Some Tools For Optimizing Our Media Use
Benevolent and malevolent media producers possess the power to influence society in positive and negative ways. They can do this through agenda setting, framing, priming, spreading memes, altering perceptions of groups and individuals, outright propaganda, and other methods.
I think more attention should be paid to the pathways from content to effects, so that we can optimize our cultural landscape.
Lest this post soon turn into Applause Light Vegas, I’ll now get into some methods I think can be used to sway mass opinion in a direction amenable to making the world better. Many of these methods deal with familiar biases, heuristics, and psychological effects.
The Craft And The Community: The Basics: Apologizing
Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it
[LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport
A blog post by Alistair Roberts, as curated by Steve Sailer. (Steve's version is shorter and more targeted; the original blog post is the fourth in a series on triggering and suffers for its reliance on the particular issue.)
It seems like a very useful dichotomy, and strongly reminds me of Ask and Guess.
The Price of Integrity
Related Posts: Prices or Bindings?
On the evening of August 14th, 2006 a pair of Fox News journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were seized by Islamic militants while on assignment in Gaza City. Nothing was heard of them for nine days until a group calling themselves the Holy Jihad Brigades took credit for the kidnappings. They issued an ultimatum, demanding the release of Muslims prisoners from American jails within a 72 hour time frame. Their demands were not met.
But then a few days later the journalists were allowed to go free... but not before they’d been forced into converting to Islam at gunpoint, and had each videotaped a statement denouncing U.S. and Israeli foreign policy.
The war raged on.
A couple of kidnapped journalists is nothing new (certainly not three years after the fact) and aside from the happy ending this particular case wouldn’t worth mentioning if not for a unique twist that occurred after they returned home. A fellow Fox News contributor, Sandy Rios, openly criticized the two men; she said that no true Christian would convert – falsely or otherwise – merely because they were threatened with death. As she later explained to Bill Maher:*
The Tragedy of the Anticommons
I assume that most of you are familiar with the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. If you aren't, well, that was a Wikipedia link right there.
However, fewer are familiar with the Tragedy of the Anticommons, a term coined by Michael Heller. Where the Tragedy of the Commons is created by too little ownership, the Tragedy of the Anticommons is created by too much.
For instance, the classical solution to the TotC is to divide up the commons between the herders using it, giving each of them ownership for a particular part. This gives each owner an incentive to enforce its sustainability. But what would happen if the commons were divided up to thousands of miniature pieces, say one square inch each? In order to herd your cattle, you'd have to acquire permission from hundreds of different owners. Not only would this be a massive undertaking by itself, any one of them could say no, potentially ruining your entire attempt.
This isn't just a theoretical issue. In his book, Heller offers numerous examples, such as this one:
...gridlock prevents a promising treatment for Alzheimer's diseases being tested. The head of research at a "Big Pharma" drugmaker told me that his lab scientists developed the potential cure (call it Compound X) years ago, but biotech competitors blocked its development. ... the company developing Compound X needed to pay every owner of a patent relevant to its testing. Ignoring even one would invite an expensive and crippling lawsuit. Each patent holder viewed its own discovery as the crucial one and demanded a corresponding fee, until the demands exceeded the drug's expected profits. None of the patent owners would yield first. ...
This story does not have a happy ending. No valiant patent bundler came along. Because the head of research could not figure out how to pay off all the patent owners and still have a good chance of earning a profit, he shifted his priorities to less ambitious options. Funding went to spin-offs of existing drugs for which his firm already controlled the underlying patents. His lab reluctantly shelved Compound X even though he was certain the science was solid, the market huge, and the potential for easing human suffering beyond measure.
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