From: jimruttshow8596
The ability to make sense of the world, known as sense making, is foundational for collective decision-making and action-taking in society [02:00:00]. Currently, humanity faces significant challenges such as environmental problems, war, and infrastructure issues, all of which are fundamentally coordination issues [01:35:00]. Effective coordination necessitates collective sense making [02:02:02]. However, the contemporary communication ecosystem presents unprecedented obstacles to this process [07:33:00].
Evolution of Communication Ecosystems
Historically, human communication has always been intertwined with individual or “agentic” interests, making it hard to decouple true information from attempts to influence [08:44:00]. The concept of narrative warfare and information warfare is thousands of years old [09:12:00]. As media technology advanced, the capacity for effective influence increased, from the written word to the Gutenberg press and then various forms of broadcast media [09:28:00]. Those who controlled broadcast media wielded unprecedented influence over the entire population, leading to efforts to capture and influence broadcasting for power [09:43:00].
A significant phase change occurred around 2004-2005, when the economics of online information shifted [18:14:00]. Before this period, most quality online information was paid, aligning providers with users to deliver value efficiently [17:56:00]. However, as platforms and bandwidth became cheap enough, services could be fully funded by advertising alone [18:17:00]. This created a new dynamic where the business model became aligned with maximizing user engagement and time spent online [18:39:00].
Characteristics of the Current Ecosystem
The current information environment is characterized by several key features:
Fractured Information Landscape
Unlike the era of three major TV networks where most people received news from shared sources, today’s communication ecosystem is a “cacophony of voices” [07:02:00]. This fragmentation means individuals can spend hours online without seeing a single piece of news in common with others [11:09:00]. Consequently, there is often “no shared reality basis” for people to even discuss issues, making democracy unable to function effectively [11:16:00]. This leads to internal enmity and in-group/out-group dynamics that drive civil breakdown [11:50:00]. The shift from broadcast to internet allowed “everyone to put out their own stuff,” but with billions of search results, curation by algorithms became central [12:21:21].
Profit Motives and Engagement Algorithms
Digital platforms are businesses whose models rely on selling advertising, which is maximized by increasing user engagement, primarily time on site and sharing [13:43:00]. To achieve this, powerful machine learning algorithms curate content uniquely for each individual (“n equals one optimization”) by appealing to emotional triggers and cognitive biases [14:20:00]. This process inadvertently leads to people becoming “more biased and everyone gets more emotionally hijacked” [15:01:00]. While not explicitly designed to radicalize, this profit-driven maximization of engagement is an externality that pushes people towards more extreme views [16:11:00].
Dopamine Hijacking and Addiction
The algorithms leverage the brain’s reward system, particularly dopamine, which is associated with motivational networks and “feels good, do it again type dynamics” [22:02:02]. Similar to how fast food exploits the evolutionary desire for salt, fat, and sugar, social media extracts “hypernormal stimuli” from social interactions, devoid of the natural context that would make them adaptive [23:17:00]. This leads to “dopamine exhaustion” and despair, mirroring the effects of drug addiction [20:10:00]. Addiction is a key measure of societal unhealth, and the current system of photon-mediated, personalized, addictive stimuli is unprecedented [24:58:00]. The incentive structure of businesses drives them to manufacture demand and addiction to maximize customer lifetime value [24:43:00].
Rise of Tribalism and Erosion of Trust
The overwhelming complexity of information and the lack of shared reality push individuals towards tribalism [11:42:00]. People align with specific “in-groups” and their associated leaders, rather than attempting to make sense of complex issues themselves, leading to “epistemic nihilism” [15:37:00]. This environment fosters confirmation bias, where individuals evaluate new information based on their tribe’s stance rather than objective truth [01:13:18].
The old system of centralized authority (e.g., three TV networks) kept “absolute nonsense out of widespread public circulation” [01:12:35]. However, this authority has been eroded without being replaced, leading to phenomena like QAnon and anti-vaxxer movements gaining massive traction [01:12:03]. While distrust of institutional authority can be positive, it often leads to people merely shifting to a new authority rather than developing their own epistemic skills [01:18:13].
Unprecedented Scale and Complexity
The world is now globally coupled at high density, particularly since the 1980s, with globalization of trade and finance [04:42:00]. Humanity is also at or beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity, making the planet itself a global player [05:11:00]. The problems humanity faces are of “high dimensionality” and “complexity,” such as climate change or pandemics spreading on interconnected networks [05:54:00]. These complex issues are often not resolvable by formal analytical methods, requiring experimentation and heuristics [06:06:00].
