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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

After a recent argument with my brother in which he kept insisting we lived in different moral and factual realities, I've become much more interested in who and what we allow to form our worldview than what it ends up being. I realized during our conversation that he was citing mainstream media news sources, whereas I was citing primary sources. For example, we were talking about a change in a law and I was comparing the actual text of the law before and after the change, and he was citing commentary on it, or he was telling me he didn't believe certain things ever happened, and I was citing research data that said they actually happen consistently.

I don't know how to speak to what someone has allowed to create the "reality" they believe they live in when it's abstracted away from primary sources. It would be one thing if he were citing different studies, different research, different legal records, but he's not. He's saying if a commenter he likes/trusts interprets something one way, it doesn't matter if there are facts that prove otherwise.

Ironically, our dad is the same way, just with the politically opposite set of non-primary sources my brother relies on, and it frustrates my brother to no end. But if the foundations of each of their worldviews are several levels abstracted from the original source material, how are they ever going to live in the same "reality"?

It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are. So few people are actually even looking at primary sources anymore, and partially because they've become so hard to find beneath all the layers of commentary on them. But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?

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> But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?

One of my tactics here is to refuse to discuss politics at all, but to encourage any/all discussion of economics and philosophy. One effect of this is to remove lots of trigger words and names, which helps those who feel persecuted or embattled to take a step back. Another effect is you get a much more clear perspective on how they actually operate wrt to belief and evidence.

If you find an economic or philosophical/ethical/moral POV that’s directly contradicting a persons stated political views, don’t just leap on the opportunity to point it out. First realize that the person you’re talking to is probably in a significant amount of psychic pain already from shouldering this kind of cognitive dissonance for decades. Activate your compassion/empathy. This way you can twist the knife better when you do leap on the hypocrisy to try and kill it! Soon you’ll have no friends left and that solves the problem of dealing with political discussions

This took a turn that feels inevitable now that I see it, but I did not see coming, and made me laugh out loud. Thanks for this!

My best friend recently said microeconomics is "bullshit" and I don't know how to handle that. I take it for granted, like algebra, it's like saying gravity is bullshit. What other model is there? They didn't propose one.

> Soon you’ll have no friends

At the rate I'm going. Of course this could all be fallout from the biggest Shiri's Scissor ever fired, hitting the US.

>What other model is there? They didn't propose one.

Start with Praxeology (the methodology of Austrian economics). Specifically, Mises’ Human Action.

The simple axiom that all preferences are subjective instantly eliminates a lot of the foundation of micro (and macro) economics as it is typically taught today.

In other words,

  “All preferences are subjective but some ikigais locally align (or at least have positive inner product*)”

In yet further words, Each of us would like to find our ikigai-trading neighbors so as to figure out the pareto-optimal way to move forward in cluster[-fuck]s [for that profane diversity-curious outsider take]

*i see that theHeisenberg uncertainty principle was codependency injected[0] into section 5[1] — a negative example of the very point?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action#Summary

[1] 5 Causality as a requirement for human action

I had to have an LLM explain this to me what in the world this comment means, but I take it as a positive. Every day is a school day, and I'm glad I don't need to do two hours of background reading to decode this to my satisfaction.

https://cdn.mises.org/Human%20Action_3.pdf

p139, under slight substitution (keeping in mind that Mises wrote in 1940)

> The accomplishment gratifies [the grad student] neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a [grad student] could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful*; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The [grad student] wants to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves toward his own disaster.

see also footnote 23? (would Rao call Mises' geniuses Clueless or Losers?)

* it furthers the great man to enjoy the life of the sage?

I do respectfully interpret {pg,tlb,rtm} as preferring to become genius hunters that fail well to remaining grad students that succeed badly..

(Thanks for reminding me of the cases of Niedermeyer and Takesaki, more appropriate to remember as them grad students rather than geniuses?)

