I think they’re being overoptimistic in imagining that this is a Trump-only problem rather than the new business as usual, but overall they do a good job laying out the danger of current campaign techniques.
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.
We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.
https://callingbullshit.org/
This is entirely fascinating, and a direct refutation of the argument that without unhappiness and suffering we wouldn’t experience true happiness. I wish for everyone to have the kind of experience that she has, and hopefully someday self-modification will get us there.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.
But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense. But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.
…
Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation. “But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.
I try not to repost Slate Star Codex posts too often — I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is aware of SSC, and already reads it if they’re interested (and tolerant of the very long posts there). But this one’s worth reposting: it’s a summary of the major threads of inquiry he’s followed over the past decade, with links to the posts on each thread. It’s also a short, quick read by SSC standards. Check it out!
What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s? | Slate Star Codex
In our time, polarization has not only grown sharper but has even become its own justification. In the spring of 2018, a poll by the Pew Research Center registered yet another marker in the long series of milestones on the road to ungovernability: Democrats are now just as averse to compromise as Republicans. Only a minority in both parties (46% of Democrats, 44% of Republicans) told Pew they “like elected officials who make compromises with people they disagree with.” The essence of the U.S. Constitution is to require compromise as a condition of governing. In rejecting compromise, Americans are rejecting governance. The United States and other countries have been down this road in the past, and the results are never good.
I don’t think that all PC culture is ridiculous the way conservatives do — but it’s definitely worth remembering that it’s sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes hurts innocent people. I think claims of offensiveness and insensitivity should be considered with a skeptical eye, just like all normative claims from any source.
A lot has happened in the last decade — including a lot of things being called racist, sexist, offensive, or insensitive.
Happy New Year 2020
I’ve been arguing something pretty similar to this for a decade, although not on free speech / moderation grounds. It’s nice to see someone make the case in a thorough and detailed way, and I’ll probably point people to this in future. I’m posting a brief summary excerpt here, but I recommend the whole thing.
Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams. On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process. Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don’t moderate). Still others have suggested that there should be no moderation allowed at all—at least for platforms of a certain size—such that they are deemed part of the public square.
As this article will attempt to highlight, most of these solutions are not just unworkable; many of them will make the initial problems worse or will have other effects that are equally pernicious.
This article proposes an entirely different approach—one that might seem counterintuitive but might actually provide for a workable plan that enables more free speech, while minimizing the impact of trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts. As a bonus, it also might help the users of these platforms regain control of their privacy. And to top it all off, it could even provide an entirely new revenue stream for these platforms.
That approach: build protocols, not platforms.
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
A bit of unexpected good news…
For once, the climate news might be better than you thought. It’s certainly better than I’ve thought.
You may not have noticed it, amid the flood of bad news about the “Emissions Gap” and the collapse of the COP25 climate conference in Madrid, but over the last few weeks a new narrative about the climate future has emerged, on balance encouraging, at least to an alarmist like me. It is this: As best as we can understand and project the medium- and long-term trajectories of energy use and emissions, the window of possible climate futures is probably narrowing, with both the most optimistic scenarios and the most pessimistic ones seeming, now, less likely.
That narrowing contains both good and bad news — what was recently the best to hope for now seems vanishingly unlikely, and what was the worst to fear much less likely, too. But let’s start with the good news, since there is typically so little of it.
“…the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”
