Fighting Against the Rip Tidal Pull of Digitized Conformity

Matt Taibbi, in his latest, "Maintain Your Brain," at Racket News:

I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing...

We’re entering a stage of history where, like the underground resistance in Bradbury’s book, we’ll have to build some consciousness as a movement to save the human mind. Because thinking for oneself has already been denounced as a forbidden or transgressive activity in so many different places (from campuses to newsrooms and beyond), it’s probably already true that membership in certain heterodox online communities is enough to put a person on lists of undesirables.

Twenty-five years ago, most of us thought it would be a great idea to digitize everything and connect it to everything else. It was a great idea. My most recent moment of demoralization: now that everything is digitized and connected, it gives too much power to anyone who can manage to control it all. To open the gates to some and close them to others. It wasn't so terrible when their were hundreds of media outlets, but that's not the case any more. Worse yet, a lot of the censoring is being don surreptitiously (e.g., shadow-banning, stealth editing and outright censoring). Increasing numbers of us are getting the sense that we are yelling into the void. I just don't know the extent of it. I don't know who is in charge. I don't know where this is leading, but if they can do this to Matt Taibbi, they can easily do it to small fish like me.

Matt urges: "We’ll eventually want to get to know each other a little more, be a little more interactive." I think that is the right approach, living and interacting significantly more locally, which will make it more difficult for power-hungry others, especially when well-intentioned (Mike Benz calls it "The Blob"; Brett Weinstein refers to this somewhat coordinated effort as "Goliath"), to intervene, to pit us against each other, to make us disappear, to generate yet another false consensus . . . .

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Censorship is the Answer, According to AOC

Americans are like infants. They can't be trusted to figure things out on their own. "Incitement" needs to be redefined as mere disagreement. Americans need perfectly enlightened people like AOC and Jen Psaki to decide what is true and to protect Americans from bad ideas.

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FAIR Educates a University About Segregated “Listening Sessions”

Update from Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism's (FAIR) Legal Team. It's interested that the University thought it had to divide the students by "race" in order to have a "listening session":

On April 13th, our legal team sent a letter to Anderson University president, John Pistole, in response to a FAIR Transparency report about upcoming “listening sessions” segregated by skin color. We informed Pistole that this would violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The stated reason for these segregated sessions was to ensure “a safe space where students can voice their opinions freely,” but many other non-discriminatory alternatives are readily available, such as encouraging students to speak openly and freely, allowing equal time for each student who wishes to speak, the ability to speak anonymously, and articulating rules and expectations for respectful conduct and dialogue. The message that it is “unsafe” to be around those who do not share the same skin color stigmatizes everyone.

We are happy to report that Anderson University has recognized the divisive nature of this proposed practice, and has reconsidered its approach to providing an open and inviting environment for all.

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The Best System for Determining What is True

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). Rauch has written an extraordinary book offering a detailed airtight case for why we need each other in order to determine what is true. We need a mediated social system in order to filter out the despots and crackpots, but who will mediate such a system? The incredible answer is no one in particular. The system powers the process, but the system cannot function in the absence of three prerequisites. The following passage sums up what we need to get the job done:

An epistemic regime—that is, a public system for adjudicating differences of belief and perception and for developing shared and warranted conclusions about truth—should provide three public goods.

First, knowledge. The system should be competent at distinguishing reality from non-reality, and at building on previous discoveries so that knowledge accumulates, thereby generating even more knowledge.

Second, freedom. The system should encourage rather than repress human autonomy, creativity, and empowerment. It should welcome and exploit human diversity, especially diversity of opinion, and it should not allow any person or faction to use force or intimidation to control what others say or believe.

Third, peace. The system should reward social conciliation, maximize the number of disagreements which are resolvable, and compartmentalize and marginalize disagreements when it cannot resolve them. It should inculcate intellectual values which abhor violence and bullying, and it should establish institutions and norms which tolerate and even embrace disagreement and doubt.

No one should expect any knowledge-producing system to be perfect, or close to it. Still, many centuries of history show that the liberal system—the reality-based community—comes closer to perfection than any other human social invention.

Next, we need two rules (p. 89):

The fallibilist rule: Ho one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and onlyinsofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’sfallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based. The Constitution of Knowledge

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

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Putting more words on the big pile of words

I’ve been blogging for 10 years at this website. It started off as a collaboration of authors, which made sense back then, in that it was not as easy to create a blog back then, and a group of authors seemed like better bait than a single author to attract readers.It was a good experience back then, and I really appreciated bouncing ideas off the co-authors through our comments and posts. I explored many ideas that I conceptualize as being under the umbrella of cognitive science. Writing about the writings of others pushed those ideas further into my working knowledge–this was so very much more satisfying than ideas slipping in and out. Before I blogged, ideas didn’t stick, and I didn’t have articles to link to my new articles, making both old and new ideas more accessible. In short, I was blogging for self-improvement, with the thought that many of the things in which I was interested would also interest some others. As I blogged through the years, the number of daily visitors climbed up to the hundreds and then the thousands (according to a measuring tool I then used called “Webstats”). I was inspired to work ever harder at finding articles that challenged me yet were accessible, or at least I tried to make them accessible. I invested two, three, four or more hours per day reading, dictating, polishing and proofing my articles, some of them running into the thousands of words. It was a really invigorating was to become educated. And here I am, still blogging, though at a much-reduced pace, but thinking that this website is a familiar and attractive place for me. Especially now that I’ve changed hosts, which has sped up the site considerably, which makes blogging seem almost effortless. And as I sit here writing, at the age of almost 60, I wonder whether what I really have to offer that hasn’t been offered dozens or hundred of times already. And upon writing that, I think I’ve identified my quest – to stay unique in my voice, even if it means writing a lot less. Even if it means “reporting” less and emoting more with my words. Bottom line: I suspect that I will be veering more toward essays and observations, though remaining vigilant regarding others’ articles and creative works. Well . . . that’s it for now. I will be taking some new steps in some new directions in the coming weeks and months, and seeing how it looks the next day and week.

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