That thing you say after you say some fucked up shit. I’m going deep in your asses this week.
Pause.
Do people actually have their own opinions on stuff? I am not totally sure. As the world turns and spins and increasingly complex topics are put forth into the collective zeitgeist, the matrix of opinions gets more complicated along with it.
If you have been reading along, you know I have posited at least three perspectives on the matter of well.. perspectives.
The tilting traditional political axis is tilting away from Left to Right into Top vs Bottom. This indicates a person’s stance on an issue, and their stances on issues are changing as technology liberates, but government control becomes more authoritarian.
We are entering a Neo-Truth world where the onslaught of misinformation no longer phases us. We optimistically adapt to our surroundings by creating new tools, or pessimistically take things at face value and get emotionally ripsawed by the media hype cycle.
Opinions are not binary, they exist on a spectrum. Nor does a person’s opinion on any one issue preclude that person’s opinion on another issue. Party lines are a myth, and society desperately needs a Thought Leader Diversity Matrix.
Opinions don’t easily fall into binaries. They are twisting and spinning through time, but they are also measured in degrees or gradients, or a confidence level on a spectrum. People in general may believe X or Y about a thing but it does not mean they are willing to proselytize for it on the podium of public opinion. There are, of course, many extreme examples of people believing in things so hardcore that they are able to convert more believers, or even push the Overton Window open wider so that previously extreme thoughts become normalized. Often, due to the exceptionalist nature of mainstream and social media, only the extreme points of view get the attention, which leads to the incorrect assumption by the public that more people hold an extreme belief than actually do.
That is US politics in a nutshell. People with extreme viewpoints bubble up to the surface of the conversation and posit ideas that everyone else has to now consider. Most people exist in the vague middle, more concerned with their own values than they are with niche platforms. So on any Overton Window of discussion, the distribution curve of how much they CARE about something will lean Gaussian.
So we are being presented with these issues, that may or may not be issues, with varying degrees of data backing them up, inciting varying degrees of passion from the populace.
All these things combine into a melting pot of beliefs. Every individual has its own little algorithm that they play out in their head and make decisions off. So, on each cell of the 2 dimensional diversity matrix, which show a person and their stance on a singular issue, there is another internal matrix, consisting of how strongly you trust the information that is available on the issue, which influences how strong your opinion is, against what your actual opinion is on the spectrum.
Each topic has its own data that is available to the public, whether they choose to find it or not. People often choose to only use the surface level data points and not “do their own research” so to speak. A very low confidence level may or may not necessarily dictate that the person cares deeply about a topic. There are many low confidence, high passion topics in society today. But, as I am going to posit at the end of this, the actual level of passion that people have is not has high as they might claim (or signal). In fact, I believe that people’s actions have shown pretty clearly what they think about certain topics in the past, and will continue to show what they think about certain topics in the future, regardless of what gets broadcast on media, as sides get chosen for big tent politics.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Climate Change
TikTok
Artificial Intelligence
Climate Change
99% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing change to the climate. Every democratic politician called climate change an “existential threat” to humanity in the past presidential election. 197 countries signed the Paris Climate Accord to introduce legislation to slow global warming. There is much data published on the topic. There is what I would call a high degree of trust from society that the data is correct and that we are collectively boiling our planet and if we don’t change course immediately, the planet we leave our kids with will be uninhabitable. Even if you don’t “believe” in climate change, you are acutely aware that it has been a disruptive political topic for a while now. High trust and high passion has led to high delegation of responsibility.
Actions from people don’t dictate this level of passion though. Sure, legislation has been sort of crafted, and there are people on the fringes who are actively seeking energy efficient appliances, using public transportation, turning off lights when not in use, and always trying to educate others. We all know who those people are, and my point is, they are not all of us. If we are all so collectively high trust and high passion about the topic, why do we think it is OK to “just” elect public officials and put the power in their hands? Especially when you consider the trust that we have for our public officials..