Albeit the more apt metaproblem would be the one of enabling these “grad students” to hunt “genius projects” in teams. not sure if YC itself was meant to be this kind of genius project— i cant tell if that project proved its salt by seducing the {OGs} with a barrage of noble, monastic yet fecund suffering… perhaps not, since they kinda moved on to comfortable spiessig lives (as have their successors, mostly)

::::

vM (good or bad faith?) sidestepped the “Rao Normalization” issue by citing only nonSTEM “geniuses”, YC embraced 2 rounds of “Rao Normalization”: “finding our ikigai by hiring G/GS to find what pple want”

Edit: Rao-Sturgeon Normalization

Lagniappe: https://archive.ph/G5nXO

Cultural revo for the old c. :=> wardriven emigration to the relatively hilly Eastcoast

>these prizes give me the willies … use… the money to help grad students

Echoes of JZY’s straight hook…

(Compare with the ineffective ennoblement of vM’s or Volodya illyich’s line)

https://www.geni.com/people/Mayer-Rachmiel-von-Mises-Edler/6... looks like a railroad Macher

(railroads were for my family what textiles were for my wife's; both techs were spiritual predecessors of inkering)

EDIT: helping grad students reminds me of the ending to Двенадцать стульев !

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcGnYLVixeY (pastiche of « La Danse Apache » )

VIU? Am I missing something? I see an embalming but not an ennoblement?

En wiki claims (via Gorky) he was entitled to sign off as a statskiy sovetnik(‘s son)

> "After we had been married for years it occurred to me that he never puts salt on anything."

The fox doesn't quite manage to brush his tail over his tracks. What is the finest topology in which the "flunked over a hottie" stories form a convergent sequence?

EDIT: next up, BCB bio?

I am disappointed that tlb's middle name is not "Lookaside" but appreciate:

> Arbitrary decisions should be made randomly —TLB

(does gwern know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-discrepancy_sequence#Const... ? they seem unmentioned, as does φ in a circular space...)

(Yes. Low-discrepancy sequences are the WP link for "a special random number generator" in /unsort, and I considered that link to also cover quasi-Monte Carlo etc. I'm not immediately sure what you mean by "φ in a circular space" though.)

My bad, I'd just ^F'd with a purely syntactic search on a few terms.

If you can arrange your space from 0,..1 and identify 1 with 0 to make it circular, obviously (consider 1/3, 2/3, etc.) advancing by any amount in ℚ will fail to explore a lot of the space. The flip side of this is that φ, or 1/φ, are the least-ℚ-like regular things in ℝ: if we consider good approximations to be places in the continued fraction where there's a large entry, that never occurs. (their continued fraction representation is repeated 1's)

This comes up with "how do sunflowers know about φ?", the answer to which seems to be: they don't, they're just creating new seeds in the least-correlated place to all the existing seeds, and because of the property above, that tends to result in apparently-spiraling placements which can be fitted with fibonaccis or φs.

Does that make sense?

That makes sense. Sounds interesting - do you have a favored reference? Quickly looking, I did find https://gwern.net/doc/math/1974-mathai.pdf

Top of my deadtree stack is Chazelle, The Discrepancy Method (1998)

(Father of the regrettably more famous Chazelle, if you’re okay californicating rabbit holes)

Update:

Now that I've pushed BC back to the stack, here's a ref that might be worthier of the (nonnewtonian) process heap

https://archive.fo/4mlUU

(Pls use the usual Chinese bulk carrier resilient doi tricks as might be required)

Lagniappe:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That sounds like the perfect swith* for me as well — I'd already been meaning to hide some imperative O(n)s behind functional-seeming O(n log n)s, but if soft heaps have no huge constant involved, maybe no rabbits have to be hidden in hats?

* http://bitsnbobstones.watershipdown.org/lapine/unit12.html#:...

Heh, not that any of us would be willing to tolerate getting stuff back in corrupted order ;)

If the constant factors aren't intolerable, it seems like one really ought to be able to do something with the fact that corruption (galois connection connexion?) only happens in one direction (corruption monad as closure)...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yExwkQYcp0

I would, ipso facto(rio), in the hope that some of these corruptions, like Shakespeare's monkeys, would rephrase the muddled messages I get from the aether in something worth remembering for all time..

Maybe you could get a professor from the Academy of Projectors in Lagado to agree to advise, whereby you could get allocated some time on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine for your own research?

(thanks for reminding me of "Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures?"!)

No favoured reference on my part, but Kragen's played around with this before, so he might have some ideas...

Its also worth placeholdering that PG’s role model is the aanglo neoEdwardian(?) (Bloomsbury) jMKeynes rather than the teutonic (neoVic) vonMises, considering the diverging hypernormal interpretations of their legacy.

(Compare with anglophile GCL?)

