nigredo
1yr ago
Documentaries and news seem too generic to use a term like "the internet," would media or educational media specifically would be a better clarifier?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Did you mean specific instead of generic?
Sounds like this is just a rant of things you don't like, or potentially issues where you aren't appreciating the rhetorical strategy. The people writing those generally are waging the Culture War, what we come here to talk about. They want to win at all costs. They are simply people rationally following their goals, trying to convince as many folks over to their side so that they win. I'm not defending the practice, but this idea of conflict theory (media etc) and mistake theory (rationalists, good scientists, etc) is useful to understand and intellectualize the mainstream discourse if it gets to be too much.
Well, think of it this way. Say, hypothetically, the U.S. is actually an evil empire that's siphoning wealth from the global south and when I see something on the news like, say, a genocide in China, it's actually a projection of U.S. soft power to signal that they have enough of their citizens convinced that they can afford broad latitude to be aggressive under the auspices of this righteous consensus. Then I feel like an idiot engaging with something like that at face value, feeling bad about the alleged victims, or making conclusions about how dangerous life in China must be. But then I'd also conclude that well, I do live in the evil empire, and it's not really so much evil as much as it is rich and powerful and wanting to remain so, thus I wouldn't care to take the counter-narrative side of that either. After all that is done, the only winning move is to not play. So, indeed, it is a rant of things I dislike, in the same exasperated vein as, perhaps, of someone with Renaissance values in Medieval times lamenting how little interest there was to discuss ideas outside of religious ones.
One, the Motte was explicitly formed as a sub-culture to discuss the Culture War. If you like the discourse here but are sick of the CW, go check out the rest of the rat-sphere! Looks like you have a good idea of it already. You could also try reading dense literature, textbooks, philosophical works, or high-quality magazines. Sure it might be a bit difficult/more expensive, but you can't expect to get infinite high-quality reading material for free. (yet)
Oh, I know. That said, it's fairly active and less explicitly focused on discussing things from a rat perspective than the rest, so it tends to have more of that "smart people sharing ideas" energy that I'm looking for.
This is a great idea, and in my opinion what a lot of smart folks do.
Yeah, from one perspective, but from another perspective, it's admitting that internet-native content is of minimal value. I was maybe hoping that's not entirely true and I just haven't been looking in the right places and there is some kind of internet discourse that is both interesting and not political or oversimplified (or at least, simplified to a level I find acceptable so I can find the same satisfaction from it that the normie gets from the drivel he never thinks to question).
A lot of people like to keep up with the news for small talk. I can't imagine doing this, but some people I know have admitted to me privately that they keep up with sports just for the social benefits, even though they couldn't care less otherwise.
Hmm, that's interesting. So, if you lost interest in CW, are you saying you'd unplug without FOMO? I sometimes wonder if media consumption is just an addiction. If we liken information to physical goods, news seems like a terrible deal. Any individual news article loses relevance fairly quickly, even those that logically seem relevant for a long time lose their utility as people simply stop responding to news once they're out of the media cycle, it has limited value in "linking up" with future news to form a larger point. Just as a class of knowledge, it seems like such a terrible waste of time, and even knowing that generations have lived without this contrivance it still holds such a grip on me because everyone else is doing it too.
nigredo
1yr ago
How do you motters think about the information you choose to take in from the world, especially through the Internet. I don't really like what my use of the Internet has turned into. As a kid, I used to read a lot of encyclopedias before I had access to the Internet. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, all of humanity's knowledge, all these different perspectives, available for free. Wow! No more asking my parents to buy another encyclopedia, I can just read anything. The kids who had Internet must be so much smarter than me.
Then, I actually got the Internet. Yeah, porn and video games. A lot of wikipedia, and bash.org, and 4chan, everything2, and some forums too, though, but yeah, I quickly learned why it wasn't the utopia I imagined. Eventually, invisibly so, most of those sources got supplanted by reddit. It seems very hard to escape reddit nowadays because like many others, I was unconsciously trained by the changing realities of search engines to append site:reddit.com to almost all of my search queries. It goes without saying that reddit is an NPC infested shithole, but it's come to a point where I'm just deeply skeptical of what valuable information can be found on the Internet. Everything just feels like clickbait. My experience of using the internet summarized is that if you're watching a documentary instead of reading some boring in-depth report, if you're reading science communications instead of the actual paper, if you're even reading the news instead of whatever primary sources may be available to you, you're getting deceived, you're getting fed an oversimplified narrative, you're filling your memory banks with garbage information that may be useless at best or may even lay the seeds for you to make further incorrect conclusions at worst.
