SpaceXponential

...The dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the... See more

The notion of epistemic sanctions clarifies what we might really mean by “consensus” in the context of public discourse — universal mutual listening , rather than universal agreement.

“Universal mutual listening” happens when publishers compete on the basis of trustworthiness, instead of on the basis of ‘facts.’

Competing on the basis of ‘facts’

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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... See more

... I realized I associate art with gifts. You don’t mark a true gift with a monetary value. You don’t predict the rise and fall of that value. If an art is important to you, you want to hold onto it, instead of trading it with others. And if an art is to initiate a spiritual experience for an audience, it should not involve itself with... See more

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said: " The... See more

The metaphor of risk management creates good-faith discourse.

In a market, everybody knows their ideological opponents are making an honest effort to understand — or, l iterally paying for the luxury of not making that effort.

A market is a mechanism for establishing cross-ideological trust.

Note that Wall Street bulls never characterize bears as

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...“blockchain trust” can be defined as generalized trust, since it does not deal with personal relationships; it is a form of distributed trust, because the truth is ensured not by a centralized body but through a consensus of all the participants; it has both affective and cognitive aspects of trust, due to the fact that although human elements... See more