Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Untruth and Consequences"

It's Sunday again, so we go back in time to a random entry from the past. This one's from March of 2021: "Untruth and Consequences" 

This was very close to the 1-year anniversary of the pandemic being officially declared, with all the disruption that it led to. The entry itself, though, is a riff off a Cracked article about disinformation.

The link is, unsurprisingly, still there; disinformation is still rampant. Much of the entry, and the article, is as relevant as ever, if you discount the references to pandemic restrictions.

So I just want to point out a few things that slipped through the cracks (pun intended) last time.

Online Groups Are Getting Really Weird

What I might not have been clear about is that in the 30 or so years that I've been online in one form or another, there has never been a time when online groups weren't sometimes weird. Though things may have been easier to deal with in the days before everything was commodified, advertised, bowdlerized, centralized, and sanitized.

Yoga And New Agey Types Are Getting Into It

Humans usually find it easier to forgive or excuse the misdeeds of their in-group while magnifying those of their out-group. It's the difference between, say, "Boys will be boys" and "Lock up that miscreant for life." Or, "A [person in minority] stole my car stereo once, so I hate all [people in minority]" and "Almost all mass murderers and serial killers are white guys, but that doesn't mean white guys are mass murderers and serial killers."

It's important to guard against this tendency, I think. It's not a matter of "both sides are bad," but of recognizing that every demographic group has both good people and assholes in it. Except Nazis, of course. They are, by definition, bad.

The point is, if you're on the political left, for example, you might be tempted to think that accepting misinformation is tied to consuming right-wing media all the time, when the left (and make no mistake, New Age is definitely "left") is just as susceptible to faulty group-think.

The reverse is also the case.

I noted this in the original entry, but the above expands on the idea:

You won't hear me say "both sides are bad," but what I am saying is that bullshit doesn't take political sides; it's an equal-opportunity brain rotter.

I'll end this Revisited entry with what I still feel is the most important point, from my own perspective:

Once you start believing one unsupportable thing, you can be open to believing more. That's one reason I hammer on about science.

But hey, at least, this week, I didn't land on one of my infamous early short-ass blog entries. (In my defense, I think those happened before the Newsfeed existed.)