Furthermore, many of the most influential phenomena today are “hyperobjects” – things that are not directly apprehendable by human senses, such as climate change, world hunger, AI risk, or market dynamics [04:53:00]. This means people lack a “felt visceral experience” of these issues, making them harder to grasp intuitively [05:40:00]. The combination of scale and complexity has rendered individual sense making, regardless of intellect or education, “inadequate to the task” [04:50:02].
Challenges and Solutions
The current ecosystem fosters both “conflict theory” (intentional harm for game theoretic purposes) and “mistake theory” (unintended externalities of solutions) [05:10:00]. Solutions to problems often create new, unforeseen problems due to partial sense making [02:34:00]. The challenge is to anticipate externalities and integrate them into design processes [05:36:00].
Addressing Bad Faith Discourse and Misinformation
The information ecology is polluted by both intentional “bad faith discourse” (sharing known falsehoods) and unintentional sharing of genuinely believed but incorrect information [01:17:20]. While proving intent is difficult, identifying bad faith discourse (where the communicated signal doesn’t match the sender’s belief) is seen as a crucial first step [01:36:26].
Individual and Institutional Responses
At the individual level, a commitment to a direct relationship with reality is crucial, fostering a “sacred oath” to be dubious of models of reality rather than treating them as absolute truth [01:21:15]. This requires developing a “bias checker” within oneself and being skeptical of strong emotions like outrage or certainty, particularly regarding in-group identity [01:21:55]. Learning about narrative warfare, rhetorical techniques (like Russell Conjugation or Lakoff framing), and data cherry-picking can help individuals become less susceptible to manipulation [01:22:31].
Practical individual actions include:
- Removing social media apps from phones to reduce continuous micro-targeting [01:24:01].
- Curating one’s own feed, unfollowing content that doesn’t enhance sense making, and intentionally following diverse viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum [01:24:10].
- Before sharing anything, asking “Is this actually good for the world to share this?” at least three times [01:25:07].
For institutional responses, the goal is to create structures that enable collective intelligence without relying on a single, corruptible authority [02:55:00]. This includes:
- Facilitating Dialectical Conversations: Hosting discussions between earnest, dissenting expert thinkers on complex topics, guided by facilitators who understand the subject [01:27:47]. The aim is to identify areas of agreement (knowns), disagreement (unknowns), and the reasoning behind different weightings, rather than winning debates [01:28:27].
- “Meta-News” and Narrative Assessment: Analyzing the landscape of narratives on polarized, consequential topics [01:30:21]. This involves “steel-manning” each narrative (making the best argument for it) to foster understanding, breaking narratives into individual propositions, assessing supporting evidence, and identifying falsifiable claims or mere conjecture [01:30:45]. This process helps people learn propositional logic and calibrate their confidence [01:31:53]. It also exposes how different sources use narrative and info weapons and spin [01:32:46].
- Transparent Epistemic Processes: Showing the process of how sense making assessments are made, including the data and epistemic models used, to increase transparency and allow individuals to learn [01:34:40]. This is akin to an “optimized public education” for civic engagement [01:34:28].
The Need for Collective Intelligence and Epistemic Capacity
The ideal is a system where the “many coordinating with each other actually produces higher quality results than just a few being able to control” [01:06:15]. This requires harvesting collective intelligence and developing a “memetic immune system” that inoculates people against cognitive and emotional hijacking [01:06:42].
Historically, democracies emerged from “cultural enlightenments” that fostered values like education, formal logic, rhetoric, history, emotional regulation, and the Socratic method (taking others’ perspectives and seeking shared understanding) [03:59:00]. The American founding fathers emphasized the need for high-quality universal public education and an independent “fourth estate” (news) as prerequisites for democracy [04:02:00]. The education system must equip citizens to understand government and regulatory capture [04:24:00].
The challenge is to foster an environment where people are comfortable with uncertainty, acknowledging that “I don’t know” is a crucial phrase in human collaboration [01:00:30]. This contrasts with the “excessive certainty” that leads to premature action or rigid adherence to beliefs [00:58:16]. A mature relationship with certainty involves being open to new data while having enough confidence to act when inaction also has consequences [00:58:40].
This cultural shift towards better communication capacity, transparent epistemology, and shared understanding can lead to a “recursive process” where better systems of collective sense making and choice making foster the development of individuals [01:14:00]. This is essential to prevent a regression to autocracy, which, while easier to coordinate, lacks the robustness and adaptability of truly participatory governance [01:05:04]. The challenge is to “re-drive a cultural enlightenment” in the face of the current impact of technology on societal values and behaviors and postmodern trends [01:10:54].