I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.

I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.

Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.

Whereas something like "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable" isn't necessarily fascist.

If you talk to anyone defending the anti-democractic occupation of the nation's capital today, you'll see that their response is typically is pro-fascist in this regard.

Even this morning, they quoted Adolf Hitler at the capital:

https://twitter.com/always_margot/status/1346578062700400647

The grandiose, arrogant, and blind social elites calling out the popular masses to be socially alienated.

Whose social alienation it would be?

Of course such masses will be of service to any any much significant opportunist group.

People will vote even for a devil himself if one promises to get rid them off such elites.

Just like that, 20 years ago, in a country far, far away, the destitute populace decided, in its sane mind, to vote into power not anybody, but an ex-officer from a mafia-like intelligence organisation people worked so hard to remove from power just 10 years prior.

The wealth divide in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, and the solution for the working class (higher education) isn't working like it used to, even making it worse for young people. This has lead to an angry working class who feel justified in blaming their problems on other out-groups, whether that's BLM, democrats, China, Mexicans, tech companies, doctors, lgtbq, etc.

This is what fascism is feeding on in America, and it has to stop.

There, we are on the same page.

A good historical example I brought up few weeks ago somewhere on HN.

A shameful truth from NSDAP days Germans did not come to admit even to this day is why Kristallnacht has happened.

The prime majority of Germans were not antisemites in thirties, and not even in forties. The image of the schizophrenoid—paranoid antisemite was completely uncharacteristic for anybody, but for single digit percentage of fanatics not unlike the current rightist crowd in America.

So, if most Germans did not drink the NSDAP coolaid, why did Kristallnacht happen?

It happened not because of Jewish people being Jewish as such. It happened because of Jewish people being rich (or being deemed so,) and NSDAP effectively promising complete impunity for looting.

I don't think anyone in their right mind would try arguing that most jewish people in Germany at the time were rich, because that was definitely not the case at all.

But now we have all the benefit of the hindsight, and we cannot go back to thirties, and tell that to masses going crazy from destitution, and poverty.

1. Revolutions of 1830: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1830

2. The Spring of Nations: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1848

USA now is basically France of early-mid-19th century.

My clumsy prognosis, USA will more or less repeat the route towards the French style liberal state, possibly, with few Napoleons along the way. And if it wouldn't, then it may well end up Weimarized.

Kings, and governments were replaced like worn gloves in 19th century, but the regime in general was always kind of stuck no matter what angry masses did.

Nobility, bourgeois, wealthy burghers, revolutionary hipsters kept changing, while poor, unwashed masses were kept being oppressed, and handing power to the next group of tricksters out of four above again, and again.

Changing the order of the operands does not change the resulting product.

Guillotines were only finally retired when the collective elite class was compelled to genuinely start improving the situation of downtrodden classes for the fear for their own lives, rather than some romantic altruism.

Nobody is even close to implementing a fascist system in America. This is the kind of thing people who don't actually know anything about Fascism say. Trump was not a Fascist or even close to it.

Stop falling into the tired rhetoric of the 20th century. New words are needed to name the problem.

The name for the system that you need to start using is "Totalitarian Liberalism". The leader is less important than the sum total bureaucratic control that slowly and "rationally" usurps freedom, flexibility, and leisure time from society for the benefit of the people who have the most influence over policy.

It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism) nor a system that purports to benefit the working class by giving them the means of production (communism) - it is a system that works to benefit the existing rich by exploiting and undermining social divides, papering over them with rules and laws that marginalize the entire working class while setting it against itself.

* strident, often exclusionary nationalism - ("America First") check.

* fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community - ("MAGA") check.

* embrace of paramilitarism - ("stand back and stand by") check.

* led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will. - check.

* protecting or elevating the rights of the national community above the rights of those seen as alien - ("build a wall", "I don't care, do u?") check.

* removing obstacles to national unity and suppressing those seen as challenging it - (myth of "stolen" votes, "Deep State" narrative) check.

* expanding the size and influence of the national state - (To be fair, this has been the military industrial complex for quite a long time. Nothing unique here) normalized/not unique here

* often, also seeking to expand territory through armed conflict - (Also, already a characteristic of the U.S. forever war to protect its interests globally) normalized/not unique here

Merriam-Webster: Definition of fascism

1. often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge

Don't know where you're getting your definition from.

But that's exactly Trumps presidency? Or at least what he was attempting.

What you're missing is that fascism doesn't align ALL of the groups, just a fraction of each, and blames failures on the ones that aren't in that alignment

> And for those who want to nitpick what she said, let me just stop you right there—Hitler was right on literally nothing.

This is most likely fake news. Hitler was one of the first world leaders against smoking. So he was right on at least one thing.

* Rockets * Propaganda films

The US still uses his advancements today

People are seriously afraid of things like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology being taught in our schools. It's indoctrinating kids and parent's don't have a choice about it being taught to their kids.

She is literally quoting Hitler to show what the LEFT is doing in schools and how it's WRONG. This reaction is taken entirely out of context.

Ideally, yes, everyone could understand every concept from the ground up and be able to engage in reasonable discourse about anything.

At this point, the complexity of the world precludes the majority of people from doing that, which is why we have specialization.

Practically speaking, people rely on authoritative sources to gain information about something so they can form opinions and make decisions. Those authorities do define what's reasonable based on different attributes, and in doing so exert control, but that doesn't make what they're doing fascist. It's done because the amount of complexity present in the world requires it.

You can help people reach reasoned conclusions without telling them what conclusions to reach.

In theory, &/or to some degree.

It's also worth noting that "reasoned conclusions" are not necessarily what is True. Rather than desiring that humanity strives for Rationality, wouldn't it make more sense to aim higher? To instead desire that humanity pursues Truth? This way, we can improve all people: the members of our outgroups and our ingroups.

Perhaps it has been found but not distributed, or accepted. If we found it, would we even know? Would we be willing to acknowledge it, and practice it?

> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective.

This seems like a bit of a false dichotomy to me.

Reality is rarely exactly as it seems.

> My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved.

Perhaps, assuming (at least) we have no major flaws in our premises, or our systems (democracy theatre). I do share your hope though.

> I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.

It may be the best we've got now, but have we put any serious effort into finding alternatives? The horse and buggy was the best we had until someone invented the car; NASA was the best we had until Elon Musk started SpaceX, and so forth and so on.

As we sow, so shall we reap.

> by what alternate means do you propose we find and determine how to correct them

A reasonable thing to do would be to perhaps ask people what their problem is. Funny thing is though, it seems like this reasonable idea hasn't occurred to any "reasonable" people, as far as I know anyways.

A more ambitious approach would be to perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there. When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually done that? I don't, perhaps because I've actually done just that, at least do a large degree. I know that 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics, likely combined with some first hand experience (perhaps with a side order of confirmation bias), and likely plenty of consumption of "proper, trustworthy journalism", written by people who are also running on heuristics.

Very few people have a very good knowledge of how the mind works, and almost no one seems to have excellent knowledge, including things like edge case behaviors. Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility - but you may not notice it unless you are consciously looking for it. That's another thing about the mind: it's not so great at seeing things that aren't there, or knowing things that it doesn't know. I believe that this is a partial cause for the perceptions of omniscience that are always on full display in threads like this. Ironically, omniscience is a fairly reasonable perception for a neural network like the subconscious mind - after all, how do you reason about data that is not in your model?

Such things can be learned, but why would one go to the effort of learning something new if you already know everything worth knowing? That would be unreasonable.

As for the general utility of using reason as an approach to our problems - HN is surely an above average intelligence forum. The conversation that's going on in this thread (and the many others like it that occur on a regular basis), is this what "reason" looks like? And if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?

