“The gold standard is trust, not information” nicely sums it up. Human intelligence is so much more than algorithmic processing of big data (aka “AI”). But the general level of education has waned to such a low ebb that few folks think carefully enough to recognize this big fact. Thanks for committing to honesty. It is what any robust culture most needs and what this culture starves to meet. Every contribution helps - one hopes.
Ohtani hit 14 HRs so far this month. Pitched pretty well too.
Not sure how many Ted has hit, but it's a lot.
Part of the problem is that many people have never really wanted information.
Very smart people like Asimov (your ignorance is as good as my knowledge) and Mencken (never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people) wrote about this many decades ago long before the internet or many other factors Ted mentioned.
2 things- did Madonna really get sick and end up in an ICU? One of the biggest celebrities of the last fifty years. Judging by the lack of coverage of many media outlets, one has to wonder if it really happened.
Putin, Prizzy, and that whole coup thing. Suddenly every Opinion writer has to share theirs with you, because you know they're experts on all things Russian. A country that was, in Churchill's words, mostly an impenetrable mystery wrapped in this and that. We're drowning in content. It's all about the clickbait. NYT has so many Opinion writers now you can't even keep track of them all. Of course the new ones are mostly DEI hires. Ayn Rand, that bitch, got it exactly right with the Fountainhead. She predicted all of this.
We're in a serious quandary. The elites are self-interested. Always have been. They may or not be incompetent, that's largely irrelevant. They'll look after their own interests. But most people are rather stupid. George Carlin riffed on this decades ago, the average American's IQ and remember now half of them are stupider than that. It only seems like it's perhaps getting worse.
That college part? Most people never needed any such thing. The real education should start well before that. But they told millions that a college degree made you X number of dollars more than someone without one. So people listened and started going more than ever. Can't tell you how many people I've met who learned almost nothing in college. They knew nothing when they started. Those stats on $$$ never specified what colleges, what majors, what GPAs. Now we've got baristas and whatnot with college degrees. Never heard anyone in that situation with a REAL degree from a real school. Since I mentioned that word twice, real estate agents with degrees. So they can show you how well-rounded they are showing you closets and bathrooms. Ever chat philosophy or physics when you're looking for a place to live, whether renting or buying? Me neither.
It's also worth remembering that quality information has always cost money. A working man who bought a cheap newspaper every day was still shelling out a significant slice of disposable income over the course of a week.
The disaster happened in the late 90s when news outlets began offering website content on a free-but-advertising model. The public has been trained in subsequent decades to think news content should be free -- and you get what you pay for.
James Caan attributed his success to his father’s advice: “Look at what the crowd does - and do the opposite.” Here it’s more than just the crowd, it’s every system and incentive. And Ted delivers the heat again 🔥
Spot on, and grim. As a professor, I face that awful number 20 a lot, and it affects the faculty (such as we are) as much as the students. I feel that I can just, sort of, feel out our digital library systems to do my work with instincts honed in paper libraries, and even that is difficult. My students who have never know anything different, are trying to learn without the shaping tutelage of those wonderful structures of shelves and stacks, and (for all the benefits of digital access) there is a real intellectual cost, a contextlessness.
In journalism, outsource the editing and subedit functions, preferably off-shore, so that journalists and editors no longer know each other. Some Australian newspapers did this about a decade ago.
Perhaps another one to add to your list (No. 31): Censor and suppress any information that is contrary to the “elite agenda,” even if it is demonstrably true, and publicly shame and shout down the truth-teller to scare others from trying to expose the truth.
And willingly elect the most corrupt and senile president in US History- Joe Biden- who is bent on destroying America with millions of third world drug dealers and refugees from corrupt countries so they can do the same for America.
This trend has been going from the moment big companies learned how to use the internet. Every information of value has started to cost a lot of money. And this tendency was started by Elsevier who hijacked scientific publications. Retreating governments who apparently cannot understand the value of an educated populations have done nothing - for decades- to enable people to educate and emancipate themselves.
We’ve been heading for a new Medieval period for a while and it’s not going to stop. The key is that there is no authority on knowledge. Us educated people may laugh about a dumb journalist for a large British newspaper who - last year - spoke their surprise about the award going to an unknown blues artist - that was Bonnie Raid!! - but that person has the job and power of knowledge comes with it although they have no real knowledge.
