More Writing 2

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11. Part 8: Organizing Information

1. EarlG’s post-election 2024 Analysis, which struck me as the most accurate one I had seen. It was a very succinctly written piece. It has been in the back of my mind as I monitor reality daily.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219680430

Add my "what went wrong" take to the pile

Although you might find this one a bit different than the others.

In my opinion, this election established that the truth is now fully optional, and the voting public is mostly trapped inside algorithmic information bubbles. They don't know who to trust, so they find news sources that align with their existing prejudices, and then believe those sources to the exclusion of everything else.

In the years leading up to this past election, millions of online Americans were algorithmically microtargeted and bombarded with messages that were directly attuned to their specific fears. This messaging could be subtle or highly explicit -- whatever the algorithms understood would work best.

There's a reason why some people who voted for Trump said they thought he would preserve a woman's right to choose. There's a reason why many of the same people who voted for a constitutional right to an abortion in Florida immediately turned around and voted for the person who overturned Roe vs. Wade.

people's opinions were already baked in, and that is because people no longer expose themselves to information that might counter what they already believe.

Traditional campaigning is still important, but this election may show that it is no longer enough, on its own, to overcome misinformation peddled on an industrial scale.

it seems that what does break through people's information bubbles is some kind of massive change, a big shocking event -- like the election that just happened, for example. It may give us a chance to reset the playing field.

2. We seem to be a fairly ahistorical society & many of us struggle with memory and retention on a daily basis as well. Some of it is cognitive offloading from overuse of the net. These are three articles I have noted over the years.

2a. A tongue-in-cheek piece I found on Psychology Today written by a former FBI officer, Jack Schafer:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/let-their-words-do-the-talking/201712/looped-linear-thinking

Looped Linear Thinking
I became frustrated when I explained a concept. I identified the concept in general terms and then dissected the concept into its component variables. To determine if the students understood the concept, I presented a parallel situation and asked them to use the same strategies they used to explain the first situation to explain the second situation. I got blank stares. One of the students stated that he did not know how to explain the second situation because the second situation was different from the first situation. I told him that although the second situation may be described using different words, the underlying fact pattern was the same. I asked him to use the same strategies he used to explain the first situation to explain the second situation since both situations have parallel fact patterns. Again, a blank stare. I discovered that millennials cannot transfer concepts they learned to explain one situation to explain a parallel situation. They focus on one task, loop around until they master the skills required for that task, and move on to the next task, loop around and master the skills required for the second task and so on without recognizing that the skills mastered in a previous task can be applied to a future task that parallels a previous task.
Looped linear thinking leaves Millennials in a constant state of flux because they face each problem as a new and separate event requiring them to find a new solution to a problem instead of relying on problem-solving strategies they used in parallel situations in the past.

Critical Thinking
The ability to take a set of strategies to explain one concept or situation and transfer the same set of strategies to explain another concept or situation is called critical thinking. Looped linear thinking preempts critical thinking. The lack of critical thinking prevents effective problem solving not only in the classroom but in life.

2b. A piece which lead me to Nicholas Carr’s body of research. I found it when browsing as I was waiting for a blood transfusion my mom was undergoing to end. She was in treatment for cancer and I was trying to distract myself and stumbled on a website my ex used to read, Rigorous Intuition. It is an out there blog written by a Canadian author, Jeff Wells. It really struck me at the time (Sept 2020), mainly the exercepts from Carr, as I was familiar with Wells already:

https://rigint.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-are-monsters-weve-been-waiting-for.html?m=1

We know well enough now, by study and experience, how the Web's interruption system impairs focus, and compounds the cognitive switching cost of our online distractions. It's the subject of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains:

When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain.... That means our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we’re not at a computer. We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.

Whoa! Just a sec there, Joey Google. Maybe I can't live in your Cloud after all. Maybe we should rethink this entrainment of our brains towards trivia, while we can still meaningfully think.

Anyway, Carr again:

Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

Or let's try on Jean Baudrillard's words, from his 1985 essay "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," and see if they fit us in 2011:

[E]ach cultural and factual set must be fragmented, disarticulated, in order to enter the circuits, each language must be resolved into 0/1, into binary terms, in order to circulate no longer in our memory, but in the memories, electronic and luminous, of computers.

Our culture digitized is no longer our culture, but that of our machines. Our machine culture replaces our own, imperfectly remembers us, and tells us to forget ourselves. Paradise to some.

If a dumb machine - "dumb" like the nematode parasite that turns its host ant into a berry-mimic to spread its kind in bird feces - if a parasitical technology could infect its host with thoughts to disarm its opposition, I imagine they would be thoughts like, "why are we going to need ourselves," "we're going to have the easy life," and "you can never turn them off."

My rewired brain has its benefits. It's helped me to make associate leaps with greater confidence, even if some times that confidence has been unwarranted. But outsourcing my working memory has come at a high cost. There's the atrophied recall and attenuated attention span, and I don't believe that's entirely attributable to age and enviro-toxins. If it's true, and I think it is, that I learned more reading one book at a time than trying to read all books at once, then I'm just a chump in the idiot's kingdom called The Information Age.

2c. A pretty cool article onresearch done by a Professor Ryan Williams, who studies algorithms, on how a little memory is better than a lot of time.


2d. Accidental planetary brain (Noema):

2e. Many insights culled from the inimitable Yasha Levine’s work:




Post in progress..