While this article doesn’t directly mention ads or algorithmic feeds, in my opinion, the dynamic it describes feels deeply tied to them.
The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior isn’t just cultural, it’s deeply structural and driven by how platforms make money from engagement.
Feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue naturally favor ideas that are fast, emotional, and identity-driven. The more transmissible the idea, the greater its reach. Slower, non-viral ideas don’t stand a chance in that environment.
To me, the architecture of targeting and personalization isn’t just mirroring tribalism, it’s reinforcing and accelerating it.
Maybe the future of meaningful discourse online isn’t about better moderation or more facts, it’s about redesigning the incentives entirely.
Until we change what the system rewards, unfortunately, we’ll keep getting more of what spreads, not what matters.
Yes and no, and I’m going to constantly plug network propaganda because it’s the easiest way to point this out. I suppose the shorter version is to hear out the section where Rob Faris speaks in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGTmuHeFdAo.
The very clear finding is that the issue isn’t the algorithm its in the information production systems on the left+center vs right.
On the right, crucially - sense is made by first having a narrative, getting it amplified by major voices, and then seeking out facts to support it. Counter views do exist, but they dont get amplified.
On the Left+center we have your typical media and information economy which we think everyone is a part of. Ie you get punished for having the facts wrong or being inaccurate.
The right is about looking like they are smart, but primarily about selling narratives.
——
There IS also a problem with the algorithms, in that it creates a fitness function that highly emotional and engaging content survives better than boring and long form content.
Or more precisely, highly emotional and engaging content spreads more.
But since reach, time on site, etc, are linked with advertising revenue they are essentially conflated with economic viability.
The exact linkage though, is a change in the content consumption mix of humans.
Humans have only N hours of content they will consume in a day, and some % of that time will be allocated to high cognitive load, kinda-boring content.
Your market will be smaller, but there is a sliver of a market that does exist.
It’s just that the effort to payout here, is not as effective as making content that gets more views.
Yes, it describes the same process, just with extra steps, but each of these steps is a different place which can be approached to alleviate the issue of engagement vs accuracy.
> The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior
I don't actually see the internet as very tribal at all compared to meatspace; in fact, I see it as one of the, if not the most, anti-tribalist force to have ever existed as a force in the general population. I just think it's hard to see sometimes through all the discourse about how many parts of the internet are built to manipulate us, and how starkly obvious and disturbing mob mentality is when you see it on a daily basis. But that's not, and never was, the majority of the behavior and interactions you're bound to run into unless what you like is fighting with people on social media.
But even I, a bastard as cynical as anyone, can see how we managed and continue to manage to form relationships across nominally tribal boundaries in spite of not making anyone money.
Of course the internet is memetic; but then again, so is all human culture I've ever witnessed. I think that's a neutral thing at worst.
Well said. I’m just pointing out that platforms aren’t really designed to promote meaningful interactions, they’re designed to keep us engaged and clicking. And because of that, it’s hard for thoughtful, meaningful content to really thrive in that kind of system.
These so-called "tech" companies would have people believe that "this is what people want" and they are just giving it to them. But if people want something that has little to no value in the online ad services business, and there are countless examples of such things, then the so-called "tech" companies may refuse to deliver it, or more likely, they may choose to rearrange what is delivered such that the content most useful to the online advertising services business is delivered first and displayed prominantly, with the rest hidden or difficult to find. Several days ago there was an HN comment arguing that the www needs curation. The www has "curation". This is performed by so-called "tech" companies operating as unnecessary intermediaries in the inteerests of collecting data and selling online ad services. Maybe this is not of the kind of "curation" that www users want. It is "curation" (or "filtering", "moderation", or what ever one choose to call it) nonetheless._
To use a silly analogy, consider billbooards. Billboard companies may be useful for their role in information distribution. The public pays nothing for this "service". But billboards are not free. Advertisers pay to use them. The information displayed on billboards is generally commercial in nature. The public pays for roads, not the billboard companies. The public does not drive on these roads to see billboards, the roads have other, more important utility. The billboard companies piggyback on a public resource: roadways.
The www and the internet in general has utility other than as a medium or vector for collecting data surreptitiously and disseminating advertising. Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" company intermediaries offer "services" that make the internet "easier to use" and are marketed as "free". But like billboards, the intermediaries' computer systems are not free. Advertisers pay for these ad services systems. The public pays for the internet to which they connect and use as a medium//vector. The intermediaries piggyback on a public resource: the internet.
