Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

[Bootstrap]

N.S. Lyons, the pseudonymous author of one of the most interesting substacks I've read, had this to say about Haidt's article:

I'm having a hard time connecting this to what Haidt actually wrote. Could you perhaps quote a paragraph or two from Haidt's article and respond to it?

Lyons seems to love making up fairly extreme phrases like this: "prestige freak-out-porn magazine The Atlantic". But he doesn't actually engage Haidt's argument as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like he gave it a good close read. Which looks like a symptom of what Haidt is describing, it's good for promoting a substack and going viral, but it doesn't actually engage in the discussion.

[HondurasKeiser]

N.S. Lyons, the pseudonymous author of one of the most interesting substacks I've read, had this to say about Haidt's article:

I'm having a hard time connecting this to what Haidt actually wrote. Could you perhaps quote a paragraph or two from Haidt's article and respond to it?

Lyons seems to love making up fairly extreme phrases like this: "prestige freak-out-porn magazine The Atlantic". But he doesn't actually engage Haidt's argument as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like he gave it a good close read. Which looks like a symptom of what Haidt is describing, it's good for promoting a substack and going viral, but it doesn't actually engage in the discussion.

I read the essay. His thesis (as you so aptly pointed out in a succession of 3 posts), is that social media is uniquely responsible for making our communal life in America (and probably everywhere) dumber and more caustic. Lyons, simply suggests that perhaps that’s too facile an explanation; that perhaps there’s more going on in our social unraveling that, while exacerbated by social media, is not traceable to social media alone. He says that as someone that both likes Haidt as a writer and dislikes social media. I’d tend to agree with Lyons - I suspect there’s something more going on under the surface that social media is amplifying and exacerbating - but I’d also suggest everyone get off social media. Is MennoNet social media? Probably.

[HondurasKeiser]

N.S. Lyons, the pseudonymous author of one of the most interesting substacks I've read, had this to say about Haidt's article:

I'm having a hard time connecting this to what Haidt actually wrote. Could you perhaps quote a paragraph or two from Haidt's article and respond to it?

Lyons seems to love making up fairly extreme phrases like this: "prestige freak-out-porn magazine The Atlantic". But he doesn't actually engage Haidt's argument as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like he gave it a good close read. Which looks like a symptom of what Haidt is describing, it's good for promoting a substack and going viral, but it doesn't actually engage in the discussion.

As for The Atlantic being a siren for disaster, especially during the pandemic…peruse their headlines from about 2020 onward to get a sense of the tenor that seems to reign on their editorial board. The sky seems to be perpetually falling over there.

I say that as someone that used to really think that they had the best commentary going in journalism just a few short years ago.

[PetrChelcicky]

I use Internet and Blogs. I don't use Facebook or Twitter, as I'm not interested.
As for Internet and Blogs, I find them very helpful. They help me to become clear and precise about my own convictions. Finding more information (or misinformation) which is relevant for me. And finding sparring partners for debates.
On the whole, I have become much more independent in my thought, whereas in my young years I was constrained to "official" or "mainstream" information, and I had difficulties to see relevant arguing points because my thinking was rather limited to the arguments in mainstream media.
I am not certain - but it seems to me that Haidt's critique is directed against Internet and Blogs, too.

As for the differences in conviction, I think they are just as big as some fifty years ago. But in my young years we had more of a "live and let live" attitude. There were all sorts of subcultures and countercultures and people had the feeling that - whatever happened elsewhere - they were secure within their own subculture, so why not let the other people do what they want?

What has really changed? The feeling of security has got lost, there is much more fear. Part of it relies to the Puritan or missionary mind ("we must abolish all sins of all people" implying all sinful subcultures), and methinks that is more a problem of the Left today. Another part is escalation and a vicious circle, and that is a general problem on both sides.
Fear creates aggressiveness which creates attempts of suppression which stimulate new fears.
And people like Haidt - people who say: Well, I accept civil liberties (speech, assembly, association) in principle, but we have to take this bit away and that bit away etc.- at a top open scale! - are part of the problem.

To get a new social contract we have to do just the opposite. We have to tell other people in no uncertain terms, how much civil liberties for them are secure because we are prepared to grant them at any case! Not only conditional! Not only because we "respect" a principle or as a momentary tactics, but because as humans they need and they deserve this degree of liberty.

[PetrChelcicky]

Okay, we were admonished to stick to Haidt's text. So some comments:

1. Haidt's depiction of childrens' social life before internet is too much idealized. I sympathize with his idea that children should be allowed to play unsupervised (one exception where he promotes the abolishment of a restriction). But conflict resolution was not always fair, there was a lot of bullying, harassing and exclusion, and boys had a tradition of forming whole "armies" who fought with each other. (And if a gang-infested Black quarter was nearby, white people would probably not have allowed their children to play unsupervised, even in the "good old times".)
2. Haidt's own empirical findings are concentrated on college intolerance and this, as a college problem, is a leftist problem. Of course there have always been rightist (small Christian) colleges who "protected" their "vulnerable" students from leftwing speech. But the reasonable answer to this would have been a parallel circle of leftwing colleges who then might have protected the most "vulnerable" students from rightwing speech. Why not? The step too far, the real problem was that suddenly nearly all colleges wanted to be such "protective" leftwing colleges.
3. Haidt tends to see the problem from the view of an engineer or at best a medic (he is enamoured by the term "de-toxification"). That is, he sees a problem with the "system" which might be solved by an intrusion or intervention from without. He doesn't really see the humans involved.
For example, many humans don't like verification processes in the internet because the companies or the government can misuse them (like the banks who regularly exclude customers b/o incorrect political activities).
Or: Open primaries in which only the two most successful candidates are allowed for the election - this obviously restricts the party members from deciding by themselves if they want to risk a defeat and nominate a more radical candidate. There can be good reasons for that, for example Congress is mostly a platform for debate and debate needs above all articulate and determined speakers, not moderates. The controversial points must be clearly and openly voiced before a moderating process or compromise starts.But there is another even more important point: A party which regularly nominates "moderate" candidates may lose its most active members and facilitate the rise of a more radical party (someone less occupied with technical solutions and more with the ways real humans live would have seen that).

