Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives
economist.com
economist.com
More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves.
We have a few rules at work.
1. Focus on solutions over reactions.
2. It becomes easy to take advantage of weaknesses in people and squander their strengths, so try as much to do the opposite.
3. Have a plan to handle highly ambitious people before they show up. Don't start wondering what to do after someone with more energy/drive/talent/resource shows up and wants to take over everything, which will keep happening as networks expand. For this we treat things like sports teams, which have to deal with a whole spectrum of highly driven people and get them to work in sync. Works out some days and blows up in our face on others.
There is no free lunch with transparency and growing networks. Just lot of tradeoffs.
So we try to nail that down and keep having conversations about it. It then has effect on how we coordinate, give and take, decide who leads etc
Without those conversations to provide some framework, it turns into a free for all, which reduces trust/faith in the group, esp when some new group or individual joins that have their own ideas and goals.
I bet it isn't just government people trust less since mobile internet, but everything.
Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind them. Trusting no one isn't feasible, so all we're doing is transferring trust, on the basis on anecdote at best and usually just memes, from organisations with flawed but improvable accountability to organisations with none whatsoever.
The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual mainstream news article and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. And then when observing each other's camps (in sufficient qualtities over a long period of time), they each consider the other community to be foolish (and unaware of it) in an aggregate sense. And they're both correct.
The anti-conspiracy-camp is correct in that if one spends any time in the conspiracy community, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy camp is correct in that if one spends any time in mainstream communities, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence (aka: axioms).
Members from both communities will take offence (usually "quite" passionately) at some portion of the above, and attempt to rebut the assertion in the standard form:
[rhetoric, narrative, "logic", "common sense", "facts"/axioms/intuitions presented as facts] + [and then therefore we shall conclude...]"
...but there will almost always be a flaw in the respective rebuttals: invalid epistemology.
At least part of the reason these two camps cannot have a productive dialogue and agree to a compromise somewhere "in the middle"...to agree on some things (that which they agree on) and only disagree, explicitly and precisely, on the subset of points where disagreement actually(!!) exists, is because both camps suffer from loose epistemology - a willingness (and often, extreme eagerness) to believe things (that are consistent with their priors) to be True(!!!), without adequate and conclusive supporting evidence. So, the minds then seem to develop a kind of all-or-nothing, total war defence of each respective comprehensive idea they hold (each of which is typically riddled with errors and untruths), and hilarity inevitably ensues.
I think the same argument is also quite applicable to many other realms, politics being perhaps the most obvious.
I wonder...if members of the two camps could come to realize the above, might it diminish the ability of those in power to so easily pit them against each other in a never ending cultural meme war, and in turn free up their minds and time to be able to more closely and skilfully observe and analyze the actions of those in power (who can currently operate largely unmonitored, unanalyzed, and unopposed, who can censor anything that gets too dangerous to their interests with <some semi-plausible reason>...something which is in the best interests both camps, and typically the majority of all peoples regardless of group affiliation? And if we extended this principle even more broadly, across all current hot-button topics in the country, and in the international world, could we maybe usher in an era of more calm, reasoned, cooperation between various parties who disagree on a few specific details, but largely agree (but don't realize it) on the vast majority of issues from the "big picture" perspective?
1. I believe that it is not a productive use of mental energy (for myself, or others)
2. My account is rate-limited on HN, so I have to use the few posts I am allowed per day wisely (and yes, I am aware of the irony in this statement)
3. Due to the nature of how the mind seems to work, I believe this runs the risk of allowing minds who are looking for "an escape" from the above an opportunity to resume normal "all is well, nothing to see here" operations
Rather, I encourage people who are "reckoning about the problems of the world" to spend less time thinking (and arguing) about relatively trivial object-level matters like this (instances of problems), and spend more time in a more abstract, systems analysis and decomposition mindset (what is the nature of these problems), with an end goal of gaining greater understanding of how the system we've built for ourselves to live in actually works (as opposed to our axiomatic beliefs of how it works)...and just how and why it is that it seems to produce so many outcomes (some of them plausibly existential risks) that are counter to the true, innermost desires of most people who are living within the system.
This overall situation seems like a rather large paradox - my wish is that more people could find a way to become curious about it, and approach it with the same engineering mindset (but applied at the abstract level) that we use every day in our respective lines of work.
Everyone is mostly a somewhat crappy model based on time and brain constraints. People can be viewed as a graph of agents collecting information about subjects along with meta information about other agents needed to construct a much larger pool of information.
Conspiracy theorists who come into a discussion with a default disbelieve position on a particular agent are likely to spend much more time finding fault and may actually be more accurate at identifying correct faults the same way you are I are more apt to correctly identify a variety of conspiracy theorists as kooks and find immediate fault with their arguments.
Unfortunately kooks are apt to have a broken model of whom is trustworthy and to have built up a large collection of incorrect facts. A particular challenge is the fact that they are possessed of a large collection of "facts" that they aren't learned enough to have come up with in the first place and don't really have an accurate model of. See the moon landing truthers as a particular example. It's trivial to collect "facts" that require only a small amount of bad understanding to "get" but require a substantial understanding of science to actually refute. Since they can't build an accurate enough model of the world to actually understand they would have to accept the expertise of others as valid in order to correct their model of the world. Having already rejected such there is no hope for them.
