In my post "The Biggest Threat to Progress" I articulated what felt like an original idea. It's not. Matt Yglesias describes the idea here:
"One of Stimson’s big findings is that public opinion operates like a thermostat that acts to bring the political system into equilibrium, stopping it from moving too far to the left or the right. So while the sharply liberal Mood of the early 1960s set the stage for the Great Society, the actual enactment of the Great Society sent it in a rightward direction. The 12 years of Reagan-Bush governance later pushed the Mood steadily leftward."
I'm quite happy with my post "The Dam of Free Speech," (it even got a retweet from Conor Friedersdorf!). I think the dam/flood metaphor works better for what I was describing in my "On Worshipping and Compression" post. I drew my ideas from Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics, but whereas he sees political views as an equilibrium (eg oppressor v. oppressed), I liken it to a default setting and a conscious effort to fight against it.
So the flood is the bad thing that humanity will do if left unchecked; for classical liberals it's authoritarianism, for conservatives it's barbarism, and for progressives it's exploitation. The dam is the thing that needs to be built and maintained so that the flood does not destroy us. So it might be liberalism, military/police/Christianity, or regulation/antiracism. I think a lot of cultural conflict comes from people protecting their dam from people who can't see the water on the other side and assume the dam people are just acting selfishly.
Amanda Ripley wrote that every conflict has the surface-level argument ("vaccine mandates are government overreach!") and the understory, which is usually fear. It's important to get to the understory to move past the conflict. Maybe another way of saying this is to ask "What is your flood?"
In a recent podcast, Steven Pinker brings up the topic of Wikipedia, and just how good it is at producing knowledge and attracting editors who value objectivity and truth. It made me think of Parts I and II of my posts on the Disinformation Funnel. How is it that something that allows anyone to write and edit has not become a major source of disinformation?
Pinker mentions their code of ethics all editors agree upon, similar to my journalistic oath I recommend in Part II. Plus they have some added checks and balances to incentivize some equilibrium. But I think the other answer may be that it's just not that powerful. Despite it being one of the most visited websites in the world, it's not something people use to prove their point. It's more useful than influential.
But maybe there is something there and the key to figuring out the disinformation problem is following the Wikipedia model.
In my post "Is Malcolm X Winning?" I talked about patents and how segregation cut Afrian Americans off from the social capital in white communities that led to a decrease in patents. Well, here's a cool analysis of a study about the impact prohibition had on patents. Banning alcohol didn't just make drinking illegal, it also banned saloons, which turned out to be a massive resource for social infrastructure.
My post about the biggest threat to liberalism being voter backlash faces a new test. This story in The Atlantic seems to think the Texas abortion near-ban will rally pro-choice voters to a Democratic victory in the mid term elections. If true, the biggest challenge to Republican dominance has been pro-life Republicans pushing unpopular policies.
My post about how Fox News and other fringe establishments became bottom feeders, picking up on the stories that mainstream outlets passed on. Now the same thing is happening on the left. Rolling Stone made a claim that a hospital was overwhelmed with ivermectin poisoned patients, which then got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc. Even though it's totally bogus and no one ever checked up on it. (Although, Scott Siskind demonstrates that the story gets even more complicated the more you dig).
My original worry was that mainstream outlets would lose credibility by passing on legit stories that were true but popular with fringe rightwing crowds. Now they're passing off their own crap. Race to the Bottomfeeders.
My post about bottomfeeders also related to my worries about screen time on my children. Recently, when I've been on my phone too much, I force myself to put it down. I've found that I often end up picking up my guitar instead. I also wrote a post about being a Xennial, meaning I remember the analog world even though I'm fully immersed in the current digital world. One way that manifests is that when I'm staring at my phone for too long, part of me feels that this isn't right. I don't think my children will ever feel that way; staring at screens has always been the norm for them.
So if they don't feel guilt about screen time, and never feel the need to put their phone down, does that mean they will never pick up a guitar? I'd be interested to know if fewer children are taking music lessons today.
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