Initiateofthevoid

It's odd to me that anyone fantasizes about nature in general being peaceful. Especially when the plot of most nature documentaries can be summarized as "fall in love with this creature, then experience the stress of watching it struggle desperately to survive."

Sorry but the problem right now is much simpler. Gullibility doesn't require some logical premise. "It sounds right so it MUST be true" is where the thought process ends.

That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.

I think your idea is laudable. Normally I'm not one to dissuade someone from fighting a good fight in the age of disinformation, but I worry that you're coming at this problem from the wrong direction, and you alone will never be able to fight misinformation at its source.

Have you ever been able to change someone's mind on an insane belief, just because you knew exactly where it came from? Or because you were aware of the idea before they were?

We're talking about a hydra's infinite rectum here. No matter what you -ectomy, more stool samples are coming than you will ever be able to process and analyze.

More often than not, a person does not rationalize their way into believing misinformation. It is not a logical process of collecting and analyzing facts. It is an emotional process of consuming content that elicits a level of fear, pride, or hate.

They fear what they do not understand.

They are proud to be a part of a group that does "understand".

They hate feeling like they're being told what to do and what to think. They feel a vulnerability within themselves - a gap in their knowledge - and rather than address it as an internality, they externalize it. They don't understand because you don't want them to understand.

To their mind, the answer can't be complex. They have arrived at the belief that knowledgeable, professional, and underpaid experts are all wrong or outright greedy and dishonest, and that comprehending truth doesn't require significant education and research.

Really, they believe the answer should be simple. If it isn't, that must mean the "true" answer - the easily digestible TIL TLDR of the entire field of healthcare that they could actually understand without much effort - well, that answer must be hidden from them.

Note that this is not intended to describe a particular group or flavor of ideology or conspiracy, but rather the experience of believing in ideas that contradict observable reality, verifiable fact, and leigitimate sources of information.

You can't just come at them with logic, evidence, or rationality. These things are necessary but insufficient. You need to approach it with emotion and empathy. Bedside manner is crucial.

Don't waste your time trying to master the lies - spend time mastering the truth. Present your knowledge as clearly and simply as possible. Address your patients holistically. Use their language. Teach them without condescending to them. Don't try to tear apart individual pieces of information they regurgitate, but understand the underlying themes and emotions that you can actually help them with.

Lastly, please don't burn yourself out. It's brave to want to immerse yourself in the rabid chaos of digital misinformation for the sake of your patients, but it's a soul-crushing exercise that should be undertaken with extreme caution.

There are plenty of patients who really just need a good doctor more than anything else. And some of them will be more likely to believe in scientific truth when they already believe in the knowledge and good faith of a scientific expert.

Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You're right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

Answering a question with a question is pretty shitty.

They made a statement. You responded with leading questions that implied the statement is factually incorrect. The premise of your questions was also incorrect - the previous administration opposed the protests, but they did not send federal agents after protesters for arrests or deportations. Unlike the current administration.

Rather than answer (mis)leading questions, OP responded with questions to force you to explicitly answer whether their original statement is incorrect. Did Harris do this? Would Harris have done this? They're fair questions. But I guess only you get to ask questions around here.

I'd be happy to apply the theory on your case, but for the sake of brevity I shall refrain from doing so unprovoked.

I'm not OP but I provoke you to share more on this theory if you want to

Wish I could help. I promise, if I could think of a way to help you, I would. On account of the whole external motivation thing, obviously.

Job searching is a genuine nightmare. Even for neurotypical people, but especially for people particularly sensitive to rejection with limited motivation and poor tolerance for tedious and repetitive bullshit with almost 0 gratification of any kind. Do literally whatever needs to be done here. Scream at the imaginary HR person for making you fill out the same form twice with slightly different wording. Pay a recruiter. Use software. Accentuate your qualities.

Pay or beg a trusted friend to help. Or just to keep you accountable. Not the guilt-induction of "hey, have you done the thing yet?" No, make an email that you only use for job searching (do that either way, trust me... the self-induced spam is horrible) and give them access (again, only a trusted friend or family). Have them check periodically. Not to induce guilt. To provide reward. Something like "Hey! If you apply to X jobs this week, I'll treat you to lunch!" or "hey, let's go see this movie tomorrow night. If you apply to a job today, I'll buy the tickets. If you don't, I'm going alone" (note this is why you may need to pay a friend for help lol. Swap in whatever rewards make sense for you.)

The idea of asking someone to do this will probably feel insane or weak. Lots of things probably make you feel insane or weak though, and those feelings are (usually) wrong. Other people often like to help you as much as you like to help them, even if it doesn't feel like it because the whole rejection sensitive thing.

If you manage to pass the job-searching step - and if you're in a career where this advice makes sense - you can try to keep the job by scheduling meetings to show off things that you've done, even though you haven't done them yet. The meeting will make you accountable for doing it, and it may provide the necessary external motivation. If all else remains the same, it will probably still get done at the last possible minute, so don't schedule it farther than a week out, and try not to overpromise in the meeting agenda.

Honestly, if not for the massive personal information required, I would suggest we build a place for ADHD people to swap details and apply to jobs for each other. I think people would be excited to help and energized by the experience of learning about other jobs, and would feel incredibly rewarded by any successes.

Flashbacks to hours writing macros, mods, and scripts so that you could spend less time doing the things you paid a company to let you do for "fun"

I've just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn't easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don't do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They've just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There's just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they're being deceived into thinking they're learning at all.

Eh, like almost everything else in human experience it initially started because of daylight and agriculture. Hunters and gatherers had fluid schedules, but farms had strict requirements. Without electricity and with a life built around plants and animals, everyone just has to work when the suns up. With most of the population involved in agriculture and not much else, you're right - you either woke up or you died.

Then candles, gas lamps, and eventually electric lights opened up the darkness for meaningful work, while agricultural technology slowly pushed workers out to other fields (heh).

But out of necessity the hours for schools and markets were originally built around the hours of the fields, and it just stuck.

Now, don't get me wrong - I think morning people are playing a hand in perpetuating this issue. They probably get to keep deciding the rules because they keep showing up before us, all energized and efficient and judging us for showing up late or tired. Or something.

But I would be curious to see if any studies have checked if there's a correlation between sociopathy/narcissism and sleep phases, I'll take a look. Or maybe they're just signalling that they're early risers as a way of feeling superior to the rest of us.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them ("it's just where my friends/music/content creators are")

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn't fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it's "simple" and they "don't want to learn" something new. That's not the actual reason - that's just stockholm syndrome.

The difference is the purpose. When people force stores to clean up after them for no reason, it can increase workloads and staffing requirements. It's pennies on the dollar, but its still a violation of the social contract, especially when you factor in the employee's personal involvement in cleaning up a mess that shouldn't exist.

When people force stores to clean up after them for a political purpose, the cost is part of the point. It costs time and therefore money to continuously re-face those products, and therefore encourages the store to reduce its stock and shelving of that product.

Again, pennies on the dollar, so significant inventory changes would require extreme customer participation in the trend, but at the very least you may spread some awareness and find some solidarity in your daily routine. May even find like-minded employees and managers who "didn't notice" or consistently "forget" to fix it.