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Facebook Crisis
2021, Facebook was in the news several times.
Doesn’t the facebook crisis reveal a deeper crisis? We are poor in the worst way to be poor: mentally.
Scientists are trained to identify logical fallacies, inconsistencies, and contradictions. In ambiguous cases, they can describe their uncertainty quite precisely.
The population at large has no such mental tools. Such training does not take place in public schools. In fact, schools train students the opposite: the unquestioned consumption and recitation of presented information. There can be no question; tax dollars have subsidized Facebook’s success.
Now, it seems we have two choices:
(1) cultivating mental wealth in the population
(2) requiring tech nobility to suppress undesirable information
How is (2) not seen as unspeakably radical?
Action Steps
Public Education
We must demand that students be taught how to think, not just what to think. Without this concession, the public school system is merely a threat to democracy, and perhaps its greatest. There are three areas which are uncontroversial and necessary to evaluate truth.
- Empiricism
hypothesis testing
- Logic
Most heroin addicts have used in marijuana, therefore, marijuana is a gateway drug. Most criminals have used pants, therefore pants should be made illegal. The ‘gateway’ argument is repeated so often and so shamelessly, it is a testament to the utter failure of public schools to teach logic.
- Statistics
Average wealth in Germany is greater than in peer countries, yet the median wealth is lower than in some. Obviously, terms like ‘mean’ and ‘median’ are not interchangeable and can be used to manipulate public perception.
Public Writing
Linking
Always link technical terms to their definitions. For example, “correlation” ought to point to a page that describes, at least within the length of a tweet, what correlation is, or how it applies to the anchor. Readers may not be left to guess the meanings of technical terms.
If you don’t have time to research and link, fine. See below.
Integration
Google already uses metrics to rate web pages based on how much they are referenced by other pages, and how much weight those other pages have, based on how much they, in turn, are referenced. Every page is therefore a descendant of multiple ancestors. Web browsers should show this ancestry. It is possible to visually depict where in the blogosphere a particular post is situated. Posts that link heavily to wikipedia are in one part of the genealogy tree, posts that link heavily to foreign-manipulated adversary websites appear in another. Every post can have an ‘internet gene’ : 27% foreign adversary, 10% anti-science, and so forth. Some posts are 100% Rupert Murdoch, and should be prominently displayed as such. Posts whose key words are unlinked, or whose generic words are linked, appear among the debris of the internet.
It is important to note that this already happens, but for the profit of private companies, not the health of the internet. Academic books and journal articles self-document their intellectual ancestry in the form of citations. Individual’s credit worthiness is evaluated by private companies, and no-fly lists are basically government-written minority reports. If determining a post’s intellectual ancestry is radical, it is radical somewhere among the debris of the internet.
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PR responsibility
People have a natural discomfort with the fun and fabulous lives that social media influencers promote on instagram and Tiktok. Why? Viewers have the intuition that while the presentation is not false, it is a very selective presentation.
However, civilization itself is a false reality. If reality is natural selection and survival of the fittest, then civilization is a selective presentation.
This city, run by warlords, would not be the same civilization, and perhaps no civilization at all. Civilization is something other than what we can see and feel. It is an agreement among people about how to think and feel about what we can see.
Civilization is built with the manipulation of social perception, and it is arguably nothing but that. The reason we pay taxes is not that the tax authority has torture chambers. We have been convinced that taxes are essential to civilization. We queue, not because we will be punished for not queuing, not because we will get what we want sooner, but because we have been convinced that order is an overarching principle.
How our minds have been manipulated by teachers, parents, film, television, and so on, determine how we behave. How we behave determines what kind of civilization we have.
To refuse to participate in PR is to dump the responsibility of building civilization to others. When we are lucky, we delegate to the fun and fabulous, but increasingly, the slack has been picked up by religious extremists, nationalists, and racists. Civilization is built by people who are willing to do the PR; it has no mind of its own.
When public perception is manipulated by capitalism to increase consumption, that is terrible. It doesn’t mean that the manipulation of public perception is wrong. It means the message to increase consumption is short-sighted. The manipulation of public perception could have gone the other way. And it will never go the other way if capitalists are the only ones in the business of manipulating public perception.
It is the responsibility of people with a positive vision of the future to engage in PR.
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Protected: Star Chamber Logic
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The Red Cross in Ukraine
Imagine that you wake up in the dead of night to find two men standing in your living room. “Who are you?”
“I’m a burglar,” says the first man.
“I’m with the Red Cross,” says the second.
“Are you helping him rob my house?” you ask, astounded.
“No, no, no,” he replies. “I’m neutral in this burglary.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“In case he hurts his back carrying out your stuff, I would provide medical assistance.”
“You call that `neutral?'” you ask, dumbfounded.
“Well,” he replies, “If the burglar were to shoot you, I would try to stop the bleeding.”
In their war with Russia, Ukrainians have come to look upon the International Committe of the Red Cross with some suspicion, and have been severely scolded for it.
The Red Cross has been accused of acting on concert with Russia to provide aid and evacuations, to the long-term detriment of Ukrainian civilians. The Red Cross has denied any wrong-doing. They say it’s not their policy to participate in forced evacuations.
Remember, it is not the policy of the Russian army to commit war crimes. Restating a policy in the face of an accusation can only sound creepy.
It is not clear what choice people who are starving and brutalised have when a bus finally shows up, so `forced’ as a term loses its credibility in a denial. What the ICRC has conspicuously not done is deny acting as a front-end to forced evacuations.
The main issue that must press on Ukrainians’ minds is the toxic environment inside Russia, which is illustrated by Russian propaganda, and the mistreatment of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers. To an outside observer, evacuating civilians to the very country that is bent on destroying them is a non-starter. If you were to rescue Uyghurs from a concentration camp in Xinjiang, would you evacuate them to China? Regardless of what actually happens to them, would you be willing to take the responsibility for sending them there?
So, what is actually happening to Ukrainian refugees? The refugee camps in Russian-controlled territory are more rightly called filtration camps, and by some inmates as concentration camps. There is plenty of reason to believe that forced deportations are taking place. Ironically, a report has surfaced of a Red Cross volunteer being forcibly deported and heavily beaten. Furthermore, there are reports that Ukrainians are being sent to Siberia. There are reports of Ukrainian children being sent 6000 km to the Pacific coast, where they are forced to learn Russian. This is consistent with a long-standing practice of sending Ukrainian refugees to remote and under-populated regions, with no means of return.
The Red Cross has been seeking to open an office in Rostov, Russia. Does the ICRC really think that Russia would invite the Red Cross to interfere with their plans? What shall the Red Cross be permitted to do in Russia, other than feeding its victims and preparing them for further transport?
In summary, there are legitimate reasons for Ukrainians to be concerned. By reprimanding those who voice those concerns, the ICRC is doing anything but build trust. The stern and unsympathetic tone of its public announcements serve only to strengthen suspicions that its primary loyalty is to itself.
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Protected: Belarusian railway saboteurs
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