Perhaps the public has forgotten the utility of the internet without advertising. Trillion dollar "billboard companies" have made the public forget about the public resource that they are paying for. Imagine if, pre-internet, every road was lined from start to finish with billboards and billboard companies tracked drivers everywhere they travelled.
The roads work fine without billboards. The internet works fine without advertising. But the online advertising services industry, the trillion dollar "billboard companies", i.e., Silicon Valley, disagrees.
> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
There’s been many examples recently. A very public one was that Covid was likely from a lab leak. There were many institutions and government figures that worked to oppress that, but now most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis.
==most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis==
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
> Covid was likely from a lab leak...government...worked to oppress [sic] that
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
Truth will still act. It will act in terms of competitive advantage, technology and the like. The manipulation of nature in any way is a source of power. It's just that such a source can sometimes be very small (e.g. there's a lot of math I won't use but I know about it). I suppose truth will act when relevant.
Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).
In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.
Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because
1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right.
2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.
Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.
Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.
The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.
Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.
Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.
——
These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas
They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.
The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.
Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.
Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.
OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
I think with the linguistic turn the idea of a "correct opinion" feels a bit archaic. Sure, if you can truly glean the semantics and connotations of the language, you can feel confident their view is coherent, that they cohere with your views, etc, perhaps you can call their opinion correct in that agreement tends to be seen as correctness in a posteriori terms. But in practice, establishing that degree of confidence requires a shared linguistic background and skepticism. Especially when you're dealing with floating signifiers, as Locke tended to do (and as many respectable philosophers have done).
Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.
Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.
The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data.
data != information != facts != truth != knowledge
Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is, it makes a lot of sense that all of those things would be different, since we there is no consensus on what they mean. We even have a whole field about it, epistemology, where people been arguing for millennia about what those things mean.
Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
> Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is
We technically can, but we don't. And _that_ is the problem. There is an unending stream of people blaming social media, Big Tech, phones (and apparently even 'the internet') for all our woes and even though there is certainly some blame to be put on the amoral profit-seeking companies, the real problem is the nature of humans.
Each of us is a walking pile of zerodays and ancient legacy biological code, just waiting to be exploited. The only thing that is protecting us is a fairly effective but thin and fragile protective layer of cultural overrides and rationality.
Barring genetic engineering those zerodays are going to be with us for a while. Instead of (or in addition to) trying to play whack-a-mole with the swiftly evolving technological environment and the companies leveraging it through regulation and public outcry, we should go all in on cultivating that protective layer.
Many people I know are not addicted to their phones and many are able to determine what 'facts' are. The key is to make active choices in avoiding low quality shit and put in the effort to act rationally. But that starts with being taught how important that is and realizing that lacking it is a very dangerous deficiency in yourself.
Blaming others and the outside world for being addicted to entertainment or being misinformed makes things worse. We should be screaming from all rooftops and in all classrooms that it is us. We need to change.
From my totally biased understanding, truth is what groups of people agreed on, people believe what they believed in. Even though people agreed on the same thing, each of them would have different interpretation of the truth that they believe it, with certain levels of overlap.
> At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them.
This particular line struck me given that I recently listened after listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with Cenk Uygur [0]
Uygur made the following point:
"More than 80% of the US voting population supports paid parental leave yet Congress won't vote on it/pass it.
Why?
B/c Congress has become captured by corporatism and it's not in the best interests of corporations to have paid parental leave"
Earlier, there is this quote:
> Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things?
I wonder why people ask these questions, almost rhetorically, when the answer is that well organized groups have made conscious decisions and taken real action to modify government/laws etc to do this.
e.g. if one group could do this, why don't more groups do this?
(on a related note, the talk by James D’Angelo, “The Ghost Bill & The Cardboard Box” [1] about how Congress became more tied to corporations is fascinating)
There is definitely a hostile entity that’s in power and is purposely rejecting the wishes of the masses, but what the author is pointing out is that this entity took power by exploiting an inherent problem of communication: There are some ideas that function as antimemes because they have a natural barrier to entry.
The hostile entity used the fact that our communication systems were built on top of an inherent trust in memetics in order to control the conversation, vaulting away important antimemes as a method of getting rid of functional and practical political action.
It’s always great to find someone who’s been thinking the same as you have been, but took the time to formalize it.
For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me.
Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.
Oh jeez I just started this book and it’s terrible. The author seems like they front-loaded the real reason they’re interested in Antimemes, which is cause they have political opinions that they want to avoid the consequences of having to publicly admit, and then they go about molding the idea of Antimemes to formalize bad politics as a philosophy rather than actually explore the idea.