To an economist, humans are economic units that make decisions based on incentives. It is very clear that people don’t care about things as much as they let on. Which begs the questions: Who does care about these things? What are their incentives? How and why have they gotten people to have high trust and high passion without actually caring?
Let’s take this lens and apply it to other news stories that are currently breaking:
TikTok
Right now there is a war on TikTok that has sprung from a two different attack vectors. One is the general effect that it has on our children’s collective screen time and attention spans. The other is the fact that it is a Chinese run app, and there are fears that the platform might be a form of spyware giving sensitive information to the CCP. The data is very low right now, so trust (and opinions) are still developing. On the first point, maybe there is visible qualitative data that individual families can attest to, but there have been no published studies that I am yet aware of. On the second point, there is absolutely no visibility on what the CCP might potentially be doing with our data. My stance is that, while TikTok is very likely dumbing down a generation of kids through an annihilation of their attention spans, if the CCP wanted to use this platform for spicy blackmail on us, they could just as easily get access to other social media platform data (and they probably already do). It is actually of no consequence if we think this is a malicious attempt by China to attack us, because if we thought that we would simply make the conscience effort to stop using the app. By our own continuance to use it, we are conceding that we either don’t know or don’t care at the moment.
Either way, the passion that politicians are going to drum up over this is going to be extreme, and there will be some data that is provided at some point to prove the case. They are going to turn this low trust, low passion topic into a high trust, high passion topic that strong arms this into an emotional decision that is actually a vote on what the public thinks about China in general. Rustling up that support should not be difficult, but the ramifications in this day in age are significant. The current bill being proposed in congress is not a ban on TikTok at all, but a way “To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes.”
Foreign adversaries in this context are up to the definition of the State. If the Patriot Act was any indication, I would say that this bill grants the government unfettered access to any digital transaction they please. Conveniently, OFAC has already set a precedent claiming that crypto protocols can be considered people and thus foreign adversaries.
Trust and passion can be a powerful combination, so it matters not if the people “actually care”.
Artificial Intelligence
As I have discussed, there is a growing concern of AI doomerism that AI is going to take over the world and probably kill us some day. The data on this is obviously low. All we have is ChatGPT and its iterations that we have seen over the past several months as Open AI went from GPT 3.5 to 3.8 to 4.0. The changes have been revolutionary from a consumer perspective, but how do we know that these releases were not planned in such a way as to make the escalation of the AI’s progress look more exponential. There is no denying that AI has progressed to such a point as to be taken seriously, but there is no evidence that the trajectory is as steep as it has been made out to be.
The future of life institute has just published an open letter to pause all AI experiments that are using GPT 4.0 or greater, for the next 6 months. The letter has some unverified big name signatures, and brings to the main stage a level of passion that we must slow down AI to be able to understand it, so as to protect our future society.
Again, low data, low trust, but increasing in passion. The general public will soon play this out in their personal algorithms and decide which side of the fence they land on. Like TikTok, this could very well be a bipartisan bill in Congress. As the Left and Right begin to agree on certain topics, the real issue will become of Top vs Bottom. People won’t know what to think, but the high degree of trust and passion will sway them. When both sides of the government agree, that’s good, right? Plus, we don’t actually care, so putting our responsibility in the hands of our delegates is the smartest possible decision. (/s)
To summarize, the topics of society are becoming more complex as technology develops. The information we need to consider is not easy to understand and there are powerful unknown incentives out there trying to sway public opinion. The absence of information has to be taken as information, and theories should be falsifiable through empirical evidence. Actual truth becomes critically important as the types of decisions we make now have more ramifications. Left and Right are converging into a single Authoritarian figure, which is demonstrably anti-Tech and pro-surveillance. Thankfully, through tech, the degree with which we can understand truth will increase over time, we just have to make sure that that progress is not paused before we can develop the tools needed to exit the post-truth world and enter the Neo-Truth world.
Don’t sign your rights away if you have no empirical evidence to do so.