And so I shall take my downvotes, and we will repeat this same process tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and eventually we will all reach our expiration date and our children can continue this process, and then pass it down to their offspring - The eternal circle of life. Well, eternal, provided another nation who doesn't suffer from this cultural affliction doesn't rise to power and ruin our party that is. That would be a real bummer.

PS: Sorry for being a dick. It's in my nature.

It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives. We’ve approached this conversation from different angles; the tack I’ve taken is to assume that is a given and consider ways to encourage it to happen productively. Of course people are not “just(!) unreasonable”; but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs. I (and, it seems, you) seek tools to help reconcile differing beliefs and ensure that shared goals—whatever they may be—might have the most effective plan of action.

With that said, a few comments on particulars:

> When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually ... perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there?

Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either, so there you go. I haven’t, either, very much; it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance (though I do try to increase the chances of that occurring), which brings me to my next point:

> 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics

Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).

> Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility...

Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity; that is frequently satisfied by merely reading, whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.

> if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable [! —ed.] is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?

Under present circumstances, perhaps not. But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.

Perhaps it's due to a difference in our thinking styles. You said:

>> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective. My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved. I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.

To "do our best by everyone involved", does that not involve society and the people that live within it, who act according to the virtual reality that is contained within their minds?

Now, maybe you weren't "making that point" (or in other words, thinking of it from that perspective), but this kind of gets into the distinction between Reality and Truth. (For more on that, see the 3rd video I linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662949)

> When I hear “the tools to understand what is reasonable” and write of “finding the truth” and “collaborating using the tools of reason” I think of things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics. Reading your reply, it’s hard for me to tell exactly what you’ve heard, but it sounds like you may have instead understood this as my desiring to impose my beliefs of truth on others, which is not what I meant at all.

Oh no, I'm not saying that it is your (conscious) intent to "impose my beliefs of truth on others" (but I would speculate that this could manifest unintentionally, via simple democracy). My point is that you seem to hold the axiom that "things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics" are the only modalities of thinking that we have at our disposal.

As for things like Systemantics, I am a huge proponent of this sort of thinking. But you may (or may not) notice a near complete lack of this sort of thinking (that we live within a complex, semi-indeterminate system) in threads like this.

> It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives.

Yes, I would very much like for HN to adopt this culture. Alas, it seems more than people here can muster, which is one of my prime complaints. I have also suggested an experimental solution to resolve this inability in the comment I linked above. Alas, @dang seems uninterested in trying to improve things, despite his (I presume) perception that he wants HN forums to be a force for good in the world. The mind has massive capabilities for imagination, but it seems there are certain places that this imagination will not go: into itself, or one's tribe.

> but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs.

True. My point is, consider the possibility that you are hitting a kind of hard limit of this approach. I believe that this is where humanity now finds itself - we are metaphorically building ever taller towers of technological capability based on our capacity for reason (science, engineering, etc), but we find ourselves unable to manage the societal consequences of the system we've built ourselves to live in. Perhaps it is indeed possible to solve this increasingly risky situation with reason - but what if it isn't? What if your intuition (which is what it is) is wrong? Disproving hypotheses is a fundamental part of the scientific process, and yet look how eager we are to skip over that part when dealing with indeterminate domains.

> Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either

And then there is: What is True.

> so there you go.

You and me both, and the society we live in. And where are we going? I don't know, but the neighbourhood outside the window I'm looking out of is starting to get a little scary, by my standards anyways. Maybe I just have to work on my thrill seeking skills. Although, I don't get the sense from others in this thread that they're seeking thrills, so do they see something different outside their windows? Or is something else going on?

> it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance

As do most people, and I can appreciate why: it is indeed a very large field, and it seems to take years just to get even a rough lay of the landscape. But what I can't appreciate is that "reasonable, informed" people (like my brethren here on HN, or so they tell me) seem to have no curiosity when such ideas arise. What they do have though, is downvotes. But to be clear: I don't appreciate it, but I do understand it. I propose that once one has traversed the right parts of these lands, you can begin to notice the very same, simple patterns always and everywhere (hence my suggestion in my other comment).

> Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).

These beliefs are derived from a heuristic (resting upon axioms and premises). Why not apply the very tool you are recommending: (first principles based) reasoning? Once again, is this not at least suggestive of a fundamantal shortcoming in that approach? On one hand, you surely know (in one state of mind [1] that is) that your knowledge is limited, and yet you speak as if it isn't (another one of the common patterns I refer to above).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

> Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity

If this was /r/politics, I wouldn't complain. But this lack of curiosity combined with the abundance of self-congratulatory claims of intelligence in these threads is a bit off-putting to me - and I am a great lover of irony!

> whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.

I dream of a day that we can manage a debate here on HN, on culture war topics, with the same mental discipline we demonstrate when debating determinate domains, like programming, hardware, etc. Heck, I'd even be happy if someone could agree that the noticeable degradation in quality of discourse on topics like this, combined with the gravity of the topics (ie: climate change), might be substantial enough to at least consider trying to do something about.

> But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.

That is what I have been trying to do for quite some time now: nudge people into a higher state of consciousness - to get them to at least realize what is going on in threads like this. But it seems to be an unpopular idea.

I would like to say though: despite the harshness of my tone and words, this has been the best conversation I've had on HN in a very long time, so thank you for that.

'The News' - which is mostly credible, is mostly not a form of state propaganda.

'The News' in the US, is a 'reasonable' form of credible information.

'Facebook' is generally not a good source of truthful information. It's a very open and free place to communicate, which is wonderful, but it's just not a good truthiness signal.

Enough with this idea that anything but 'everyone on a soapbox' is somehow fascist. Every community has sources that are more legitimately authoritative than others.

'The problem with the press' are their own internal narratives and biases, not any external influence.

The press are generally free to report on what they see, and they do that. It's their opinion that gets in the way.

And ironically, if there are bits they're afraid to report it's definitely not political, it's corporate, for fear of losing advertising revenue.

There is just the same as “control them” and in practice is how fascism works. The DDR didn’t rely primarily on stasi breaking kneecaps to enforce order.

Social media has given everyone a soap box, a megaphone and a repeater and the ability to piggyback on other people's shouting directly into people's ears and eyes. Do you think this is a good thing? No one is vetting anyone seriously, no one is being consistently judged on their honesty, accuracy, track record or motives.

It's not entirely about being dumb, more and more it's turning out to be about how much time people are able to commit to understanding what they're reading. This is why people are known as experts in the first place. Do you really think everyone is capable enough to handle the highly nuanced planning and decision making necessary for governing millions of people on the balance of thousands of existing laws and regulations?

Sometimes you can't boil information down into something that everyone can understand in a short enough amount of time which would be what is necessary for each person to play a role in democracy. Just like we pay someone to fix our plumbing we should be paying our politicians to figure this stuff out for us.

We don't have the time or attention span. It's impossible.

No it's not. This is declaring a problem -- which I think is a very real problem -- but not suggesting a solution. I don't believe anyone is suggesting fascism is the solution to this problem -- except for you.

But now that you've provided this unreasonable response, it's now much more difficult to discuss it. You've unintentionally provided an example of the very thing we're talking about.

In a conversation that is supposedly about how people are being mislead by media we're 2 seconds away of Godwin's law again. It's exhausting.

An idiot who shares something untrue that he ought to have known was false is materially different from someone who fabricates something and ultimately directly and by proxy misinforms 10 million people.

The choice isn't between tyranny or absolute freedom. It's about our actions shaping the bones of society. The current framework isn't mere ground truth we must accept we can reshape it if we desire and perhaps we should.

