I'm hopeful that we can use AI models to pressure test better options of social organization etc.

Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.

Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.

All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)

In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.

The rot is really, really deep.

The point is to get citizens fighting each other on things that are personally important so we're too busy to fight for things that are nationally important, like corruption or the decay of democracy.

Both parties suck because the system is broken, and both parties benefit from perpetuating it -- along with those who fund them.

I can see how you think this, since othering and dehumanizing responses rise to the top when people ask how Republicans can support this administration.

Who benefits from amplifying those voices?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xwedodah

>Xwedodah (Persian: خویدوده xidude; Avestan: xᵛaētuuadaθa) is a type of consanguine marriage historically practiced in Zoroastrianism before the Muslim conquest of Persia.[1] Such marriages are recorded as having been inspired by Zoroastrian cosmogony and considered pious. It was a high act of worship in Zoroastrianism, and there were punishments for not performing it.[2][3]

>This form of direct familial incest marriage allowed Zoroastrians to marry their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and their own mothers to take as wives.[4] Xwedodah was widely practiced by royalty and nobility, and possibly clergy, but it is not known if it was commonly practiced by families in other classes.[5] In modern Zoroastrianism it is near non-existent, having been noted to have disappeared as an extant practice by the 11th century.[5]

We're still human, and the collaborative problem solving the ancients did still applies today. That much of the concepts survived and maintained relevance from ancient Greece, to Rome, to now lends them a certain 'time tested' quality.

I came up with this idea, too, but was beaten to it by at least 100 years.

Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back.

Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.

It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.

1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.

Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...

If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.

Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.

But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.

After 9/11, the Bush administration was accused of abusing the crisis to expand executive power and the national security state. Those who raised the alarm about things like the Patriot Act were often dismissed as fringe alarmists.

Now, nearly 25 years later, we're seeing the downstream effects of that gradual degradation of democratic pillars.

On both sides, voters and politicians can be influenced by propaganda and campaign finance to accept small, incremental changes that don't seem dangerous in isolation, but can cumulate to crush an empire.

Every democracy carries these risks. Do we think our opponents haven't noticed?

100% confirmed meme product.

>meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][9]

Failing to reproduce an effect doesn't prove it isn't real. Mythbusters would do this all the time.

On the other hand, some empires are built on publication malpractice.

One of the worst that I know is John Gottman. Marriage counselling based on 'thin slicing'/microexpressions/'Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. His studies had been exposed as fundamentally flawed, and training based on his principles performed worse than prior offerings, before he was further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.

This type of intellectual dishonesty underlies both of their careers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Model_of_Relational_Di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Principles_for_Makin...

https://www.gottman.com/blog/this-one-thing-is-the-biggest-p...

But Apple devices take a bit longer to go obsolete, and seem just a tiny bit less invasive as they don't rely on an advertising model for revenue.

We run into human-perceptible relativistic limits in latency. Light takes 56ms to travel half the earth's circumference, and our signals are often worse off. They don't travel in an idealized straight path, get converted to electrons and radio waves, and have to hop through more and more hoops like load balancers and DDOS protections.

In many cases latency is worse than it used to be.

In physiotherapy, we used to think that structural issues like slipped disks caused pain, but when we started imaging healthy people, we found the same structural issues commonly in the 'healthy' population.

Both how much pain we feel and how sensitive we are to it are things that can be learned. The bullet ant initiation rites of the Sateré-Mawé people are an extreme example.

A decent book on this is 'dopamine nation'.