Another interesting observation is that while China is going more 1984 with AI on every camera on every street corner, the West is going Brave New World where people are drowned in the river of crapology you described so well.
I am still naive enough to get disappointed by the stupidity of society and about things not working, breaking etc. Our Windows and Apple PC’s are less reliable than when XP was around!
And let’s not forget the unseen influencers that have ensured the world does nothing to stop climate change, a truth resulting from 150 years of quality scientific work. The real influencers are lobbyists and business associations and they do a million times more damage than that girl with the blown up lips and the pink tights. I guess you know about the big sugar misinformation scheme?
Take heart brotha. The critique is sharp and I’m feeling you on every point. But you of all people know that the latent human potential for truth and beauty will always present formidable opposition to the stifling forces afoot in culture, society and the economy. You know that because of jazz. Let the bastards try to baffle us with BS. Some people know better.
Treat the medical community like cigarettes. Start with no medical advertising. Zero , and that is a good first step to getting off cigarettes and the media merry go round
This article is very on-point and resonates with my experience. It reminds me of David Foster Wallace's work, which posits that in the (then) future (our present, clearly) information will become so voluminous and of questionable veracity that people will essentially have do meta fact checking by essentially relying on a handful of trusted sources to curate what they see to prevent drowning in nonsense. Neal Stephenson's novel Fall has a similar concept but more literal: the web of the 2040s and on becomes so polluted wealthy people *literally* pay low wage assistants to manually scrub their personal version of the internet they interact with, while everyone less fortunate just has their brains melted by a torrent of AI-generated spam, porn, propaganda and worse
Ted, while you do not explicitly say this, the list at least implies that all these phenomena are imposed top-down with malicious intent. Some, to me, appear emergent bottom-up, such as our consumption of short form content, or the rise of the influencer-class. Just humanity being human?
Fantastic list, and so much that I agree 💯 with. Thank you!
#31. When govt intel agencies secretly payoff hundreds of mainstream media editors, journalists and anchors to spread their propaganda in support of forever wars, intervention in foreign affairs and elections, and protect the interests of big oil and pharma, and at the same time discredit and minimize any dissenting opinions.
And treat scientific data as being just another opinion, or dismissing it, when it comes to treating infections like COVID.
“The gold standard is trust, not information” nicely sums it up. Human intelligence is so much more than algorithmic processing of big data (aka “AI”). But the general level of education has waned to such a low ebb that few folks think carefully enough to recognize this big fact. Thanks for committing to honesty. It is what any robust culture most needs and what this culture starves to meet. Every contribution helps - one hopes.
Ohtani hit 14 HRs so far this month. Pitched pretty well too.
Not sure how many Ted has hit, but it's a lot.
Part of the problem is that many people have never really wanted information.
Very smart people like Asimov (your ignorance is as good as my knowledge) and Mencken (never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people) wrote about this many decades ago long before the internet or many other factors Ted mentioned.
2 things- did Madonna really get sick and end up in an ICU? One of the biggest celebrities of the last fifty years. Judging by the lack of coverage of many media outlets, one has to wonder if it really happened.
Putin, Prizzy, and that whole coup thing. Suddenly every Opinion writer has to share theirs with you, because you know they're experts on all things Russian. A country that was, in Churchill's words, mostly an impenetrable mystery wrapped in this and that. We're drowning in content. It's all about the clickbait. NYT has so many Opinion writers now you can't even keep track of them all. Of course the new ones are mostly DEI hires. Ayn Rand, that bitch, got it exactly right with the Fountainhead. She predicted all of this.
We're in a serious quandary. The elites are self-interested. Always have been. They may or not be incompetent, that's largely irrelevant. They'll look after their own interests. But most people are rather stupid. George Carlin riffed on this decades ago, the average American's IQ and remember now half of them are stupider than that. It only seems like it's perhaps getting worse.
That college part? Most people never needed any such thing. The real education should start well before that. But they told millions that a college degree made you X number of dollars more than someone without one. So people listened and started going more than ever. Can't tell you how many people I've met who learned almost nothing in college. They knew nothing when they started. Those stats on $$$ never specified what colleges, what majors, what GPAs. Now we've got baristas and whatnot with college degrees. Never heard anyone in that situation with a REAL degree from a real school. Since I mentioned that word twice, real estate agents with degrees. So they can show you how well-rounded they are showing you closets and bathrooms. Ever chat philosophy or physics when you're looking for a place to live, whether renting or buying? Me neither.
