Martin Gurri.........................

..............................on the New Censorship:

 A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.

Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.

influenced..................

 A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

infinite capacity................

 We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.

-Dee Hock, as culled from here

Could have fooled me....................

 Every day is April Fools from now on, let’s not get fooled.

-Seth Godin, from this post on the ease of manipulation

Feels about right..................

 

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Ah, science........................

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Ah, the fine art of reasoning..............

On emotion-based click-bait versions of reality....

     In such a world, where truth routinely loses to emotion-based click-bait versions of reality, how can you know what is true and what is not?   And more importantly, how can you act for the greater good—or even your own good—when you can't reliably sort the truth from the lies?
     If you buy into the full-scary narratives promoted by either the political left or the political right, you're probably experiencing loserthink.  A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.  If you think the frightened feeling you are getting from the news is legitimate and appropriate, you probably don't understand how the business model of news has changed

-Scott Adams, Loserthink, How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Many truths................................

There are a few things that are so obviously true, and true for everyone, that no one argues about them. But most stuff isn’t black or white. Most of the stuff we argue about usually have many truths – several “right” answers depending on the person and situation – and we’re actually arguing over the other person not having the same goals, needs, risks, and wants as you do. It’s a mess. And the only thing worse than thinking everyone who disagrees with you is wrong is the opposite: being persuaded by the advice of those who need or want something you don’t.

This is common in finance. You can count the number of things that are certain on one hand, so the “right” answer to most finance questions is just however much uncertainty you want to accept, which is not only different for everyone but constantly changing for everyone. People don’t agree on a lot of big investing points because they shouldn’t.

-Morgan Housel, as he starts this blog post

Pretending.....................................?

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” 

-Bertrand Russell

Shards.............................

The decisive endeavor of our moment – far surmounting, I believe, any specific policy call – is the re-establishment of trust in the institutions of representative democracy.  Only after the system has been reformed and the public has been reconciled to it can we again talk about truth as a self-evident proposition.  Until then, all we will have is perspectives – fragments of truth circling, randomly, the gravitational power of some opinion.  Appealing to tribal identity only compounds the fragmentation.  Fighting imaginary fascists and Nazis can be no more rewarding than hugging an imaginary friend.  What we need is a rhetoric aimed at the whole and persuasive to the whole – and for that to be possible, the public must be heard, and its perspectives, in their multiple and contradictory reality, must be taken seriously.

-Martin Gurri keeps banging his drum

Learned another new word today.....

It's pretty clear that cartoonist Paula Pratt was a student of the nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.  By the way, that's not a typo;  his name really did violate the rule "i" before "e," except after "c," and he pronounced it "Purse."  And that's not the only rule he broke.  He staked out new territory with is declaration that "truth is what works," and he is therefore known in the history of philosophy as a "pragmatist."  His own term for himself was "fallibilist," meaning, as he said, that "people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions of fact."  But in the meantime, we have to go with our best shot, based on current evidence, and see how it works out in practice.

-Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein,   I Think, Therefore I Draw:  Understanding Philosophy Through Cartoons

Maybe part of the problem is........

..........not acknowledging that scientific truth is fairly elusive:

Religious and ideological dogmas are still highly attractive in our scientific age precisely because they offer us a safe have from the frustrating complexity of reality.  As noted earlier, secular movements have not been exempt from this danger.  Even if you start with a rejection of all religious dogmas and with a firm commitment to scientific truth, sooner or later the complexity of reality becomes so vexing that you might be driven to fashion a doctrine that shouldn't be questioned.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Unfortunately, scientists and pundits....

.......................also seem to be captured by "communal groupthink"

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what's going on.  Consequently, some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose polices regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map.  People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforce and seldom challenged.
     Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters.  Scientists hope to dispel wrongs view by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports.   Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans really think.  Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views due to group loyalty.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessors for the 21st Century

A puffball populist.....................?

Actually, I despise Trompe, and am opposed to almost everything he is doing, but I’m not going to give the slightest satisfaction to his “progressive” opponents, whom I despise more. He is no reactionary, and no “conservative,” either, only a puffball populist; why would I like him? (Example: Trompe thinks everyone should have more money; I think they have too much already.)

He has unusual virtues in a politician, however. He is candid about his intentions, and is passing honest, however sloppy with the details; robust in his flattery, as too in his abuse. His self-seeking is open, not disguised. He is the dead opposite of a Machiavellian schemer. This is brave because, while it charms his stiff-necked supporters, the majority in any democratic electorate demand to be lied to. Should the entire media say one thing, and Trompe says another, I would think Trompe more likely to be telling (some aspect of) the truth.

-David Warren, as lifted from this post

For the most part, yes..................

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Was this really published in..................

.............................................................the Washington Post?

"... — always wrong but nonetheless repeated so often as to take on the appearance of truth — ..."

"Despite the media circus surrounding the salacious but questionable allegations in Wolff’s book, most Trump supporters don’t care. Nor do they care much about the very public row between the president and Bannon. They care about what the president and his administration can do for them. They support Trump because he articulated and, increasingly, is enacting an agenda they believe will improve their lives and secure the future peace and prosperity of the country. It’s that simple."

Stories..............................

Optimists told themselves a story that may not have been true, but it kept them going, often allowing them to beat the odds.  Psychologist Shelly Taylor says that "a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies."  The pessimists were more accurate and realistic, and they ended up depressed.  The truth can hurt.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree

All one has to do is look around, and read.....

....a bit of history, to realize that the veneer of civilization is fairly thin.  Societal cohesion, once lost, is not an easy thing to peaceably re-create.  Martin Gurri offers an interesting essay on the subject, but leaves us all to draw our own conclusions and find our own solutions.   He begins this way:

Three years ago I remarked that the public was engaged in a messy divorce from the elites who run the great institutions of the industrial age.  That bit of scandal is by now notorious.  The elites, with more to lose, have come to regard the intrusive public as little better than a barbarian horde.  They know that a complex society can’t be managed without expertise, and long to return to a past in which the expert’s dictates went unquestioned.  Their watchword is “resistance,” but their dream is reaction.

The public, however, has so far proved irresistible, and the breach appears irreconcilable.  Established institutions, the political process, the economy, “the system,” all look to the public suspiciously like a lottery rigged in favor of the perpetual winners:  a class of insiders who manage to be both self-righteous and self-serving, arrogant and failed.  The terms of the divorce would send the lot of them packing.  This attitude is being called “populism” – a fraught word, rarely used by the populists themselves, connoting a politics of anger and negation played out on a minimalist ideological stage.  You can have populists of the right, like Donald Trump, or of the left, like Bernie Sanders.  What brings them together is a determination to do away with the present order of things, and an indifference to what comes after.

Post-truth....................................

The underlying difficulty of today’s polemics about post-truth is that many well-meaning residents of the reality-based community are talking as though it is ­always obvious and uncontroversial what is a “fact” and what isn’t. And yet the very idea of a fact is a social construct with an origin. (As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written: “Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a 17th-century invention.”) Facts are fuzzy and changeable; in scientific practice, matters of truth and evidence are always at issue. The best scientific theories are social constructs. Whether they should be taken as accurately describing reality is still an unresolved debate in quantum physics; and, as the biologist Stuart Firestein has written: “All scientists know that it is facts that are unreliable. No datum is safe from the next generation of scientists with the next generation of tools.”

-Steven Poole, as excerpted from this essay

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