Categories: General

Some (scattered) thoughts

The power of “echo chambers” to create polarizing views resides in the exploitation of a non-linear process. That’s probably why polarization is so hard to overcome -after a few belief-compoundings in opposite directions, two individuals come to embrace diametrically opposed views of reality. (Think also about the attention economy. We might have a mistaken, linear view of the power of algorithms to train our attention and then highly underrate the amount of effort regaining control over our habits requires).
In this explorable, we see the crucial role of open-mindedness: in a highly connected society, polarization grows faster if open-mindedness is low. This is interesting because many times, when asked, social media advocates rightly remark the technology’s capacity to connect people.
Over-sharing is a form of threatening others’ autonomy (“Honesty and Discretion”, P. Quinn White).
Books, particularly as perspective-taking devices, built modern societies; they helped us fight our Hobbesian nature (Pinker).
The downtown is the brain of the whole city, the source of the centralization of power (James C. Scott).
Should the signalling power of a sentence trump any considerations about justice? This is the old debate between deontology and consequentialism. I think that intuitions move in one direction or another depending on what you focus on: either, the victim of an undeserved punishment, or the benefits that such punishment brings to society in the form of deterrence. In any case, the fact that deterrence is only the absence of something -in contrast to the unmissable reality of the punishment- might impact people’s intuitions about such cases.
The questions of free will makes sense only in an atomic context, where it seems legitimate to isolate the units of study (this clashes with a systemic approach).
“Most professional philosophers did not, I found, share the ancient conception of philosophy as discourse addressed to nonexpert readers of many kinds who would bring to the text their urgent concerns, questions, needs, and whose souls might in that interaction be changed. Having lost that conception they had lost, too, the sense of the philosophical text as an expressive creation whose form should be part and parcel of its conception, revealing in the shape of the sentences the lineaments of a human personality with a particular sense of life. […] An article, for example, argues that the emotions are essential and central in our efforts to gain understanding on any important ethical matter; and yet it is written in a style that expresses only intellectual activity and strongly suggests that only this activity matters for the reader in his or her attempts to understand.” Nussbaum, M.
Think about the attention economy and this statement by Eliezer Yudkowski: “it is not so terrible a disrespect for free will, to live in a world in which people are free to shoot their feet off through their own strength—in the hope that by the time they’re smart enough to do it under their own power, they’re smart enough not to” (Devil’s Offers).
In “Cooperation Over Coercion: The Importance of Unsupervised Childhood Play for Democracy and Liberalism”, Steven Horwitz explains how, through unsupervised play, children develop conflict-resolution skills that are fundamental for smooth interactions that are not regulated by the state or the market —and, then, fundamental for democracies, which are based on freedom, not coercion. He says this about the style of parenting that is eroding unsupervised play from society: ” Those parents who attempt to cushion every one of their children’s failures, whether in the trivial form of Second Winner trophies for losing sports teams, or in the more serious form of aggressively pushing school officials to change grades or override a coach’s decision to cut their kid from a sports team, are denying those kids the chance to feel the psychological loss that comes from failure, and that is necessary for learning what not to do. Trying to bail out kids from every possible failure has the same effect as bailouts do in the economy: it locks-in inefficiencies and wastes resources by cutting short the process by which we learn what to do and what not to do. Just as bailed out firms can become economic zombies, economically dead but still wandering around consuming resources, so do bailed out kids stumble through late adolescence and early adulthood unable to be resilient in the face of failure and creative in the face of roadblocks” (p. 7).