These "facts" act like prions corrupting their model. When they see people providing true and valid info they are predisposed to discard that agents information as corrupted because it contradicts prior beliefs. Since their prior beliefs predispose them to believe bad agents and disbelieve good agents their model inevitably gets worse until it is unrecoverable.
As a binary, perhaps. But is the ability for the human mind to alter the manner in which it forms axioms fixed? How would we know?
> Its impractical to construct a usefully large model of the world in the tiny slice of time afforded us without accepting far more uncritically based on prior performance of agent, apparent validity, credentials, social position etc etc and only discarding or doubting when given reason to.
I am not recommending that anyone stops "accepting far more uncritically based on prior performance of agent, apparent validity, credentials, social position etc etc", I am asking people to not label unknown or axiomatic beliefs as ~"known for certain to be be true/false - any new or conflicting information is therefore false"). I recommend using the history of physics or medicine as one's guide when pondering this.
> Everyone is mostly a somewhat crappy model based on time and brain constraints. People can be viewed as a graph of agents collecting information about subjects along with meta information about other agents needed to construct a much larger pool of information.
This is exactly the style of abstract, systems analysis thinking that I believe the world needs far more of.
> Conspiracy theorists who come into a discussion with a default disbelieve position on a particular agent are likely to spend much more time finding fault and may actually be more accurate at identifying correct faults the same way you are I are more apt to correctly identify a variety of conspiracy theorists as kooks and find immediate fault with their arguments.
From an abstract perspective, this same behavior can be seen in all human beings, regardless of their community affiliations - it seems to be innate subconscious heuristics that enable it. The frequency and magnitude may vary per community, and adjusting one's heuristics accordingly is both reasonable and logical, but if one's heuristic is to assume that membership in a group necessarily implies certain things, without exception, then you have opened yourself up to a future of erroneous thinking.
For a specific instance of this at the object level (people who have skin colour different than one's own, and to what degree it should be considered in your decision making), this advice seems easy to understand and uncontroversial. But when you simply change the dimension of categorization (to membership in a group on something other than skin color), might a fundamental change in thinking style occur? And might the mind energetically defend that belief (but also not want to get too deeply into a discussion about just why is it that it so aggressively defends this particular belief, while for others it has little more than indifference. Is there perhaps something "special but unseen" about this one? How might one know the answer to that question?)
> Unfortunately kooks are apt to have a broken model of whom is trustworthy and to have built up a large collection of incorrect facts. A particular challenge is the fact that they are possessed of a large collection of "facts" that they aren't learned enough to have come up with in the first place and don't really have an accurate model of.
Again, what you are saying applies to all human beings, and always has. It is innate. Compare current ~"consensus beliefs" in 'USA 2020', to consensus beliefs held in various countries throughout the world - are there disagreements between groups? Is one group always right, and the other always wrong? By what means does one know the answer, 100% of the time? Or, instead of comparing to other countries, compare to prior periods in US history, and ask the same question.
> See the moon landing truthers as a particular example. It's trivial to collect "facts" that require only a small amount of bad understanding to "get" but require a substantial understanding of science to actually refute. Since they can't build an accurate enough model of the world to actually understand they would have to accept the expertise of others as valid in order to correct their model of the world. Having already rejected such there is no hope for them.
This seems fairly true. So, are we to form certain conclusions based on these facts? Are moon landing truthers a big problem? Are the attributes of this conspiracy representative of the attributes of all ideas from that community, and then via simple logic we know(!) that the proper heuristic to form is to immediately reject all ideas from that community? If that isn't what you're saying, what specific idea is it that you are intending to communicate with this example?
> These "facts" act like prions corrupting their model. When they see people providing true and valid info they are predisposed to discard that agents information as corrupted because it contradicts prior beliefs. Since their prior beliefs predispose them to believe bad agents and disbelieve good agents their model inevitably gets worse until it is unrecoverable.
Do you believe that this is a 100% one way street? Do you hold the belief that literally every single idea in the conspiracy community is 100% wrong, and where there are conflicting ideas, the corresponding theory in the mainstream world is 100% correct (known(!) to be correct, as opposed to axiomatic correctness)? If so, upon what actual evidence does your belief system rest?
All sorts of the (perceived to be) "facts" on many matters, are simply not facts. There are a massive number of questions in the world, for which the answer is literally not known. I am suggesting that people start distinguishing, explicitly, between True, False, and Unknown. I should probably also point out an accompanying and often unrealized idea: certainty is not a pre-requisite for action. Of course we all know this at the abstract level, but let's not forget this at the object level. Abstract knowledge being seemingly inaccessible from object level cognitive processes can be regularly observed, and can sometimes result in extremely harmful outcomes - I am suggesting that we keep such things in the forefront of our minds.
The main question I would like to put to people is simple: are you willing, and able, to differentiate between True, False, and Unknown? Both in a binary "matter of principle" sense, and also as a "to what degree are you able to, with high skill, in constant, reliably consistent, real time operations" sense? (And, consider how you know whether the answers you are giving are actually correct, and not estimates, or intentions?)
