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Comment by throwaway038519 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your comment about behavioral management at scale. Carl Sagan once said: "If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

It would be interesting to know if this were true in that case.

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Or, as a recent politician evocatively put it: "“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?"

There really is pain associated with acknowledging reality sometimes. I certainly know that from my personal life.

Wisdom comes from willingness to go through pain. Something our general culture ain't great at.

> Something our general culture ain't great at.

What culture is good at it? People in general try to avoid pain. This tendency is not unique to our culture, is it?

The US is uniquely oriented around pain elimination. For example, the opioid epidemic ravaging the US after the overprescription of painkillers is absent in most European and Asian countries, because they were not optimizing patient outcomes for pain elimination.

It may also be that working conditions, poverty, lack of vacation, and differences in the practice of medicine, put Americans in more physical and mental pain than the average European, and so are more likely to turn to painkillers.

Stoicism.

98% of the population gets its reality from authority (the opinions of the hive being #1). Independent thought is unimaginable. Not even on the table. May as well ask a grain of sand lodged in a eastgoing glacier to consider heading south.

This is pretty much Plato’s cave. But yeah, it seems to be absolutely true.

Your understanding of the meaning of Plato's cave is questionable.

Not sure Plato’s cave applies here.

You clearly skipped the footnotes.

Forgive my dusty memory but I think the relation is that most people stay in the cave, not because they enjoy the experience or they're completely ignorant of the sky, they stay because they are unprepared, incapable, or unwilling to leave.

I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.

My understanding of Plato's cave is that it is about the disparity between the ideas in our head and reality. For example, you know what a triangle is, but there is no such thing as a triangle in the world, only imperfect shapes with three sides that approximate a triangle.

This means that it is not "most people stay in the cave" - it is, "we all stay in the cave because it is impossible to bridge the gap between theoretical construct and lived experience, but we all know about both".

It’s possible to draw multiple meanings from the same allegory

I thought it was a circle rather than a triangle.

Take that, Pythagoras!

Upvotes and disagreeing comments.. hard to parse. Anyway, my understanding is that Plato’s cave refers to being bamboozled a core lie about the world, and then when someone tells you how you’re wrong they will reject it because they lack the ability or language to process the alternative view, or it conflicts with their identity that they’d rather stay in the world they know. In Plato’s cave, it’s iirc a former prisoner who tells the other prisoners, ie someone they previously trusted. Yet, they are still upset and violently reject his message.

Is that the same statement as Carl Sagan’s? No. I’m just casually associating. To me they both seem to cover the same aspect of human psychology, our core beliefs that basically cannot be altered later in life.

Moreover, it’s really interesting that people only seem to agree about this observation when it comes to other people–they are stuck in their ways, they are beyond salvation. Very few accept that they themselves suffer from this.

Hence all the addicts that are so quick to its defense.

In other words, cognitive dissonance.

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

Indeed. Like thinking Tiktok is "such a serious danger" while having apps such as Spotify, Snapchat, and Amazon or Meta < anything > installed on our phones, using Google < anything >, or using devices such as "smart-tvs" and computers with Windows OS. Let's not forget the mild tinge of prejudice/racism that colors the messaging.

Dissonance is just that.

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