I don’t think that the internet itself is making us dumber, I think that big crowds of people tend to be stupid and that the modern internet creates a lot of such environments. To say something insightful and concise: Groups of people tend to lower the competition rather than improving themselves. E.g. harming the reputation of the other party, rather than developing themselves to higher standards and winning this way. I’m not hitting the nail entire on the head with this sentence, but most people should have noticed something similar themselves.
I agree with your example of Goodhart’s law mechanisms. When signaling valuable outcomes becomes more important than the things which actually cause said outcomes, it becomes a game of pretend-virtue and pretend-competence. Experts generally can’t deceive eachother, but in recent times, it’s all about appealing to the general population, who are entirely unqualified in judging what experts are doing. Consider for example a situation where PhD papers were graded by public opinion rather than by professors. Students would have to change their papers to reflect this, and the quality of the papers would suffer gravely as a result.
To generalize further on the previous point, an important issue in the modern world is a lack of selection and proper hierarchies. The rule “90% of everything is garbage” applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
I disagree that strong competition is bad. What’s bad is judging people on shallow criteria which can be gamed. In short, you can’t outsource character judgement/evaluation to simple metrics. But I can see an intrepretation which is correct: The need to perform well makes weak people sacrifice organic and genuine interests and approaches with meta-gaming. They abandon all personal standards and adapt the dominant strategy (clickbait is one such strategy)
Yes, narrow audiences were a focus in the past, as opposed to broader audiences. This is once again a quality vs quantity tradeoff, and you’re right to notice a drop in quality as a result from this. Your observation about hedonic selection seems correct as well, but one has to wonder what sort of psychological changes are behind this decadence of taste. Perhaps it’s just that the internet used to have more intelligent people, with a higher need for novelty and challenges, and that society is increasingly suffering from a sort of exhaustion which calls for hedonism, escapism and other harmful indulgences in material with zero cognitive cost (a more fancy way of ‘doing nothing’) (Only relevant for those who are interested in the relationship between society and how changes in society changes the general psychological state of the population)
I can’t help but recalling Nietzsche’s critiques of decadence, for all of this behaviour seems to run quite parallel to the sort of smallness and lack of taste that he personally fought against.
To wrap it up, I’d call all this a subversion of standards. Everything valuable is rare, but value is mostly decided by public opinion (numbers), and why wouldn’t public opinion speak well about itself, and badly about whatever is out of reach for it? I think all of these issues are cause by an important idea which is missing in the modern society: That bad things spawn good things, and that good things spawn bad things. Everything comes at a price, e.g. strength comes at effort. Modern society is removing the “bad” things which generate the good, not realizing the harm it’s doing. An instance of this problem is overprotective parents, but I mean it in a much larger sense, so large that I want to ask you “Are you sure reducing human suffering is the right move? Have you considered the value of suffering?”
As a final note, I don’t see why you aren’t generalizing your idea further. To the point of using methaphors like “Why wouldn’t an untended garden fill up with weeds rather than pretty flowers? Weeds are stronger and multiply more quickly, and beauty doesn’t translate to fitness”, or perhaps a comparison to game theory problems. Or this one that I like: We’re replacing organic human things with mathematical things, so human taste is now a weaker selector than efficiency”. What I want to know is: How did we keep these problems at bay in the past? Through good mental health? To reject the winning strategy because it’s ugly seems like a costly standard to have, and yet that characterizes the past much more than the present.
Thanks for reading. I apologize for my low verbal abilities, but I’m confident in my intuition.
P.S. While software is less important than hardware, it seems that changes to this software can easily cause us to regress. That most of modern human progression is due to the software, which doesn’t seems robust against the degradation taking place now. Hopefully we’re just approaching a local minimum, but if this issue is caused by modern technology like Ted Kaczynski is hinting that it is, I’m not so optimistic.
The rule “90% of everything is garbage” applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases? If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.
I find that subjective measurements are punished harder than objective ones. You are sometimes forgiven for claiming that “science shows X”, but personal opinions are rarely allowed to discriminate, even if they, by their very nature, and meant to do exactly that. Example: “I want to date X type of people” or “I wouldn’t date X type of people”. For almost every category of X, you’ll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn’t consciously choose any of them.
I don’t think it’s just about shouting the loudest or most convincingly. At least I want to stress that what counts as “convincing” is more emotional than rational, in all cases where the rational is less pleasant to the ear. Some people can see through this and side with the truth, but I think the ratio of them is too small to counter the effect.