The Internet seems to exist as a compromise between learning nothing at all and taking the time to actually form a complex opinion about something. If you're tired of endlessly mulling over values-based argument (like abortion for example) that obviously have no discursive solution, if you're tired of reading various content where the punchline is capitalism bad (not to say that it isn't, but your feelings won't change the world), if you're tired of reading how a congressman supports [horrible thing] because he voted against a bill titled "[horrible thing] eradication act" but actually filled with dozens of other unrelated provisions, then what do you read? Communities like this are one potential solution, mostly because the audience is more intelligent, but so much of this online discourse is just criticism (in the broad sense of the word) of the normie discourse, and that has the same energy as actual scientists wasting their time on in-depth debunkings of flat earthers.
I've been eating this bad information diet for so long, I don't even know what's good on the Internet anymore. What I can read and feel like I learned about something that's really going on in the world, not just something to convert me to an ideology, not something to get my outraged, not something oversimplified, not something America-centric (once again, broad sense of the word here, reading about, say, hijab protests is pretty much American news).
Best I've come up with is, I guess, blogs like ACX, gwern, cosma shalizi, that type of stuff. It's a complete reversal of what they teach in school, right? Personal blogs--opinion--the lowest tier of source credibility, but, shit, at least they talk about things I haven't heard of before, at least they anticipate skepticism and ask and answer some of the questions I would have asked. I'm also considering just completely reimagining how I use the Internet, ideas include:
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Don't use it for the content, use it as a social network prioritizing those who can link the most interesting offline resources: books, organizations, products, and then consume that instead.
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Read only financial news, reasoning that if nobody's making money off it, it's not worth knowing about.
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Forgo news altogether as a starting point, read only about the future. Prediction markets, superforecasters, McKinsey reports, that type of thing. Reasoning that the most useful, actionable information known now is indirectly incorporated in competent (remains to be seen) individuals trying to predict the future.
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Cut my losses, settle for a very plain information diet of "just the facts" type news that I (somehow) curate to not have any culture war bullshit or lurid news and seek the stimulating content else(where?)
nigredo
2yr ago
Ah yes, that's a great example. It makes too much sense for them to dope up, there are enough biochemists saying they can hide PEDs from tests. Standing from the perspective of an ordinary person uninformed about such matters, it would seem really implausible that there's doping, then there are tests to detect doping, and then there is the game of getting around those tests so you can dope anyway, and every single competitive athlete chooses to play the test evasion game.
Another issue is maybe the recent chess cheating scandal. #1 grandmaster in the game accuses another, younger grandmaster who cheated as a teen, of cheating to win against him at an offline tournament. We're told they were checked for devices, so people online are making jokes about anal beads, part of the joke being that, perhaps, this is too ridiculous an extent to go to for cheating. But, in fact, why not? The prison wallet is a time-tested loyal friend of the smuggler. Doesn't just have to be in his ass either, since there are audience members at the match, all he'd have to do is have a confederate in the crowd with some pre-arranged way(s) to signal a few pertinent messages.
I hear also that most of those male instagram fitness influencers actually got that look on juice and then put their followers through that silly game of "how to get as big and shredded as a steroid user without using any steroid.
Anywhere where cheating can get you ahead after adjusting for risk I expect to find a lot of cheaters.
nigredo
2yr ago
Well, people talk about it, but like, how often do I see "watching replay" in a friend's status bar or a replay review on someone's stream? It kind of seemed like one of those things everyone said to do, everyone agreed is good, but hardly anyone actually did.
nigredo
2yr ago
In my case, not really, but that's largely because I am one of those strangely obsessive people who will spend hours per day on sometimes obscure endeavours to the detriment of my own health and sanity and wellbeing.
