pnexk

Democratic institutional norms and a system relying on informed citizenry will always face new obstacles, but technology companies, particularly social media, adtech analytics, decline in established journalism have done so much damage and contributed to more conspiracy theories. Makes me feel even more icky about firms a16z pouring tons of money into things that undermine these norms… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055

dotA2. I love to death what you can do within each hero and itemization and strategic layer. Highest mmr players constantly figuring out little tricks and builds and ways to eek out an advantage or find new strats as each patch’s meta develops

How are we so sure archive is going to stay up? It’s already under legal attacks.

This concept of lack of boreness along with mention of studies was covered in a book called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter (2021) that made me think about it a lot since I came across it. Amazing to see someone organically mention their experience about something similar.

I also strongly think there is a decline (demand?) in appreciation for such art. Even something not critically acclaimed or featured in the prestigious (think something more regional or local) may very well go underneath unnoticed and dismissed in a culture with no effort put towards education or attention for it. The result is an absence of vital nourishing/reflection for many a soul.

In a similar vein, one of my favorite HN comments in the context of the modernist movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243252

Sounds like South Africa possibly.

Another example of how we’re all collectively becoming worse at properly reading and parsing longer text.

Really does make me wonder about backtracking on our breakthroughs in literacy rates.

I wish there was an article on this matter that wasn’t written like a capitalist industrial consumer taste manufacturing piece. Takes longer to get to the point too, but that’s just me.

TFA’s author notes they’ve watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization. As someone who is vary of his Century of Self documentary, I think it’s worth remembering how deceptive visual mediums can be.

It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.

None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.

Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.

I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.

It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.

You created this account exclusively to articulate transphobic misinformation?

true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.

I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.

Helpful type of nagging for me. Most here would agree they are not a positive aspect of the modern digital experience, calling it out gently without hostility is not bad. It might not be quite self policing but some of that with good reason is not bad for healthy communities IMO.

Clearly an AI bot posting slop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46753519 being another example.

I wonder if there’s known ideas on how to protect the quality of discourse on here from this type of intrusion :<

Firsthand evidence of AI bot accounts posting slop on here/astroturfing I suppose.

Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.

Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.

On the contrary, it being published in 2012 makes it feel a little closer to 20th century mode of traditional media cultural criticism which felt a little more grounded than it is now in established media.

It’s also interesting for me because it’s a small slice of insight into the cultural consciousness of people’s perceptions of the trajectory of technology and its ills & promises at the time. It may sound like I’m exaggerating how long ago this was, but it really does feel like 2015 onwards was a large disruption from the expected status quo in the West in both good and bad ways. Not just in politics (Cambridge analytica?)but also in the way the general public perceived the technology industry and the nature of the kind of force it is at large in society.

> This is a large, obvious, mistake.

It seems quite rational a response to the decisions taken by a larger neighboring nation’s state unexpectedly increasing hostility.

Would also recommend the Moody's Talks podcast led by Mark Zandi, the Moody's Analytics chief economist. He's been more or less talking about this for months now and sounded the alarm much earlier than others about this prospect.

I think this is covered in Micheal Easter’s notion that as societies become more comfortable, our brains lower the threshold of what constitutes a “problem” in our lives. We’re wired not only to be great at problem solving but also discovering new ones. Think this is based on prevalence theory related research in psychology.

First off, I think you're a bit convoluted with your timeline with modernism and postmodern. Most of what you seem to criticize seem to be related to postmodern sensibilities, rather than modernist one. Modernism attempted to make new, but with a belief in progress and a utopian/ideal vision. Postmodernism in contrast often would have been interested in breaking down long held assumptions, and an inert opposition to grand narratives and a promotion of complex meanings. [1]

Second, looking through the binary lens of 'creation' or 'destruction' is reductive. Plenty of anthropological, sociological and historical evidence seem to suggest that as a species we are capable of being organized in many different arrangements. I acknowledge that marriage 'feels' like a more straightforward institution to enforce with clear benefits to individuals, but I would suggest that you strongly consider that it too has sharp limitations, including aspects of oppression or suppression (e.g. for the more naturally promiscuous) historically.

In general while the assertions and influence of the postmodern project are a mixed bag. They've led to overt widespread cynicism and loss of meaning for many in our time, but they've also brought with them an invaluable tearing down of assumptions that would otherwise be treated as unquestioned narratives of reality. [2] I would hope that awareness of such realities won't lead us down disarray but to an embrace of the fact that there is great diversity in the way we live, and that fixed constructs such as marriage might no longer be capable of solely accommodating that, but might instead co-exist among other arrangements and notions that can.

Thirdly, I would suggest looking into 'metamodernism' which we seem to be slowly beginning to enter. One description you might consistently hear of it is that it's described as if it's an "oscillation" between aspects of modernism and postmodernism. - In other words, an answer to postmodernism's shortcomings and negative effects, while still not abandoning its realizations. [3] [4]

[1] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism [2] https://qz.com/1388555/everyone-hates-postmodernism-but-that... [3] https://thesideview.co/journal/what-is-metamodernism-and-why... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism

I meant my response generally since you listed some thinkers I'm more familiar with.

For Heidegger, perhaps you would find this overview (and related videos) interesting for some context: https://youtu.be/eDAyhsZ-Gs4

>So what is the value of such work, which is so open to interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?

Different takes to make sense of complex phenomena happen in many fields. It's not a co-incidence that it is especially as such in the realm of our culture where challenging existing interpretations is common place.

>Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing them seems far out of our reach.

Indeed it is difficult, but I would highly suggest not being too empirically minded about abstract concepts like these. What conceptual frameworks and methods are useful in one field (e.g. quantification and measurements in the sciences) do not carry over to another necessarily. Human societal structures and phenomena are complex and would be more difficult to make sense of were it not for useful works like these.

>So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?

One answer is tradition given these are thinkers part of significant and established schools of thought, and another is that there simply are contemporary scholars that find value in furthering and fleshing out the (usually dense) systems of thought and frameworks. Modern psychology for example has come about from philosophical and psychoanalysis frameworks, some of which are still explored and furthered alongside empirical investigations.

I might be mistaken, but it feels as if your post fails to wrap itself around the idea that not all human knowledge need not be something that contributes to practical or immediate assistance to humans or their productivity. And that instead, sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and sake of knowledge itself.

Discord does the same when you open the electron inspect element panel with F12. Wonder how much that's helped as well