The big schism in their thinking happens when they refuse to label legal contracts or math as Antimemes, which of course ruins the whole idea in the first place. In this authors eyes Antimemes are just normal memes that no one wants to admit to, which means they’re not functionally different from memes in any way besides the fact that the person engaging with them is a coward. In fact, this entire book just seems like a philosophical formalization of being a little scaredy cat, and it’s not even an interesting one like The Americanization Of Emily.
You know how people are a product of their culture? Have you ever read a book from someone whose culture is so overpowering and yet so limiting? Thank god I never moved to San Francisco.
I’m certainly not reading a book by someone who’s discovered a secret arcane truth underlying communication. I’m reading a book by someone who’s so deep in their safe space secret chat rooms that they’ve never had their ideas challenged or elaborated on once.
This entire question to me seems really philosophically confused. The article already leans into the Darwinian framing of communication. i.e. "memetics", "the marketplace of ideas" and so on.
I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense.
This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.
> It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded.
This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own.
Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.
> Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information
I don't think this is the default mode for most people. It wouldn't even make much sense.
Some professionals, in some contexts, some of the time can act as rational arbiters of information. But not most of the time, nor in most contexts. That way only leads to these cultish sites like LessWrong, full to the brim of self-appointed rationalists holding the freakiest, most irrational beliefs (one of them being that they are "less wrong").
That’s what I was saying: People who see themselves as being extra-rational are often the same ones outsourcing their thinking to personalities they follow.
Your example of LessWrong is perfect because the “rationalist” community is, ironically, home to a lot of irrational beliefs deeply held. I think their desire to feel like they’re going back to first principles and entertaining alternate theories leaves them especially vulnerable to people who know how to write prose that fits the rationalist mold.
That’s why you see the “rationalists” getting involved with people like Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, and other reactionaries.
Readit News
The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior isn’t just cultural, it’s deeply structural and driven by how platforms make money from engagement.
Feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue naturally favor ideas that are fast, emotional, and identity-driven. The more transmissible the idea, the greater its reach. Slower, non-viral ideas don’t stand a chance in that environment.
To me, the architecture of targeting and personalization isn’t just mirroring tribalism, it’s reinforcing and accelerating it.
Maybe the future of meaningful discourse online isn’t about better moderation or more facts, it’s about redesigning the incentives entirely.
Until we change what the system rewards, unfortunately, we’ll keep getting more of what spreads, not what matters.
The very clear finding is that the issue isn’t the algorithm its in the information production systems on the left+center vs right.
On the right, crucially - sense is made by first having a narrative, getting it amplified by major voices, and then seeking out facts to support it. Counter views do exist, but they dont get amplified.
On the Left+center we have your typical media and information economy which we think everyone is a part of. Ie you get punished for having the facts wrong or being inaccurate.
The right is about looking like they are smart, but primarily about selling narratives.
——
There IS also a problem with the algorithms, in that it creates a fitness function that highly emotional and engaging content survives better than boring and long form content.
Or more precisely, highly emotional and engaging content spreads more.
But since reach, time on site, etc, are linked with advertising revenue they are essentially conflated with economic viability.
The exact linkage though, is a change in the content consumption mix of humans.
Humans have only N hours of content they will consume in a day, and some % of that time will be allocated to high cognitive load, kinda-boring content.
Your market will be smaller, but there is a sliver of a market that does exist.
It’s just that the effort to payout here, is not as effective as making content that gets more views.
Yes, it describes the same process, just with extra steps, but each of these steps is a different place which can be approached to alleviate the issue of engagement vs accuracy.
I don't actually see the internet as very tribal at all compared to meatspace; in fact, I see it as one of the, if not the most, anti-tribalist force to have ever existed as a force in the general population. I just think it's hard to see sometimes through all the discourse about how many parts of the internet are built to manipulate us, and how starkly obvious and disturbing mob mentality is when you see it on a daily basis. But that's not, and never was, the majority of the behavior and interactions you're bound to run into unless what you like is fighting with people on social media.
But even I, a bastard as cynical as anyone, can see how we managed and continue to manage to form relationships across nominally tribal boundaries in spite of not making anyone money.
Of course the internet is memetic; but then again, so is all human culture I've ever witnessed. I think that's a neutral thing at worst.