You can’t just squeeze the screw tighter on this.

The idea of “I know better than you, therefore I control what you see and say or else” is the absolute height of arrogance.

First of all, plenty of the people currently spreading lies on the internet are doing so under their own names and have built some celebrity and a career out of it, so I don't know why you think that anonymity contributes to the problem in any real way.

But more importantly, how exactly do you propose to "punish people" who spread lies? With what form of punishment? Is this a formal system of punishment, or some informal system?

If formal: Under what jurisdiction? How does your proposed system determine the truth, and if it can determine the truth how does it determine which lies are malicious enough to be deserving of punishment?

If informal: How does it differ from what we have today, in the form of people arguing with each other and occasionally trying to get each other banned from social media or otherwise made unpublishable or unemployable?

I'm not saying that reading a news article is equivalent to PTSD but it's a spectrum and we all sort of need to accept that different people have different abilities and tolerances when it comes to being exposed to extremism and propaganda - heck we'd all probably pride ourselves here as being able to see through the BS of most advertising but we also need to acknowledge that advertising is effective on a lot of folks.

1. As a society in general, I hope you'll allow.

Too dumb, no. But definitely too gullible - and the is made worse by the profit that is to be made manipulating such people.

The same way that there are large pockets of disease outbreak in rich areas of the country because moms with accounting degrees think they're smart enough to be immunologists because they have an internet connection.

We're literally watching democracy die in real time and its directly due to social media and internet disinformation, on top of the already existing radio/tv disinformation.

US life expectancy may have plateaued, but doesn't appear to be in decline, and it's still above even Cuba, which has perhaps the highest amount of social spending on healthcare as portion of GDP.

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Mexico are in clear declines.

With regards to which extremes of the political spectrum have the highest body counts, I would say the far-left Marxist states are the clear winners, with somewhere in the region of 42 to 160 million killed.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

Here is a copy of the chart with some additional countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

Australia is even higher than Sweeden, yet both the UK and Australia are currently governed by conservative parties.

I'm an Australian myself, and in favor of socialized medicine, I just get annoyed by characterization of left vs right as a good vs evil scenario, as our polarized political discussion so often likes to do.

The answer is instead to support human rights and freedoms, and fight back against attempts to take away our freedoms no matter who is trying to take them away.

EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.

The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic - the same as most other democracies on this planet.

Republic just means that the government is a public affair - there is no monarch. It's the opposite of a monarchy.

I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-01...

"most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" ... and therefore let's help them to understand.

This leads to people being blindsided by things like Trump or Brexit. Its important to register that we tend towards a slanted world view.

I have imperfectly adopted a principle in discourse: that if I have to resort to patronizing explanations to understand, I'm not working hard enough to understand.

It is the responsibility of, well, everyone, but especially those in power—journalists, politicians, pundits—to act in some semblance of good faith. To try to inform their audience. To not say things they know to be false.

The people storming the capital right now have been told by (1) the president of the united states, (2) the news channels they watch, and very possibly (3) their religious leaders, that Donald Trump would have won the election if not for a conspiracy to rig voting machines and throw away millions of ballots. So of course, in that case, the right thing to do is storm the capital and protect democracy!

The basic problem is that too many public figures have decided to reject their most basic responsibility to society. And I just don't know what to do about that.

> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.

Nonetheless it seems objectively true to me. This may just be my biased perspective being substantially smarter than average, but I'm continually surprised by how gullible, uneducated, and uninformed the average person is. In the USA especially - stop skimping on your education system there!

I'm also surprised pleasantly by what humans in the aggregate accomplish, so it's not all doom and gloom.

What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match.

Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in

Do you have a specific citation for that? There was Kent State. Before that they were racially and earlier, sexually, ethnically, and religiously, segregated.

What specific time period are you thinking of?

2020: 64

2019: 11

2018: 13

2017: 9

2016: 4

2015: 4

[0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211

I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.

For instance, Galileo was not treated well for going against conventional wisdom, and nobody liked vis viva because it wasnt newton's momentum.

Are there people losing their jobs and being cancelled for going against the Copenhagen interpretation today?

Back in the 50s and 60s, Pete Seeger was banned from performing to anyone but young children by the FBI because he may have been a member of the Communist party -- including at educational institutions. Is that still happening today? Has that changed or something?

What's the difference in analytic technique that has changed since that time period? People are still writing essays, running experiments and measuring p values. These are still the methods being taught, too

I do think it's a problem that a lot of employees can and do get fired over saying dumb stuff - a lot of times that they didn't mean to say. Does this include Trump's famous "Grab them by the p#$$y" comment? Maybe.

However, there's this idea that people should basically be able to send out hate speech memos in a company and not be apprehended for "speaking their mind". These are completely different. One of them is premeditated idiocracy. The other is a mistake. We shouldn't confuse the two.

One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong.

I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.

Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail.

When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that.

And we all know who loves the poorly educated...

If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning.

But is that new? I have no idea.

I think it's easy to blame the symptoms of social media for the issues we have. But the internet, video quality bandwidth, smartphones, and social media together have combined to dramatically change who publishes and who finds it over the last 10-15 years.

In my mind, it is going to take us time to adapt, maybe a couple generations. Things will be difficult during that time but I hope we don't make regressive changes in our values based on what is fundamentally (in my opinion) an issue adapting our approach to free speech to the rapid advancement of publishing technology.

EDIT: "most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" -> This is the kind of dramatic conclusion I don't think we should be drawing.

America has been good at free speech, and we should never give that up. But for free speech to result in advancement of society, rather than goons storming the Capitol, a good education is an absolute requirement, and the government has not given all Americans the opportunity to get a good education. There will be pressure to censor speech because people aren't equipped to process it -- we should resist that and focus on education instead. This is where we should be spending our money; this is what the government exists to do. Give everyone an equal standing to understand these sources of information. We're not doing that, and the results are bad.

It should always be one of the top priorities for any populace.

It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean.

Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).

So you (hypothetically, as a developer) make six figures? Superb.

How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?

That's what I keep telling people around me. They're still bewildered that I don't go out of my way to "optimize" my way out of taxes, or that I'm in favor for raising the taxes for my income bracket. And it doesn't even take a civil war - as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help? Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?

and how much help will you be able to offer, given your prior lack of optimization for this very scenario?

> Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?

"I gave already, it was taken out of my income before I had a chance to spend it, go away now"

Isis may have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria, but that did not mean that the oil stopped flowing

Where in the world is there a free market in education?

Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.

I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.

If there's no slack in the system then how do you propose to expand the scope of function provided by a system running at its limitations?

> I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.

I agree with this, which is why I questioned you. A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.

I don't. I do think that adding slack into the system is an important step in fixing educaction. But my comment was trying to point towards the question of how come there's no slack in the system? What ate it? Answer: market pressures. Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.

> A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.

I'm not disagreeing completely, but I have many concerns about this view. Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades. I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education. On top of that, free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.

The lack of market pressure allowed the quantity of unnecessary/unwanted services to expand as the quality decreased (because people are still forced to pay for a failing educational system, bad teachers are shielded from accountability, and anyone who wants to pay for private education must pay twice).

> Answer: market pressures.

If you don't respond to the market telling you that you cost too much and provide too little, you shouldn't be surprised when you're unable to produce what you consume on the market and become dependent on additional assistance.

> Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.

Can you provide some source substantiating your denial of this historical assertion?

> Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades.

Free market is also good at optimizing for means of production that deliver commodities and goods over the long term. The limitation is that the owner of the capital must have a long term vision he wishes to accomplish with his capital. Coercive systems decouple the vision-seer from the capital-owner by permitting the vision-seer to realize his vision by expropriating the necessary resources from individuals who do not share that vision. This replaces the impediment of needing a coincidence of capital and vision with the perverse incentives and moral hazards associated with expropriation.