And if the answer to the first question is "No", or <downvote>, ask yourself whether choosing wilful ignorance is a good idea, and consider whether there may be some sort of unseen force involved in making this choice - in a programming forum of all places.
EDIT: I would also like to restate an idea from my prior comment, in hopes of catalyzing more in-depth abstract thinking:
>> Members from both communities will take offence (usually "quite" passionately) at some portion of the above, and attempt to rebut the assertion in the standard form:
>> [rhetoric, narrative, "logic", "common sense", "facts"/axioms/intuitions presented as facts] + [and then therefore we shall conclude...]"
>> ...but there will almost always be a flaw in the respective rebuttals: invalid epistemology.
Looking at US politics, there has been some suggestion by progressive libertarian politicians (such as Bill Weld) that the majority of americans are simultaneously tolerant of socially progressive and fiscally conservative principles.
I don't have any statistics around this, but it appears to be consistent with the people I know (mostly in California). My friends that are Democrats are likely to loudly fight for gay rights, but are less loud about government programs getting cut (they may still be vocal about that, just not as loud). My friends that are Republicans are typically worried about government waste and socialism. Sure, some may be pro-life, but that's not their top priority.
This isn't to say there aren't Democrats passionate about fiscal issues (Sanders wing), or Republicans passionate about social issues (religious right), simply that it is plausible these camps are <50% of each party, which could imply there is more agreement and/or tolerance between what the two parties stand for than disagreement.
However, I am interested in the opposite: scenarios where human beings cannot cooperate (reliably, consistently, and at scale), and more fundamentally: where it seems not possible to achieve this cooperation (even though it is in both party's best interests), why is it not possible? Is there an underlying cause, and if so, what is it?
I happen to subscribe to the theory that the problem is innate (in some manner), neurological/psychological in nature, and I think there is plenty of evidence to support this type of theory. As a thought experiment, imagine it like this....let's assume that there are certain things that the human mind simply can not do (the reasons are irrelevant for now), certain ideas that the human mind simply will not compute - full stop.
Now, imagine if one of these ideas was a pre-requisite for achieving reliable, consistent, at-scale cooperation (perhaps not in all instances, as your example demonstrates, but sometimes/often, which seems to be the case). Also imagine that there is another one of these "neurological cannot do's", and this one just so happens to be a pre-requisite for the cognitive processing required for identifying the first one. But because CannotDo #2 cannot execute, CannotDo #1 cannot be discovered.
If this was the case, you would then have yourself a situation where a fundamentally important problem can be identified, that all/most parties support fixing, there appear to be no impassible blocking barriers to fixing it, and yet it cannot ever be achieved. You are stuck in an unsolvable problem, blocked by something that you cannot see.
So now that you have this theory, is it possible to find some real world examples of unusual/illogical human behavior that plausibly matches this theory (which would represent a sanity check, not a proof)?
Pieter Hintjens, Clay Shirky, Bryan Cantrill, Nadia Eghbal caliber.
I'd read anything you write about FOSS, organizational psychology, governance.
Government has a lot of corruption, people who don't care about their jobs and the stakes are much more personal - greater personal wealth and power at stake.
[...]
Of all social roles, those of hierarchy are affected most by new patterns of information flow. The loss of information control undermines traditional authority figures. Further, because information control is an implicit rather than an explicit aspect of high status, the changes in hierarchy are surrounded by confusion and despair.
[...]
Many Americans are still hoping for the emergence of an old-style, dynamic "great leader." Yet electronic media of communication are making it almost impossible to find one. There is no lack of potential leaders, but rather an overabundance of information about them. The great leader image depends on mystification and careful management of public impressions. Through television, we see too much of our politicians, and they are losing control over their images and performances. As a result, our political leaders are being stripped of their aura and are being brought closer to the level of the average person.
– From Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place, 1989
Trump lies, but I have seen very little evidence that he lies more than any previous president.
The things he lies about are precisely the "Great Leader" style attempts to improve his image.
To me, that is much preferable to lying in order to push us into another Middle East war.
The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much.
"In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities."
They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."
Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something.
Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
Not really though? Remember that people still fall for the most hilariously badly made phishing mails etc. Not everyone is capable of determining whether they’re currently viewing the truth or maybe some skewed part of it or outright lies. And then there’s just so much information on the net. Do _you_ know the agenda of all the sites you visit?
I believe this isn’t something that can be fully taught either. (As in teaching a mathematical method or algorithm or whatever.) You can only try to make people aware as much as possible and hope for the best.
And neither is misinformation: Government and/or religion could alter your entire worldview, and unless you were lucky enough to travel, you never knew. For example: The spanish flu was really called that because Spain didn't have the wartime controls on its press like, say, the US did. It is likely the US troops really did a job spreading the pandemic, but we (Americans) couldn't really report on the virus at the time.
No, with internet you have a much higher chance of being able to find out that a particular thing is misinformation if you put in the time and effort to research it.
But also because of internet you are exposed to a much higher percentage of false information than before, because internet lowered the cost of producing and disseminating false information much more than it lowered the cost of producing and disseminating true information.
And with social media, which is one of the biggest ways false information gets spread, taking up a large fraction of a lot of people's time outside of work they rarely find the time to research the information they get.
