BJ - sorry it took me a couple of days to respond - deadlines all over the place this week.
Also, thank you for your response. I'm particularly glad because it helps me understand where I might need to be more clear about what I'm trying to say.
I don't disagree about the points you raised. You've described these elements of the foreground, the current context.
The point that's important for all of us to keep in mind, IMO, is that the _reason_ why so much of this is happening right now is because we're at that "between there be monsters" phase. Because people have so much _prima facie_ access to information, two things happen:
(1) we lack the tools to deal with the information deluge adequately, and as a result we are letting ourselves get trapped into echo chambers and failing to adequately assess the reliability of information. That's a result of the fact that all but the youngest of us came up in that Industrial Era, command-and-control context, where we were taught from childhood to believe what authorities told us. That means that when the New York Times or Tom Brokaw or some other Authority told you what to think, we believed them. And as we found out with the Vietnam War and Iran-contra and all of the other important stories worldwide that we heard barely anything about, we were getting a very filtered reality. Now there's a whole lot less of that kind of filtering, and too often we react by creating our own personal or tribal bubbles. But I think that's going to change as younger generations are growing comfortable with managing more information sources. Bubbles pop sooner or later.
(2) As you note, there's a lot of information manipulation going on right now, and that's an immediate concern. But think a moment about why that's happening: it takes _more effort_ now to maintain a level of disinformation than it ever has, because the information that can counter it can be found by virtually anyone willing to look for it. So interests trying to maintain an obfuscation or keep misleading have to put far more effort into that than they did 50 years ago, when alternative views had a much harder time finding an audience and you only had to "sell" your half-truths to a small number of stakeholders - who might have a very strong self-interest in supporting your narrative. If I'm hiring a corrupt scientist or pushing a lie, it's a whole lot harder for me to hide that for long. There might be a bubble that believes me no matter what, but over time those bubbles can only keep their core members in the face of all the other information out there.
The only thing I really disagree with you on is "kids" fact checking. Media has a ton of flaws and failures, but if you look at how a fact checker with a reputable operation does the work of fact checking, most of them IMO are pretty sound. Just because you have a political POV does not mean that you cannot look at a range of sources and vet their reliability. In fact, I would argue that people who have learned to do critical thinking (most liberal arts degrees, with the exception of economics, which has its own problems), are on the whole better qualified to do fact checking that someone who is deep in the technical details. You need someone who can criticially evaluate the underlying assumptions, not just whether they did the math right. And I'd rather have someone who has facility with managing a wide range of information sources and approaching those with an open perspective that considers other possibilities than the one they came up with than someone who is convinced that they know all the answers. Brain research indicates that people under 25 are better at than than us oldsters.
The last point you make is actually a really important one. As you know, our understanding of physics changed totally in the last 100 years. Even the very fundamental ideas of our certainty about everyday physical objects seems to have broken down at the atomic level, with current understanding being that the very act of observing something changes the distribution of its subatomic elements . Quantum physics upends most of our core, inherited assumptions about how matter works, and yet we are still acting as though Newton's laws govern everything they way we thought they did when we invented industrial systems. One of the most significant challenges to our systems - and our own brains - over the next 100 years is going to be integrating that understanding of uncertainty, of shifting perspectives, of what we see not necessarily being the whole story, into our lives in community. It's going to require us to be able to perceive and accept multiple alternative realities at the same time. And I think that's going to be an important element in helping us deal with the challenges that the time of monsters showed us.
You're wrong about transparency increasing. Obfuscation is the new watchword. Half-truth and trickle truth and spin are becoming higher arts as AI becomes better at manipulating human thinking [sic]. Also, competing ideologies are getting trapped in echo chambers where NO dissenting ideas need intrude. And that's in the MSM crowd. Keep out malinformation (real facts that disagree with our interpretation of reality). On the fringes, fanatics search for out of context sound-bytes that support their biases. No questions allowed.
Usable information is crowded out by random, often deliberately misleading, out of context data. And wisdom is becoming harder to find. You may find that an organization's official "fact checkers" are kids with political science degrees and a definite political bias. They are totally incompetent to check science-based facts. And since the era of big tobacco, the "hire a corrupt scientist" program has expanded to the point where you can easily find an "expert" you can pay to do biased research and cherry pick data to throw doubt on facts that don't support your corrupt business practices and bankrupt political ideologies.
Yes, you can find data, but it's accuracy and applicability are always in doubt. We no longer have trusted sources that aren't biased by ideologies and self-interest. Perhaps we never did?