Yeah, I guess that was mostly a rhetorical question of sorts than an actual one. I mean, I have these doubts because I'm not used to working hard. It's a weird process to work more than you're used to in the sense of voluntarily doing not just more volume, but inventing new tasks for yourself to do. Like, is it normal to write a short story using every word you looked up that day? I don't think many people at all do that, but I can't deny that my own experience has shown me that merely looking up words does not cement their meanings in my memory and merely remembering their definitions does not then put them into my active vocabulary. So it all checks out logically, but it just feels like I shouldn't do it because what I think of as normal people wouldn't do it and it's probably too tryhard.
Though obviously the question of whether there are a significant amount of actual high-level conspiracies that people dismiss out of hand due to their extrapolation of their own behaviour onto people that simply don't act like them probably can't be answered with much certainty.
True, we don't have access to the underlying information that would help prove it one way or the other. But there's this gnawing sense that most reasonably thought-through conspiracies would work.
nigredo
2yr ago
Well, partly true. The instinct's not really connected to anyone being a loser. I mean, I've spent considerably more time playing those games casually since the time when some practice ideas had occurred to me than it would have taken to see them through. Assuming those efforts had paid off and future games become more satisfying, it would have probably been worth it. But that feeling of disbelief occurs all the time. Sometimes disbelief that Problem N really requires time-intensive Method C to solve. Sometimes disbelief someone "up high" would really seed a rumor somewhere in the blogosphere so that eventually tabloids quote it, then next tier up newspapers quote it, and then good ones talk about it until it looks legit to anyone not willing to do a deep dive to investigate the dependencies.
Everything I listed could make you money. Optimizing youtube views absolutely can get you paid loads, especially if you got in on it early. Getting really good at a game can get you paid as a streamer, booster, or coach. Getting super popular on reddit for what Unidan was doing definitely got him some job offers to be a vsauce type guy. feel like once something becomes a job you can't really perceive its basic weirdness anymore because it comes across as just so. You know, there just happen to be workplaces, located real close to stock exchanges, paying people millions to come up with more ways to act faster on price data from exchanges. There are also people who buy up a bunch of ASICs to have them calculate hashes all day for money. You can experience the weirdness and the conspiracy aspect only in the stage where you're not yet sure if you or anyone else could be making money doing [weird overly tryhard thing].
Like, maybe there's an unexploited niche of finding a bunch of cheap, unknown onlyfans models from whom you order videos to your specs that you dub over with your own male voice through a good voice changer and then you use those videos to legitimize multiple financial dominatrix accounts to the right people on twitter who then will pay you large amounts because you demanded it and even larger amounts when you berate them for being worthless paypig slime.
nigredo
2yr ago
Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief? For example, I play some multiplayer games, mostly RTS and MOBA games. I can see some interesting ways to improve at those games. For the RTS games, some of the ideas I had involved a spreadsheet, of course, and an autohotkey script that would make an additional save game every time I pressed the build worker key so that I could easily compare different decision branches while hill climbing toward an optimal build order. I can see some experiments I could perform in Dota 2, such as running a custom game on 2 computers to explore how I could take advantage of blind spots in enemy vision, or doing some mathematical modeling and running a solo game to figure out the exact patterns of how waves of enemy creeps cascade and yoyo from losing to overwhelming the enemy creeps.
But then I think, hardly anyone even bothers to consistently watch replays. At least, that's my perception. These ideas I'm having, they're weird. I've never heard anyone talk about doing this sort of thing. Would someone really try this hard to win at a video game? Well, eventually, I had the chance to join some high skill discords, and, yes, they made spreadsheets, the were timing things down to the second, they were re-running test ideas dozens of times until perfect, they'd spend hours testing and looking for bugs. Turned out that really was how some people got good. I had the right ideas, but I couldn't believe in them because I couldn't believe others were trying that much because up to that point, I hadn't been trying that much so that must be how others acted too, because otherwise they'd have talked about the extra things they did.
It's all these soft spaces where you can take the time to figure out best ways of getting upvotes on reddit, best ways to get lots of clicks on youtube and it's hard to believe that someone would resort to something like giving their comments an initial boost through alt-accounts so they can ride their initial higher visibility to thousands of upvotes, but that was exactly what incredibly reddit popular and actual scientist Unidan did.