Refactoring KST’s (from Rainer?) “only 2 games worth playing, the opening game and the endgame”, i propose: “only 2 things worth doing: showing its possible or making it easy”

That's beautiful. It not only gives us a relatively objective measure of genius, but it also explain's my fencing teacher's opinion that the most beautiful move is "feint direct; direct":

   - the feint direct shows a touch is possible
   - the direct is the easiest possible touch

Of course, that almost never happens. RPF (like TAE) says that if you want to show it's possible, you have to schlep a lot beforehand discovering what's impossible ("you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"); Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991) says that if you want to make it easy, you have to schlep a lot beforehand providing value to people who can make use of your stuff even before it's easy ("You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all different").

EDIT: Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1MlXmNSL7s#t=210s

> Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back —PH

>> Problems… —PH

With gratitude, i’d already riffen on this with “… [YC] proved its salt…”

Riffing on the schlep of “talking to users” my current (more designori-oriented?) variant is “building a marketplace Elon style”

> marketplace Elon style

which would be? (should I comment out my Elon filter?)

Stylewise I'm far more familiar with the agoric stoa*: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

* in both its archeological and its modern incarnations

    Start with Praxeology (the methodology of Austrian economics).

"Start with a fringe ideology that explicitly rejects empirical evidence" is not exactly a good start.

    The simple axiom that all preferences are subjective instantly eliminates a lot of the foundation of micro (and macro) economics as it is typically taught today.

No? If anything, econ 101 classes are basically Austrian economics classes due to how many idealized simplifying assumptions are made. And subjective preference curves are the entire basis of the supply/demand graphs that econ 101 students are bombarded with.

> I take it for granted, like algebra, it's like saying gravity is bullshit. What other model is there?

I somewhat relate to their position. Something can be probably wrong, even if no better alternative can be proposed. I haven't seen a case in my personal life where the laws of gravity are off by any observable amount. Microeconomic rules felt broken at times.

Maybe no economic model works on everything in advance, and you'd need to first deeply understand situations before actually picking an abstraction, to minimize the denaturation of reality.

> Soon you’ll have no friends left

This dynamic far outweighs factors like moral and intellectual honesty. Humans want to be a part of a tribe and be respected within it far more than they want to do the right thing or be honest.

There was an interesting thread in reddit's /r/AskHistorians about common mistakes amateur historians make, and the top comment was this

> Valuing primary sources over secondary, and first person accounts over records. Primary sources are great in that they are created in or near the moment; however, the lack the scope and broader understanding hindsight provides to secondary sources. First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts.

See the whole thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16d474n/what...

Now, the context of the OP is less about history and more about contemporary events, but the key point here is that there is different value in primary vs secondary sources, and that primary sources aren't always categorically better.

As a personal example, I grew up not knowing a lot of racist dog whistles that some politicians use, something I would have missed if I had only read or listened to the primary source (ie the politician). Having secondary sources interpret and explain things was highly valuable to me.

However, the OP also has a really good point that sometimes these secondary sources can't always be fully trusted. It's a tough epistemological problem about who and what you can trust, interleaved with social influences, mass media, and personal worldview.

And I didn't do a good enough pointing out that my complaint was focused on mainstream news media as the secondary source, not expert commentary.

I don't think primary sources are some be-all, end-all, standalone authority. I'm just concerned that mainstream news media is so many layers abstracted from them, but people rely on them as though they have some sort of firm enough grounding in "reality" to support a worldview.

I mean, all secondary sources are (by definition) based in some way on primary sources. So the advice is necessarily epistemologically incomplete.

On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no? Or at least a combination of commentary and curation of the constant firehose of new information, which feels like a form of implied commentary itself.

Primary sources are only an improvement on commentary if, between you and the commentator, you are the one with the combination of expertise, time, and objectivity better suited to extract truth from the source, and this weighing of suitability is going to vary from source to source.

New Computer Science research? Maybe I can parse it better than some. New novel treatment for insert-disease-here? I need some help.

> On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no?

Oh yes, very much so.

Which is why it's so deeply concerning that media has become terribly consolidated and controlled by capital. The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views [0].

Examples: Illegal wars, the holocene extinction, climate change - in each case you can point to massive disparities in what media commentators present as important, and what genuine experts believe is important.

One very recent example is how media across the West presented Israeli football fans as victims of roaming gangs doing 'pogroms' in Amsterdam, when in fact, the footage shown was very clearly of the Israeli fans terrorizing residents: [1]

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60

1 - https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1857352815343210804

>The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views

How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet? Why shouldn't everyone ask if those interests are align to own goals?