Even if you do take the time to try to research the latest false information, there is a decent chance you won't find anything because refuting a false claim takes longer than making a false claim. By the time the debunking is available, there is a good chance you've moved on to something else and are no longer interested. When the false information shows up again on your social media, it is no longer new to you and the chance you'll try again to vet it is much lower.
I think if you're willing to put in the effort, and if you're aware in the first place that a lot of stuff on the internet is nonsense, this is probably true. The problem comes when people don't. There are people whose main source of news is social media, and many really don't have a great basis for figuring out what's real or not.
I mean, you do realize that FB itself has admitted that it’s network was used and misused in the genocide of the Rohingya for example? Or that widespread fake news on its platforms in India has led to many a false murder? Or that malignant agencies used its network to manipulate people with false news in both US and UK elections?
The list is long, but the point is that unlike the satanic scare of the 80s there have been very real and negative effects.
Also, no “old media” outlet ever had billions of users, of which it was able to build detailed individual psychological profiles which they could then use to target for misinformation.
The idea that old media’s access is simply passing onto Facebook is beyond ridiculous. FB and the like have created an information and manipulation monster the likes of which the world has never seen.
From what I've seen misinformation is usually just lies, not pretending to be news.
I think this is interesting in context of "moral panic" - in that this actually happened, just not the way (I think) you mean. The misinformation surrounding the events of the first decade of this century has radicalized Westerners - made the western societies a couple orders of magnitude more afraid of terrorism than it's warranted. And this had political implications.
The other day I was at the supermarket, and one of them was trying to get in with no mask, shouting in the face of an employee about masks being a conspiracy.
Relative to what? The last decade has been devastating to the credibility of conventional news sources. With the advent of the internet, they are literally just ordinary people voicing badly thought out opinions and generating gossip.
The number of stories that turn out to be low-key hoaxes where the story was fabricated are probably the same now as they ever were, but an order of magnitude more are being caught. I'm often speechless by how badly all politicians are misrepresented when I compare reporting to actual transcripts of what was said.
I don't especially trust social media news. But people who are paid to generate news aren't about to admit nothing is going on today. And too many important media stories were just wrong.
(1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have.
(2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less.
Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
— When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake
— Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA.
— It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops:
— “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ”
The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening.
What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later:
— “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA.
The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world.
Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.)
Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run.
The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
I'd say common people are even better than them at making thought connections when things relate to daily life, and something obvious.
I highly, highly doubt that you can make somebody truly "mad with 140 characters," Most proletarians who go on fuming these days are ones who genuinely are pissed off at something very obvious to them about the government, but that something is not that obvious to people up on the social ladder, who only see what is on the surface, like the calls to "burn those A, or B, or C on the stake."
I think that's a bit of simplification.
The idea that people in charge cannot understand them it's as old as modern humanity (hence 5-6 thousands years old)
I believe that a good part of that "being easily pissed" has been engineered by the same people you think are too up on the social ladder to understand.
What bothers me is that most of those who are genuinely pissed are pissed about things that don't actually matter for them.
What does it matter to the proletarians if a famous person (say an actor) says something pro or against Brexit (for example). You have your vote, you cast it and that's what really matters to your category: representation.
Have you ever read the comments below some of these tweets?
I do not think that kind of reaction is really genuine or has anything to do with the situation of working class in 2020.
I could be wrong, but I think that that kind of knee jerk reaction has been fabricated.
To make an extremely simplified example: in an episode of "the boys" (the TV show) one of the new character says to an old timer who's have more followers than her (the incumbent in the posted article) something on the line of "you have followers, I have soldiers"
People up on the social ladder are up there also because they are good at exploiting human weaknesses and aren't afraid nor ashamed of doing it for their own personal gain.
- Outrage about things that have no bearing on their lives. That's, in a big part, continuous dramas about what a famous person said, or - if no celebrity said anything controversial this week - about what some random people are saying. This includes drama as spectator sports - like few people get offended at each other, but it gets magnified to a million-large audience, because everyone gets offended at an offense.
- Outrage about things that have bearing on their lives, but misguided and misdirected. Knee-jerk reactions to government decisions, as well as general politics, are a lion's share of that. This is the problem with simplistic views, that manifest on the social media. If you talked with any random person individually about an issue that affects them, you could likely help them reach a nuanced position - that takes into account second-order effects, and reflects the understanding that most policy decisions involve optimizing across the entire population. But on social media, almost all you see is repeating soundbites and arguing in circles.
To a large extent, both of those types I can confidently classify as manufactured by media, traditional and social alike. Not entirely intentionally - it's a bunch of feedback loops we're stuck in[0]. But the consequence is that exposure to the hivemind can easily drag you way past "declining faith in government", and all the way to idiocy.
--
[0] - Some of the pieces from which the loops are assembled: traditional media earns money through ads, so will systematically prioritize things that generate more pageviews. Algorithms on social media optimize for engagement, which also means promoting things people are statistically likely to engage with. Humans seem to have a natural tendency to pay attention to the gossips about people of highest status. Thinking is hard, knee-jerk reactions are easy. Soundbites are easier to digest and have more immediate emotional impact than well-thought-through, nuanced arguments. Add all that together, and you get a strong, sustained pressure to dumb down our social discourse.
