misinforming ourselves

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I set out to write a letter to friends who know Twitter and are Mastodon-curious. As I worked on it, I thought: What if the letter could serve as a starting point for anyone explaining Mastodon?” —Lee Lefever

“society: damn misinfo at scale is getting a bit out of hand lately. seems like a problem.
tech guys: i have invented a machine that generates misinformation. is that helpful?” —@Jacqueline

“The more I think about what went wrong with web search, it comes down to this: the internet companies did not ever come up with a workable definition of truth, or fealty to reality, or anything like it. What are the markers of fact in some text? They never figured that out. You cannot organize all the world’s information without that core concept. The chatbots are just making this failure plain (and weird).” —Alexis Madrigal

The boss has been pestering me to attend a leadership conference so I, completely jokingly, said, “A true leader would never sit in a audience being told what to do” and now half this office is in existential crisis. —Elle Gray

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity”

Bonhoeffer’s argument, then, is that stupidity should be viewed as worse than evil. Stupidity has far greater potential to damage our lives. More harm is done by one powerful idiot than a gang of Machiavellian schemers. We know when there’s evil, and we can deny it power. With the corrupt, oppressive, and sadistic, we know where we stand. You know how to take a stand.

But stupidity is much harder to weed out. That’s why it’s a dangerous weapon: Because evil people find it hard to take power, they need stupid people to do their work. Like sheep in a field, a stupid person can be guided, steered, and manipulated to do any number of things. Evil is a puppet master, and it loves nothing so much as the mindless puppets who enable it — be they in the general public or inside the corridors of power.

VISA’s founder’s vision of a global mega co-op

Stock markets do not measure the value of companies or their anticipated earnings. They measure belief of investors that someone will buy their shares for more than they paid for them. They measure greed, not value. In a sense, they are the worlds largest casinos.

Only a fool would think that capitalistic command-and-control organizations could ever produce an equitable, enduring free society. Only a greedy man would create them. Only an arrogant man would run them. Only a cruel man would perpetuate them. —Dee Hock, founder of VISA