It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things.
It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership.
I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest.
And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code.
I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good.
I'm just not sure if the
1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?
It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership.
I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest.
And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code.
I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good.
I'm just not sure if the 1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?