None of us read Latin or Greek anymore.
Facts rule the day: atomic truths; tidbits of information that, as variables in code, would evaluate to true. Except life is slightly more complex than that. You can't write a program with an endless list of constants that all evaluate to true. The compiler would optimize it away. You also can't get to any complex thought while stuck in the dissection of ever more atomic representations of ideas. Whitehead and Russell failed to formalize even math; we will fail worse in politics.
We need to look at life from higher up. Read the original book instead of a tweet thread or a summary from ChatGPT. You can't gain wisdom from summaries.
Except that's all we do now.
You get someone to read a book and then write a thread for you, record a podcast, or, even worse, mime it into a TikTok for drooling consumption.
Things that used to be obvious are now discredited or judged as too much effort. The average person acts like a perpetual teenager. Every thought has to be made up of atomic facts. Anything that can't be atomized into an entropic mist of truths is not valid and will be swept under the rug of our collective mind. If it can't be fact-checked, it shouldn't exist.
The only current belief is that you shouldn't decide for others. They have their set of atomic truths, and you have yours. Everyone knows what's best for themselves. We discredit everything that came before us because our ancestors weren't open-minded™ enough. They didn't work off this spreadsheet of cherry-picked truths. They didn't have our advanced technology. They couldn't even Doordash a taco in under 20 minutes. But compare a student of classics from the start of the 20th century to one of today, and there's a stark contrast.
I think it's because the average person has been infinite jested into submission. Boomers by CNN or Fox, millennials by Reddit, zoomers by TikTok.
No one reads anymore. Or at least no one reads anything serious. You enter Barnes and Noble, and the first thing you see is BookTok. Recommendations come not from a scholar weighed down by hard-won scars but from a slop-generating statistical model. The slightly less doomed among us amass huge reading lists or even piles of books recommended by the few uncorrupted erudite elders or a Twitter thread of sources we should check out. Except we never get to the pile. The gravity well of the algorithmic Infinite Jest is too great for our weak minds to overcome.
Being one-shotted by recommendation systems is a destructive feedback loop on more than one level. Not only are we stuck consuming the slop, but on a higher level, when interacting with others, we regurgitate it back at each other. For any deeper topic, opposing views no longer interact, and those who do share opinions don't have much to talk about because they are already in full agreement. They gathered their views from the same tasty trough, after all.
Our political instincts are now polarized to cartoonish extremes. Of all times, it's right now that we have arrived at the pivotal moment of scraping all our musings of the day to train a statistical model that will probably cement whatever ideology (or lack thereof) we have for the next hundred years (or worse, forever).
As we progress, we will rely more and more on LLMs and AI. Software engineers are already passing the wheel to LLMs to write their code for them. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT for advice on their life. From now on, we'll be stuck in a feedback loop that will amplify whatever cultural, epistemological and political norms we have in place. Precarious enough on its own.
Feedback loops often distort and destroy whatever seed or input produced it. Today's views are polarized and profoundly anti-intellectual. We are almost at a bimodal North Korean level of political speech. Two brittle echo chambers yelling past each other. Anyone outside our camp is a heretic, corrupt, damned, irredeemable. Add to that the collapse of elite erudition, and you now have not just a dangerous feedback loop waiting to happen but a feedback loop with a shitty seed.
I, for one, would like our new godmakers to have at least understood Plato.