10 ms·

In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

68 points by benvanderbeek 11mo ago

andsoitis 11mo ago
“When gathering information, what questions do we ask? How hard do we work to get to the truth? Do we consider alternative perspectives and explanations? Scrutinize the quality of our sources? Attend to the limits of our evidence?”
burnt-resistor 11mo ago
HyperNormalisation (2016) helped me frame the decline they (and we) allowed. The people at the top have been trending towards dumber, less conscientious, less hopeful, less moral, and more corrupt when it doesn't have to be this way; plus, it's easier than ever for billionaires and private equity to buy up corporate media and manipulate social media to shape narratives favorable to their interests. It's trending this way because the very rich seem to believe they aren't stakeholders in society or planet Earth, and that they can breathe and eat money, and so they are extracting as much of it as possible before it all comes crashing down rather than doing anything to reset, rebuild, or prevent it. Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  "HyperNormalisation" was interesting but gave me tinfoil hat vibes such that I kept everything they claimed at arms length. But there we are, in a "post truth" world you have to be skeptical of everything. (At the same time, I am conflicted because I tend also to be skeptical of skepticism itself and try to maintain a dogged optimism.)
  - Applejinx 11mo ago
    I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails. If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set. I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
    - mallowdram 11mo ago
      He makes cause and effect statements and posits them as definitive. This person does this and that reaction occurs. These are the causal illusions we build history from after the fact. It's a kind of game that becomes addictive. He happens to have a skillset that makes it more addictive then the usual History channel offering. Our problem though, is that history as we design it, is not really there. Sayyd Qutb going to a sock hop no more caused 9/11 than a chance encounter bin Laden had with a courier in 1977. There are thousands of factors, mistakes, etc that lead to 9/11. Designing a casual narrative out of it is an illusion. That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.
- mallowdram 11mo ago
  Baehr and Curtis are still trapped behind the edifice of evolution. We're primates, we compete for status at any cost that has better benefits, including epistemological loss. The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same. There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.
- cantor_S_drug 11mo ago
  I like American strategy of allowing views to be discussed but not let them affect Elite club's strategy. In this regard, China has failed. They should allow ample discussions about tiananmen square and strip away emotional value so that whenever these topics are brought up again they lose their relevance.
zkmon 11mo ago
Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You get flooded by info that you never need in your daily life or in near future. Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood. This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world. Because people feel that their government should do something about it.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
  Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. And this is how news are being reported even before the rise of smartphones. And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
  - latexr 11mo ago
    I’m not the person you replied to, but I believe you misunderstood OP’s point and are focusing on too narrow of a view regarding (what I perceive to be) their point. > is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works. > Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest. > And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health. Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them. > be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet. That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.
1dom 11mo ago
Warning for others: it's not signposted anywhere apart from half way through the article that the end of the article is paywalled.
- gsf_emergency_4 11mo ago
  Can't find a pw bypass but the following slide from a recent talk somewhat summarizes (the author) Prof Baehr's stance on intellectual virtues & vices that underpins his entire(?) outlook https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s Compare those 3+3 to Aristotle's 5: intuitive understanding (nous), scientific knowledge (episteme), wisdom (sophia), art/skill (techne), and practical wisdom (phronesis). Or to Laozi's (n)one--- as popularized by Alan Watts, not r/Stoicism https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_virtue_has_no_intention_to_be_virtuous/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_v...
mosura 11mo ago
We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
- exasperaited 11mo ago
  We lived at least in a consensus reality world, where most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true, and most people had a shared sense of the fuzzy boundaries of fact and opinion. We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use. [0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
  - mosura 11mo ago
    > most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true Indoctrination. Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
    - progval 11mo ago
      Do you have examples of lies that the majority was indoctrinated to believe?
      - mallowdram 11mo ago
        Any mythic/causal statement (lightning causes fire) is a lie of folk science.
      - hn_throw_bs 11mo ago
        [flagged]
      - 11mo ago
analog8374 11mo ago
Consider the "truth level" of things. Things you personally see = 10 Things you heard from a friend = 9 Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1 Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10 Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  You missed things you see on the internet/news. We all "saw" the World Trade Center towers come down. Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
  - analog8374 11mo ago
    We've always known that this machinery of "text and images acquired from remote sources" is profoundly thin and flimsy. Now it's just becoming obvious.
foofoo12 11mo ago
Topical, Firehose of Falsehood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
bertman 11mo ago
Complete article (extracted from the site's <meta> HTML element and converted to Markdown): https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xxCQNUAAACSp4vcwdTYMHxn7s9c https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...
mallowdram 11mo ago
Claiming to imagine a workaround like "virtue" will solve the embedded primate bias inherent in our lossy signaling like words and narrative/causal statements is worse than wishful thinking, it's uniformed and positivist/idealist. Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed. Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective. People have to confront what we built here. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2XMpq5gagBPlFxDp23Qs/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
- analog8374 11mo ago
  2 solutions. A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge. An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.
  - mallowdram 11mo ago
djoldman 11mo ago
> As humans, we care about forming true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. We want to know, understand, get things right. We want to avoid cognitive error and ignorance. These are our twin epistemic aims. Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs. In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.
- hn_throw_bs 11mo ago
  Anyone in the dating market should know this instinctively by now, that it makes reading most news or puff pieces of this sort comical.
- mallowfram 11mo ago
  That's simply the function of narrative using words. How can anything built subjectively in symbols and cause and effect reach consensus, correlational objectivity? They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement. We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count. "It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
- ottah 11mo ago
  Case in point, votes on comments. Especially Reddit.
johnnienaked 11mo ago
There is no world but that in our minds, and every mind a world to itself.
cyanydeez 11mo ago
Eh. As a headline, this is probably ambiguous. QAnon demonstrates whats more important is a lack of bias when seeking sources.
- mallowdram 11mo ago
  QAnon is simply a hack of narrative, and though it's crude conspiracy nonsense, it demonstrates a future form where info is non-linear, modular. If we had more complex modules and not this messy symbolically built info, there could be perception from external memory. Current external memory is junky, cheap.
  - cyanydeez 11mo ago
    unfortunely, one mans truth is another mans ill concieved subjective choices to support a preconcieved decision making.
    - mallowdram 11mo ago
      There are no truths using words, as words are arbitrary, subjective metaphors. Worse we externalize them in arbitrary symbols. What proves decision-making are actions, only actions. Until we modularize a specific form of external signaling, be it speech or object, nothing we express is the truth.