BJ - sorry it took me a couple of days to respond - deadlines all over the place this week.
Also, thank you for your response. I'm particularly glad because it helps me understand where I might need to be more clear about what I'm trying to say.
I don't disagree about the points you raised. You've described these elements of the foreground, the current context.
The point that's important for all of us to keep in mind, IMO, is that the _reason_ why so much of this is happening right now is because we're at that "between there be monsters" phase. Because people have so much _prima facie_ access to information, two things happen:
(1) we lack the tools to deal with the information deluge adequately, and as a result we are letting ourselves get trapped into echo chambers and failing to adequately assess the reliability of information. That's a result of the fact that all but the youngest of us came up in that Industrial Era, command-and-control context, where we were taught from childhood to believe what authorities told us. That means that when the New York Times or Tom Brokaw or some other Authority told you what to think, we believed them. And as we found out with the Vietnam War and Iran-contra and all of the other important stories worldwide that we heard barely anything about, we were getting a very filtered reality. Now there's a whole lot less of that kind of filtering, and too often we react by creating our own personal or tribal bubbles. But I think that's going to change as younger generations are growing comfortable with managing more information sources. Bubbles pop sooner or later.
(2) As you note, there's a lot of information manipulation going on right now, and that's an immediate concern. But think a moment about why that's happening: it takes _more effort_ now to maintain a level of disinformation than it ever has, because the information that can counter it can be found by virtually anyone willing to look for it. So interests trying to maintain an obfuscation or keep misleading have to put far more effort into that than they did 50 years ago, when alternative views had a much harder time finding an audience and you only had to "sell" your half-truths to a small number of stakeholders - who might have a very strong self-interest in supporting your narrative. If I'm hiring a corrupt scientist or pushing a lie, it's a whole lot harder for me to hide that for long. There might be a bubble that believes me no matter what, but over time those bubbles can only keep their core members in the face of all the other information out there.
The only thing I really disagree with you on is "kids" fact checking. Media has a ton of flaws and failures, but if you look at how a fact checker with a reputable operation does the work of fact checking, most of them IMO are pretty sound. Just because you have a political POV does not mean that you cannot look at a range of sources and vet their reliability. In fact, I would argue that people who have learned to do critical thinking (most liberal arts degrees, with the exception of economics, which has its own problems), are on the whole better qualified to do fact checking that someone who is deep in the technical details. You need someone who can criticially evaluate the underlying assumptions, not just whether they did the math right. And I'd rather have someone who has facility with managing a wide range of information sources and approaching those with an open perspective that considers other possibilities than the one they came up with than someone who is convinced that they know all the answers. Brain research indicates that people under 25 are better at than than us oldsters.
The last point you make is actually a really important one. As you know, our understanding of physics changed totally in the last 100 years. Even the very fundamental ideas of our certainty about everyday physical objects seems to have broken down at the atomic level, with current understanding being that the very act of observing something changes the distribution of its subatomic elements . Quantum physics upends most of our core, inherited assumptions about how matter works, and yet we are still acting as though Newton's laws govern everything they way we thought they did when we invented industrial systems. One of the most significant challenges to our systems - and our own brains - over the next 100 years is going to be integrating that understanding of uncertainty, of shifting perspectives, of what we see not necessarily being the whole story, into our lives in community. It's going to require us to be able to perceive and accept multiple alternative realities at the same time. And I think that's going to be an important element in helping us deal with the challenges that the time of monsters showed us.
You're wrong about transparency increasing. Obfuscation is the new watchword. Half-truth and trickle truth and spin are becoming higher arts as AI becomes better at manipulating human thinking [sic]. Also, competing ideologies are getting trapped in echo chambers where NO dissenting ideas need intrude. And that's in the MSM crowd. Keep out malinformation (real facts that disagree with our interpretation of reality). On the fringes, fanatics search for out of context sound-bytes that support their biases. No questions allowed.
Usable information is crowded out by random, often deliberately misleading, out of context data. And wisdom is becoming harder to find. You may find that an organization's official "fact checkers" are kids with political science degrees and a definite political bias. They are totally incompetent to check science-based facts. And since the era of big tobacco, the "hire a corrupt scientist" program has expanded to the point where you can easily find an "expert" you can pay to do biased research and cherry pick data to throw doubt on facts that don't support your corrupt business practices and bankrupt political ideologies.
Yes, you can find data, but it's accuracy and applicability are always in doubt. We no longer have trusted sources that aren't biased by ideologies and self-interest. Perhaps we never did?