> I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education.

Only as far as the people paying for the education approved those proxy results.

> free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.

a free market wouldn't have a minimum wage by definition.

This ignores the point? At a lower than minimum wage, you still don't have happy labour

Yeah, because then the government is telling them they are illegally unskilled to work a job.

And it's still just market pressures. Markets are just bad for people

Easy bad ideas make for catchy phrases. The kinds of thoughts that are spreading across the US today would have been stopped by editorial accountability in an earlier era. I'm not sure education is the way to reduce the impact of easy bad ideas, because group members take on the catch phrases without thinking them through.

Open exchange of ideas is not new. It's just faster and cheaper now.

Sophisticated people are just as prone to bias and cognitive error as unsophisticated people. The danger with limiting the spread of information is that the task of deciding what to censor is vulnerable to corruption by the interests of the censor.

People forget, statistically half the population has an IQ below 100. And importantly, to be absolutely clear, that does not mean those people should not have a voice, or that they are “stupid”, far from it. It does however mean that certain issues are overwhelming complex to assume every American can make competent decisions on. Many of these rioters I’m sure don’t grasp how the very system they are protesting works on a fundamental level. If they believe the earth is flat, how can we expect them to understand the electoral college process, or the role of state versus federal government in our election process.

Certainly everyone’s voices need to be heard. When people and their families are struggling, many of them doing the jobs that make this country function, they are ignored. So when a savior seems to come before them, we need to be very vigilant.

We’ve seen these things happen before in history with other demagogues.

We expect in this country that all voices should be heard in order to elect people who’s job it is to lead. That’s the definition of a republic. That leadership should have killed the conspiracies and falsehoods from the start, protecting those of the democracy who are vulnerable, many of them suffering from the consequences of this pandemic.

Instead they sat on their hands. We need to hold our leaders responsible. We need to ask, en masse, for those leaders to hold each other accountable.

We also need to take ownership as a people. Us. We consume this media. We have created these social media companies, and allowed them to spread this stuff. Ultimately each and every one of us is responsible.

Let’s make sure going forward we ask more for those we ask to lead in our stead. Our vote isn’t the only thing we have to do that. We also have our voice and our 1st amendment. Let’s use it to the fullest.

Your fellow citizens deserve more credit. They have brains. They really can and almost always do form adequate understanding of reasonable takes on new information.

But when their eyeballs are subjected to consumerist bidding wars and ranking algorithms to inflame, to stoke fear and insecurity, to render feelings of inadequacy, and they are so thoroughly manipulated, then you get information monoculture.

We need information diversity and information vitamins. Instead we’re allowing ourselves to be spoonfed information junk food.

Meanwhile, our fellow citizens deserve no credit at all, and neither do we. No one has any real idea what's going on, we just either follow the herd or totally gamble. Even if someone was actually able to be correct about complex systems, it would be unverifiable.

Do you have a source for this comment? I'm pretty sure he heard about the allegations of fraud from actual purported witnesses who filed sworn affidavits. Those blogs that you're saying he gets the information from have hyperlinks to the documents filed by his legal team. I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.

Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper.

If intelligence services or elections officials had found something, they would've announced it officially, instead they have announced the opposite. [0] [1]

> I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.

Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet. [2] (and hundreds more)

[0] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio...

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUS...

They are poll workers who claim (under penalty of perjury) to have witnessed illegal or election-tampering conduct.

> Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet.

Its presumptuous for you to pretend to know the sources available to POTUS.

>> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

This from the guy who was fired because he continued to claim there was no evidence when people were presenting evidence of election tampering and begging the government to investigate before the evidence trail grew cold.

He has tweeted today his displeasure at Mike Pence if he doesn't reject the Electoral College votes.

And he has tweeted moments ago, yet again, that he won in a landslide and that he and his supporters have had the election win viciously stripped away from them.

Whether it's delusional or some malicious intent to incite violence, I think doesn't even matter. He should be impeached, removed from office, and banned from ever holding office again. The priority must be, counting the state certified Electoral College votes, and certifying the result. Following that, Congress could impeach and remove Trump from office in half a day, if they want. Their normal speed is glacial, but that's institutional momentum. They can move very quickly, if they want to, they just usually don't want to.

Being reasonable is time consuming, expensive, requires constant education and a mind open to accepting that being wrong is ok. It’s elitist almost by definition. I don’t see how you got authoritarian in the equation, though.

The response to this should be to ensure everyone does have the education and free time to be able to deal with this type of misinformation, but that runs contrary to the goals of those who benefit from the status quo.

Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones.

What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.

If you go looking for different opinions you can find them, but most people don’t do that. They let an algorithm generate their opinions for them by excluding anything that might challenge their views from their feed.

With every new communication medium comes new responsibility.

When radio was first introduced, it was rife with misinformation and false advertising. One Dr. Brinkly made a fortune selling fake goat testicle transplants (for treating ED) over the radio, only to relocate it to the Mexican border when he was shut down. He made so much money that he ran for Governor and received 30% of the vote.

We're kind of in the same place right now, but with a much broader medium. How we move forward is anyone's guess.

Yes. And thirty or forty or fifty years ago (remember the Internet itself is more than 20 years old), we had even less diverse access.

However, that does not mean the information we got back then was more reliable than the information we get now. It just means it was harder back then for we the people to spot when we were being misinformed, lied to, or just plain not told about things we should have been told about.

- from Thomas Paine Common Sense, to getting all the farmers with pitchfolks to revolt over whiskey tax to the newspaper boy shouting on the corner.

It's really the same coin.

We are headed for dark times unless people like you are removed from positions of power.

Economic values operate to reward them, and to punish - or at least inconvenience - those with less toxic values. So naturally the Dark Triad types have a very strong incentive to exploit the below-average. And the more below average and cognitively unsophisticated they are, the easier it is to exploit them.

This isn't even about Left vs Right. It's about how you design a political and economic system that can handle these challenges without imploding.

I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam.

Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people.

Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect."

I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia."

Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out.

The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.

But in your profile here on HN, you describe yourself as:

> I'm an appellate lawyer. In a past life, I was an engineer at a cognitive radio startup.

I'm puzzled at why you see the distinction as having anything to do with "the professional class".

I think the word you could have used to good effect here is "cosmopolitan". Its meaning is a subtle and probably used a little differently by different people, but I take it to describe a person somewhat like myself who (unlike you) doesn't have much of an attachment to "soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs", but instead sees all of the culture of humanity as their birthright, and who feels free to pick and choose (subject to certain political and economic constraints). I find it personally important to me to be able to combine things I love from different cultures from all over the world, and I confess that I regard those with a strong attachment to whatever they perceive as "their culture" as somehow a little (or a lot!) backwards. I also confess to a genuine irritation with anyone who expresses ideas that suggest that certain culture is "owned" by specific groups of people.

Clearly, we have quite different views of the world and our place in it. But I'm still confused why you put Yglesias and his cosmopolitan views in "the professional class" when it seems (from your being here on HN as well as your profile) that you are also a member of this class. Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?

If so, it's really about "the professional class" vs "ordinary people", it's about people (like me) who view cosmopolitanism as central to the great hope for a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity, and people (perhaps such as yourself) who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.

Let me make clear that I’m not making value judgments here. Obviously I have my views, but I’m just trying to describe what I’m experiencing.

