Comment by mallowdram
1 day ago
The missing link to our epistemic collapse is language. The acceleration of language, which is arbitrary, accelerates language distortion. The contagion on social media is merely a symptom of the disease of language.
“Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118
acceleration? as in the literal speed at which we translate information through language?
Not translate it, simply transmitting it. This stuff is just arbitrary. we can say anything we want, it means nothing. Look at high speed conflicts now, each side accuses the other of being the same villain. It means we're saying nothing.
The initial conditions are arbitrary, very indirect perception. How we ever assumed we were communicating is quite strange. Everything is primate, every word is first a negotiation for status. Then control. Perhaps manipulation. That words words refer directly to anything outside of a momentary context is impossible. Plus every word isn't simply arbitrary, it's metaphors, and they separate things by attributes that are based in folk science/psychology. We basically have to unlearn and replace words.