Since this is mostly about value, objectivity can’t help us. Even if it could (through agreement about metrics), the relationships of real-world data is too complex. War feels terrible, yet it’s great for technological advancements. “War is good” is not a common opinion at all, it lost, and the positive effects are rarely even considered. Society tends to think of things as either entirely good or entirely bad, but if you consider 3 or 4 links of cause and effect, such thinking becomes useless. But society generally doesn’t look that far, and neither does it like people who do. People who look that far ahead will advocate for terrible things now to bring about good things later (accelerationism, revolution, eugenics, etc). But it will happily make the locally best choice even when it’s completely unsustainable.
Anyway—I think making the correct choice requires some willpower, for the same reason that it requires willpower to eat salad rather than a burger. But the average person, to the extent that they’re “moral”, tends to be weak. No willpower, no backbone, no abiliy to resist temptation, conflict-shy, afraid to assert themselves. Stronger people suffer from this effect, for they can either make the worse choice, or get called “evil” for making the better choice. To use an example which may be familiar to you, how do you save somebody who is addicted to something harmful or procrastinating important work? You either aid their destruction, or take their pleasure away from them, and both choices are painful.
You’re right, “objectively” doesn’t fit as well in that statement as I thought.
That is how I intended ‘convincing’ to be interpreted.
For almost every category of X, you’ll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn’t consciously choose any of them.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. “I don’t want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]” sounds a lot less politically correct than “I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction.” because you don’t have to explain your criteria to everyone. I admit that’s more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.
It does depend how you explain yourself, but in the end, you’re just wording the same thing (the same preference) differently, and that’s still assuming that you know the reason of your own preference, and that they have a reason.
The logic seems to be “when the truth looks bad, it is, therefore you must pretend otherwise”, which adds a useless layer on top of everything obscuring the truth. The truth isn’t always more valuable than pleasant lies, but when this constructed social reality starts influencing areas in which it does matter (like medicine, general science and ways of doing things, like parenting), I find that it’s harmful.
I’ll also admit that I don’t find preferences to be a problem at all. Even though most preferences are shallow (occuring before conscious thought). I think both lying about them and inferring something from them is more harmful. All this perceived intent where none exists is what causes aspects of life to be so unappealing. I find most peoples perceptions to be unhealthy, by which I mean lacking in innocence, resulting in a sort of oversensitivity or tendency to project or interpret negative signals.
This is sort of abstract, but if we assume that racism is solved by not seeing color, then moral evil can be solved by not looking at the world through such a lens. Favorable and unfavorable outcomes will still exist, the dimension of “pure/corrupt” feelings associated with things will just disappear. This may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater though.
I don’t think that the internet itself is making us dumber, I think that big crowds of people tend to be stupid and that the modern internet creates a lot of such environments.
To say something insightful and concise: Groups of people tend to lower the competition rather than improving themselves. E.g. harming the reputation of the other party, rather than developing themselves to higher standards and winning this way.
I’m not hitting the nail entire on the head with this sentence, but most people should have noticed something similar themselves.
I agree with your example of Goodhart’s law mechanisms. When signaling valuable outcomes becomes more important than the things which actually cause said outcomes, it becomes a game of pretend-virtue and pretend-competence. Experts generally can’t deceive eachother, but in recent times, it’s all about appealing to the general population, who are entirely unqualified in judging what experts are doing.
Consider for example a situation where PhD papers were graded by public opinion rather than by professors. Students would have to change their papers to reflect this, and the quality of the papers would suffer gravely as a result.
To generalize further on the previous point, an important issue in the modern world is a lack of selection and proper hierarchies. The rule “90% of everything is garbage” applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
I disagree that strong competition is bad. What’s bad is judging people on shallow criteria which can be gamed. In short, you can’t outsource character judgement/evaluation to simple metrics. But I can see an intrepretation which is correct: The need to perform well makes weak people sacrifice organic and genuine interests and approaches with meta-gaming. They abandon all personal standards and adapt the dominant strategy (clickbait is one such strategy)
Yes, narrow audiences were a focus in the past, as opposed to broader audiences. This is once again a quality vs quantity tradeoff, and you’re right to notice a drop in quality as a result from this.
Your observation about hedonic selection seems correct as well, but one has to wonder what sort of psychological changes are behind this decadence of taste. Perhaps it’s just that the internet used to have more intelligent people, with a higher need for novelty and challenges, and that society is increasingly suffering from a sort of exhaustion which calls for hedonism, escapism and other harmful indulgences in material with zero cognitive cost (a more fancy way of ‘doing nothing’) (Only relevant for those who are interested in the relationship between society and how changes in society changes the general psychological state of the population)
I can’t help but recalling Nietzsche’s critiques of decadence, for all of this behaviour seems to run quite parallel to the sort of smallness and lack of taste that he personally fought against.
To wrap it up, I’d call all this a subversion of standards. Everything valuable is rare, but value is mostly decided by public opinion (numbers), and why wouldn’t public opinion speak well about itself, and badly about whatever is out of reach for it?
