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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

This.

These outright falsehoods that people take for truths are not taken for truth in a vacuum. As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them.

I was reading somewhere that people tend to readily assimilate information conforming to their own world view, and have a tendency to block out information that does not conform to their world view. It's claimed that these tendencies pre-date the internet.

If that's true, the negative effects of virality were inevitable.

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Tribalism is as old as humans, and previous successful attempts at “defeating” it have typically involved warring tribes being wholesale eradicated by, or assimilated into, larger tribes, then states, then blocs. Now we have global tribes and nobody bigger left to defeat or assimilate them.

The only way out I see is to try to grow the “sensible majority” into a dominant majority that can robustly eject extremists - make a bigger tribe, essentially. But what cluster of issues unites enough people to form a dominant political force, while also rejecting the dark patterns that consume the current political tribes?

I’d guess economics is the only thing that can really unite people across all cultures. I live in an upper middle class Midwestern suburb , and my neighbors are Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jordanian, Nigerian, Kenyan, and the people we bought our house from had Nepalese names based on a few Google searches.

If we just make everyone rich, maybe they won’t want the world to burn?

Having disposable income is a culture itself, and different levels of wealth/income can be broken down into different tribes as well.

Economics is also at the root of tribal disagreements. It’s all about securing assets for your tribe, and that doesn’t just mean money. It could also be the unquantifiable qualities that make up a stable tribe, which are found less frequently in tribes with less security of housing, food, energy, and opportunity.

“You are the company you keep” is a popular saying that sort of touches on it.

> The only way out I see is to try to grow the “sensible majority” into a dominant majority that can robustly eject extremists - make a bigger tribe, essentially.

That's only good if we have the ultimate truth - if we have no entrenched wrong ideas ourselves. I think that's a dubious proposition. If we have an entrenched false idea X, then anyone who denies X is one of those extremists that we eject. But if X is actually false, by ejecting them we destroy the ability of society to figure out that X is in fact false.

I think it’s the entrenchment that’s the problem. Science, for example, has a pretty good track record of coping with false ideas by being self-correcting and avoiding dogmatic truth claims. I don’t think a political body needs to be in possession of ultimate truth to identify and disempower those who do not seek it.

So, like... the Democratic Party? I'm less than half joking.

At least in the US (and oversimplifying) "tribalism" is what keeps the conservative party intact, while the liberal party is a big tent. One way you see this is that liberal policies tend to be broadly popular when presented outside the partisan frame. Meanwhile Republicans eneltered the election without even an official policy platform.

This is also ignoring the other dimension of lying: it's a way to assert dominance. The lie is the point.

You saw this when Russia invaded Ukraine: Vladimir Putin and other Russian propaganda efforts spout easily disprovable lies about what's happening, about what was plainly visible in the news (Russian soliders and vehicles crossing the border).

Russia wasn't trying to hide the lie, the point of the lie was to make you waste time fact-checking it, and then do the thing they needed anyway - which was you had to repeat the lie and then expend disproportionate rhetorical resources disputing it. And then they can simply turn around and tell another lie.

The idea that better fact-checking somehow will solve any problem is ignoring what the point of modern propaganda is - it's about dominance and power.

This should be upvoted more, very well said.

I usually frame it in terms of incentives but yes, you are absolutely correct, there is a power play involved.

> As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them.

Right, and there we also see the answer. We need to move people to no longer want to believe the lies.

For example, if I believe that it's all a conspiracy by "them", then it's not my fault that I'm a failure. That's comforting. But it also follows that I'm helpless, and that things are never going to get better. That's... not so comforting. If someone shows me that, I may not want to believe that any more.

Now, that's a very slow process, and almost requires one-on-one interaction with lots of time. You can't do it in a drive-by post on the internet. Worse, even if you put in the time and effort, it still may not work. But I don't know of anything else that will, and this might work at least some of the time.

Another theory:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/political-lying-as-tribal-...

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