Putting that aside, I agree “cosmopolitan” describes aspects of this as well. But economic trends have caused the professional class to become much more cosmopolitan than it used to be. In the law, for example, it used to be most companies used local or regional firms. Today, stuff is increasingly consolidated in NY/DC/SF. The same is true of the news media, etc. As a result, these industries are increasingly filled with people who were okay moving halfway across the country to pursue opportunities. And the process of moving itself reduces some of those traditional attachments to place.

This is happening internationally. Surveys show that the vast majority of people in Asia wouldn’t immigrate to another country even if they had the chance. So places like Silicon Valley are increasingly filled with people who are a little different than the normal person in the country they left behind.

As for me, I came to DC at age 5 with my parents so it’s not like I had much of a choice. And it’s hard to be “from” DC since everyone here is so transient. Even then, I moved back when my wife and I had kids and we live 10 minutes from my parents.

> Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?

Yes, I think that’s true. But as explained above, there are a lot more cosmopolitans in my profession than the average place. The median American lives less than 18 miles from their mom. The median American lawyer or journalist certainly doesn’t. I remember scrambling to get a passport when my boss decided we were going to Germany with two days notice. My passport had been expired for years.

> Who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.

And just happiness. I don’t mind if my kids go out somewhere else for college, but I want them to come back to Maryland and raise kids. I travel for work, and my wife and I like to go to random Midwestern cities once a year for vacation, and I really love Japan, but traveling for the sake of it doesn’t do much for me.

Cosmopolitanism is one aspect of how the professional class is different. Religion is another. There are more religious people than you’d think in the professional class, but everyone keeps it pretty DL and churchgoing isn’t a typical weekly activity. Education is obviously another, and that’s got a lot of knock-on effects. I’ve been trying to explain the new meaning of the term “racism” to my dad and he’s pretty perplexed. He never went to college in the US, and prides himself on “not being a hyphenated American.”

For the most part, people can just sort into the kind of life they want. But when the media becomes highly nationalized, it becomes a challenge. I’m politically a pretty liberal person (I was a Democrat most of my adult life) and it’s just hard for me to read mainstream news these days. I stick to Bloomberg which tends to be pretty neutral. I have to admit, I read foxnews.com or WSJ when 10 years ago I would’ve read the NYT. Not because I think “these people are bad” or anything like that, I just don’t want to fight with the impedance mismatch to see what happened in the GA election.

Notably, the local news doesn’t create this tension. The Capital Gazette here in Annapolis doesn’t make me want to flip to Fox.

Maybe I’m understating the actual xenophobia towards Pakistanis in Bangladesh. I’m (inadvertently) rather ignorant some of these things because my knowledge is second hand through family. My parents were strongly pro-independence, and my uncle was in the army.

Anything can be made more inflammatory if you remove key details while still remaining factually correct.

- Tim punched Bob

- Bob punched Tim

- Bob and Tim shake hands

Reported as...

- Bob punched Tim

Factually correct but lacking context. Unless the reader knows the entire story be putting it together from multiple reports, this will create a skewed view of any report. This happens all the time with headline circulation where nobody reads the article.

If you’ve ever seen reporting or articles on something where you have deep expertise, you’ll spot it immediately because you know exactly what’s been left out. Nobody else does though.

And honestly, I have no idea what to do about it unless somebody can create a site to aggregate news from multiple sources to highlight what’s missing from each one.

A tactic that I suspect would be useful is the ability to call out specific things—"Yeah, a bunch of this stuff is arguable and murky, but that thing you said right there is wrong and I can prove it; I will stake a chunk of my reputation on this, and we will litigate the issue, and if I'm successful, it should damage your reputation and boost mine"—combined with people expecting to be in the system for long enough that reputations are worthwhile. ("Wrong" will include "factually wrong" and might also include "against the rules of this system"—it might be sensible to have rules about claims needing to be backed up by certain kinds of evidence.)

I think at least some parts of academia were supposed to work something like this, and maybe a few parts of it actually do.

This seems at least like the type of experiment that would be worth trying.

Also, it will be interesting is which "news" outlets label this as riots and which label it as protests.

Reflecting the same joke for Fox News is left as an exercise to the reader.

Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. It is exceedingly difficult to find information presented without some attempt to mislead.

The short version: There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows the nation trusts to present the news without filter or spin.

That coupled with the algorithmically enhanced echo-chambers of social media you mention, multiplied by two decades of teaching outrage and protest instead of critical thinking and history, gets you this.

Have you ever actually read examples of newspapers and news reporting from the earlier parts of the 20th century? The dishonest, mendacious bias in favor of any media source's ideological preference was extreme to a degree that even today isn't readily visible. Certain media empires were absolutely ruled by their owners and even major papers like the New York Times were often loaded in slant towards certain ideological narratives. Just to name one example: Read about Walter Duranty. Things were even more vicious in the 19th century.... I have no idea where this notion of once fair, objective news sources comes from but it's certainly not rooted in the practical reality (referring in all of this to U.S media and politics, regarding other countries things get more ambiguous and complciated probably).

Whereas Walter Duranty was a big deal in the 20s & 30s, in much more fragmented & volatile times. Although how much their fragmentation resembles ours I don't know. They had many far-out newspapers but still only a few radio shows, and perhaps a larger role for shared institutions like churches & public schools?

Sure, but that reality was a top-down creation. How much airtime did dissidents get? Socialists? Women? Marginalised people? And I don't mean reporting on them, but stories by them.

But I'd like to highlight other forces. One was technological, 3 TV channels or whatever was all they could do, and this implied that there was going to be a pretty high degree of conformity. You couldn't broadcast weird Italian movies because only a few percent were interested. The 4 big car companies who bought the ads which paid the bills really didn't want to be associated with anything partisan, they all needed to sell to everyone.

Another was historical / emotional. The nation had just emerged from this gigantic world war, and it was a spectacular victory, which gave enormous prestige to the huge centralized machines built to fight it. They built a lot of similar machines back home, big corporations with a commander-in-chief who wasn't a self-made robber barron, he was promoted up the ranks. Big unions, and big regulation.

This experience also squashed a lot of earlier differences. You say "Women? Marginalised people?" but this seems like a modern take, I think they would have said "Irish? Polish? Jewish?". These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one, I mean, a Catholic could be elected president, that was a big deal.

But all of these are gone now. So perhaps 100 years ago is a better guide than 50 years ago.

> These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one

Shared by white people, for the most part.

I'm not sure what you mean in your penultimate paragraph. "identities and divisions eroding" is only partly true, surely. You could certainly argue the opposite is true - see the women's lib and civil rights movements for examples of people fighting back against conformity.

Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.

I wish more people thought this way. We think we're so smart!

In off to bed, but thank you for the reply, I understand more what you meant now.

No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.

When other outlets shill for the RNC, that isn't the same as having "political tendencies."

In the past, these maneuvers would have been considered conflicts of interest and a violation journalistic ethics. Today, we don't have many practicing journalists. We have "here's a lefty and here's a righty, let's watch 'em argue on screen" passed off as news.

The moment Obama was elected those counts stopped.

We all want to believe that nice guy on TV. Is honest and neutral.

This is almost never the case.

Notice how in the first few months of the pandemic the daily stats were front page? Like, every day and multiple times per day. Now we just occasionally get the "USA breaks single day record" second or third level heading with no specific numbers.

But, I promise you in 4 years people will be remember this as "Remember when the media was reporting the pandemic deaths non-stop when Trump was in office but it _suddenly_ stopped when Biden was in office?"

Just like people seem to remember when "Mitch Mcconnell" overrode Obama's veto. The veto both houses and both parties overrode. 97-1 in the senate.

Couple that with people remembering things how they want, or believing what they want to hear, and Bob is you uncle.