> How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet?

Sometimes it's really easy, and yet we're still failing.

Say a community is deciding whether to clean up a polluted river, and prevent the polluter from dumping chemicals in it that are killing fish and leaving residents with foul water.

Person A says: "The polluter's interests conflict with the community's need for clean water."

Person B says: "How can we even define what the community needs? Maybe some people don’t mind foul water. Maybe a little PFAS pollution and pesticide runoff is fine actually. We've no firm evidence that these chemicals cause harm. There's no proof that the rise in cancers since GreenWashCorp moved to town isn't just coincidence.”

I would say that person B is ignoring a clear, shared need (clean water). The appeal to the status quo will do real harm to people if they listen to it.

... Flint still doesn't have clean water. Like many parts of the US.

Which collective goods do you consider disposable - clean air, water, food? A livable climate?

How sure do you think we need to be of what the "interests of humanity" are, before we defend them?

Flint has had clean water since ~2018 and there are ongoing state and federal efforts to remove all lead from water systems in Michigan (and the rest of the country of course).

Is there some specific criteria you have in mind when you say that Flint doesn't have clean water?

"Ongoing efforts". Great.

> a federal judge recently found Flint in civil contempt for failing to meet a deadline to remove all of the city's lead service lines.

> There are an estimated nine million lead service lines in need of replacement across the U.S.

- https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1247095068/its-been-10-years-...

> Flint residents have yet to see a penny of the $625 million class-action settlement that came from a lawsuit against the state

- https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/2024/04/25/flint-water...

And it's not just Flint, like I said:

> CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together service more than 19 million people.

> A total of 118 of the 120 samples had concerning levels of PFAS or arsenic above CR’s recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead.

- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...

Specific criteria you ask: How about just living up to our own standards, for a start. Holding polluters and enablers accountable.

Then we can get those standards up to where other, more densely populated, less wealthy countries already have them.

So that study uses limits set by consumer reports, it's a misrepresentation to use it to argue that water doesn't meet standards. And it's not clear if they included private wells (where things like arsenic levels may be naturally high).

The EPA hadn't even set limits for PFAS at that time.

They only got around to it earlier this year - after the "forever chemicals" were detected in the water systems of nearly 200 million Americans.

So I guess you're right - technically, you can't meet standards that don't exist. Not sure that helps your argument that we have safe water though!

For some areas you need expertise. But some areas can be checked by everyone. Affirmations like "according to the sources politician X was accused of fraud" and "during president X, the economic sector Y experienced a growth of Xyz %".

That still takes time, though.

Very true! But I’d still argue the idea that (partially) relying on commentary is what causes bias is hubristic; in practice, it usually just means that you’re relying on commentary without realizing it. Like, take the instance mentioned in the original comment: reading “the text of a law”. This is a great thing to do, but assuming you’re not a legal scholar and a political expert specializing in that field, it’s no reason not to also seek out commentary that explains the intent and likely impact of the law. To say the least, laws are not objective — that’s why we need the judicial system.

In my experience, this overall rhetorical tactic is often pulled out by people who pride themselves on some variety of centrism/moderation, and are trying to dismiss the worries of others. This is good when they do it to beliefs like “crime is going up” or “criminal immigrant are invading our country”, but not so much when it’s used against “yes, he really does endorse P2025 even though he claims not to”.

Plus cmon it’s gotta just infuriate any interlocutor. I’ve never dealt with “well you’re just not smart enough to understand why I’m right”, and this focus on reading primary sources seems like a variety of that.

Again, not at all saying that they’re wrong to read primary sources, or that it’s not sometimes absolutely necessary; just that the “worldview”-based confidence stemming from such a practice is misplaced.

Commentary has its place, but it's in the context of primary sources. It can't stand on its own. And there's a vast quality chasm between expert commentary and mainstream news commentator commentary.

I can't speak to everyone's experience, but I have never been to an event later reported in the news where the news report corresponded to what I witnessed enough for me to believe the reporter was even there. And anymore, they aren't. They're trying to synthesize observations from dozens of different people, who themselves may or may not have been there, and doing it so fast they don't have a chance to verify whether they were. It's like a giant game of "telephone," but it's presented as though it's all fact.

In the specific example of the law, I was specifically saying, "[Politician] approved the change of a law from saying X to saying Y," so the text of the law before and after the politician's approval was the specific issue in question. I can see why there would be lots of situations where expert legal commentary would be important to understanding the impact of the change, but in this case, my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.