I think all of these issues are cause by an important idea which is missing in the modern society: That bad things spawn good things, and that good things spawn bad things. Everything comes at a price, e.g. strength comes at effort. Modern society is removing the “bad” things which generate the good, not realizing the harm it’s doing. An instance of this problem is overprotective parents, but I mean it in a much larger sense, so large that I want to ask you “Are you sure reducing human suffering is the right move? Have you considered the value of suffering?”
As a final note, I don’t see why you aren’t generalizing your idea further. To the point of using methaphors like “Why wouldn’t an untended garden fill up with weeds rather than pretty flowers? Weeds are stronger and multiply more quickly, and beauty doesn’t translate to fitness”, or perhaps a comparison to game theory problems. Or this one that I like: We’re replacing organic human things with mathematical things, so human taste is now a weaker selector than efficiency”.
What I want to know is: How did we keep these problems at bay in the past? Through good mental health? To reject the winning strategy because it’s ugly seems like a costly standard to have, and yet that characterizes the past much more than the present.
Thanks for reading. I apologize for my low verbal abilities, but I’m confident in my intuition.
P.S. While software is less important than hardware, it seems that changes to this software can easily cause us to regress. That most of modern human progression is due to the software, which doesn’t seems robust against the degradation taking place now. Hopefully we’re just approaching a local minimum, but if this issue is caused by modern technology like Ted Kaczynski is hinting that it is, I’m not so optimistic.
When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases?
If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.
I find that subjective measurements are punished harder than objective ones. You are sometimes forgiven for claiming that “science shows X”, but personal opinions are rarely allowed to discriminate, even if they, by their very nature, and meant to do exactly that. Example: “I want to date X type of people” or “I wouldn’t date X type of people”. For almost every category of X, you’ll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn’t consciously choose any of them.
I don’t think it’s just about shouting the loudest or most convincingly. At least I want to stress that what counts as “convincing” is more emotional than rational, in all cases where the rational is less pleasant to the ear. Some people can see through this and side with the truth, but I think the ratio of them is too small to counter the effect.
Since this is mostly about value, objectivity can’t help us. Even if it could (through agreement about metrics), the relationships of real-world data is too complex. War feels terrible, yet it’s great for technological advancements. “War is good” is not a common opinion at all, it lost, and the positive effects are rarely even considered. Society tends to think of things as either entirely good or entirely bad, but if you consider 3 or 4 links of cause and effect, such thinking becomes useless. But society generally doesn’t look that far, and neither does it like people who do. People who look that far ahead will advocate for terrible things now to bring about good things later (accelerationism, revolution, eugenics, etc). But it will happily make the locally best choice even when it’s completely unsustainable.
Anyway—I think making the correct choice requires some willpower, for the same reason that it requires willpower to eat salad rather than a burger. But the average person, to the extent that they’re “moral”, tends to be weak. No willpower, no backbone, no abiliy to resist temptation, conflict-shy, afraid to assert themselves. Stronger people suffer from this effect, for they can either make the worse choice, or get called “evil” for making the better choice. To use an example which may be familiar to you, how do you save somebody who is addicted to something harmful or procrastinating important work? You either aid their destruction, or take their pleasure away from them, and both choices are painful.
You’re right, “objectively” doesn’t fit as well in that statement as I thought.
That is how I intended ‘convincing’ to be interpreted.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. “I don’t want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]” sounds a lot less politically correct than “I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction.” because you don’t have to explain your criteria to everyone.
I admit that’s more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.
I see! I think we largely agree then.
It does depend how you explain yourself, but in the end, you’re just wording the same thing (the same preference) differently, and that’s still assuming that you know the reason of your own preference, and that they have a reason.
The logic seems to be “when the truth looks bad, it is, therefore you must pretend otherwise”, which adds a useless layer on top of everything obscuring the truth. The truth isn’t always more valuable than pleasant lies, but when this constructed social reality starts influencing areas in which it does matter (like medicine, general science and ways of doing things, like parenting), I find that it’s harmful.
I’ll also admit that I don’t find preferences to be a problem at all. Even though most preferences are shallow (occuring before conscious thought). I think both lying about them and inferring something from them is more harmful. All this perceived intent where none exists is what causes aspects of life to be so unappealing. I find most peoples perceptions to be unhealthy, by which I mean lacking in innocence, resulting in a sort of oversensitivity or tendency to project or interpret negative signals.
This is sort of abstract, but if we assume that racism is solved by not seeing color, then moral evil can be solved by not looking at the world through such a lens. Favorable and unfavorable outcomes will still exist, the dimension of “pure/corrupt” feelings associated with things will just disappear. This may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater though.