The thing about "what has happened" is that it actually leaves a lot of room for bad faith reporting. You can never include everything. What isn't reported is just as important as what is, whether it's whole stories, certain viewpoints, context, anything.

What criticisms did mainstream news outlets level at George W. Bush that you felt were attacks? At what point in the lead-up to lies-based invasion do you feel it's ok to say "Bush and Cheney just might be lying here, folks."?

I don't think there can be economically, without regulating (supply limiting) news media.

They were debatably on par with politicians. But increase the number of news outlets, and the importance of any anchor decreases.

Consequently, their ability to ask hard questions without losing access to their sources decreases.

Rupert Murdock called on Republican political strategist Roger Ailes in 1996 when creating Fox News. Ailes launched and then ran Fox News as its CEO for decades.

This is the same guy who worked as a media adviser to basically every successful Republican presidential campaign.. Nixon, Reagan, Bush.. and even Trump (before Ailes died, and after a sexual misconduct scandal finally got him canned at Fox).

Ailes was so influential as a strategist that he was even credited for one of Bush senior's wins back in the day. And he built and reigned at Fox News for 20+ years.

So we had a major republican political operator put in charge of a news network by a global political operator (Murdoch) who only got US citizenship as it was a requirement for US television station ownership. And who had a history of using his media empire to shape political narrative for influence.

The frustrating thing is that Murdoch's influence shaping has always been more about accumulating power than towards spreading specific ideology. In Australia in the 60s and 70s, he backed the faction pushing for universal free health care, free college education for all Australians, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources.

Sounds very un-Fox-like, doesn't it? It was the in-road to political power, the faction that would get him the most influence by supporting. There was a write-up some years ago in the UK that delves a bit more into his history (as he has also been peddling influence in the UK for decades as well):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a-man-of-selfish-lo...

But tying this back to Fox News.. he came to the US, built a TV network and used that foundation to build a news station. This was a push to become a major political controller by building and embedding Fox News as the media arm of the Republican party.

They used this to condition their base. The lead-up to today is decades of people turning on FOX to watch Geraldo, sticking around for the news, then wandering off with talking points stuffed into their heads by influencers with an agenda who were presenting the news.

And the strategy was so successful that it generates mimics to the model. The most evil I see is Sinclair Media buying up local news stations and putting the same talking points into the mouths of local pundits across the nation. There's a creepy video compilation that highlights the tactics of this influence machinery by showing clips from each of these local news outlets with different talking heads each repeating the same points.

Or, given the conflict starting from the first Gulf War and continuing up until the second, maybe 30 years ago.

Or, given the US deep involvement in the immediately preceding Iran-Iraq war, maybe closer to 40 years ago.

Or...

20 years ago was the disputed 2000 election, 9/11, Department of Homeland Security, Gitmo, invasion of Afghanistan, lies about WMD, invasion of Iraq, etc. So no, I wouldn't say things were better then.

Reminds me of the rapid increase in housing prices now and concerns about a bubble. I mean, 8-9 years ago it was non-stop articles about how nobody would be fooled again by a housing bubble.

We’ve seen headlines on this site showing how we have access to more kinds of information than ever.

Society HAD been pressured to toe the line even harder back in the day. Internet has no TV censors, though the most visible properties do.

It’s ridiculous to suggest we’ve become more protective given book burnings, anti-Dungeons and Dragons, anti-comic book, Bible thumping paranoia that used to exist.

What we’re seeing is American incompetence to comprehend more than just their speech is wrong. Their entire agency is wrong.

When political forces beat us over the head with economic correctness, which has lead to decades of growing inequality, and the Fed relied on a policy of worker insecurity to keep people in their jobs, this has little to do with Main Street tolerance for alternative ideas (they’re everywhere) and everything to do with tried and true human nature to maintain economic power in the hands of a minority.

Humans evolved quite a bit before language. What is language anyway except muscle agency emitting random sound forms? Then of course we normalize on them, effectively constraining our syntax systems organically. Even linguists agree.

This has little to do with suppression of speech and everything to do with top down control of productive agency altogether.

The undermining of agency for the masses, sequestered in the hands of a minority has nothing to do with speech. We say a lot of diverse shit. But spend our time securing the wealth of oligarchs.

Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.

A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil...

In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down.

So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.

This is irrational and hostile. Regardless, what's unfolding is not a result of people more frequently experiencing normal social reactions to their public statements and actions, nor a result of the exceptional and justly criticized cases where those reactions are based on error. That line of criticism is usually just a dishonest way to excuse other behaviors, like we are witnessing here, that are dangerous to society and poisonous to discourse.

It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.

So it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power as to how we got to the point where the President is inciting those rioters... the President is literally telling them to be offended, and to be angry. Speech promoting violence. How is that speech not itself a threat to democracy?

The fact that it applies to both perhaps suggests validity, no?

    It needs to be made clear that the path of 
    progress is littered with hurt feelings, and 
    that the importance of our feelings is 
    significantly dwarfed by the collective 
    good of science and democracy. 

The human race is not a zero-sum game with "feelings" on one side and "progress" on the other!

Don't lose sight of why we're making all of this progress in the first place.

We are not building more highways and inventing more computers just for the heck of it. We are -- or should be -- doing it to improve the happiness of ourselves and those who come after us.

Y'know, happiness? One of those pesky feelings you mentioned?

We used to teach our children to "have a thick skin." "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." When someone took offense we told them to "grow up."

Being offended, especially on behalf of someone else, is useless. Teach people not to take offense. They'll be happier.

Words to affect people and if you don't respond to insult, you will be bullied and insulted more and more. You will not have respect and you will lose ability to influence what is going on with and around you.

In addition, men used to hold duels over words, so it was not even historical standards.

> When someone took offense we told them to "grow up."

Yes, some adults were enabling bullies like that. Especially if they themselves did not like the target. But it still was exactly that - enabling.

Just letting it go or being submissive is not functional strategy to deal with these issues.

    Teach people not to take offense. They'll be happier. 

I am expressing my belief that progress and happiness pair pretty well -- they should not be at odds with each other.

In addition to earning a living, it's why I got into this industry. Is that not why most of us are here? Aren't we here to write code that makes things better for people? Perhaps not on world changing levels, but hopefully on some level even if it's just making the file upload box on some fourth-rate social media site a little easier to use?

This is never said or implied.

The way I interpret this argument is this: the world wasn't meant to be pleasing all the time. Excluding unpleasant facts from one's information diet because it hurts their feelings is what the OP is arguing against. It is absolutely possible to present hostile/offensive statements that are also true. Feel free to agree/disagree, but it's quite rational line of thinking.

I am fully for it, but I believe the ones who need to change the informational diet are not ones who you think they need.

If today's events make any surprise to HN readers. I will tell them they spent not last 4 years, but like 20 years under a rock, and have no idea whatsoever what moves the political pendulum to the right with such force. And they don't want to hear why it is so.

Here on HN, 3 years ago I said that US is inching ever closer to the second civil war, and the point of no returns gets gets more, and more visible.

Then, I was told that such talks are not welcome on HN, and it's below the esteemed patrons of our establishment to think of such lowly matters.

Voila, sealed ears, what they lead to. Not only on HN, but across the elites of entire Western world.

Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting?

Because all I see are rioting by people who have lost any upward mobility they might have once had.

They'll be burning Teslas next but that doesn't make it a civil war.

Come again? The BLM riots went on for months, multiple people died, a section of a major city was occupied for weeks (two people murdered by the self appointed security force), a police precinct was burned down (as well as many building in several cities), etc. And you’re talking about the the grave felonies involved in a single day of occupying a public building...

Isn't this what ultimately fuels all civil wars?

What is the biggest social crisis there now, for every opportunistic force to take advantage off?

