Comment by 2devnull
2 years ago
>”It is a conspiracy theory of course (and therefore wrong, of course), but some people are of the opinion that somewhere within the vast unknown/unknowable mechanisms of government, there are forces that deliberately slice the population up into various”
What you are talking about is called polling or marketing. It’s structural, not a conspiracy. It’s inherent to most all statistical analysis, and everyone uses statistics.
Take the temporal relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the culture war battles (as can be seen on Google trends).
It is physically possible for a media campaign to be launched to increase the amount of discussion of such topics, which gets the public fired up and arguing with each other, leaving them less attention to pay attention to things like the issues surrounding Occupy Wall Street. Whether this actually happened is an epistemological matter, but it is not polling, and it is not mere marketing, though one could frame it as a kind of marketing: "here are some things to fight over, plebs....are you interested in doing so?".
And this is just one instance. And, defending a claim of nonexistence is essentially impossible, especially when the matter is largely subjective.
I don’t deny that conspire over pr campaigns happens. What I’m saying is that the same thing happens as a side effect of marketing and polling, in the open with no conspiracy involved. Groups are addressed and in doing so group identities are reinforced which eventually leads to conflict and competition between those groups. Social media, one currently hot area of the ad business, is a great example. To increase ad sales platforms like x (formerly Twitter) optimize engagement which on a technical level means making people angry, typically by culture war content. Gansta rap is another example where marketing just sort of organically lead to a genre of deleterious (for society) music that glorified and thereby exacerbated social problems like prostitution and drug sales. No conspiracy needed, just record companies marketing to white suburban teens who desired authentic sounding ghetto-music.
Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged? There are structural reasons that can be proven to exist (e.g. engagement metrics) which explain the phenomenon. Occam’s razor.
> Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged?
Why people do the things they do is a good question. For example: why do you speak as if you are omniscient, and perfectly rational, simultaneously? I appreciate that is the norm of the culture we grew up in, but then so was racism ~20 years ago.
Figure that one out and maybe you will be on your way to figuring out your question, and perhaps a large swath of the other outstanding mysteries of "reality".
Can I get some Meme Magic (or radio silence) now? ;)
The conspiracy theory is also a form of craziness/utter failure of theory of mind. The same sort which is determined that <current given leisure> is specifically intended distraction from <pet issue that only they really care about>. It was seen across the spectrum. The old bizarrely specific noughties chestnuts like <reality TV/the war in Iraq>.
Which in some cases results in self-fulfilling prophecies like the "footloose church" which believes that dancing is driving young people away from the church instead of the church's own behavior.
Technically, you are describing how your mind ("you", to you) has interpreted the symbols above. The way you have done it is one way, the way I do it is another.
For example, most people think in True/False binary: a proposition is either True, or False. If it is an extraordinary proposition, then it "requires" extraordinary evidence, and if "no" extraordinary evidence is available, then it "is" False. "LITERALLY" FLAWLESS "LOGIC" FOR THE WIN!
But if one's thinking is less simplistic (there are various superior gradients above this default approach), the situation "is" (appears, thus "is") very different.
This can easily be realized if the topic of discussion was abstract: psychology, logical fallacies, etc....but if the topic of discussion is an object level, ~"culture war" topic, this knowledge becomes inaccessible to the mind (similar to when a ChatGPT session becomes too long and the initial context (knowledge) has moved out of the active context window).
Humans are extremely interesting, I highly recommend studying their behavior, especially the behavior of the relatively more intelligent ones.