Nothing exciting going on in my life so I’ll live dangerously and talk about my thoughts. That’s after the important things, my food. I made grits ala Horvendile for the first time in a while and made it with a twist. The basic dish two eggs poached in a serving of grits. That alone is great, but it just the template. Today I mixed in chopped breakfast sausages and the thing that made it special, cheese curds. I often make it with cheese, but the curds change the consistency to something gumbolike. I imagine mozzarella might do the same thing. I’ll try that next time. The coup de grace was adding garlic salt to the water before I put the grits in. This breakfast made me happy. I’m still amazed that someone like me who in many ways can’t cook, can make delicious low effort meals. Two greats lesson you can learn is that something is easier than you thought and that if you make a mistake, it’s not a disaster; that’s how you learn. Do not follow that advice if you want to be a brain surgeon.
Today’s thought is that people will blame things that are ubiquitous for problems because it’s easy. We all are taught that correlation does not imply causation but have trouble accepting that. We all should be taught what correlation means but don’t. The fact that 90% of crimes are committed by righthanded people is not a correlation because 90% of all people are righthanded. If they were correlated, then the odds of a criminal being righthanded would be higher or lower than expected by chance. That’s where ubiquity comes in. It’s quite easy to blame any problem on things that are ubiquitous, and this has been going on forever. If you were born around the same time I was, 1957, you will remember people blaming all our social ills on television. Then came the period that everything was caused by video games. The new scapegoat is social media. The solution is always the same too, regulate the offending media. In the 20s and early 30s people blamed movies, so the Hollywood established the Hays code on the belief that movies made people violent and sexually active. In the 50s comic books were blamed, that’s why I grew up with the comic family friendly Batman instead of the Dark Knight. The FCC still regulates what we watch on broadcast TV and radio.
On what seems like a different note, but isn’t, people will blame every ill on capitalism not on the fact that some people are willing to hurt others to benefit themselves. Capitalism is relatively new, but people have always been people taking advantage of each other. It isn’t helped by the fact that the right ignores the fact that capitalism requires well-functioning markets and that often requires public regulation to keep the markets fair. They are so incessant in denying this that people have come to think of markets with thumbs on the scales as capitalism. Every time that somebody scams someone is not capitalism’s fault; people will always be imperfect. That doesn’t mean we need to let it happen in the name of capitalism. It always will happen, but we can help make it happen less often.
What the economy and social media have in common is that they are complex and filled with feedback loops. Things often have consequences that aren’t obvious. I read two types of complaints about Facebook every day. The first is, “Facebook is censoring me or people I agree with! The second is “Facebook is not censoring the people I don’t agree with.” You can say, “Just censor lies!” The problem is who determines what is true? It seems simple. I know that the Big Lie is a lie, but most Republicans think it’s true. It’s easy to say that it’s objectively false, but it’s much harder in practice to come up with a system that people will agree separates what’s true from what’s false. If you ban “Hate Speech” how long till people with power direct that ban at the weak?
I’m sorry I don’t have solutions of these things. People have been trying to figure out how to deal with people being flawed since there have been people. We try things. Something that that we try don’t work but continue from social inertial. Some things change. All we can do is hope that eventually things change for the better.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation have always been with us. If you think things are worse, now think back to literal witch hunts, pogroms, The Red Scare, the anti-Catholic hysteria of the 19th century, and the biggest Big Lie that the Jews causes Germany to lose WWI with the help of traitors. Things seem worse because we see today’s problems up close. The same thing that feeds conspiracy, the idea that if there’s something wrong then there is a single cause that we should fight, is attractive. It makes things seem more manageable than having to deal with human nature and social interactions in all their complexity. We don’t want to play whack-a-moles. Not wanting to play it doesn’t mean that there is a simple alternative.
Right now, I’m whacking a mole. If you don’t like the spread of misinformation, don’t spread misinformation, and create a social cost on those that do. Don’t accept the lies and more commonly errors in reasoning, which promote your values. If we do that, we won’t solve all our problems. No one thing will solve all our problems. It’s just something we can do that makes the world marginally better. We do enough things like that they add up to being no longer marginal.
Wise Madness 