One need to be very, very blind not to see it coming, especially living in a major US city.

Pretty sure the monied interests have no desire for civil war — the opposite was the case in the mid 19th Century.

True, really a lot. In needs a nation on the edge for it to decide to turn on itself. And a nation on the edge it is.

> Pretty sure the monied interests have no desire for civil war — the opposite was the case in the mid 19th Century.

And so thought monied interests of the Old World when a wave of civil wars sped through the continent, and the Spring of Nations happened after few decades of turmoil.

And historians err here, taking desirable, for believable. "The Two Terrible Decades," aren't called that for nothing. They were devastating for both of Europe's Old, and New Money. It were the same upper classes socialites who wrote the term in the history books after all.

It would help if there were some geographical lines, as well. Are you envisioning the next civil war will be simultaneous sieges of all the major cities in the US?

No, most likely the same North-South split, with a bit of interior, vs exterior element to it.

Plus, when the shit hits the fan, the reasonable among us seem to suddenly conclude maybe we don't really care to fight about this. Yesterday is a classic example. These folks at the capitol like to think they were going to start the war and everyone else would join in. What really happens, of course, is that they find out how limited their numbers are, and that regular people will simply direct the police to squash the insurrection.

And this divide lines uncannily along the lines from centuries ago.

I used to think if I read through media with opposing biases then I'd understand the real story. But in most cases there's just a huge amount of relevant context missing even if the articles are factually correct.

In the same way that you can present statistical data in a way to support a view when the data doesn't actually support it despite being factually accurate.

Given that lies about the election, protected by free speech, have stoked these riots maybe you should consider whether it's really a problem of not enough free speech.

Anecdotally I’ve been reading a lot of old news (60s-90s) and it’s amazing to read as a retrospective. It has given me context for how we arrived to present day and it’s funny to see some of the same social phenomenons repeating themselves.

In middle school I had a week long course on how to identify the trustworthiness of online sources that talked over topics like what does the site gain by pushing one narrative over another, are they selling anything that might make them artificially favor a view point over another, checking multiple sources but identifying common trends in arguments or even common site themes that might suggest the sites are ran by the same entity.

In highschool in another district all I got on the topic was "wikipedia bad because it can be edited by anyone".

This matters both because some could end up being used if the country ignites, and also because US serves as the linchpin of the MAD doctrine, which kept the world relatively stable for over a half century now. US becoming unable to credibly deter other nuclear nations would probably not cause a nuclear war, but would definitely leave space for other big powers to make big changes in the geopolitical landscape.

     It's the practical erosion of Free Speech

Or at least it is, in a woefully undereducated country with large segments of the population that reject science and value ignorance.

Careful, vetted, fact-based reporting is incredibly laborious.

It takes orders of magnitude more time, money, and effort than it takes your uncle Steve to fire off a group text message with a bunch of conspiracy theories or share his anti-vax opinions in yet another wonderfully insightful all-caps Facebook screed. And yet, they are treated with the same level of respect in a country like this.

Further restriction of free speech at the government level is not the answer. That would be even worse than what we have now.

The problem is, there is no answer. This is simply where our values and our ignorance has taken us.

This is completely upside down.

This is not the 'erosion of free speech' - it's actually the 'explosion' of it.

Free from any kind of filters of credibility, people can now promote whatever fictions they want to promote.

When fictions are emboldened by those in positions of legitimate authority, aka The President, the truth falls by the side.

The ratio of 'noise to truth' has blown up, and it's mostly a result of our ability to communicate in a more direct manner.

The voices of mostly uninformed individuals, free to express themselves on the soap box, are now much louder. That's not a slight: we're all busy and have different roles in life. We can't be experts in everything, ergo, most of us are not legitimate sources of truth on that much. We allocate those responsibilities to people within whom we entrust a certain degree of trust. Like the free press as one example, Science as another.

Far from 'restrictions' on speech, the internet itself, Facebook, Twitter - whatever their policies provide for 100x more communication than existed before.

We used to get information from news, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers - and some gossip from the neighbours. Now the 'gossip, youtube and TikTok information' factor is 10x greater - and that's mostly a function of free expression.

Random people on Facebook will 'like' and 'propagate' whatever 'science' they want to believe is true - which is obviously not going to result in rigorously verified information, rather the opposite.

'Good or Bad?' - that's a more complicated issue - but what we are seeing now is 'much more expression' not 'limited expression'.

I challenge anyone here to demonstrate, over the last 25 years, how there could possibly be fewer channels and sources of public information and expression.

Edit: I should add that obviously there are issues with freedom of expression, on campus, and the in the commons with certain forms of shaming for certain opinions, but that's an entirely different issue from 'public information' and 'how people are misinformed' about things like election results. The public commons is several orders of magnitude bigger than it ever was. It's not even comparable to 25 years ago, this is a completely different era we live in.

To be flippant, there are more village idiots than ever before and they are all talking to each other on the internet.

The solution to this, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education and a shift of American politics to the left. America doesn’t have a left and a right, it has a far right and a right. In the UK American democrats would be very comfortable in the UK Conservative party.

To wit a top comment is talking about 'suppressed speech' when we have 100x more avenues to speak and express ourselves, and more people have voices than ever before, by several orders of magnitude ... is evidence of that is abundant.

YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Blogs, the fact we can now access information from around the world, the readiness 24/7 nature of information, any book, from anywhere, people from around the world interacting on Facebook.

Only 25 years ago it was literally unthinkable - I was alive then and nobody was predicting this. If you wanted to learn about 'Russia' you went to the 'Library'. Now - you can read Russian News, videos, TikToks, Instas, communicate with Russians, heck - you can even work with them.

HackerNews itself is an amazing opportunity for information clearing and individual expression that did not exist in any form 25 years ago! The very comment you are writing is 'revolutionary' in the broader picture of time. There was nowhere to do this before. Nobody could interact with people from around the world about 'daily tech news'.

It's not even a debate how much more expression there is today.

To your point about 'education' - obviously that would be wonderful, but that's not going to be good enough.

Just look at the issue here: we have incredibly more power as individuals to express ourselves publicly - and a 'very educated' HN board can't seem to grasp that.

We're just starting to grasp the power and influence of Social Media - and now that Trump has shown 'what can be done', I'm afraid it will be an 'arms race' of misinformation for a while.

Our system depends on integrity: that your doctors is certified, professional, moral. Same for your teacher. The Judge. And the same applies to information. We 'fact check' books, reports. We certainly expect that in the Scientific domain. So we must have that for public information as well. Which is not to say we won't have other expressive channels, but randoms on 'TikTok' just can't be a source of news, other than the experience they might be able to grab on their phones (which FYI can be enlightening).

So yes, education, but we need credibility in our institutions as well.

In other words: this magically aligns with everything you already believed.

I’m someone’s complete lack of surprise.

Less diversity as in-for example-a small village means you have to find compromises with your neighbors.

people have different thoughts! some people want an ethnostate for white people and some people dont! we just disagree. too bad that censorship caused all this to happen!

3. The anonymity of online identity.

People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous.

Perhaps this is a version of mob psychology/dynamics where the anonymity of the collective causes people to act in ways that they normally wouldn't.

I don't know about that. I see people on FB who are accurately identified by their real name who have no problem whatsoever expressing "F*ck your feelings" to people who are ostensibly their friends. Lack of anonymity doesn't seem to have helped.

Some people don't take responsibility for offending others, they'd rather place the blame on the person who heard them. You think that's rather a minor problem, ok. Let's skip past the question of offensive speech for now...