Sort of in agreement with you, but on this, I think there's good reason to be concerned with something like this. If people with social influence disagree with your position and are public about it, they are in a position to influence more people than you can, and your position is less likely to be heard/adopted/enacted/etc.
I'm not sure that's actually why people get upset/involved when famous people hold opposing views - I think it's probably something more visceral - but I can say I don't want views in opposition to mine to get amplified favorable treatment in the media.
Perhaps secondarily, people get upset with famous folks holding opposing views because it ruins our perceptions of them. We often think we 'know' famous people on some level, and when they break out of the model we have of them, it's bothersome.
Yes, it does.
But in a different way than people think.
First of all, it only reinforces the positions pro or con, it doesn't actually move votes, it polarizes them though.
So in theory the best reaction would be to ignore the statement if you are against it, to not give it more exposure.
Secondly, attacking that person personally, commenting on social networks, usually with fake names, I doubt solves anything at all.
> Perhaps secondarily, people get upset with famous folks holding opposing views because it ruins our perceptions of them
That's my impression too, people, but I should simply say humans, we are all affected in a way or another, usually don't like to have their opinions challenged, because it puts them in the position of reconsidering their choices and we kinda have a natural protection against it that made us form tribes that lasted because members shared a common view and common beliefs against "the others".
Probably if that famous person is someone you follow and then you find out that they don't actually think like you do or like you believed they did, it can feel like a betrayal.
But on the other hand, I love Ted Nugent's music while I completely despise the man behind it...
I'm not shocked when he says what he says, I simply don't understand how that same man made something I like so much.
There isn't great evidence for authority structures that would justify the label "person in charge" 6 thousand years ago. History generally starts around 5 thousand years ago, with the development of writing.
(Were there people in charge of other people 6 thousand years ago? Sure, it's not unlikely. But Çatalhüyük is a more or less urban area 9 thousand years ago; if we're going on what's likely, your estimate of 6 thousand years is much too low.)
That's where my estimate comes from, but I'm not archeologist, I might well be wrong
I wouldn't put much weight on any estimate of when he ruled.
it would be interesting to know who's benefiting from these revolutions
it would also be interesting to understand if they really are revolutions or not
I am more inclined to call them riots and I am afraid that a number of them are steered by people with very bad intentions
Internet simply made propaganda easier and more effective, for the good but also for he bad
p.s: It's a good story, but Yeltsin went to Texas less than two months before the Berlin wall was taken down, people in USSR already knew about supermarkets at that time. Especially in East Germany. That's not the reason why they teared the wall down.
We in Italy knew about American malls and supermarkets, we had them but we usually didn't use them as much as we do today to buy groceries because our culture was based on local smaller shops selling fresh food.
I beg you thing otherwise. I spent my first 5 years of life, 1990-1995, with my mother shuttling in between a country which I would rather not name, and Russia, where my father lived until she was able to secure Russian citizenship, and a Russian birth certificate for me.
People in early nineties Russia were going crazy from all novelties they saw for the first time in their lives. Either in 1995, or in 1996, the first Western (actually South Korean) supermarket in the town was JAMPACKED with people for months after opening despite it being quite a huge warehouse store style supermarket, and very far away from the city. People were making reservations to get into it.
On the other hand, people previously in position of social prominence, affluence, and power were in a such deep shock for years on end, that some very literally died from starvation because they didn't know how the money are supposed to be earned from something that is not a government.
I wasn't saying that Russia in the 90s was an happy place like the cocaine driven USA of the 90s.
Russia in the 90s was dealing with the ruins left by the regime.
I know of people that died because they poisoned themselves with home made vodka.
In Italy people were going crazy from all the novelties too, like any novelty people are attracted to them, you could see kids walking down the streets all dressed like Andre Agassi, all with the same haircut, even those that had no money to afford them, a friend of mine was caught many times stealing from the new mall that had recently opened in Rome.
It might surprise you, but the first mall in Rome was opened in 1989. Not so long ago.
It was fun at first, it soon became the most boring thing to do.
The first Mc Donald's in Italy was opened in Piazza di Spagna (Spanish steps) in 1987, 40 years after their first opening in the US.
The first Mc Donald's in Russia opened in 1990, not a lot of difference there.
Ironically, probably thanks to the strong US military presence, Germany had its first Mc Donald's in 1971.
There were people that saw one in Germany (probably agents from East Germany as well) 16 years before us.
Of course the difference is we could travel to US, there was no restriction for us to go there.
But on average people didn't know much about US culture up until the middle 80s.
We actually knew USSR a lot better than the US of A, just as an example see the story of Togliattigrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolyatti
They mainly knew stories about their grandfathers who went to America between the two wars.
Most of them never came back, the only read about it from letters.
But what brought USSR down wasn't the discovery of the supermarkets, it was the war in Afghanistan that left the once powerful Eastern Block with no money and forced them to declare bankruptcy.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttzAsH1yM6E&t=60 (along the lines of: officers, you brought sons back to their mothers)
[1] I remember back when the Taliban were freedom fighters instead of terrorists. In the interim, I doubt their theology has changed significantly (but any outside weaponry is probably currently labelled in a different script).