> my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.

And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

One possible explanation for stuff like this is that you’re dealing with someone that has an anti-realist meta-ethic, which is not so unusual, but what is new is the blurred boundary between factual questions and ethical questions. Something like “Fair election?” would seem to be a clear and concrete question about the world, but the answer you’d get is always for a different question, and so it amounts to boo or hurrah. Even asking a simpler question about a specific policy changing or staying the same cannot untangle the discourse if that question is perceived as too close to an ethical one.

> And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

It actually wasn't even rejection. It was this pivot to, "You live in a different moral reality than I do, and therefore your assessment of factual reality is morally bankrupt," even though I thought we were talking about whether the law had changed, not the moral value of a change.

It got ugly really fast, and frankly I'm still bewildered by it. It would have been one thing if he didn't think there was a reality to appeal to. This was just, "You have a fact I don't like, and therefore are evil."

You just don't talk about it with them. You can't change the mind of someone who doesn't care what's real.

The problem comes down to consequences. He can run his mouth and basically second-hand-make-up how he says reality is, and he gets to enjoy the benefits of that, whatever those may be (e.g. being able to pretend he's smarter and more moral than he is).

But he suffers no costs for it. In fact, he imposes all the costs on you - it's bothering you enough you're posting on the internet about how much mental and emotional effort you're spending arguing with him.

This is why there should be way more of people putting their money where their mouths are, or else being called cowards. Wagers should become commonplace - skin in the game.

E.g. if you're talking about a point of law, that's easy to get an objective answer on. Agree with him that you'll pick a lawyer at random, and put the question to them.

The loser has to either pay $1 and admit they were wrong publicly (plus the lawyer's fee), or pay $10k if they refuse to admit it even after that (or held on trust for a charity or whatever).

And be sure to get it in writing so the weasel can't squirm out of it.

He's my brother. And the last of my three siblings still alive.

Had I known this was his perspective ahead of time, I would never have brought it up, and I never will again, but he's not just some random person being wrong on the internet. He's someone I grew up with, shared my whole life with.

I think being upset to find out not only does he think we live in different realities, but he thinks mine is populated by heartless bastards is pretty fair.

Yeah the "he" in my example is really me thinking of specific recalcitrant toerags I've had to deal with before.

You could try asking your brother's motivations/feelings rather than the facts, since that's what's driving it.

Unless you are an extremely astute observer of every human endeavour, relying on primary sources like this is a way to bake in your biases. Of course relying on a small number of specific commentators is as well. But don't pretend you are being more rational here.

I'm not sure the reliance on primary sources is necessarily superior - or at least results in less of a reality "creation".

I would say the important thing is to have trust in who or what is curating/filtering and commenting/interpreting your inputs (which in itself is a very challenging problem), whether primary or secondary.

Part of what scared me was that his "authorities" on the matter were mainstream news commentators. It would have been one thing if he had been pointing to experts who actually knew the topic.

"mainstream news commentators" but alternative news commentators would be fine?

What is mainstream news? Joe Rogan? Rachel Maddow?

Who are the experts? Ex-FBI and CIA agents, or Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr?

Why are your sources better?

I didn't say that, because I didn't mean that.

In this case, it was a newscaster on CNN. Couldn't tell you who.

The question, specifically, had been whether a politician had or had not authorized a change to a law. My primary sources were the law before he changed it and the law after he changed it, which had different text. It wasn't even a situation that required interpretation. My brother wasn't arguing that the change was meaningless. He was arguing that the law had not changed.

I appreciate that there are nuanced situations where interpretation matters a great deal, but newscasters are not experts on the things they report. That's not their job. Their saying something did or didn't happen when they don't even pretend to have been there, read the documents, or informed themselves about the situation isn't authoritative.

Maybe both your brother and father expect the influencers whom they trust to not break their trust. Which should be a decent expectation. Not everyone has the time and energy to dig after primary sources of truth, sometimes multiple sources of truth, read, comprehend and summarize what happened. They rather depend on someone to distill the whole thing for them.

This is in concept a great point and may actually be what’s happening but as you allude to with “should” in “Which should be a decent expectation.” sadly that isn’t the case anymore, when a good chunk of listened to influencers are more driven by the money and/or power (where basically money is just an abstracted form of power) conveying what really happened is less of a concern to them, at times they tend to not even look at primary sources either (depending on which influencers we’re talking about here).