Let's talk about preserving a democracy. What happens when people no longer feel any responsibility for citizens having trust in that democracy? They use their speech to weaken it (this is a much broader group than just Trump) and now, with Trump, even to incite violence if they think it will benefit themselves. Fault and responsibility seems to clearly lie with them and their choices, they shouldn't be able to dodge that responsibility by redirecting to abstract discussion of the pros and cons of restrictions on speech.

You are dodging the direct "how did we get here?" answer of "people are making blatant shortsighted power plays" by talking about people's "iddly-widdly-fweelings." That's ridiculous.

1. In the past, the wrong speech would result in both government, and private sector censure. You're selectively omitting the civil rights struggle, the communist witch hunts, the german witch hunts that preceeded them, the history of internment and concentration camps in this country, the suffrage struggle...

We didn't somehow magically arrive at the world of 2020, without a lot of people being punished for their speech.

2. Our information diet was never as diverse as it is now. Media, prior to the age of the internet, was much more of a monoculture of ideas than it is now. New, radicalizing information arose in university halls and books and rallies, not on the television.

3. People are no more, and no less willing to admit that they were wrong today, as they were in the age of, say, segregation-forever Jim Crow south.

This coup is not the result of offensive speech being restricted, or hurt feelings. It's the direct result of a few people with media and political influence actively directing their followers to undermine our democracy.

This could have happened in any decade - but it happened today because of the particular personalities involved. You elect a president that is very vocal about his lack of respect for the law, the election process, the presidency, or democratic institutions, and this is what you get. The only reason it is happening in 2020, and not 1920, 1960, or 2020 was because the personalities on the ballot in those years had respect for those things - or at least, were adults who managed to check their worst impulses.

When he said that he won't accept the results of any election that he didn't win (back in 2016), do you still think he was confused, or kidding, or misunderstood? He was just being honest. You can't let people who profess such ideas within reaching distance of political power, because they will happily burn the world down around them to retain it.

The solution, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education (schools for the next generation and reskilling and educating for adults paid like a job via a stipend) and a shifting of American politics to the left so you actually have a left and a right like most democratic countries.right now you have a far right and right wing party.

This is utter madness and it has to stop. We have to start to see each other and people and not adversaries. You might like something I wrote last night about how the American mind has been fractured:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Death

You're not seeing the connection because you aren't thinking at a high enough level of abstraction. The entire social media and entertainment edifice is built on the objective of telling you what you want to hear. This basically generates a rapidly polarizing schism with a tendency toward radicalization, anda natural aversion toward established info sources on course correction, because if they didn't get it right the first time, or second, or third time, then why give the benefit of a doubt?

You can argue these people weren't looking for truth in thefirst place, but you're missing out on that the "Truth" is not the same to all people, and as it turns out, you rely on the fluid nature of non-bubbled organization and communication to ground disruptive social energy and disharmony.

I agree. See my comment here[1]. I simply don't see how that is the result or evidence of too little free speech. The opposite seems true. The problem isn't that people can't say what they believe. It is that people have the freedom to knowingly lie in order to corrupt the beliefs of others.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662297

thus the 2 realities the top post is referring to.

Go watch the George Floyd body cameras. All of them. The full 1 hour (30 min per officer). The story is ENTIRELY different than the one that was fed to us.

People don't trust those channels because it's so easy to look at literally any other non-mainstream source to see how we've been constantly lied to.

“Sudden discovery of 50 thousand votes”, and suggestions that “Democratic counties reporting last” means they can arbitrarily add votes as needed.

This isn’t some extreme view it’s being endorsed by both elected officials and pundits. I am genuinely concerned that people have forgotten just how fragile democracy is and are trying to score political points at the expense of critical institutions.

That's assuming the losing minority still wants democracy. Maybe they just want King-for-Life Trump.

political news is a waste of time and probably a net negative for an individual. That's MY truth which you won't find on CNN or breitbart's twitter feed.

I actively avoid political news (it sucks it is showing up here on HN).

EDIT: I don't like CNN fwiw.

I was mainly talking about political news, I do occasionally browse some mainstream business news.

There is no “CNN Politics” TV channel, nor is there a “CNN World” (“CNN International” is a thing, though) or “CNN Business” (there used to be CNNfn, but its been gone for more than a decade) channel.

“Business”, “Politics”, and “World” are sections of the CNN website; the corresponding content would generally all be covered, on TV, by the main CNN channel.

This is always the problem with suppressed speech. Nonsense will still be spewed, but no one reasonable gets a chance to counter it with analysis and cool it down.

Zeitgeist is broken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellenton_riot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_massacre

The censorship and punishment you claim as new is plainly and obviously not a recent development, look at how socialist and capitalist ideas have been treated for the last century. Or how American evangelism has treated "dangerous" ideas for even longer than that. https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp... , for instance. Never have we been a country full of people willing to admit we're wrong. But we're increasingly a country of people being pandered to by those who want to make a buck telling us we're not actually wrong.

I think you'd more easily make the OPPOSITE argument, that our norms about what is acceptable speech have eroded too far, that we've taken free speech to an unhealthy extreme (such as how our tech platforms will happily amplify the speech of extremists - in fact, they PREFER to do this, because their algorithms have figured out that it gets more ad views).

If it's acceptable for politicians to respond to losing popularity by claiming fraud - as Trump has been doing for months - then you are on the path that leads here. If the resulting violence is not acceptable, but you ALSO don't want to restrict Trump's speech with stronger norms, what do you propose instead?

How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

The ruling class says whatever it wants with belief that there can never be any negative results for any action they take (max "freeness"),

the opposition can't talk about anything in a substantive way because all they do is react to the inane and random political grenades thrown by the ruling party (very constrained "freeness" really. Being forced to respond to propaganda-maximizing controversy after propaganda-effectiveness-maximizing controversy is a record that sucks to play and is definitely forced onto the air more than everyone wants -- and the targets of the propaganda blame the wrong people for why they have to keep listening to it ... )

the people are left with no meaningful political voice (0 freeness of speech) because there's virtually 0 correlation between anything being talked about in the political dances and anything that is actually sufficiently practical to talk about as to be worth the cognitive attention required to talk about it ... You can't have free political speech when there are no political engagements worth talking about ...

The "team sport" that is the current political landscape is not at all a fun or useful game -- some amount of fun and usefulness is gonna need to be found and introduced to the process of defining government to help move out of this ...

I think this riot is best understood as being actively organized by the current ruling party.

I think there is a clear free speech issue in the current politics though -- systematically devaluing the potential for productive political talk is a form of free speech restriction -- it's a ddos attack against rational discourse - which has the effect of reducing the value of political discourse in general.

I doubt that this is a technical issue. Sure, the internet, social media and filter bubbles will have an influence. But there are so many political forces at play, so many angles under which the situation could be explained.

> How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course?

But here it is for certain that this specific coup hinges on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And it follows what he says all the time.

> But here it is for certain that this specific coup hings on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And what he says all the time.

Even there it's both, I think. Trump is part of a trend towards valuing immediate power over everything else, and being willing to play dirty to keep that power. His followers listen to him in large part because they've been primed by the media for decades to distrust the "mainstream" (where "mainstream" apparently doesn't include some of the people with the largest audiences, but actually just means "people who disagree with you").

The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

> Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napolean went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last labourer struck it for the last time with his pickaxe. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

> The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

Yes, that is a fascinating mystery. But one has to keep in mind: Many of the people that just tried a coup today and effectively tried to dismantle the democratic system in the US by installing a dictator will think of themselves as defenders of democracy. There will be of course hard right wing nationalist terrorists in that crowd - the last pro-trump protests have shown that - but there can only be so many of those.

Didn't we already go through this during McCarthyist red scares?