mrxd

In non-western countries the norm is filial piety, which means showing respect, devotion and obedience to one’s parents. The West is really the only region that has shifted to the values you describe.

I believe there are advantages to the Western way. But the claim that any other way is abusive seems quite ethnocentric to me.

This mostly comes down to parents who have more traditional cultural values than their children. It’s like watching two sports teams argue about who broke the rules, but they can’t agree because fundamentally one team is playing soccer and the other is playing baseball.

See also Diotima’s ladder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love

I’d love to know what those obvious reasons are, and whether they don’t ultimately boil down to paternalistic conservative bromides that people can’t be trusted to govern themselves.

> So what, in your mind, is a more “democratic” news media?

Assuming the problems of voter participation are solved, I would like to see publicly funded journalism and the position of editor-in-chief as an elected position.

My criticism of US journalism is that they lay claim to legitimacy by being above the rabble. That is why they are able to decide what's in the best interests of the country. That's a claim to 1) a political role based on 2) an anti-democratic premise. I don't know of any expert specialization which makes a similar claim.

Nielsen TV and radio ratings are the functional equivalent of "an algorithm that rewards CTR", and that system rewards polarization and outrage in exactly the same way. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the longstanding mantra of TV news.

IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?

None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.

The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.

The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.

Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.

I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The results were far-reaching. The US violated the UN charter and launched a disastrous war in Iraq where millions of Iraqis were killed, injured and displaced. They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies.

All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry.

If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.

That may be true, but the WSJ headline was Facebook ignored its own research that Instagram is harmful. This blog post is intended to contest what the research said. Whether the research was good or not is a different issue.

> Citation needed.

https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-v...

The original paper refers to specifically to economic elites, but this article quite strangely redefines this group as a credentialist/cultural elite that is motivated by status and influence within bureaucracies and favors socialism. This seems to be a description of the author’s personal experiences within his university, but it ends up being a significant misrepresentation of the actual paper, which refers to an economic elite, where support for socialism is lowest.

It’s quite strange to see a paper about economic power exerting control over government policy being summarized as “elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability.”

> there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers

According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.

This is going to be a real headache for localization.

I think you are right that many therapists expect their clients to adopt a position of helplessness and submission, and label them as uncooperative if they don't. We constantly hear about the stigma among men against going to therapy, but no acknowledgment that men's approach to emotions is influenced by the fact that men are the main breadwinners in most households. The typical stoic male approach to emotions isn't just arbitrary "male culture", but a product of the fact that if you as a man can't get out of bed in the morning, people go hungry.

A second, related issue is that the culture of therapy since Freud is heavily influenced by romanticism, a 19th century social and aesthetic movement that prioritized sentimentality and emotion as the source of individual authenticity and creativity. Being in touch with your emotions can be valuable for certain kinds of artistic expression, but in many circles those ideals has become so powerful, they're synonymous with mental health. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the values of the artistic class don't find traction among working class.

It's actually not hard.

Rationality is a form of communication. Its purpose to persuade other people and coordinate group activity, e.g. hunters deciding where they should hunt and making arguments about where the prey might be. In that setting, rationality works perfectly well because humans are quite good at detecting bad reasoning when they see it in others.

Because of the assumptions of psychological individualism, rationality is misunderstood as a type of cognition that guides an individual's actions. To a certain extent, this is a valid approach because incentives within organizations encourage people to act this way. We reward individual accomplishments more than collaboration.

But many cognitive biases disappear when you aren't working under the assumptions of psychological individualism. For example, in the artificial limitations of a lab, you can show that people are unduly influenced by irrelevant factors when making purchase decisions. But in reality, when a salesperson is influencing someone to spend too much on a car, people say things like "Let me talk it over with my wife."

We instinctively seek out an environment of social communication and collaboration where rationality can operate. Much of the advice about how to be individually rational comes down to simulating those conditions within your own mind, like scrutinizing your own thinking as if it was an argument being made by another person. That can work, but the vast majority of people adopt a more straightforward approach, which is to simply use rationality as it was designed to be used.

Rationality is hard, but only for a small number of "smart people" who live in an individualistic culture prevents them from using it in the optimal way.

There was a meme going around where a doctor took a high school biology quiz.

Q: What are mitochondria?

A: [Long complex scientific answer about ATP synthesis]

Grader: Wrong. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell.

Yes, that’s what it’s about. Turnabout is fair play. You should think through the long term consequences of that.

I wish you weren’t getting downvoted because I think your comment reveals so much.

Most major tech companies have a 1:8 ratio of designers to developers.

I agree, my point is that psychoanalysis was developed by medical doctors trained in scientific methods and scientific understanding of human biology. So they were certainly aware that psychoanalysis wasn't scientific and never pretended it was. Freud attempted to link psychoanalytic observations to neuroscience, but ultimately abandoned that project because he thought the science of the day wasn't sophisticated enough.

> Freud came as a kind of a doctor for mind, calling his clients 'patients' and mimicking "real" doctors in any way he could.

This is a popular misconception. In fact, Freud was a "real" doctor who studied neuroscience in medical school and had a career as a doctor working in hospitals. The most interesting thing about psychoanalysis is that it was invented by neurologists like Freud and his mentors Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer, not by psychologists. The "talking cure" was originally used to cure people who had been hospitalized with various physical symptoms and ailments.

The popular myth holds that psychoanalysis is a non-science trying to mimic science, but in reality it is the other direction. It was originally closer to biology and moved away from that.

Word of mouth is person-to-person, not online or media. Brand marketing is also different from product marketing.

100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.

> We wanted something that was memorable but meaningless, so we could educate people as to what it means.

That is an incredible statement. I would think you’d want a symbol that represents danger to be intuitive.

> Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.

That doesn’t surprise me at all. Why would anyone instinctively know the terms a psychologist would use to categorize their feelings?

That’s like saying you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know the key of their favorite song.

Not a great article. Cobranded cards have proliferated because of lower interchange fees. Customer loyalty isn’t the main benefit to the company.

I wouldn't say that morality is classist per se. The idea of writers influencing the minds of their readers seems paternalistic, because the reading public are treated as impressionable children who need protection and guidance from their betters. And then it's a small step to saying maybe they shouldn't be trusted to vote, either.

The weird thing is that this article is in itself elitist. Cultural moralizing comes from a place of superiority and trying to morally improve the public. Inequality exists because the elite class holds political power, not because there is stigma and bigotry against the working class.

That would probably be illegal for a public university. Elite private universities frequently defend themselves against the criticism that they reinforce social hierarchy and class privilege. They would incur significant reputational damage if they had official policies that did just that.

> If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?

Because there's no real way of measuring the cost of a fake review to Amazon. Yes, Amazon could do a lot more. What's the right amount to do? How much should be spent on that initiative, and why shouldn't that money be spent on other initiatives?

But what if the students assigned to the less desirable building really were less happy, but they had made other changes to their life to make up for it? Maybe they spent less time in the building, or improved the aesthetics of their room, or spent more time on hobbies or socializing.

I suspect confirmation bias leads researchers to find proof of their initial hypothesis without ruling out other explanations.

There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact that there's a corporate PR department is enough.

But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects, Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom of the article:

> What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability.

The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and corrupt.