Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

The idea that there are emergent, systematic issues that are damaging our culture is always very compelling. The first 100 articles of that style had me so utterly convinced. It's taken 10-THOUSAND of those articles for me to start questioning whether there is an alternative hypothesis.

Maybe all of the apparent poverty in our culture's discourse, art, social cohesion, etc. isn't caused by broad tragedies of the commons that make for intriguing blog posts. Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste? We keep trying to invent these just-so stories for why we keep selecting for horrible, simplistic ideas when so many good ideas already exist. Rather than inventing a hundred different perverse incentive models and technology-changing-the-landscape theories, Occam's razor would favor the explanation that there has been a 'continental drift' in our cultural tastes and maturity. The observation that we keep voting for crappy stuff is best explained by... us preferring crappy stuff.

"Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?"

Hasn't this always been true though? Widespread public education systems did not exist for 99.9999% of human history. How could it be that education is more present in the world than it has ever been in history yet we somehow have worse critical thinking skills? Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education.

The illiterate weren't able to communicate outside of their immediate vicinity. They simply weren't part of the conversation

Illiterate couldn't read, but not necessarily didn't have critical thinking skills.

And how would they tell anyone not right next to them what they thought? Word of mouth certainly isn't an answer, ever played telephone?

Critical thinking does not depend on sharing those thoughts. Not sharing a thought does not make it less critical and vice versa.

Let alone that with your train of thought critical thinking must have not existed before literacy became a thing.

Why do you equate widespread public education systems with amount of critical thinking?

I didn't, the comment I responded to did "poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated"

I don't read it as blaming the education system. In my mind it's an indictment of all the trends of the past 20 years in the public education system: austerity, lack of autonomy for teachers, heavy reliance on metrics and standardized testing to establish success. What we're getting now out the other end of that is a lack of critical thinking and a reduction in traits that can't be quantified like critical thinking.

Basically if our education system sucks, it's because we've spent 20 years cutting corners, cheaping out, over-relying on metrics, and enforcing top-down control over teaching and curriculum. No wonder it sucks. Our public policy has been to stamp the outliers out of the system and crush it into mediocre mush.

> Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education

Why? Education may easily have negative impact. Modern education was created to teach people to read instructions how to operate factory machinery. Critical thinking is not needed for that. In fact, society without much critical thinking is easier to work with.

I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".

Content creators too. "Democratizing" tech is almost by definition a race to the lowest common denominator.

> book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people

Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.

On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)

We've always liked crappy stuff. Try reading 1930s pulp. (Sci-fi, Westerns, adventure stories, detective novels, what have you.) It's almost all garbage, even if you can set aside the chauvinism of the age. The difference I see between then and now is that the dominant media outlets are elevating garbage as their premier product, where in the past they occasionally produced prestige works that went for highbrow appeal. It's not that the median has shifted down; if anything, it's slightly better garbage than it used to be. It's that there's doesn't seem to be anything at the top anymore.

Yeah I think sometime in the last 20 years it became very uncool to appear to be elitist about anything cultural. As a result there is no cachet in appearing to have elevated tastes and no stigma in liking trash. Personally that suits me as I like both Pulp and the Canon, for example. But on the other hand I think it is destructive for current writers who are doing anything remarkable as it usually does take tastemakers of some kind to bring their work to general attention.

> our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste

That’s really begging the question, isn’t it? Can you explain why your claim above should be true today (and especially not true/less true years ago)?

From an investor's perspective, would you prefer to invest $100M in a movie franchise where the last 4 titles have done really well and become borderline cultural landmarks, or a novel title with absolutely no backstory? The reality is that the former wins out most of the time and this is the explanation Occam's razor really favors. No one wants to make a bad movie--it just so happens that some stories are less risky than others.

Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.

But the problem is less with the source material and more with the execution of the movie. Look at Game of Thrones and what happened when they ran out of source material.

Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.

If culture is a random walk around a center of mass but without a strong negative feedback mechanism to keep that center of mass where we (we who?) want it, then it could easily go in any direction and keep going. However when you add our ability to collectively enjoy hedonistic culture more than intellectual culture, then it makes sense that there is just one direction that this random walk is going to take. Moreover, over time that preference of "culture" to move in one direction will be amplified by each generation, thus the trend should accelerate.

> Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?

On first read this opinion just sounded like some misanthropic two-bit Nietzsche take

OTOH I've thought the same thing reading reddit comments, some people really are just fucking stupid and the only thing you can do about them is get away

The way I see it: the common culture can go fuck itself. Find your own people and ride off into the sunset

"I don't know, maybe they're stupid" — Butthead

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