[ExI] Study of social media behavior must be 'crisis discipline'

[William Flynn Wallace]

Before the web, a parent could only infect his own family with prejudices,
biases, myths and other superstitious behaviors and ideas.  Now they can
infect the entire world.  I am reading 'In Gods We Trust, the Evolutionary
Landscape of Religion'.

For me, it's practically a college course in evolution, which I needed.
Very high level book by a cultural cognitive anthropologist, a new type to
me.

"Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general
psychological propensity to reduce cognitive dissonance by ignoring or
reappraising information that is contrary to one's views.  It is the direct
cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally
apply to ordinary communications.  If faith is, in part, willingness to
suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in
faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction, but become
even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or
contradiction.  Apparently disconfirmed religious beliefs show only the
superficiality of one's current interpretation and point to an even deeper
but more mysterious truth."

So how does one lose one's beliefs?  Challenging them can make them
stronger.

(Not finished - more later)   bill w

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 8:14 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> ...> On Behalf Of BillK ...
>
> >...These platforms are driven to maximize engagement and profitability,
> not to ensure sustainability or accurate information—and the vulnerability
> of these systems to misinformation and disinformation poses a dire threat
> to health, peace, global climate and more.
> --------------
> ...
>
> Ja.  The great challenge of our times is finding ways to promote health,
> peace, global climate and all that stuff while still making a pile of cash.
>
>
> >... unable to stem the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation” that has hindered
> widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines...
>
> The mainstream media did itself no favors.  After the fact, we find out
> that covid might really have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, regardless of how
> hard the media worked to convince us otherwise, and that other medications
> might have been effective against covid during the time the vaccine was
> being developed.  The mainstreamers' credibility will take years to recover
> lost ground.
>
>
> ----------
>
> >...Ohh,  Somebody's noticed that social media might just be destroying
> society..........
>
> BillK
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Social media is certainly fracturing society into smaller pieces which may
> or may not work well together.  The mainstream media long for a return to
> when they controlled the message to the public.  That day will never come
> again.
>
> spike
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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