From: jimruttshow8596
The ability of humanity to coordinate effectively on a global scale relies fundamentally on collective sense-making and communication [01:35:00]. Many of the world’s most pressing issues, such as environmental problems, war, and infrastructure challenges, are ultimately coordination issues [01:35:00]. However, the current global communication infrastructure presents significant societal and technological challenges that impede effective sense-making and collective action.
The Problem of Communication Breakdown
The modern era is characterized by an unprecedented level of global coupling and high-density interconnectedness, particularly since the 1980s, driven by increased world trade and the globalization of finance [04:42:00]. Humanity is also at or beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity, making global coordination imperative [05:11:00]. This context amplifies the difficulty of coordination, which is already challenging even at a family level [05:27:00].
Current methods of collective sense-making are deeply flawed, leading to a state of “peak bad sense-making” [03:09:00]. On almost every consequential issue, people either have no idea what is true or hold fervently opposite beliefs, leading to intense polarization and civil tensions [03:09:00]. This lack of shared understanding contributes to a rapid civil breakdown [04:18:00]. Solutions derived from partial sense-making often fail due to geopolitical ramifications and active resistance from those whose interests are harmed [02:30:00].
Evolution of the Information Ecosystem
The current communications ecosystem was not intentionally designed but rather emerged and is evolving rapidly [06:37:00].
Loss of Shared Reality
In the past, with limited broadcast channels (e.g., three TV networks in the US), a significant portion of the population received news from the same sources, providing a common basis for discussion, even if they disagreed [06:47:00]. This has been replaced by a “cacophony of voices,” none holding high status across a large percentage of the population [07:02:00]. Today, individuals can scroll their social media feeds for hours without encountering a single common piece of news, creating a complete lack of shared reality [11:09:09]. This environment fosters intense internal enmity and in-group/out-group dynamics, making participatory governance impossible [11:50:00].
Perverse Incentives of Advertising-Based Models
The internet was initially envisioned as a tool to empower individuals and enhance democracy by removing the monopoly on information held by a few broadcasters [12:13:00]. However, a “phase change” occurred around 2004-2005 when falling costs of platforms and bandwidth made it possible to fully fund services through advertising [17:41:00]. This shifted the business model away from aligning with user value (providing information quickly) to maximizing user engagement and time spent online, as revenue became tightly coupled to time online [18:31:00].
Algorithmic Exploitation of Human Psychology
Social media platforms, using powerful machine learning and AI (more powerful than the AI that beat Kasparov in chess [25:52:00]), build detailed psychographic models of individual users based on their online behavior (clicks, shares, hover time) [13:14:00]. These algorithms then curate content uniquely for each user, optimizing for maximum engagement and time on site [14:56:00].
This optimization primarily appeals to emotional triggers and cognitive biases, as content that evokes fear or anger is more likely to capture attention [14:39:00]. The result is increased bias, emotional hijacking, and greater certainty in one’s own (often wrong) beliefs, while simultaneously increasing outrage [15:01:00]. Fake news, intentionally designed for high impact, spreads five or six times farther than true news [19:16:00].
Dopamine Hijacking and Societal Impact
The current communication system functions similarly to addictive substances. Just as processed foods exploit the natural dopamine response to salt, fat, and sugar, social media extracts “dopaminergic hits” from social interaction, devoid of the evolutionary benefits of real-world relationships [23:17:17]. This “dopamine hijacking” aims to maximize user engagement, making addiction a profitable outcome for businesses [24:36:00].
The widespread engagement in this behavior leads to “dopamine exhaustion” and despair, reminiscent of the effects of amphetamine addiction [20:18:00]. An increasing level of addiction in a society is an inverse indicator of its health [26:35:00]. This system empowers bad actors, including state and non-state entities, to easily push individuals further into existing trends, exacerbating information chaos and turning groups against each other [16:44:00].
Overcoming the Challenges
Addressing these challenges in current civilization methods and systems requires a multi-faceted approach, focusing on individual resilience and institutional innovation.
Individual Actions
Individuals can take steps to mitigate the negative effects of the current information ecosystem:
- Doubt Over-devotion to Models: Cultivate a direct relationship with reality, understanding that any model of reality is an imperfect compression, not reality itself. Avoid attachment to models as sacred truths, allowing for openness to better understandings [01:20:27].
- Recognize Bias and Emotional Traps: Be dubious of strong emotional reactions (outrage, certainty, tribal identity) and consciously question if one is being emotionally or cognitively hijacked [01:21:55]. Developing an internal “bias checker” is crucial [01:22:11].
- Learn Info Warfare Tactics: Understand common techniques of narrative warfare, such as cherry-picking data, spin, and rhetorical framing, to become less susceptible to manipulation [01:22:31].
- Seek Dissenting Earnest Views: Actively seek out and understand perspectives from people who hold different, but seemingly earnest, viewpoints [01:23:01]. This dialectic process can lead to higher quality understanding than singular positions [01:23:17].
- Curate Information Consumption: Remove social media apps from phones to reduce constant micro-targeted dopamine drips [01:24:01]. Intentionally curate feeds to follow diverse views across the political and ideological spectrum [01:24:19].
- Think Before Sharing: Before sharing content online, ask three times if it is genuinely good for the world to share it, acknowledging one’s role as an actor in shaping the epistemic commons [01:25:07].
Institutional and Systemic Approaches
Given the unprecedented scale and complexity of current global issues, individual sense-making alone is often insufficient [04:59:00]. New institutional structures and processes are needed:
- Facilitating Dialectic Conversations: Host dialectic conversations (not debates) between leading earnest thinkers on highly consequential and debated topics [01:27:50]. The goal is to identify areas of agreement (knowns), disagreement (unknowns), and different weightings of probabilities, allowing listeners to understand how experts derive their conclusions [01:28:27].
- Meta-News Analysis: For polarized and consequential topics, conduct “meta news” assessments [01:30:21]. This involves identifying dominant narratives, clustering related news sources, and then “steel-manning” each narrative to help people understand why others are compelled by them [01:30:45].
- Exposing Narrative Weapons: Transparently show where different sources employ narrative and info weapons, statistical cherry-picking, or put spin on information, regardless of political or ideological alignment [01:32:46]. This helps people develop a “memetic immune system” [01:06:42].
- Transparent Epistemology: When presenting findings or assessments, show the process of what data was factored and what epistemic models were used. This transparency allows others to learn and replicate the sense-making process, fostering greater civic engagement [01:33:40].
- Reforming Education: Prioritize a “science of government” in universal public education, encompassing history, game theory, and political theory, to equip citizens with the knowledge to understand and bind government actions [01:42:02].
- Exploring New Governance Models: Consider new institutional structures like liquid democracy which allows individuals to proxy their votes to more informed experts who align with their values, while retaining the ability to reclaim their vote or change proxies at any time [00:47:09]. This acknowledges that not everyone can be an expert on all complex issues [00:45:50].
The overarching goal is to foster a cultural enlightenment that enables a “collective intelligence” to emerge [01:06:11]. This involves making people less susceptible to emotional and cognitive hijacking, improving individual epistemology, and promoting a culture of respectful dialogue that seeks shared understanding, ultimately leading to higher quality collective sense-making and choice-making [01:07:43].