It's also worth remembering that quality information has always cost money. A working man who bought a cheap newspaper every day was still shelling out a significant slice of disposable income over the course of a week.
The disaster happened in the late 90s when news outlets began offering website content on a free-but-advertising model. The public has been trained in subsequent decades to think news content should be free -- and you get what you pay for.
James Caan attributed his success to his father’s advice: “Look at what the crowd does - and do the opposite.” Here it’s more than just the crowd, it’s every system and incentive. And Ted delivers the heat again 🔥
Spot on, and grim. As a professor, I face that awful number 20 a lot, and it affects the faculty (such as we are) as much as the students. I feel that I can just, sort of, feel out our digital library systems to do my work with instincts honed in paper libraries, and even that is difficult. My students who have never know anything different, are trying to learn without the shaping tutelage of those wonderful structures of shelves and stacks, and (for all the benefits of digital access) there is a real intellectual cost, a contextlessness.
In journalism, outsource the editing and subedit functions, preferably off-shore, so that journalists and editors no longer know each other. Some Australian newspapers did this about a decade ago.
Perhaps another one to add to your list (No. 31): Censor and suppress any information that is contrary to the “elite agenda,” even if it is demonstrably true, and publicly shame and shout down the truth-teller to scare others from trying to expose the truth.
And willingly elect the most corrupt and senile president in US History- Joe Biden- who is bent on destroying America with millions of third world drug dealers and refugees from corrupt countries so they can do the same for America.
This trend has been going from the moment big companies learned how to use the internet. Every information of value has started to cost a lot of money. And this tendency was started by Elsevier who hijacked scientific publications. Retreating governments who apparently cannot understand the value of an educated populations have done nothing - for decades- to enable people to educate and emancipate themselves.
We’ve been heading for a new Medieval period for a while and it’s not going to stop. The key is that there is no authority on knowledge. Us educated people may laugh about a dumb journalist for a large British newspaper who - last year - spoke their surprise about the award going to an unknown blues artist - that was Bonnie Raid!! - but that person has the job and power of knowledge comes with it although they have no real knowledge.
Another interesting observation is that while China is going more 1984 with AI on every camera on every street corner, the West is going Brave New World where people are drowned in the river of crapology you described so well.
I am still naive enough to get disappointed by the stupidity of society and about things not working, breaking etc. Our Windows and Apple PC’s are less reliable than when XP was around!
And let’s not forget the unseen influencers that have ensured the world does nothing to stop climate change, a truth resulting from 150 years of quality scientific work. The real influencers are lobbyists and business associations and they do a million times more damage than that girl with the blown up lips and the pink tights. I guess you know about the big sugar misinformation scheme?
Take heart brotha. The critique is sharp and I’m feeling you on every point. But you of all people know that the latent human potential for truth and beauty will always present formidable opposition to the stifling forces afoot in culture, society and the economy. You know that because of jazz. Let the bastards try to baffle us with BS. Some people know better.
Treat the medical community like cigarettes. Start with no medical advertising. Zero , and that is a good first step to getting off cigarettes and the media merry go round
This article is very on-point and resonates with my experience. It reminds me of David Foster Wallace's work, which posits that in the (then) future (our present, clearly) information will become so voluminous and of questionable veracity that people will essentially have do meta fact checking by essentially relying on a handful of trusted sources to curate what they see to prevent drowning in nonsense. Neal Stephenson's novel Fall has a similar concept but more literal: the web of the 2040s and on becomes so polluted wealthy people *literally* pay low wage assistants to manually scrub their personal version of the internet they interact with, while everyone less fortunate just has their brains melted by a torrent of AI-generated spam, porn, propaganda and worse
Ted, while you do not explicitly say this, the list at least implies that all these phenomena are imposed top-down with malicious intent. Some, to me, appear emergent bottom-up, such as our consumption of short form content, or the rise of the influencer-class. Just humanity being human?
Fantastic list, and so much that I agree 💯 with. Thank you!
With all due respect – may I add one more…
#31. When govt intel agencies secretly payoff hundreds of mainstream media editors, journalists and anchors to spread their propaganda in support of forever wars, intervention in foreign affairs and elections, and protect the interests of big oil and pharma, and at the same time discredit and minimize any dissenting opinions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
Next up: Ted's favorite 'clear streams' in 10 different categories. We're ready!