I feel for you in empathizing for people's ability to just have what they want, but... I worry about it too. (I say all this with compassion and a non-confrontational tone.)
> The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them
No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be?
Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.
And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.
Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.
imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape.
Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3
> The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them
No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be?
Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.
And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.
Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.
imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape.
Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3
[1]: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146