68 points by benvanderbeek 11mo ago

“When gathering information, what questions do we ask? How hard do we work to get to the truth? Do we consider alternative perspectives and explanations? Scrutinize the quality of our sources? Attend to the limits of our evidence?”

burnt-resistor 11mo ago

HyperNormalisation (2016) helped me frame the decline they (and we) allowed. The people at the top have been trending towards dumber, less conscientious, less hopeful, less moral, and more corrupt when it doesn't have to be this way; plus, it's easier than ever for billionaires and private equity to buy up corporate media and manipulate social media to shape narratives favorable to their interests. It's trending this way because the very rich seem to believe they aren't stakeholders in society or planet Earth, and that they can breathe and eat money, and so they are extracting as much of it as possible before it all comes crashing down rather than doing anything to reset, rebuild, or prevent it. Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.

JKCalhoun 11mo ago
"HyperNormalisation" was interesting but gave me tinfoil hat vibes such that I kept everything they claimed at arms length. But there we are, in a "post truth" world you have to be skeptical of everything. (At the same time, I am conflicted because I tend also to be skeptical of skepticism itself and try to maintain a dogged optimism.)
- Applejinx 11mo ago
  I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails. If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set. I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
  - mallowdram 11mo ago
    He makes cause and effect statements and posits them as definitive. This person does this and that reaction occurs. These are the causal illusions we build history from after the fact. It's a kind of game that becomes addictive. He happens to have a skillset that makes it more addictive then the usual History channel offering. Our problem though, is that history as we design it, is not really there. Sayyd Qutb going to a sock hop no more caused 9/11 than a chance encounter bin Laden had with a courier in 1977. There are thousands of factors, mistakes, etc that lead to 9/11. Designing a casual narrative out of it is an illusion. That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.
mallowdram 11mo ago
Baehr and Curtis are still trapped behind the edifice of evolution. We're primates, we compete for status at any cost that has better benefits, including epistemological loss. The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same. There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.
cantor_S_drug 11mo ago
I like American strategy of allowing views to be discussed but not let them affect Elite club's strategy. In this regard, China has failed. They should allow ample discussions about tiananmen square and strip away emotional value so that whenever these topics are brought up again they lose their relevance.

zkmon 11mo ago

Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You get flooded by info that you never need in your daily life or in near future. Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood. This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world. Because people feel that their government should do something about it.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. And this is how news are being reported even before the rise of smartphones. And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
- latexr 11mo ago
  I’m not the person you replied to, but I believe you misunderstood OP’s point and are focusing on too narrow of a view regarding (what I perceive to be) their point. > is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works. > Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest. > And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health. Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them. > be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet. That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.