[PetrChelcicky]

One last point, even if I repeat myself here:
Haidt doesn't want to be seen as an authoritarian; but he adheres to the traditional position that "trusting" - of course not trusting "authorities" or "elites", oh no, but trusting "institutions" (and where is the difference) - is a goal in itself and must be promoted by whatever means possible. If Facebook undermines trust, the humans who use Facebook be damned!

I don't think that trust is something we are morally obliged to deliver to our "elders and betters". I think we should trust only where our "elders and betters" do their part of the contract: making the institutional processes as transparent and controllable as possible. In all other cases I recommend a healthy distrust!

[Bootstrap]

As for the differences in conviction, I think they are just as big as some fifty years ago. But in my young years we had more of a "live and let live" attitude. There were all sorts of subcultures and countercultures and people had the feeling that - whatever happened elsewhere - they were secure within their own subculture, so why not let the other people do what they want?

What has really changed? The feeling of security has got lost, there is much more fear. Part of it relies to the Puritan or missionary mind ("we must abolish all sins of all people" implying all sinful subcultures), and methinks that is more a problem of the Left today. Another part is escalation and a vicious circle, and that is a general problem on both sides.
Fear creates aggressiveness which creates attempts of suppression which stimulate new fears.

I agree with this. Except that I don't think it is more of a problem of the left than the right. Denunciation and outrage and fearmongering about "the other side" is clearly present on the right. I do think there are media sources that are calmer and more factual than others. Both Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow start most stories by reminding you how stupid or evil the other side is, then use today's news to reinforce that predefined narrative. I think we do well to boycott that kind of "journalism".

And people like Haidt - people who say: Well, I accept civil liberties (speech, assembly, association) in principle, but we have to take this bit away and that bit away etc.- at a top open scale! - are part of the problem.

As far as I can tell, Haidt does not say that. He says that people would be wise to spend less time on social media and more time talking to other people face to face, he says that direct community is essential if we want to have community and the wisdom it brings. But he doesn't want to legislate it, he hopes that society will realize this.

On the other hand, he does want social media to consider what kind of behavior their user interfaces and algorithms promotes. I don't think he is calling for legislation, just awareness. If I'm wrong, please be specific about what you are objecting to in what he said, provide a quote from the article, so I can know what you are talking about. I might start picking quotes from his article to discuss.

To get a new social contract we have to do just the opposite. We have to tell other people in no uncertain terms, how much civil liberties for them are secure because we are prepared to grant them at any case! Not only conditional! Not only because we "respect" a principle or as a momentary tactics, but because as humans they need and they deserve this degree of liberty.

To me, it's a little weird that we spend so much time on MN acting like we are the people who can decide what the social contract is for America as a whole or for Facebook. To me, a basic Christian response to the things Haidt describes is probably more like this: (1) be aware of the outrage cycles, predefined "us" versus "them" narratives, and clickbait journalism, step away from it; (2) if you choose to care about an issue, find reliable sources that don't do those things; (3) remember to seek first the Kingdom of God in all things; (4) ask how we can be like Jesus to the broken world around us.

[Bootstrap]

One last point, even if I repeat myself here:
Haidt doesn't want to be seen as an authoritarian; but he adheres to the traditional position that "trusting" - of course not trusting "authorities" or "elites", oh no, but trusting "institutions" (and where is the difference) - is a goal in itself and must be promoted by whatever means possible. If Facebook undermines trust, the humans who use Facebook be damned!

He is mostly saying we need to set up processes where people are safe to disagree, where there is a healthy public square, so that dialog can happen. That's quite different from saying we should blindly trust "authorities" or "elites". Let me give some direct quotes for what he says undermines that in social media:

• First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.
• Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.
• Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process.

Here's how he describes the consequences:

Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

And he says that makes us stupider. I'll say something about that in the next message.

[Bootstrap]

Haidt says American society has grown more stupid because we rarely have constructive interactions with people we disagree with. That's essential if we want to get beyond confirmation bias:

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

And that's precisely what Haidt praises in traditional American institutions - and what he thinks these same institutions have often lost now.

In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.

And here's one of the major reasons for that:

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution.

[Josh]

To me, it's a little weird that we spend so much time on MN acting like we are the people who can decide what the social contract is for America as a whole or for Facebook. To me, a basic Christian response to the things Haidt describes is probably more like this: (1) be aware of the outrage cycles, predefined "us" versus "them" narratives, and clickbait journalism, step away from it; (2) if you choose to care about an issue, find reliable sources that don't do those things; (3) remember to seek first the Kingdom of God in all things; (4) ask how we can be like Jesus to the broken world around us.

Perhaps you should join a church where usage of social media and watching TV news is forbidden, and is also preached against from the pulpit, and action is taken to strengthen the courage of church members to avoid reading news, social media clippings, etc. on their phones.

I do the above things. I also do (2) as you mentioned above, although you and I don't agree on what "reliable sources that don't do those things" are.