Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza
Belief in NHI
Jubal:
--- Quote ---the most successful approaches to helping individuals escape a rabbit hole aren’t comprised of simply explaining why they are wrong
--- End quote ---
I would like to have this pop up as a reminder for users (sometimes including mysefl) on a lot of social media sites :)
I think the mythmaking thing is interesting here partly because it seems to intersect with both community and isolation in odd ways - and maybe needs us to rethink the extent to which we make those things into a community/isolation dichotomy, because actually people can in a sense be very isolated within communities if the structure of the community doesn't include enough lateral links. To think of it as a network, a centre-and-spokes network where there's a few highly central nodes but limited contact in the outer ring (say, a community with a very strong church and almost no other organisations and few external links) is going to be vulnerable to misinformation because it's very, very reliant on those central-node people brokering information to everyone else, whereas more lateral links across which information can move and more external links beyond the network make it more likely that there'll be other inputs going on and can create a broader sense of collective knowledge that has reinforcement other than at the top.
BeerDrinkingBurke:
That's an interesting way of looking at it. So the issue at times might not be 'isolation' in the sense of 'feeling lonely and wanting to connect with like minded individuals', but 'isolation' in the sense of a community's structure preventing a diversity of inputs.
Perhaps here (and I'd need to read that book) we have one issue with conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The more you connect with this new source of interesting information, the more you can end up shutting down alternative inputs yourself, by spending less time with friends, etc. So there is some kind of self-reinforcing / feedback loop there with respects to information / networks.
Jubal:
Yes, that sounds about right.
I guess the converse case would also be interesting to look at: people who are very socially isolated but don't have any of these kinds of issues. I'd guess some of those cases are people who don't have such big stress/neuroticism tendencies, but also it'd be interesting to know if e.g. diversity of non-human information sources contributed to people being less likely to adopt conspiracist beliefs for people with few human connections: to what extent do different non-human information sources "count" compared to having varieties of human connections?
--- Quote ---Perhaps here (and I'd need to read that book) we have one issue with conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The more you connect with this new source of interesting information, the more you can end up shutting down alternative inputs yourself, by spending less time with friends, etc. So there is some kind of self-reinforcing / feedback loop there with respects to information / networks.
--- End quote ---
This feels very plausible to me.
dubsartur:
Nick Pelling the Cipher Mysteries guy has a few recent posts on the related phenomenon of communities which form around cold cases and cipher mysteries: https://ciphermysteries.com/2021/09/19/charles-gazzam-hurd-and-the-somerton-man
--- Quote ---OK, even though I’ve assembled all the information on Charles Gazzam Hurd in one place above, the stuff that actually interests me here isn’t Hurd himself, but rather the swirl of stuff around ‘The Disappeared’. For me, a much better question would be about why so many people are interested in identifying John / Jane Does.
Is this about closure, doing good, being helpful, connecting to (often long dead) people in a disconnected modern world? Is it about becoming interested in something, and then repeatedly scratching some kind of previously-unnoticed research itch that never quite scabs over? Is it about just finding an online community that you can settle into, safe in the knowledge that there really aren’t any terribly bad theories? Or is it about being nosy, opinionated, mouthing off, bickering, forum fighting, disagreeing, and occasionally trolling relatives and descendants?
--- End quote ---
BeerDrinkingBurke:
Thanks for sharing. It definitely seems to have some similarities.
--- Quote ---
In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd’s family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn’t help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?
--- End quote ---
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version