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In many circles in San Francisco, if you don't think President Trump is an absolute piece of shit, you lose status. And people think you are less than intelligent. And people will make snide remarks about how you love Trump.
They will call you anti-intellectual. They will make fun of people in "flyover states." They pride themselves on being up to date on current affairs mostly through Vox, the Atlantic and NPR. This is how they show they are well-informed and cosmopolitan. https://link.medium.com/gqQ7lmvps7
These people mock hypothetical people that exist nowhere but believe to be everywhere. They claim victory over people that do not exist. They pat themselves on the back for being different from "them"
I think 2016 was a watershed year for me. Seeing all the insanity around me surrounding the Presidential election, I made a prediction: https://medium.com/@hyonschu/donald-trump-will-be-our-next-president-f3da2d56d788
Merely by making a prediction with the evidence plainly in front of me, people accused me of being a Trump supporter. People would question my judgement openly, low-key gaslighting me.
My favorite one was:
> Dude, you're such a smart guy, but you're wrong. How can you not see this? How can you support him?
I wasn't supporting him. I merely made a prediction. But by making this prediction, people believed that I was somehow not as intelligent as they.
> Dude, you're such a smart guy, but you're wrong. How can you not see this? How can you support him?
I wasn't supporting him. I merely made a prediction. But by making this prediction, people believed that I was somehow not as intelligent as they.
People actively would want to engage me in debates. They'd say he's a rapist, a child-molestor, a racist -- how could I support such a candidate?
I never did.
I never did.
People got visibly upset over it; some discussions would turn vicious, vitriolic. I'm sure many of you have lost friends because of your support for Trump.
And still, I never did. https://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/
And still, I never did. https://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/
The pattern I saw repeatedly was clear: it didn't matter if you supported Trump or not. People had a clear association with Trump and by saying anything positive or even neutral about him, you were branded something of a heretic.
People stopped talking to me entirely. I learned to keep my mouth shut. It was much better to not engage them and rather just smile and nod. Even defending my position as stating "I'm not a supporter, I just think he's going to win" would trigger an emotional reaction.
The day he won, I remember a friend saying to me "congratulations, your boy won."
The day after the election, people at my job openly cried. They consoled each other. People said it was OK to go home for the day.
Months passed and none of the horrors my "friends" warned me about came true:
Trump didn't start WWIII, the economy didn't irreversibly crash, Pence didn't round up all the gays into concentration camps.
Trump didn't start WWIII, the economy didn't irreversibly crash, Pence didn't round up all the gays into concentration camps.
Pointing this out to people would just get replies like, "well yea, not yet. But just wait."
The first Trump term is nearly over, and some people still are holding out hope that he will start WWIII and that the economy will crash. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/09/maher_im_hoping_for_a_crashing_economy_so_we_can_get_rid_of_trump_bring_on_the_recession.html
Plenty of people have made ridiculous claims and predictions of what would happen during a Trump presidency, and none of the catastrophic ones have come true. Many might say the exact opposite of those predictions happened.
Yet the vitriol remains. Some of those people still think I support Trump and are appalled by the idea.
When you hate someone -- I mean truly hate someone -- nothing they do is ever good enough. Everything they do is misconstrued and contorted negatively, or thought of as some nefarious scheme which will plot-twist itself into some overly complicated plan to screw other people.
I know this from experience. We all likely have had a similar experience as a child, of disliking or hating someone so much that you could see nothing positive about them..
You know you've dehumanized someone sufficiently when you are incapable of saying something remotely positive about them. When even saying something inocuous about them makes them uncomfortable and they find themselves incapable of doing so.
This isn't about Trump.
I'm not even a citizen, but a permanent resident. I can't vote. If shit goes down, I can always leave.
What I'm interested in is how it got so vitriolic for one person, who only a few years before his candidacy was being praised by most everyone.
I'm not even a citizen, but a permanent resident. I can't vote. If shit goes down, I can always leave.
What I'm interested in is how it got so vitriolic for one person, who only a few years before his candidacy was being praised by most everyone.
That was why 2016 was such a watershed moment. The public perception of him was turned on its head almost overnight - even for people that I consider to be intelligent and well-informed. How could such cognitive dissonance exist such that it is only expressed as univocal vitriol?
How could people outright ignore data that was contrary to their initial beliefs; while they proselytize information that was plainly untrue, but in accordance with the narrative they wanted to play out?
One answer is that journalism went to absolute trash: https://medium.com/@hyonschu/clickbait-the-attention-economy-and-the-end-of-journalism-c4f16d2c447d
Another is that our capacity to absorb information does not keep up with our thirst to acquire information, thus leading us to rely on experts to make decisions for us. https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1244488579906031617
We're flooded with information from all directions: advertisers, politicians, businesses, friends, etc they all want a little space of our attention spans. And it's harder to remove information from our brains than to never have it there in the first place.
This leads me to a concept called "epistemic agency."
How do we know our beliefs are fundamentally true if we expect others to tell us what is true?
How do we know our beliefs are fundamentally true if we expect others to tell us what is true?
Every day, we seem to be giving up some epistemic agency: to algorithms, to reporters, to search engines, to social media feeds. We wake up every day and turn on our phones and computers, implicitly asking the question:
What should I care about today?
What should I care about today?
My aim is to understand these processes, figure out how they work, show people how they work, and perhaps with a little luck, find out how to unfuck people from these processes.
How do we reclaim epistemic agency in a world that is hellbent on robbing us of it?
I have some ideas. Let's work through them together.
/end
I have some ideas. Let's work through them together.
/end
Here are some threads where I try to work out some of the separate parts:
1. What meditation really seems to be about: attention-gathering and attention-control: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1250579058707972096
1. What meditation really seems to be about: attention-gathering and attention-control: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1250579058707972096
2: Nudging, a parable on how our cognition and behavior is being changed: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1158822460210339840
3: Horoscopes and fortune-telling, how they help us to focus our attention in a noise-filled world: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1242141837319532545
4: How behavioral experiments are changing our behavior under our very noses, and how the behavioral "scientists" have no clue what the effects will be: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1231625842804944896
5: Why we love stories and narratives, but how they break our bullshit-meters: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1215302436543332358
6: How tech companies are using data to rob you of epistemic agency for fun and profit: https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1150882373434658817
