comes to this topic, the two just are not counterparts in any sense worth considering morally or otherwise.

The underlying stucture the author describes simply notes that both CNN and Infowars use narrative. True, but this observation could be applied to virtually any public facing commercial enterprise (not just news) both present and past.

In the context of this piece (even after the author's self-aware qualification) its a glaring mistake to describe Infowars and CNN as each others "counterpart" regarding making Reality into a game. Infowars does so with far greater intensity and impact to the point where comparison much less equivalence feels like a disengenous attempt to "both sides" their way out of coming across as partisan. Up to now, a left-wing counterpart with remotely the reach and intensity of things like Infowars, OAN, or even Fox news has simply not immerged. To treat this topic seriously acknowledgement of the partisan imbalance is necesary and shouldn't be ignored/side-stepped.

There does not exist left-wing counterpart to Jan 6 and the subsequent acceptance of it on the right. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to the belief that Obama was a succesfully installed manchurian candidate from Kenya (of all countries). There does not exist a left wing counterpart to Fox News' political comic section on a daily basis promoting for over a year (still ongoing) a conspiracy that Joe Biden finds nourishment drinking literal children's blood from a sippy cup. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to contesting deeply understood physical phenomena like climate change fueled by human produced CO2. But we don't blink at these things, because it's "normal" for rightwing outlets to do this in a way it simply is not for left wing outlets.

The steele dossier finds its counterpart not in Jan 6 as the piece seems to suggest with it's a or b "pick one" offering, but the far lesser scandal of Hunter Biden's laptop. Both are tainted wells of genuine and partisan injected scandal. And its worth acknowledging, the left abuses objectivity occasionally like with their floating of the Steele Dossier. Still, the left has never so much whispered something so politcally scandolous as abandonment of parliamentary democracy. The Republican party, after failing to do so on Jan 6, continues pursuing just that within state legislatures as its main political project at the moment. Chalking up Jan 6 and Steele Dossier as essentially the same thing at heart just dialed to different degrees really misunderstands the techniques, technologies, and structures at play.

This imbalance has to be reckoned with for a serious attempt to better understand the "gamefication of reality" occuring foremost within both mainstream and fringe Republican realms and to an almost incomprably diminished degree on the left.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that removed obstacles to global domination of petro-dolllar are a direct consequence of this event.