They succeeded in their intent and the fall of the USSR was so sudden that hundreds of soviet tanks were abandoned on the field
http://www.artificialowl.net/2008/08/ussr-red-army-tanks-gra...
A few years after the end of the war US left the region, refused to help with the reconstruction and handled control to Pakistan that in exchange for routes and security made pacts with local warlords and the Taliban.
With the consequences we know.
I wish I could understand what the Russian Walter White is singing in that YouTube video!
If you're really motivated try looking up офицеры текст песни ("officers text of-the-song") and use machine translation from there. Afghan war songs is a major genre.
I will look it up
Thanks
The theory is that it was a contribution to the brutal treatment of Germans immediately before and after the end of the war (beyond the retribution for the German atrocities in the East).
The second world war in the East was brutal, even more brutal then the one on the West, which was super brutal anyway.
The story is generally unlikely to be "general sentiment" of Russian soldiers. Among other things, there was enough mandatory political propaganda targeted at soldiers for them to not ask questions like this all that much, not loud.
> why would a country this rich invade a poor country like ours?
This question implies that soldiers assume the war was started because aggressor was poor and struggling, attacking out of no other choice. That gives quite a lot of benefit of doubt toward heavily demonized enemy in the war.
Can you please share the story? This is the first time I hear of this
It wasn't described as a main motivation, just another contributing factor for revenge. Which seems entirely understandable - someone with a better life than you decides to invade your country and massacre your fellow country man.
Obviously it's hard to have a solid data on these kind of things but I'd be cautious about believing this. On the other side if any of them felt that way, it would be doubtful they'd publicly share that.
IIRC, the Germans also treated Soviet POWs far more badly than they did Western POWs.
I believe nothing can dispel the disbelief people outside of ex-Union feel about what you point to, other than living through that surreal time, but it was really like this.
Out of all Soviet defectors to the West, the biggest groups were: 1. diplomats, 2. spies, 3. military. All who were entitled to see that.
San Francisco supermarket in Little Italy getting plenty of deliveries? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swdtgcaFess&t=1085
California (1974) orchards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytE_RDrsmMg&t=445 and of course, the Mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytE_RDrsmMg&t=1127
Also no supermarkets along the 1976 Mississippi, but they did make it to the French Quarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7xo7rtSwwI&t=1615
Luxury shopping in Dallas (1978) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCQzMJd4kiM&t=1942
No supermarkets in Pittsburg (1975) but for some reason they went to the unemployment lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgfq1isLUUI&t=1200
Los Angeles, with more Disneyland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmZMJvFVKiA&t=2725 (and wide freeways with lots of cars)
1974 DC has plenty of monuments, white house, pentagon, protestors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvy2fYVs5iw (but the cars have changed in the intervening half century)
Even such documentaries were curtailed, nor aired, or aired only in Moscow and very later, or screened privately.
This particular ones seem to be aimed not on your average union's citizen, and it feels much more like "internal propaganda." Such things were screened to lower level CPSU members, and whomever amounted to social elites as prophylaxis exactly against such scenario as above,
But from my lifelong interest studying how countries work, and fail, I would tell that an average union's citizen would be given a chance to see such inoculatory dosages of "truths" a dozen or so times in his life, the more the higher the rank the person has in the society. And that for most, the exposure to it will pass more or less without consequences, given how watered down it was.
I believe their rationale for engaging in the later was to influence their own elites as much as they can until the level where the benefit from it comes close to the harm from truth stirring up "proles."
I'd say a half of all adult, moderately intellectually developed, working age people by eighties had an idea in principle that:
1. USA is more well off than the union, some even knew by how much from smuggled Western press.
2. That all communists are liars, and that the CPSU is now corrupt beyond salvation.
3. That Radio Liberty is probably not all lie.
4. USA is probably less corrupt than USSR, or at least their bosses don't steal more than half of worker's salary.
5. That it's possible that not all Americans were millionaires, but nevertheless, even some non-millionaires may be able to afford a car in USA...
6. That CPSU keeps microdosing them with much distorted, and watered down depictions of reality in, and outside of the union, in just enough dosage as to preserve CPSU's last vestiges of credibility, as to make what they say not entirely silly.
> "neo-feudalism is what one gets when russians spend the 1980's deciding the capitalists had valid criticisms of communism, then the 1990's deciding the communists had valid criticisms of capitalism."
where by neo-feudalism I mean I believe the basic deal Putin has with the populace is: (1) living standards will increase, (2) what corruption there is will keep its ill-gotten gains at home and not flee to London, and (3) governors may fleece their region according to taste but if they're so blatant as to cause a major scandal they'll be out.
Somewhat remotely close to truth. The trick of Putin's ascension to power was him being completely pliant when it comes to crimes of regional elites, mafias, and governors. He did pretty much everything, but saying it out loud that "I will let you steal as much as you want if you just don't touch me"
1. It didn't anywhere, but in Moscow, and their imagination
2. A majority did flee to London, as mafias went out of all bounds killing each other when Putin gave them that carte blanche
3. There were, and are governors who are scandalised more than Jerry Springer
The US is working hard to close that gap.