Of course. But many people are wired to usually assume good intentions from other people.

I think the trouble was that it didn't take any time to pull up the facts. A quick search for the text of the law before and after the change, for example, on the phone already in my hand, to show the difference, easily happens in real time during the conversation. That should be enough to make someone stop and think, shouldn't it? When you think something is true about the world and someone can show you it's false in real time? How do you not even stop and consider that information?

I think "trust" is the wrong word I see for how commentators are treated. It's more of a blind faith.

I can think very specifically of an example where a political commentator, in private, said what they were publicly saying was crazy garbage. When I brought that up to my parents, it did not change their view of him. Effectively the response was "Well, all commentators lie" and they continued following him.

At least in my case, I think this is mainly a religion thing. I grew up mormon and one quote that sticks in my mind is the following:

> When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a plan–it is God’s plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy. God works in no other way. To think otherwise, without immediate repentance, may cost one his faith, may destroy his testimony, and leave him a stranger to the kingdom of God.

I've seen this sort of mentality extend in non-religious contexts. Basically "Well, don't you think X would have already thought about Y? Why are you questioning?"

What other people think shapes our reality, more so than the other way around. Because of that, the primary sources are barely relevant.

Our thoughts are our lives. Other's thoughts shape our society, as we elect the people in power.

Just as in the stock market, the people can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent (sane?).

This makes the "reality" of today the collective minds of the people in our society. We're all on stage together and there are no rules.

> We're all on stage together and there are no rules.

Until the stage is gone.

It's the problem of human culture, not of the world. Today all astronomers agree in what position the Sun will be in a particular time. On the other hand, humans can't agree on basic facts which are heavily politicized (e.g., how immigration affects economy). In such questions people don't care about respecting the truth, they care about what would be more profitable to them.

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan might have some insight that you might find usefull.

I do lean on commentary a bit. Primary sources tend to be dense, or rely on specialist knowledge. But the key difference, I think, is I prefer commentators who refer to primary sources, explain what it means, and explain the ways it could be or is misunderstood. So my main input on a subject I'm not invested in enough to be knowledgeable about might be (for example) Abigail Thorn or LegalEagle, but they don't stand in for the source with their own heavily biased spin.

I think the main difference is how seriously an entertainer takes the material. Even John Oliver cites sources and has a team of researchers and writers who try to make sure they represent the source material accurately.

Interesting. Maybe there is space for a newspaper that links to primary sources, with minimum commentary.

I can recall an article about the famous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It pointed out that millions watched Barack Obama opine on the situation. And further noted that millions watched a guy by the name of Bobby Jindal chime in as a sort of rebuttal/response to Barack Obama’s opinions. But during this time there was one channel CSPAN, that ran geological physicist, after petroleum engineer, after geological physicist to get their opinions. Needless to say, almost no one tuned in.

All that to say, there is some evidence out there that even if such a newspaper were to exist, most of us wouldn’t read it.

> if such a newspaper were to exist, most of us wouldn’t read it.

This isn't a reflection on humanity, but rather on the culture we live in. There are countries where people value higher quality media. They have better education, higher equality, more accountability in government and business, more diverse media ownership (not hard), etc. They are not perfect - that's not the point.

Point is, there are many, many factors we can improve on before throwing in the towel. I really dislike seeing people blame the population for watching media that uses every psychological trick to blast bombastic propaganda and bullshit into people's brains from birth; it's truly victim blaming.

> It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are

This is your fundamental mistake. These are not people. They don't have personhood.

Nothing will ever change that.

The word that stands out to me most in this comment is "mainstream" where it appears before "media". If the issue is primary sources vs commentary, it shouldn't matter if the person is listening to NBC, CNN, FOX, or Joe Rogan Experience -- those are /all/ commentary.

And by the way, which ones are mainstream? What does "mainstream" even mean? The only people I ever hear complain about the "mainstream media" are on one side of the political spectrum and who somehow always fail to notice that their media is actually more popular. More mainstream, if you will.

> It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are.

"Wake up sheeple!"

Give me a break, lol.

In this case, it was a CNN newscaster, which is about as "mainstream media" as it gets, but I would extend the same criticism to anybody else who doesn't even pretend they have any background knowledge or research supporting their claims, just a teleprompter to read it from.

The comparison was between source material and commentary, specifically commentary by people who don't even claim to understand the topic in any depth.

