A. You have an excellent education, the means to answer questions: building a consistent understanding of the world. You are hard to trick. That said, you live in a society where the powerful can't be criticized. Many things you know cannot be said.
B. You freely and loudly express your ideas. But, you have very little education, formal or otherwise. You have been tricked before & know you could be again. You just don't have the best tools to prevent this.
I don't think this split mirrors any political divide. "The powerful can't be criticized" is always true to some degree.
I do think we are in danger of losing the gains that have made people harder to trick over the past few hundred years. And I think there are too many people who know they will be tricked and sort of accept it as inevitable which is disturbing.
When you tell them that need not happen they just don't believe you.
Hypothesis: "the powerful" are those who are not harmed by a criticism of them.
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos don't care if you mock them or point out their crimes, because what does it matter? The emperor may have no clothes but he's still emperor.
Elon Musk does care if you mock him, because he's a thin-skinned piece of shit, but that's not the same as being harmed by it.
On the other hand, if J.K. Rowling says something cruel about trans women or Donald Trump says something cruel about Black teenage boys, that does harm them, because the act of them speaking mobilises a power structure against their victims.
@futurebird
having spent some time in various skeptic communities, it has been my experience that on average, people who are sure they can't be tricked are usually much worse people than people who know they will be tricked and accept it as inevitable.
And both groups seem to get tricked with aproximately similar frequencies.
No one is immune to propaganda. But we can limit our exposure to it. In 2015 Facebook profited off the Cambridge analytica scandal, which mapped peoples political ideologies. I fell for it and then I left Facebook. Mastodon is the only social media I trust.
@mishi@llewelly I have never felt so manipulated as with facebook in 2016. It was making me depressed and angry by somehow finding content that was upsetting and misleading every single day. I left for twitter and was much happier which should tell you how bad it was (until twitter developed the same disease and I left there too)
@futurebird@mishi@llewelly Xitter is toxic. Facebook pretty much - it also increasingly resembles those excruciating Christmas letters people used to send (Jemima got a 1st in XYZ whilst also getting a Nobel prize) but this time with adverts. Much better here!
@futurebird I'm still on FB. I'm connected to fewer than 200 people and use a third-party Firefox app that filters out ads/spammy crud and allows me to control the appearance of the page/block various widgets that annoy me. If FB starts showing me stuff I haven't explicitly followed, I swat it down right away.And these days I'm mostly there to keep track of neighborhood or city goings-on. So my experience is atypical. But it is just possible, sort of, to have a not-terrible experience.
@liferstate On facebook I followed people I know from schools & former jobs/projects. It was impolite to be active & not include them. I found myself being directed by the feed to view posts from people I knew saying things I felt compelled to respond to. Drawn in. Manipulated. Meanwhile my nephew posts a lovely drawing of a bug? I never see it, they get no comments. Some school acquaintance saying “what’s wrong with all lives matter 🥺?” Facebook had that in my face multiple times.
@futurebird [gritted teeth emoji]
I'm fortunately in a position where I don't have to polite-follow anyone, especially people who annoy me. Agree that the algorithm is the worst, though.
@liferstate It seemed like an argument machine to me— and these same people & their extended network were getting pushed only the most volatile content I posted— they never saw any of my posts about education or nature— had a pack of angry trolls dogging me. One even stumbled into one of my math posts & remarked “why don’t you post interesting things like this more often instead of that BLM drivel?” (he also studied math) I responded with links to 20 similar posts, then left facebook.
I really want to see that, rather than people feeling forced to focus their persona into a single issue as if that's the only way they'll ever mean anything.
The idea that an algorithm would purposely hide things from me because it's not "engaging" enough is horrifying to me.
@futurebird
I realised at some point I wasn't convincing anyone with the arguments. It was really quite a lightbulb moment, very sudden. After Charlie Hebdo I realised I couldn't be bothered getting back into debates about how all Muslims aren't terrorists and it wasn't actually doing any good even if I would so I just didn't go back.
@futurebird@liferstate My Facebook involvement is now mostly funny memes from Mastodon and jokes from a support group (don't worry, these are standard jokes and don’t reveal anything about participants except at times we can be a bunch of sickos).
@futurebird@liferstate 2016 was when FB pushed it too far for me. They kept shoving posts with violence against women, and when I reported them, they said it wasn't against their terms of service. So I left and haven't gone back. I have missed relative's baby pictures (etc.), but I didn't trust them to show those anyway.
@futurebird@liferstate Still on FB, mainly for the messenger feature with a small group of folks who won't use other platforms. Sometimes get sucked into doomscrolling there and it seems I've tailored it to eliminate all political stuff. Mostly what I get now is AI-generated fake astronomy pix (complete w/ rubes exclaiming how great God is to create such magnificence) and unauthorized Calvin and Hobbes cartoon reposts. It still tries to grab you by the limbic system, but I feel less drawn in.
How do you avoid the very unproductive and defeatist “they are all corrupt”
“its all lies”
“you can’t trust any information from anyone”
“you are a sucker if you take action because you can’t know anything”
“everyone is out to get you so it’s pointless to talk about one set of policies being worse than another”
“you don’t know any real information THEY keep it all hidden”
etc stance?
It is possible to know things.
Some sources are better than others.
@futurebird
But one of the most important ways to learn how to distinguish good sources from bad comes from understanding when you've been tricked in the past, and how that happened. And that requires admitting that you can be fooled. As with so many other things, mistakes are part of the learning process.
