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

Wonderful you have drawn attention to Jonathan Haidt and this article. He is one of the most important intellectuals in the world today. His fight is essential to our future. This goes way beyond America. Let children out to play he encourages us, without fear of prosecution for neglect. Great start. So simple. My son at kindergarten as far back as 2001 made a tank with a couple of his mates. He ran to tell his mother when she came to pick him up. "Your can't be making a tank darling...?((!))" "Don't worry, we told them it was a spaceship."

While RFF is social media of a sort it is also the local club that de Tocequville commended, just not so local, with even Australians and SLRs included. We have minor problems and generally it is a respectful positive guild association inspiring tolerance and enlargement of the mind.

The trans debate, one of Haidt's domains, which debate it isn't, has been a fascinating lens for examining the madness of the current world and how social media and its exclusion and suppression work. The New York Times, even later than the UK's Guardian, only now so very late to allow a thought about the madness of mutilation and recognition of where the science in all that may lie.

Meanwhile the light exposes film as it used to, digital prints are also beautiful, and you can still get a Konica Hexar from the RFF classifieds and wonder at the little club of engineers who filtered photographers' wants into that little genius machine.

Just enjoyed a very subversive book by Vaclav Smil "How the World Really Works." Fossil fuels will be with us a while yet: without them 'us' would shrink by at least 50% for a start for the lack of fertilzer and sufficient food. The book is full of uncomfortable figures, like how many mL of diesel fuel it takes to get a hot house southern Spain kilogram of tomatoes into your Sunday lunch salad in Stockholm. His chapter on globalisation quantifies the peak and early decline now of globalisation. His voice is neutral, he makes no prediction, but he offers facts, and hope. Haidt is essentially hopeful also.
 
But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
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Sorry, but it is totally clueless, if not just a twisted ill minded. Could be sponsored by the dark side too.

The polls showed Chaushesku as trusted person day before they hung him upside-down.
In fascists' China they announced good Chinese credit system. If you are "good" you will get mortgage, promotion and so on. All is based on what you are saying.

Quote from the article shows what some Americans are so closed minded, yet, all they have to do is to ask some immigrants who have escaped from the dark side and not brainwashed.

I was doing night updates at TLN in Toronto, have to coordinate with on-air operators. One was older person, working late shifts and many were afraid to talk to him.
Not me. He was few months short before retirement as professor in Iran, he has lost everything to save his son and daughter.
Islamists took over and at some time he and his wife started to see how children became brainwashed and started to "show trust" those clueless are talking about.
So they escaped on foot via mountains waiting for bullets to their backs. After it - refuge camp. They made it to Canada and he busted his shoulders working as cameraman on retire age.
But kids went back to normal here, because they were exposed to democracy.

Winston Churchill : “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
 
While social media has boosted stupidity levels, the root cause of polarization in many developed countries is of an economic nature. Wealth is steadily flowing from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, and automatization, robotization, and other AI developments are fundamentally changing the economic landscape. Politicians in liberal democracies are thus far unable to deal with this reality.
 
Thanks for posting this, Stephen. His "The Righteous Mind" is excellent also. And I just finished Smil's "How The World Really Works," mentioned above -- a welcome dose of reality.
 
I was not able to read the article Stephen linked to because it is behind a pay wall, but I did find a synopsis of the article and can see that the original piece was not directed at politics specifically, but more on the mechanics of the internet/social media sphere and how it drives division.

Best,
-Tim

PS: Just for clarification, that article was published last April.
 
Ko.Fe. said:
Sorry, but it is totally clueless, if not just a twisted ill minded. Could be sponsored by the dark side too.

The polls showed Chaushesku as trusted person day before they hung him upside-down.
In fascists' China they announced good Chinese credit system. If you are "good" you will get mortgage, promotion and so on. All is based on what you are saying.

Quote from the article shows what some Americans are so closed minded, yet, all they have to do is to ask some immigrants who have escaped from the dark side and not brainwashed.