You don’t even need to fear being shipped off to Siberia; judging by the news, the current administrations of both the USA and the UK are making people afraid to tell them the inevitable consequences of their decisions, and that’s just fear of losing their current jobs.
* I was one of those persons and I can assure you that it was very impressive and changed everything...
So the simple answer is "We lie about this, therefore, they must also be lying about this."
He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously.
Now, if you imagine an alcoholic Trump who has wreaked massive havoc on the economy, driving Americans into poverty going on a state visit to Russia and fawning over, for example, a caviar tasting... how would you interpret that?
Not quite the same as Russia, but the concept being undermined is that USSR was a superpower that fell leaving only the US. When, at this point, most countries that were aligned with US offer better infrastructure and average-case opportunities for people, while dulling the best-case of rapid excess wealth attainment and practically nullifying the worst case of poverty, incarceration and marginalization which is a constant threat in the US.
Without a millenium of geopolitical baggage, Americans don't really care which country in Europe and sample them all for an unparalleled combination of benefits.
If Time magazine is bragging about having installed the puppet president that came on a state visit to your supermarket I would have thought that concept was well and truly undermined already.
I don't see how that supermarket having a fancy fish counter really contributes to that other than as a publicity stunt.
I don't think Trump has ever been accused of wandering around Moscow blotto, but Putin certainly got a laugh when he claimed he was certain that, Trump's hotel having been in close proximity to the Bolshoi, the future POTUS, a family man, would undoubtedly have taken the opportunity to sample the culture of Russia instead of that of its girls of low social responsibility.
If you lived in the Potemkin village №1 — Moscow, then yes. Having myself lived in a part of Russia where light wasn't shining back in soviet times, nineties were such a giant breath of fresh air, and opportunity.
For most of people there, it was a never before seen opportunity to change their predicament to live in the empire's cloaca — the union's Far East. Were they to continue live as in USSR, most there would've probably kept living on a few dollars a day.
In 1993, longshoremen, and dockers in Vladivostok at my father's business were getting $300-$500 a month, almost as much as average bankers in Moscow. It was enough for somewhat comfortable living for most.
It sounds like you're a generation or so too young, but do you have any opinions on КИНО? Any recommendations for Vladivostok (or general Pacific) music groups I should look up?
People were living alone along with their boredom, and their hatred.
Edit: if only you'd had radios, you would've heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RVeoPQ8FiM . The pics seem to be recent, but the song's from 1985 Moscow. (Only 125 years? That's a boomtown: no wonder the USSR had so many similarities with the US. The city near me has been populated since about 6'000 BC, but only has a twentieth of the habitants.)
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGbzCBLmfJg
The アニメ clips, as well as the album cover, hint at japanese influence. I guess japan is awfully close by, by which uncle youtube leads us to a bonus bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAHX_Oefm3c
In west Ukraine a lot of people been there. I think that's what divided country. In no way I am going to support pro Russia policy once I've been to Europe.
Citizens visiting prosperous neighbor country is worst enemy of authoritarian regime.
And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change.
Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives.
With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
As an example, in Poland, it's widely observed that rural regions are much more supportive of the current ruling party than the urban ones; this is attributed in part to the good relationship between our ruling party and the Catholic Church in Poland.
People in US rural areas are likely to personally interact with the mayor, sheriff, police chief, council members, US park service directors, US forest service directors, local or federal agriculture agency reps, public utility commissioners, water commissioners, tribal government, and so on.
And, many of these people do have direct influence on their day to day life.
I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information.
The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.
This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.
Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”
I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads:
we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?).
Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
Early theories were about "access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation." Current theories are about foreign and domestic intelligence manipulating social media.
The internet is an era. Eras have a lot going on.
The way we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse.
The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.
Decentralization != chaos. On the contrary, it can be far more stable for the forces of coordination, allowing for greater production of knowledge and intelligent action.
See Wikipedia.
First, the internet isn't really distributed anymore. The media part, at least, is controlled by a handful of operators. It is a many-2-many medium, which is a strong distributed quality... but IDK. Idealism about the internet is starting to seem quaint and naive. I did think so, though, at one point.
To give a concrete example: the late 1800s saw growing awareness of the miserable conditions endured by the poor, especially those working in factories in newly industrialzed cities.
Yet the quality of life of the typical person was much poorer before industrialization, with most people working as subsistence farming and facing the ever-present danger of starvation and diseases linked to privation.
It was the very resources unlocked by industrialization that increased the time people could expend on acquiring literacy and the ability of people to publish written work, that led to people communicating and becoming conscious about the misery that the poor endured.
It appears that the study doesn't factor in cases where the governments indulge in mass propaganda. Mobile internet helps disseminate information at scale instantly, and people usually don't tend to ascertain authenticity of information.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also do little do prevent spreading misinformation. If a government is "committed" to spreading misinformation, mobile internet makes it much easier to have a much wider reach that would be easily possible otherwise.
We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government.
This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often warrented and needed.
That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier.
It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
It is incredibly difficult for a society to function as smoothly as any western country does. It is miraculous to people in many nations that there can be such things as timetables at all.
Sure, and in the context of any single country it might not be working. Is a train running at 3mph "working" because there were no trains on earth during all those years of human history before the invention of trains? I don't think that's a useful definition of "working".