To use a silly analogy, consider billbooards. Billboard companies may be useful for their role in information distribution. The public pays nothing for this "service". But billboards are not free. Advertisers pay to use them. The information displayed on billboards is generally commercial in nature. The public pays for roads, not the billboard companies. The public does not drive on these roads to see billboards, the roads have other, more important utility. The billboard companies piggyback on a public resource: roadways.
The www and the internet in general has utility other than as a medium or vector for collecting data surreptitiously and disseminating advertising. Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" company intermediaries offer "services" that make the internet "easier to use" and are marketed as "free". But like billboards, the intermediaries' computer systems are not free. Advertisers pay for these ad services systems. The public pays for the internet to which they connect and use as a medium//vector. The intermediaries piggyback on a public resource: the internet.
Perhaps the public has forgotten the utility of the internet without advertising. Trillion dollar "billboard companies" have made the public forget about the public resource that they are paying for. Imagine if, pre-internet, every road was lined from start to finish with billboards and billboard companies tracked drivers everywhere they travelled.
The roads work fine without billboards. The internet works fine without advertising. But the online advertising services industry, the trillion dollar "billboard companies", i.e., Silicon Valley, disagrees.
> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
But also when the establishment is correct, it still gets (incorrectly) exposed by independent sources.
There's a nontrivial part of today's population that is purely edgy and contrarian as a rule, without a solid rational foundation to their worldview.
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).
In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.
Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because
1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right. 2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.
Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.
Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.
The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.
Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.
Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.
——
These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas
They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.
The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.
Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.
Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.
OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.
Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.
data != information != facts != truth != knowledge
Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
We technically can, but we don't. And _that_ is the problem. There is an unending stream of people blaming social media, Big Tech, phones (and apparently even 'the internet') for all our woes and even though there is certainly some blame to be put on the amoral profit-seeking companies, the real problem is the nature of humans.
Each of us is a walking pile of zerodays and ancient legacy biological code, just waiting to be exploited. The only thing that is protecting us is a fairly effective but thin and fragile protective layer of cultural overrides and rationality.
Barring genetic engineering those zerodays are going to be with us for a while. Instead of (or in addition to) trying to play whack-a-mole with the swiftly evolving technological environment and the companies leveraging it through regulation and public outcry, we should go all in on cultivating that protective layer.
Many people I know are not addicted to their phones and many are able to determine what 'facts' are. The key is to make active choices in avoiding low quality shit and put in the effort to act rationally. But that starts with being taught how important that is and realizing that lacking it is a very dangerous deficiency in yourself.
Blaming others and the outside world for being addicted to entertainment or being misinformed makes things worse. We should be screaming from all rooftops and in all classrooms that it is us. We need to change.
This particular line struck me given that I recently listened after listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with Cenk Uygur [0]
Uygur made the following point:
"More than 80% of the US voting population supports paid parental leave yet Congress won't vote on it/pass it.
Why?
B/c Congress has become captured by corporatism and it's not in the best interests of corporations to have paid parental leave"
Earlier, there is this quote:
> Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things?
I wonder why people ask these questions, almost rhetorically, when the answer is that well organized groups have made conscious decisions and taken real action to modify government/laws etc to do this.
e.g. if one group could do this, why don't more groups do this?
(on a related note, the talk by James D’Angelo, “The Ghost Bill & The Cardboard Box” [1] about how Congress became more tied to corporations is fascinating)
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtPROVsePk (Lex Fridman)
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg (Ghost bill)
For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me.
Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.
You know how people are a product of their culture? Have you ever read a book from someone whose culture is so overpowering and yet so limiting? Thank god I never moved to San Francisco.
I’m certainly not reading a book by someone who’s discovered a secret arcane truth underlying communication. I’m reading a book by someone who’s so deep in their safe space secret chat rooms that they’ve never had their ideas challenged or elaborated on once.
I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense.
This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.
This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own.
Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.
I don't think this is the default mode for most people. It wouldn't even make much sense.
Some professionals, in some contexts, some of the time can act as rational arbiters of information. But not most of the time, nor in most contexts. That way only leads to these cultish sites like LessWrong, full to the brim of self-appointed rationalists holding the freakiest, most irrational beliefs (one of them being that they are "less wrong").
Your example of LessWrong is perfect because the “rationalist” community is, ironically, home to a lot of irrational beliefs deeply held. I think their desire to feel like they’re going back to first principles and entertaining alternate theories leaves them especially vulnerable to people who know how to write prose that fits the rationalist mold.
That’s why you see the “rationalists” getting involved with people like Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, and other reactionaries.