Which all kind of circuitously leads me to the following point here. If it's so easy to have such a bias like "nah, everyone's just playing it straight for the most part" even in the face of seeing that sort of belief overturned multiple times, how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness? If these sorts of weird and trying too hard kinds of tactics are effective at getting you to, say, the top .1% in some endeavor, then even if people willing to bend the rules or go to insane lengths are rare, they could easily make up a substantial proportion of such a small sample of people. For example, could Epstein have actually been running a business model of offering up underage girls to the rich and powerful, surreptitiously recording it, and then blackmailing them? It seems insane, it seems something at least 95% of people wouldn't even dare try, it seems high risk, but if you could pull it off, would you not be a rich man?
I still don't understand. Who are those people and why are they like this? Was it me or was it them? How did it get to where I sort every thread by controversial not because I expect to see racists and trolls, but people with actual opinions of their own discussing the linked content? I remember, many years ago, in the time before reddit, I'd occasionally peek at the comments of something like a yahoo! news article and feel a chilling contempt for the people commenting there. How stupid must those people be, I thought, that they spend their time hanging out in the comment sections of news articles that, judging by their replies, they hadn't even read past the title, which struck me as so utterly pathetic since the articles weren't even that long. Those comments always stood out to me as a major drop from the usual quality of discourse I'd find even on forums.
But then at some point I got linked to reddit, a site that pretty much just centralizes comment sections for other content. I still don't know if I actually degenerated from using the site or there was something there. I remember initially, I felt overwhelmed by the deluge of clickbait titles, the many urban myths that redditors were spreading around in the comments. Maybe that should have been my cue to leave, but I stayed. It wasn't necessarily a conscious choice, but it just seemed like I couldn't get away from reddit because search results seemed to be getting increasingly useless so I'd end up back on the site multiple times a day through google searches, anyway. I still don't know, did the clickbait and urban legend sharing actually go down, or did I simply stop noticing because I got used to it the same way one gets used to seeing fag and nigger on 4chan? Or an even worse possibility: was I able to identify so many falsehoods on reddit at the beginning because prior to that, I was getting all of my information from other sources, and maybe, by some later point, I had consumed an information diet so high in reddit content that now I was one of the many who unwittingly believe in many falsehoods?
Or maybe I just evolved over the years? When I was a kid, I was firmly far left, but I was always curious about how could others genuinely believe in something else? That is, how could anyone be for anything right wing, how could anyone believe in religion, how could anyone be for war? I got my start with Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary psychology, and libertarianism - those were sufficiently close in inferential distance as pathways to understanding beliefs hitherto completely alien to me. Eventually I made it all the way to where I can see why fascism can look like a genuinely better way to run a society, but god was the hardest one, had to take some mind-altering substances to see how that one might be true. I think nothing at all of it now, to be a left-winger at heart who can comfortably play devil's advocate for right wing positions without condescension. But I've found in life the feeling of "I didn't understand X until now, and now I see clearly those who don't" tends to be fleeting. Eventually you get used to X, it starts to seem so obvious, and before long you don't even functionally remember what it's like to not understand X, and you start to wonder if every smart person is supposed to understand X and if your journey of figuring it out only had to take place because you were an otherwise intelligent person who, through bad lack or something, had acquired really bad priors for X.
All this to say in the end that redditors piss me the fuck off. I hate it all: their formulaic snark, their seeming inability to realize that said snark is not an actually good argument, their persistence in relying on a predictable sequence of snarky arguments as if I won't notice the blatant straw man in the next one, their pathetic attempts to "win" by blocking and reporting, the nauseating ignorance of just how mainstream (nothing wrong with being mainstream if they'd just drop the conceit that TPTB aren't on their side) their views are, their many thought-terminating cliches, their faux education about "concern trolling", "sealioning", "just asking questions", "paradox of tolerance", their habit of reporting you to the suicide bot. I hope they're kids, I hope they have 2 digit IQs, I hope they're a highly unrepresentative, mentally ill subset of the population, I really hope people like redditors isn't the best humanity can hope for at scale.
Could you give a few examples of what you consider to be good content?
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