I wasn't going to share this, because frankly it's not that interesting, but then I got to number 42:
- That Americans are homogenizing and exporting their view of a normal mind around the world. –P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry
And it reminded me extremely of this, one of the most interesting things I've read lately. It's a completely valid fear, much more practical than half the other things mentioned -- but you won't hear about it in America.
And then an English professor and a Yahoo Correspondent are tagging along. Yahoo still exists?51. That we will worry too much. –Joseph LeDoux, neuroscientist
76. That we worry too much. –Joel Gold, psychiatrist
82. That we worry too much. –Gary Klein, scientist at MacroCognition
89. That we worry too much. –Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist
92. That we worry too much. –Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology
95. That we worry too much, but about fictional violence. –Jonathan Gottschall, English professor
116. That we worry too much. –Virginia Heffernan, Yahoo News correspondent
128. That we worry too much. –James J. O’Donnell, classical scholar
129. That we worry too much. –Robert Provine, neuroscientist
146. That we worry too much, and “package our worries” in a deleterious fashion. –Mary Catherine Bateson, professor emerita
It looks like anyone studying the cognitive or the psychological is actually pretty worried about worry. At first I thought they were just making the same tired joke; perhaps there's more to it.
The Vice article is summarising the piece in Edge magazine, here are the full articles written by the aforementioned smart people.
JakobVirgil, mk, flagamuffin: An explanation about the fascism comment is there.
seems to me he means laize faire economics mean social turmoil and then fascism. fair enough high GINI scores ain't nothing to fuck with.
very interesting I can intuit and see a raising Fascism but I don't know how tech is involved. lets discuss this further.
In my mind it has to do with a loss of anonymity coupled with increased regulation of interactions. Democracy is a way to achieve stability amongst free agents that feels good for most involved. However, part of the freedom of democracy comes from taking into account the unpredictability of these agents. As we can reduce the unpredictability, we can increase regulation, but at the same time decrease the incidents by which regulation rubs any one agent wrong. That is, until there is a significant change in the general condition for most involved. At a certain point, it will be easier to modify our behaviors than it will be to modify the regulations built to account for them, and given that there will be few unknowns regarding us agents, modifying our behavior can be done in a way that doesn't feel disruptive. Why modify for a hard truth when you can achieve the same result by serving up a soft lie?
The fascism definition we are using is social control through mythology? If so the Madison avenue already has us.
I think that's always been the way of things, right? Madison avenue might have us, but they've mostly kept themselves to toothpaste and sugar water. I imagine: "Why should we worry people about climate change when they have already expressed to us that they don't want to worry about it? Also, look at what climate change does to our holiday travel numbers. We've only got time for some much news, why spend it giving people something that they don't want?"
This of course is already happening - happened? southern english has a tense "been happening" that is perfect. As soon as the techniques of marketing/market research are applied to everything (and they have been) there is no safe ground to stand on. have you seen http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/vie.../ as well as having an awesome section on the Juggalos it talks about the feedbackloops market research produces.
My favorites were the more aloof and optimistic answers like these;21. Not much. I ride motorcycles without a helmet.
37. Don’t worry—there won’t be a singularity.
I suppose I'm not alone when I go on rants here and here. Not that I claim to be one of the smartest people in the world, however, I might not be too crazy after all. 5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist 9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist 12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. --W. Daniel Hillis, physicist 17. That digital technologies are sapping our patience and changing our perception of time. –Nicholas G. Carr, author 25. Cultural extinction, and the fact that the works of an obscure writer from the Caribbean may not get enough attention. –Hans Ulrich Obrist. curator, Serptine Gallery 36. That technology may endanger democracy. –Haim Harari, physicist 39. “The diversion of intellectual effort from innovation to exploitation, the distraction of incessant warfare, rising fundamentalism” may trigger a Dark Age. –Frank Wilczek, MIT physicist 42. That Americans are homogenizing and exporting their view of a normal mind around the world. –P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry 44. That the new digital public sphere isn’t really so public. –Andrew Lih, journalism professor 48. That we will literally lose touch with the physical world. –Christine Finn, archaeologist. 49. “We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity
from nature” –Scott Sampson, dinosaur paleontologist. 50. That we are becoming too connected. –Gino Segre, professor of physics & astronomy 61. “We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth [pop] Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all." –Bruce Parker, professor 65. That we "are inarticulately lost in Modernity. Many of us seem to sense the end of something, perhaps a futile meaninglessness in our Modernity.” -- Stuart A. Kauffman, professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy 67. Augmented reality. –William Poundstone, journalist. 69. That we will spend too much time on social media. --Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist 72.“I worry we have yet to have a conversation about what seems to be a developing "new normal" about the presence of screens in the playroom and kindergarten” --Sherry Turkle, pshcyhologist, MIT 73. “That we will become irrationally impatient with science” --Stuart Firestein, professor who is working as hard as he can, dammit 88. “What I worry most about is that we are more and more losing the formal and informal bridges between different intellectual, mental and humanistic approaches to seeing the world.” -- Anton Zeilinger, physicist 110. “The illusion of knowledge and understanding that can result from having information so readily and effortlessly available.” -- Tania Lombrozo, assistant professor of psychology 115. That “in one or two generations children will grow up to be adults who will not be able to tell reality from imagination.” --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist 135. “We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing just as the research tools for doing so are coming online” –Michael Shermer, publisher, Skeptic magazine 142. That knowledge is getting too fast. –Nicholas Humphrey, prof. at the London School of Economics 144. The homogenization of the human experience. –Scott Atran, anthropologist