Yeah I mean no matter how you look at it, it comes down to the individual ability to appraise the quality of something. You're always going to be bottlenecked by that. Its hard to talk someone out of their own judgment because you have to pass their test at the same time. Also you're assuming everyone values the cold hard truth above all else. They're probably getting more emotional validation out of their sources.

As I get older, the nuances of linguistic meaning of words and the personal variation of the linguistic deconstruction across political viewpoints, sometimes individual, is becoming apparent.

"Freedom" for example in the political sphere ultimately comes down to what aspects of opposed politics you want to oppress. Like the actual fictional meaning of libertarianism, it really is defined as the freedom to do what you want, but regulate anything that people may do to you.

So much of rhetoric is linguistically clarified by gender swapping to reveal sexist double standards, or appending "white" to key words to make the racist undercurrent component more apparent.

I know this is incendiary, but for example in huge amounts of right wing rhetoric like something as basic as "I'm voting for America", a classic vapid pseudo patriotic statement that somehow marks a divide between parties, if you translate it to "white America" on the right vs "multicultural America" on the left, all of a sudden the organizing emotional undercurrents become clear.

Obviously loaded rhetoric exists on the left. Oh course my opinion is that it is far more pervasive on the right however.

Such is the media universality we exist in, the assault of media advertising, we often aren't even aware of the loaded meanings.

So let organizing linguistic phrasings, which becomes psychological worldviews, are compounded with deeply complex and layered visual and audio aspects: stalwart conservative white man with authoritative voice., for example. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

I find Trump's often smorgasborg of word political salad instructive often because such ramblings are actually a mass deconstruction of right wing rhetoric. It removes the framing and just goes to the loaded words

If someone says he votes for "America" why should we assume it's "White America" or "Multicultural America" unless we want to introduce a divide and fuel hate.

In the 1970s and 1980s when someone said he "voted for America" that affirmation was taken at face value, no one asked "which America" and no one assumed that there is more than one American.

I am not an American, so please correct me if I am wrong.

In the political sphere of America, It echoes back to the southern strategy all the way back to the civil war, slavery, and the fundamental racial divide.

Staunchly racist Americans have alls existed as large key demographic for coalition building. I used to be in the '70s and '60s. It was in the Democratic party, simply because Republicans were the ones that invaded the South and the civil war.

Around the time of the Nixon election, Republicans pivoted to the southern strategy to use the civil Rights act of of the Lyndon Johnson administration to turn racist Democrats into racist Republican voters.

To do so such large shifts in voting allegiance requires substantial election/ linguistic /propagandistic engineering over decades.

Trump is AMAZING at such linguistic engineering, amazingly while making no actual structural linguistic sense. It's abhorrent to smart people,but speaks right to the core of dumber voters.

Rational voters are succumbed by other means ...

I mean, there were literal white supremacists back then; not in a pejorative sense, but, like, in the “white people are genetically superior” sense. There were absolutely people voting for a non-Irish, Italian, catholic, Jewish, or god-forbid dark-skinned America, in direct contradiction to the state’s founding principles.

> in direct contradiction to the state’s founding principles

"adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

(I mean, I'm on the side of "all men are created equal, ... with certain unalienable Rights,... among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" but it's hard to deny that that other language is right there as well. Logical implication and noncontradiction do not seem to have been among the founders' strong suits.)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lMOL7GaPWI

>personal variation of the linguistic deconstruction across political viewpoints, sometimes individual, is becoming apparent

I don't particularly like or trust people who try to deconstruct language, Derrida style. I don't like how they take words, turn them around, and proclaim they have a different meaning than they used to. The white is black and red is blue kind of guys.

They only do that to manipulate naive people and gain power from promoting lies.

Deconstructing language like this can’t give you extremely clear signals, but it’s still information, so ignoring it is not the best idea. Think of it like body language. We don’t condemn or acquit based on that, but if you were a detective looking for clues, or just a friend or lover navigating difficult conversations, then of course you can’t ignore it.

Unlike body language though, linguistic stuff changes faster and moves virally through populations thanks to ubiquitous media, etc. but that extra noise doesn’t mean there’s no signal.

And word meanings do change based on usage of course.. I won’t demonstrate the deconstruction but if you look at a label like “operation enduring freedom” and you refuse to even try to read between the lines.. you’re going to have less understanding of the world than someone who can read between the lines.

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