@llewelly There is a difference between recognizing that you could be tricked or when you have been tricked and thinking everyone is always being tricked so there is nothing you can do about it.
@llewelly I’ve had people say things like “what’s the point of moving to Mastodon then I’m just being controlled by John Mastodon*.”
Ok they didn’t literally say “ #johnmastodon “ but it was along those lines. Same with when you show some people a peer reviewed paper and they balk saying “but that’s just what the people who run that journal want you to think” — we can know things! Know them with enough confidence that it matters!
I know how Mastodon works, and this is a legitimate complaint. You are far more likely to run into trouble with the mods on a mid-sized Mastodon server than you are on any huge system where the mods don't have time to do anything but intervene in very predictable ways.
@futurebird@llewelly
While I think his influence varies between instances that can tailor their parameters at least somewhat, Mastodon does have a center and a CEO/private owner that is empowered to make business agreements and partnerships that can change users' security level, etc. Admins can, too.
So, I mean, maybe there's a grain of truth to what they said insofar as there is a business structure here?
@futurebird one person providing helpful info when Covid was more people's concern literally named her blog/site "You Can Know Things" and I love that framing (even if perhaps a bit philosophically oversimplified but it's a medical blog so… 😆) just a really neat overarching title for the work she's doing 👍
People want there to be absolute truths and falsehoods.
But in reality, science offers only probabilities, theories, and evidence. Some are very solid. Some less so. Some are pretty much bunk -- but some oddball theories then turn out to be true (I'm still reeling from "the Moon is a bashed-off piece of the proto-Earth", myself).
You have to learn to accept uncertainty as fundamental, but not as a roadblock.
@futurebird I've had some luck approaching it from the incentives - ie discussing how none of these journals are intended for a lay audience so what goes into them is a combination of P&T grist, sincere nerdery, and spite aimed at academic rivals. That requires standing up to some scrutiny as well as not really leaving room for global conspiracies.
@futurebird I think the thing that makes me so angry about absurd conspiracy theories (especially the science-related ones: Flat Earthers, antivaxxers, young-earth creationists, etc.) is that on the surface, these people are expressing what should be a healthy skepticism of authority, but it's gone wrong somehow. It's just making them believe a far worse authority who says things that are easily refuted, because that person presents as being on their side. They've perverted the whole precious idea of "nullius in verba", that you should see for yourself instead of taking what other people say on faith.
@mattmcirvin@futurebird I feel as though the flat earth people make noises about that ideal but don't really follow through with it. They'll try experiments to determine the shape of the Earth, but when the dead simple "find a long, still body of water and see if the base of a tree on the other side is obscured when you view it from a low angle" approach confirms that the surface of the water is curved, they'll simply disregard that.
@DamonWakes@futurebird I think a lot of the high-profile ones are just liars, not ignoramuses. They'll walk through correct explanations of phenomena using the heliocentric model and turn them into "gotcha" refutations by just throwing in a blatant, checkable-in-five-minutes falsehood. That's not the behavior of someone who's just confused.
@DamonWakes@futurebird For instance, one that's gotten a remarkable amount of traction recently is "If heliocentric cosmology were true, we would see different winter and summer constellations--but we don't!" Yes we do, you're just lying and guessing correctly that your fans live in light-polluted zones and are not familiar with the sky.
People actually propagate that one by "just asking questions" on Quora, and the people posting answers get very confused because they assume someone wouldn't be asserting something that blatantly false, and they bend over backwards to interpret the question to make more sense than it does. Maybe it's about circumpolar constellations? Maybe it's about parallax? No, it's just someone repeating a lie.
@futurebird ...I think one thing that blunts the distinction, and makes skepticism too easy to game, is that one of the most important aspects of becoming harder to trick is knowing how easy you are to trick. You can't be too smug about it; that's how the skill erodes.
So people who are hard to trick end up seeming to lack confidence, and people who are either easy to trick, or are tricksters themselves, are brimming with confidence. And confidence socially plays as a sign that you know what you're talking about.
@futurebird Option C. It's like A, but whatever you say doesn't matter, because you don't have any reall power.
This is the situation of the prodemocratic fraction of Slovakia. We can't persuade the currently larger combination of the antidemocratic/fascist/misinformed majority, and the current ruling kleptocracy know that we don't have any real way to stop them.
But they are cementing their power and there is a mounting pressure on the media to establish censorship. So maybe we will get to A.
@futurebird Close to the first one, except the powerful can be critiqued. It just doesn’t accomplish anything. I can talk about how childish a certain billionaire or politician is behaving until I’m blue in the face, but it in no way causes them to lose money/power. I think it’s at least as much about that feeling of powerlessness. No, believing in the conspiracy doesn’t actually fix the imbalance, but it can make you feel special for having secret knowledge …
@futurebird I have a pretty solid education, but I find that I still can be tricked. The tricksters refine their methods as their full-time job, I have other work than analysing their trickery. So I'm just harder to trick, but not immune.
@futurebird On the other hand, the more educated you are the more complex the world seems, and the less adequate to it your own understanding. You see more clearly the constraints on your own choice, and what ability to speak you have can seem just shouting into the void. In a way, each of those options is the way the other feels.
It's not hard to see where education can seem a devil's bargain, that flips on it's head what you thought you were going to get from it.
@futurebird A in a very real way is the GDR, Eastern Germany
for B, I'm priviledged to not know where I'd compare that best to - maybe I only have the past of how my grandparents lived (as subsistence farmers in the countryside after WW2)