Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn’t even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.
I guess I’m wondering if there is a hard limit to how many hateful people you can realistically scrape together with lies
I’ve lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn’t containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it’s a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.
“And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.” - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.
No, not at all. This February 2017 story spells out the significance of what I think Cambridge Analytica was doing to people since 2013/14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/23/harvard-scientist-worries-were-reverting-to-a-pre-enlightenment-form-of-thinking/
Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn’t even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.
I’ve lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn’t containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it’s a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.
“And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.” - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.