1dom 11mo ago

Warning for others: it's not signposted anywhere apart from half way through the article that the end of the article is paywalled.

gsf_emergency_4 11mo ago
Can't find a pw bypass but the following slide from a recent talk somewhat summarizes (the author) Prof Baehr's stance on intellectual virtues & vices that underpins his entire(?) outlook https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s Compare those 3+3 to Aristotle's 5: intuitive understanding (nous), scientific knowledge (episteme), wisdom (sophia), art/skill (techne), and practical wisdom (phronesis). Or to Laozi's (n)one--- as popularized by Alan Watts, not r/Stoicism https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_virtue_has_no_intention_to_be_virtuous/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_v...

mosura 11mo ago

We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.

exasperaited 11mo ago
We lived at least in a consensus reality world, where most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true, and most people had a shared sense of the fuzzy boundaries of fact and opinion. We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use. [0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
- mosura 11mo ago
  > most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true Indoctrination. Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
  - progval 11mo ago
    Do you have examples of lies that the majority was indoctrinated to believe?
    - mallowdram 11mo ago
      Any mythic/causal statement (lightning causes fire) is a lie of folk science.
    - hn_throw_bs 11mo ago
      [flagged]
    - 11mo ago

analog8374 11mo ago

Consider the "truth level" of things. Things you personally see = 10 Things you heard from a friend = 9 Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1 Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10 Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.

cindyllm 11mo ago
[dead]
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
You missed things you see on the internet/news. We all "saw" the World Trade Center towers come down. Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
- analog8374 11mo ago
  We've always known that this machinery of "text and images acquired from remote sources" is profoundly thin and flimsy. Now it's just becoming obvious.

foofoo12 11mo ago

Topical, Firehose of Falsehood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

bertman 11mo ago

Complete article (extracted from the site's <meta> HTML element and converted to Markdown): https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xxCQNUAAACSp4vcwdTYMHxn7s9c https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...

mallowdram 11mo ago

Claiming to imagine a workaround like "virtue" will solve the embedded primate bias inherent in our lossy signaling like words and narrative/causal statements is worse than wishful thinking, it's uniformed and positivist/idealist. Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed. Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective. People have to confront what we built here. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2XMpq5gagBPlFxDp23Qs/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...

analog8374 11mo ago
2 solutions. A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge. An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.
- mallowdram 11mo ago

djoldman 11mo ago

> As humans, we care about forming true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. We want to know, understand, get things right. We want to avoid cognitive error and ignorance. These are our twin epistemic aims. Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs. In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.

hn_throw_bs 11mo ago
Anyone in the dating market should know this instinctively by now, that it makes reading most news or puff pieces of this sort comical.
mallowfram 11mo ago
That's simply the function of narrative using words. How can anything built subjectively in symbols and cause and effect reach consensus, correlational objectivity? They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement. We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count. "It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
ottah 11mo ago
Case in point, votes on comments. Especially Reddit.

johnnienaked 11mo ago

There is no world but that in our minds, and every mind a world to itself.

cyanydeez 11mo ago

Eh. As a headline, this is probably ambiguous. QAnon demonstrates whats more important is a lack of bias when seeking sources.

mallowdram 11mo ago
QAnon is simply a hack of narrative, and though it's crude conspiracy nonsense, it demonstrates a future form where info is non-linear, modular. If we had more complex modules and not this messy symbolically built info, there could be perception from external memory. Current external memory is junky, cheap.
- cyanydeez 11mo ago
  unfortunely, one mans truth is another mans ill concieved subjective choices to support a preconcieved decision making.
  - mallowdram 11mo ago
    There are no truths using words, as words are arbitrary, subjective metaphors. Worse we externalize them in arbitrary symbols. What proves decision-making are actions, only actions. Until we modularize a specific form of external signaling, be it speech or object, nothing we express is the truth.