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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Well, consider "whiny" is perhaps an understatement, or a proxy for other things. What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality? As an example, I really can't trust any news source for anything that is said about Trump. They can basically say whatever they want, because half the country is ready to believe it, and they have tons of precedent to draw on from other new sources doing the same thing.

And the same thing happens in my everyday life, too, when dealing with all my friends and loved ones. It's a complete uphill battle for me to try to communicate to anyone that they're being a conspiracy theorist crazy person, and ultimately I end up sounding like the conspiracy theorist because I'm going against the grain. It's hard enough to argue against a Gish gallop, but even worse when there's precedent for the Gish gallop, and everyone dogpiles on board, and there's a whole industry devoted to that one Gish gallop.

edit: I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.

What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality?

What people?

Most normies are on Twitter for sports news, maybe a favorite celebrity, and possibly something location specific, and don’t check it every day. The whining- and the people who pay attention to it- is a very small percentage of the total.

Normies get their news and opinions from sources that are downstream of it, a lot of time. George Floyd and the response to it has to be a central example, I would think. Tik-tok lefties may be a minority of the population, but if they start evangelizing to normies in real life, and get mass media backup for their evangelizing, that's more than enough to create false beliefs in an outright majority.

Well, I think that sort of thing trickles down to the normies, too. If there's this ambient level of crazies constantly spouting "Trump's insane, Trump's going to kill us all, Trump's going to usher in a second holocaust, Trump cheated his way into the presidency", at some point the normies start to believe it. It has become truth to anyone who doesn't pay really really close attention or at least have some source of information that doesn't fall in line, because of this onslaught of one-sided information coming from sources that were considered reliable prior to Trump's presidency. Like, my cousins are those sports news people, and they are pretty checked out of world events, but even they believe Trump is the complete worst, tacitly.

@gattsuru had it right with Pyramid and the Garden. I thought Scott elaborated on the part where a sufficiently advanced defense also looks like a conspiracy theory, but it wasn’t in Epistemic Learned Helplessness. Maybe Prospiracy Theories counts?

Edit: JulianRota found the real part you were looking for while I was typing this. I really appreciate that we have so many users willing to pore over the sacred texts for that one thing we remembered seeing.

That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.

Thanks! I kept thinking of The Pyramid and the Garden and kept combing through it to try to find it, but it is funny that it's actually from Scott's post about this exact topic!

What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality?

Have you considered that you’re affected by the same thing? Honestly everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy theory to me. Maybe this is just evidence that everyone’s brain is broken.

  • -12

everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy

Don't do this. Its antagonistic phrasing. There are better ways to get your point across.

I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.

Maybe the ACT post Contra Kavanaugh on Fidism? Or SCC The Pyramid and the Garden?

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