post-truth internet
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
post-truth internet
As time goes on I become increasingly convinced that an understanding of narrative and mythology, and the ability to navigate the grand narratives of other humans outside the internet itself, is most important.
Over and over again, it doesn't matter what happened. It matters how people see the world. Navigating this fact is a survival skill.
You need causality-oriented models to comprehend the shared orientation that people are likely to develop. Humans require truth in order to operate. Mythologies do not adequately describe truth, and therefore do not adequately describe where viewpoints tend to harmonize.
Major discrepancies tend to develop as the result of people abusing power to create things that are indeed true pressures, though they are pressures not towards truth. There must always be *something* true.
@Finfell Well, that's my point. There is no truth, there is only a centre to the grand narrative, to the core mythology someone's ideological perspective presents. Truth is a matter of storytelling.
Science is founded on the existence of shared reality, and I'm pretty sure science has shown itself to have some very serious advantages. Please keep the hard mysticism in the ancient histories.
@Finfell Except rationalism and science are both ideologies and even then they are independently mediated by one's political belief — science can contradict progressive or reactionary myths, but they get disregarded. The most common conservative-leaning people I've seen are psychologists and biologists (though this is anecdotal).
@Finfell I'm more of a Jung person, I do believe there are things that can't be empirically witnessed or understood, I am not arrogant enough to only rely on what I can detect as a human or with our instruments. That makes me a mystic, yes, but we are talking about understanding human understanding.
@matilde Of course there are things that can’t be directly measured - people can lie, and they need that capacity as a tool against those who mistreat others. To understand mysticism it helps to imagine the ubiquitous violence in which early humanity dwelled