Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You get flooded by info that you never need in your daily life or in near future. Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood. This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world. Because people feel that their government should do something about it.
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
> Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue.
You could have stopped there. I don't think we (in the U.S.) get too much international news — to the contrary in fact. But to be sure we are not getting enough local and relevant news.
For example, just opened Google news and saw "Joy Behar calls out “The View” cohost's revealing outfit: 'Where are you going in that dress?'"
(Of course it's easy to cherry pick dumb celebrity "news".)
rTX5CMRXIfFG 5 hours ago [-]
Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. And this is how news are being reported even before the rise of smartphones.
And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
I’m not the person you replied to, but I believe you misunderstood OP’s point and are focusing on too narrow of a view regarding (what I perceive to be) their point.
> is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be?
Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works.
> Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy.
The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest.
> And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored.
The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health.
Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them.
> be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.
squigz 4 hours ago [-]
> Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works.
This isn't a symptom of global news dissemination though, it's a result of people being shitty and needing to grasp at any thread to justify their shitty position. Whether most of our news comes from local sources or not will not stop that. They'll just go seek out those local sources.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
> This isn't a symptom of
It is only made possible by, which is the point. And that was a single example of the harm, TV news play much of the same stories.
Avoid taking a too narrow view of the argument. Don’t get stuck on a single part you can think of, steel man and engage with the macro point being made.
squigz 4 hours ago [-]
> It is only made possible by
Well... no, it's not only possible this way, as I just tried to point out. With or without global news programs, with or without addictive news feeds, those people will still act that way and go to great lengths to find reasons to justify it.
I did not engage with other bits because I do not generally disagree with you: watching too much news is a problem, highly addictive news feeds are a problem. I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face, particularly racism - and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
> I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face
No one is arguing that. Even the original commenter said:
> This is partly the reason
Partly. But they are a reason.
> and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
There is no single factor which is the cause and can be solved. There are a bunch of partial factors which cause the issue. Fixing any of them would help.
ACS_Solver 39 minutes ago [-]
Global and foreign news is a good thing. But a lot of attention devoted to foreign stories of questionable relevance isn't a good thing.
One of my usual news sources is SVT, the national Swedish broadcaster. Their svt.se website is good and, aside from Swedish news, they're also quick to cover major foreign events, if something is breaking news they'll have it up right away. But one of my main complaints is SVT covers local American crime too much. It pops up as one of the top "just in" headlines. I went to look just before replying here, and it's actually happening again right now - there's a "just in" headline "Four dead in a shooting in Mississippi". It's fast, I don't even see it on cnn.com as I'm typing this. But, with all respect to the victims, mass shooting are pretty much a daily event in the US and generally have no global importance.
1dom 4 hours ago [-]
> Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be?
What were you trying to convey by starting with "Er...", and all the other rhetorical and dismissive tone and techniques?
Your entire post reads like you're quite offended, and you're dealing with that by being quite confrontational and dismissive towards someone who probably wasn't trying to offend or start a fight.
tgv 4 hours ago [-]
Before, foreign news would actually include articles about politics in other countries, and their economies. As an avid news paper reader, I knew the prime ministers of bunch of countries, what party they belonged, etc. Nowadays, you have to be happy when you get an article about a national election. Foreign news has been reduced to trade conflicts, wars and gruesome murders.
groundzeros2015 34 minutes ago [-]
With the internet what’s stopping you from actually reading the foreign news?
In the newspaper days there was greater professionalism due to money and prestige but I think part of the appeal is you never heard conflicting interpretations so it felt more true and less confusing.
7 hours ago [-]
bertman 2 hours ago [-]
Complete article (extracted from the site's <meta> HTML element and converted to Markdown):
Warning for others: it's not signposted anywhere apart from half way through the article that the end of the article is paywalled.
gsf_emergency_4 4 hours ago [-]
Can't find a pw bypass but the following slide from a recent talk somewhat summarizes (the author) Prof Baehr's stance on intellectual virtues & vices that underpins his entire(?) outlook
This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature.
For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
AnimalMuppet 60 minutes ago [-]
We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative.
Those two worlds are not equivalent.
mosura 55 minutes ago [-]
> We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on.
You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.
groundzeros2015 32 minutes ago [-]
It’s that their narrative formation was so dominant and without alternative that it just felt true.
exasperaited 3 hours ago [-]
We lived at least in a consensus reality world, where most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true, and most people had a shared sense of the fuzzy boundaries of fact and opinion.
We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use.
[0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
mosura 2 hours ago [-]
> most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true
Indoctrination.
Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
progval 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have examples of lies that the majority was indoctrinated to believe?
mosura 1 hours ago [-]
Religion.
The fact there is intense disagreement about what is “obviously true” between countries shows that this is still happening.
The beliefs of the masses are simply shaped to suit political interests.
Concrete example: “boys should be circumcised”. If the answer was objectively obvious to educated people why does the US have such a different position on it than Europe?
hn_throw_bs 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
groundzeros2015 29 minutes ago [-]
Belief in western liberalism and democracy
mallowdram 1 hours ago [-]
Mosura is correct, there was never a consensus reality world. Consensus post-domestication is built from coercion into centers. This requires a steady diet of myth or religion that explains phenomena. If you think consensus is agreeing that this particular god made that lightning, then consensus is ultimately devolutionary. Myth is unfortunately the basis for causality: this statement stands in for the correlational phenomena we're witnessing. Once we were subsumed by myth, status and hierarchy became dominant to truth statements. Look at everything you see here, status controls statements and their validity. There's never a correlational reality accessible through cause and effect statements competing for domination. The myth never solves the phenomena, but kicks it downstream into what appear to be more accurate forms like news. But if you study news, history, law etc, these are mythic constructions that embed cause and effect locally, rather than solve the initial phenomena (like murder).
