If you think that one side of the political/religious/scientific spectrum beliefs is completely unfounded and delusional. Perhaps you are the one that is deluded.
I find almost every idea that humans deeply believe has some level of wisdom to it, even if there are many fundamental misunderstandings.
Even many "absurd" ancient beliefs like animism and totemism have a lot of intuitive wisdom that modern society could learn a lot from.
I think Twitter is having a hugely negative effect on discussion. Obviously, there are more typical reasons such as algorithms incentivising more extreme positions. But there's another fact I really hate.
One of the core philosophies of Twitter's design is posting arbitrarily short statements. You can create a thread but they are far less appealing to the average Twitter user. This arbitrarily small-sized message normalises the age-old problem of politicians having to make their ideas short and snappy.
In every field I'm slightly knowledgable about no subject of debate is ever that simple, there usually several layers of nuance. Because I believe reality is nuanced.
Twitter is literally incapable of this nuance and so in my opinion I believe twitter posts are (for the most part) fundamentally incapable of expressing ideas that reflect reality to a sufficient degree.
I think what is fascinating about the alt-right and to some extent many people throughout history is their fascination with the Jewish conspiracy. In a time in which is seems like much of our past mythology has become irrelevant to contemporary thinking, this still persists.
I think many people anticipate the use of myths as understanding to decrease as we gain scientific & historical knowledge. But I'm worried that new myths are rising, in many cases dangerous myths. I have 2 theories why, perhaps both are at play.
* The first of which is the fact that living a hyper-polarised post-truth reality politically will necessarily create new myths. Why is the other side so evil? Are they being mislead or is it in their nature? This has been commonly seen throughout history in traditional tribalism, i.e. Catholics and protestants. However it seemed to be on a downwards trend until recently (perhaps this is just a spike).
* The second of which is far more insidious. I believe in the past no one person understood all fields, but generally there were specialists in each fields that had a decently comprehensive understanding of their discipline at the time.
System's complicate continually, i.e. advanced society and the portion of the system anyone is capable of understanding is shrinking.
Meaning no one individual can understand the chaos.
The issue here is the human mind latches to order and in the absence of a real understanding will come those with convincing false narratives about said system, and feed people what they want to believe, the new mythology. I think we may be seeing myth resurface as a means (perhaps the primary means) of understanding things beyond our comprehension. To clarify, not in scientists but in the everyman.
Conspiracy theorist epistemology -
I think the thing is with conspiracies theorists is if they fall far enough down the rabbit hole, it is almost as if they grow an aversion to truth.
They will simply believe whatever is false, in fact the more false something is the more likely it is to be believed. It is almost this absurd line of reasoning like "why are they going out of their way to prove that this is true? It must be really important that that they hide this from the people".
I think this comes from the fact they gain a sense of superiority from believing what normal people would never believe.
Don't Touch Ya Face
https://www.donttouchyaface.com/
(submitted by dkobran)
A place to discard my thoughts