I do absolutely agree that advanced societies are miraculous, though I wouldn't call them functioning smoothly (there's a lot of overhead). Still, there's plenty of things that aren't working at all or aren't working as well as they should (a thousand dollar burger should taste crazy delicious), and government (or more general: a large bureaucracy, of which government is the largest) is often involved.
there is no sense in which a $1k dollar burger weighs on whether a society is functioning
your moral distaste at the marginal value of $1k to different people, doesnt strike me, as very relevant to the issue
indeed, that, people have different marginal values for $1k is precisely a symptom of how profoundly well rich societies function
Do you think that a power plant that produces energy at $10000/kwh "works" next to one that produces energy at $0.1/kwh?
I don't see "works" as a binary, I consider it relative to expectations and possibilities. I hoped the burger example would illustrate that, but maybe it was too close to reality since it probably exists.
Let me try another way: it's great to have clean water, but if you spend all X on providing clean water while others create the same with X/1000, whatever you're doing to produce clean water is not working. But of course it "working" as in "okay, there's clean water", but it's not working in a societal sense, we cannot sustain doing that, we must look for another option.
For sure, efficiency is part of "working". I guess my baseline for "working" is a far lower level of efficiency than yours.
Yours is certainly contextually-relevant to our society (ie., we should always hope for better efficiency). But I think when taking a step back to answer the binary question "does government work?" our baseline has to be against governments which dont (rather than some minor local inefficiency).
Governments which don't work produce civil wars, mafias, mob patronage structures, impoverished citizens, etc.
It is those governments we shouldn't trust, rather than a somewhat incompetent western bureaucracy which should mostly get the benefit of the doubt towards "working".
People being deprived of the truth and free information have no alternative but to blindly believe whatever you(the government) will tell them, North Korea style.
The allegory of the cave is about having choice and ignoring it. This is about obtaining choice and everyone seeing the folly of their masters. The people that don’t would be closer to that allegory.
With the use of force.
Hitchens did interviews in the eastern block during the 80s. Everyone knew Kafka, it turned out, once they felt safe letting you know they knew it. Vice news did a tour of Assad's territory at the height of the civil war. Propaganda at the highest levels, with people expected to believe a fiction in extreme contrast to reality. A policeman said to the journalist: "this is 1984 and I am Winston Smith."
It's not easy to put people into Plato's cave.
Reality is more complex than this. When people learn the truth, get woke, take the red pill (note these are all modern references to the cave)... it almost always involves shaking or adopting a complex worldview. Facts play a part, but narrative plays a bigger part. So does emphasis, etc.
Or maybe we're all still in that cave, and the internet just projects some new shapes we haven't seen before. New shapes, new shadows, new wisemen telling us what they mean.
Deep down at a very basic level humanity probably perceives this level of connectedness as a threat and that's a very bad spot for anything in the universe to find itself in.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-...
Faith in government only declines if they are corrupt.
"The 3G expansion decreases government approval if there is at least some corruption. In few noncorrupt countries, the effect of 3G on government approval is actually positive."
So the internet is good for democracy even at the maxima?
Also censorship works well "Government approval falls with the expansion of 3G only when there is no internet censorship."
Neither I believe to be true. Censorship allows management of the population and will work, but it's hard, there should be some drop.
Anyway for corrupt governments without censorship I agree with the document and Starlink will sort it all out soon and bring in a few revolutions
Mobile also arrived right around the time we really got confirmation there were no WMDs in Iraq.
I haven't done much research on what is the current state of the art thinking about this.
I bet people here know loads about it - where should I start after the wikipedia?
there's no easy way
When you live in a rural village and can't really communicate or interact beyond the village, you NEED to believe there is a government out there keeping things working, keeping the enemy away and running stuff. So you do.
When you get a mobile phone and need to complain about something and talk about how you're a self made person and how those bozos in <capital city> are IDIOTS, and it seems like you can access more resources by complaining louder, guess what you believe then?
That's a big part of the rise of neoliberalism: the modern economy requires us all to be self starters and entrepreneurial (or at least to switch jobs regularly and make out own way in the world). To do that, it really helps to think of government and other people as morons and obstacles and yourself the a randian hero of you're own story. So we believe that. Because belief isn't based on evidence, its based on utility.
That's not a loss in faith in government, it's a loss in faith in the current government. A loss of faith in government would be voting for those who want a smaller government with less power, but the movements in Europe and elsewhere are hardly libertarian. Perhaps mobile internet is driving a desire for change, but for different, not less. Why would you desire that if it's government in general that you've lost faith in?
I find it interesting that we refer to "faith" in government, as opposed to "trust." When cheaply printed books and pamphlets arrived on the seen, thanks to the printing press, we saw another kind of faith shaken. What followed, eventually, is what we call "The Enlightenment."
I'm not sure the decline in government is a bad thing. Here I will disclose my political leanings. I lean very heavily libertarian. I'm something of a classical liberal, in favor of what's derided as a "night watchmen" government. I am not for getting rid of government. I just think it should do a lot less. The scope of government increases only because of the "faith" people place in it, because its track record by comparison isn't all that good.