We have to face truth constructions are lures in folk science societies like ours, they are not valid. Science is not understood (correlational thinking) or accepted b a majority of the population anywhere on this planet.
analog8374 3 hours ago [-]
Consider the "truth level" of things.
Things you personally see = 10
Things you heard from a friend = 9
Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1
Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10
Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
You missed things you see on the internet/news. We all "saw" the World Trade Center towers come down.
Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mallowdram 1 hours ago [-]
Claiming to imagine a workaround like "virtue" will solve the embedded primate bias inherent in our lossy signaling like words and narrative/causal statements is worse than wishful thinking, it's uniformed and positivist/idealist.
Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed.
Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective.
HyperNormalisation (2016) helped me frame the decline they (and we) allowed. The people at the top have been trending towards dumber, less conscientious, less hopeful, less moral, and more corrupt when it doesn't have to be this way; plus, it's easier than ever for billionaires and private equity to buy up corporate media and manipulate social media to shape narratives favorable to their interests. It's trending this way because the very rich seem to believe they aren't stakeholders in society or planet Earth, and that they can breathe and eat money, and so they are extracting as much of it as possible before it all comes crashing down rather than doing anything to reset, rebuild, or prevent it.
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
cantor_S_drug 3 minutes ago [-]
I like American strategy of allowing views to be discussed but not let them affect Elite club's strategy. In this regard, China has failed. They should allow ample discussions about tiananmen square and strip away emotional value so that whenever these topics are brought up again they lose their relevance.
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
"HyperNormalisation" was interesting but gave me tinfoil hat vibes such that I kept everything they claimed at arms length. But there we are, in a "post truth" world you have to be skeptical of everything. (At the same time, I am conflicted because I tend also to be skeptical of skepticism itself and try to maintain a dogged optimism.)
Applejinx 2 hours ago [-]
I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
mallowdram 1 hours ago [-]
Baehr and Curtis are still trapped behind the edifice of evolution. We're primates, we compete for status at any cost that has better benefits, including epistemological loss.
The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same.
There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
“When gathering information, what questions do we ask? How hard do we work to get to the truth? Do we consider alternative perspectives and explanations? Scrutinize the quality of our sources? Attend to the limits of our evidence?”
Rendered at 14:51:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
You could have stopped there. I don't think we (in the U.S.) get too much international news — to the contrary in fact. But to be sure we are not getting enough local and relevant news.
For example, just opened Google news and saw "Joy Behar calls out “The View” cohost's revealing outfit: 'Where are you going in that dress?'"
(Of course it's easy to cherry pick dumb celebrity "news".)
And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
> is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be?
Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works.
> Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy.
The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest.
> And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored.
The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health.
Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them.
> be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.
This isn't a symptom of global news dissemination though, it's a result of people being shitty and needing to grasp at any thread to justify their shitty position. Whether most of our news comes from local sources or not will not stop that. They'll just go seek out those local sources.
It is only made possible by, which is the point. And that was a single example of the harm, TV news play much of the same stories.
Avoid taking a too narrow view of the argument. Don’t get stuck on a single part you can think of, steel man and engage with the macro point being made.
Well... no, it's not only possible this way, as I just tried to point out. With or without global news programs, with or without addictive news feeds, those people will still act that way and go to great lengths to find reasons to justify it.
I did not engage with other bits because I do not generally disagree with you: watching too much news is a problem, highly addictive news feeds are a problem. I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face, particularly racism - and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
No one is arguing that. Even the original commenter said:
> This is partly the reason
Partly. But they are a reason.
> and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
There is no single factor which is the cause and can be solved. There are a bunch of partial factors which cause the issue. Fixing any of them would help.
One of my usual news sources is SVT, the national Swedish broadcaster. Their svt.se website is good and, aside from Swedish news, they're also quick to cover major foreign events, if something is breaking news they'll have it up right away. But one of my main complaints is SVT covers local American crime too much. It pops up as one of the top "just in" headlines. I went to look just before replying here, and it's actually happening again right now - there's a "just in" headline "Four dead in a shooting in Mississippi". It's fast, I don't even see it on cnn.com as I'm typing this. But, with all respect to the victims, mass shooting are pretty much a daily event in the US and generally have no global importance.
What were you trying to convey by starting with "Er...", and all the other rhetorical and dismissive tone and techniques?
Your entire post reads like you're quite offended, and you're dealing with that by being quite confrontational and dismissive towards someone who probably wasn't trying to offend or start a fight.
In the newspaper days there was greater professionalism due to money and prestige but I think part of the appeal is you never heard conflicting interpretations so it felt more true and less confusing.
https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...
https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s
Compare those 3+3 to Aristotle's 5: intuitive understanding (nous), scientific knowledge (episteme), wisdom (sophia), art/skill (techne), and practical wisdom (phronesis).
Or to Laozi's (n)one--- as popularized by Alan Watts, not r/Stoicism
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_v...
This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature.
For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
Those two worlds are not equivalent.
You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.
We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use.
[0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
Indoctrination.
Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
The fact there is intense disagreement about what is “obviously true” between countries shows that this is still happening.
The beliefs of the masses are simply shaped to suit political interests.
Concrete example: “boys should be circumcised”. If the answer was objectively obvious to educated people why does the US have such a different position on it than Europe?
We have to face truth constructions are lures in folk science societies like ours, they are not valid. Science is not understood (correlational thinking) or accepted b a majority of the population anywhere on this planet.
Things you personally see = 10
Things you heard from a friend = 9
Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1
Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10
Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed.
Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective.
People have to confront what we built here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same.
There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.