The EAs were too “woke” and too concerned with appearances.
The EAs were too “woke” and too concerned with appearances.
This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (nationa... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
“The rationalist utopia is a power trip,”
Nate Silver • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
Yglesias argues that the progressive politics of the 2010s encouraged progressives to think of everything in catastrophic terms, making them less happy. In essence, he sees teenagers as having been prodded by political and media figures into adopting the same kind of doomer worldview espoused by people like Taylor Lorenz.
Noah Smith • Honestly, it's probably the phones
Without this expertise, he said he thought that the company had built incentives into the app that encouraged users and media outlets to write tweets and headlines that appealed to sensationalism instead of accuracy.
Michael Barbaro • Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes (Published 2020)
You could tell that the Manifest conference was a rationalist rather than an EA event because of the presence of people who were either considered unwoke (like Hanson, who told me he’d basically been canceled from EA events since a 2018 blog post in which he wrote sympathetically about the idea of redistributing sex to incels),
Nate Silver • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
- “One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware.”
The Point • Elite Education | The Point Magazine
It’s political and it’s cultural: At some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed
Michelle Goldberg • The Darkness Where the Future Should Be
Obviously ideas have always gained and lost popularity throughout history. But I think it’s fair to say the conditions that disrupt the so-called arc of progress have intensified beyond comprehension. Mass media’s emphasis on images and appearances has shifted the political discourse to a facile imitation of its former self.