I was doing night updates at TLN in Toronto, have to coordinate with on-air operators. One was older person, working late shifts and many were afraid to talk to him.
Not me. He was few months short before retirement as professor in Iran, he has lost everything to save his son and daughter.
Islamists took over and at some time he and his wife started to see how children became brainwashed and started to "show trust" those clueless are talking about.
So they escaped on foot via mountains waiting for bullets to their backs. After it - refuge camp. They made it to Canada and he busted his shoulders working as cameraman on retire age.
But kids went back to normal here, because they were exposed to democracy.

Winston Churchill : “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
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This too is true. Perspective. The thing is you value democracy and the rule of law. In the inner-city elites in developed countries people born there don’t value democracy, knowing nothing else and they happily give away their rights and freedoms and obsess over trivialities like switching banks to find one that invests less in fossil fuels like that would achieve anything. Social media amplifies the stupidity of these people who don’t know history and don’t think for themselves: they think what they currently ought to think. The COVID-19 pandemic was a refreshing fact imposition with measurable benefits for certain logical steps and political manipulation exposed for what it is. Certain trades like medicine and engineering have always had refreshing stabilizing reality feedback to the practitioners in healed or dead bodies, condemned buildings or bridges that we take for granted. Farming is the same: wheat doesn’t have pronouns. The universities permitted this contagion and then fomented it. Occasionally there is a vice-chancellor with the courage to make a stand but mostly it’s business as usual.
 
So much of this is what I've been thinking and formulating for a long time, I believe social media has corroded minds like nothing else. I think the view that it crumbles institutions, and that institutions are necessary for the continued cohesion of a society which is prosperous is completely true. People need shared causes to remain harmonious, and adversity serves as a shared cause for societies struggling towards economic stability. Once that is reached, there have to be other things which hold society together. As Madison observed, the tiniest things become divisive if they are allowed to. Social media magnifies dissention. America has lots of inequality now, but these are not universally shared causes -- they are limited to those who are directly affected by them. You have to replace national adversity with shared universal causes, or at least institutions which engender a sense of meaning and are a positive contribution towards life. Morality is a continual striving so a moral society shares a certain amount of unity, but morality has become weaponized by both sides of the partisan political divide, and social media has become a tool to burrow that divide deeper into the daily lives of individuals, but behind it is a power struggle, and, ultimately, money flowing into the coffers of power brokers. This was not how our democracy was designed.
 
Richard G said:
This too is true. Perspective. The thing is you value democracy and the rule of law. In the inner-city elites in developed countries people born there don’t value democracy, knowing nothing else and they happily give away their rights and freedoms and obsess over trivialities like switching banks to find one that invests less in fossil fuels like that would achieve anything. Social media amplifies the stupidity of these people who don’t know history and don’t think for themselves: they think what they currently ought to think. The COVID-19 pandemic was a refreshing fact imposition with measurable benefits for certain logical steps and political manipulation exposed for what it is. Certain trades like medicine and engineering have always had refreshing stabilizing reality feedback to the practitioners in healed or dead bodies, condemned buildings or bridges that we take for granted. Farming is the same: wheat doesn’t have pronouns. The universities permitted this contagion and then fomented it. Occasionally there is a vice-chancellor with the courage to make a stand but mostly it’s business as usual.
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I don't know about that....I am affiliated with a public university with probably 10 Vice Chancellors/student (yes, this is hyperbole but it's the way it feels). No way any of these people would be considered "brave".
 
I've been saying for years that each generation is more stupid than the one before it. No one seems to care.

PF
 
Richard G said:
Social media amplifies the stupidity of these people
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Here is no totally smart or totally incapable people.

I can't make money, for example. In the opposite, I don't know any politician starving on bellow poverty line pension.

Social media doesn't do anything special. I'm totally agree, it is just an amplifier under specific tuning verified by the owners.

Current situation in USA (and Canada) is result of outsourcing for corporate profit. Good for developing countries, bad for simpleminded folks here. I realized it around 2003, first year living here.
Young dude at cash register tossing fancy, discounted clothes at mall in GTA. With some crappy wage pay for this.
In the opposite, my 60 YO colleague told me yesterday how at age of sixteen he started buying and trading hotrods, just by working at café in prairies province.
 
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