Happy ideas for sale. Mediums and palm readers have always known what
western politicians only recently grasped - that people don't care
about truth, they care about feeling good about what they believe.<p>"Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, blue skies from
pain" [1]<p>Did you exchange cold comfort for change? You can believe anything
you like for a price.<p>Williams proffers that bullshit, and believing crazy things is a
mutual stroking behaviour of a mass huddled together in the comfort of
collective ignorance, and that within that group there are rewards for
dreaming up the most soothing stories. He extends this beyond Harry
Frankfurt's position to say that an entire "economy of bullshit"
exists. and that its trade could be "an economic good".<p>This is why in Plato, Shakespeare, Cicero and so many luminaries, it
is always the _mad_ (the fool) who deliver the truth. Only despised
outsiders who have no skin in the collective self-delusion game are
able to break the norms and deliver the unwelcome message. Further,
(Foucault, Cassandra etc) there's a market in silencing truth speakers
who rock the boat of profitable rationalisation.<p>[1] Pink Floyd
[2] On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt
Huh, very interesting. Quote from the twitter thread linked in a sibling comment:<p>> When preferences for beliefs are widespread, this constraint gives rise to <i>rationalization markets</i> in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs in exchange for money and social rewards such as attention and status.<p>As an example: when people would really like to believe in an afterlife due to fear of death but cannot find evidence for such an afterlife themselves, people and organisations will pop up to cater to this belief in various ways and the most "believable" offer will win out in the long term. This seems obviously true, though I had never considered it in these terms before. I wonder what the other obvious occurrences are (climate change beliefs and Ukrainian war propaganda seem like obvious examples) and/or if there are any direct applications of this principle other than becoming a better propagandist.
Rationalism took over in the mid-twentieth century and now it's the lingua franca of pretty much any activity that requires resource allocation. Any idea you may have, regardless of how mundane or obvious, must be expressed in analytical/economic terms. Have a qualitative aspect that can't be measured? It doesn't exist. Can't predict the future? Pretend like you do and give us some numbers. Arbitrarily create numbers and make them grow. Find studies, regardless how dubious, to support your claims. It's a trap everyone must abide by.<p>The fantasy is people analyzing data and making the right decision, the truth is people have their assumptions and then back into data to give their assumptions legitimacy. That's the bread and butter of the rationalization market: legitimacy.
Overview by the author: <a href="https://twitter.com/danwilliamsphil/status/1500768915797991426" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/danwilliamsphil/status/15007689157979914...</a>
Ok so this is social-psychology in an economic framework. That is what it is, and I think we should view such articles as rhetoric rather than science.<p>That said... there are some good, pertinent ideas here.<p>From author on twitter:<p><i>Second, an influential idea in social science is that the main thing that is wrong with political media is misinformation or fake news. This idea is wrong. The share of misinformation in most people's information diet is minimal.(11/16)</i><p>Misinformation, and I think this is intuitive to observers of the current misinformation/censorship dynamic is not really about misinformation or any kind of information. It's much more about rhetoric, argumantal frames or "rationalisations," where the author places emphasis.<p>Information (true or false) itself is like an crappy commodity market. It's ubiquitous, evergreen , relatively vendor neutral, and too cheap to produce for profit.<p>Rhetoric otoh, has a fine market. It has a literal economic market and a social/informal market.
Is this actually saying anything new, except for putting it in the language of economics and markets?<p>How does this differ from say Hitler's "Big Lie" or advertising or propaganda generally or 1984's memory hole.<p>I'm not sure the weasel words around "fake news" are required. If someone is misinformed by their news source, are we really splitting hairs that it isn't misinformation if they just don't mention certain things because that's not a false fact?<p>Wasn't the whole point of Newspeak that you couldn't mention or discuss certain ideas?