mh (+)
Haven’t posted much here, but I’ve been doing mostly better.
Something internally shifted that I’ll want to talk about at some point, loosely corresponding to no longer holding myself to arbitrary constraints from others. I’m not sure why, but talking about and reflecting on my own narrative helped.
As did spending time making things again, which apparently I hadn’t done in awhile? Being a builder and storyteller just seems to be my thing, for some reason.
mh (+), with mild vent
I guess I’d been kind of cynical about how things I do are seen by others, given how other people controlling the narrative seems to... be a thing. I guess I finally found a way to work around people reactive to controlled narratives and keep being me, which helps more than I think I knew.
Wish I still had faith in disinfo not dominating the process, but I’ll settle for “I can work within this framework and minimize my exposure.”
mh (+), with mild vent
@Goldkin That's been one of my biggest problems. I don't trust the communications lines not getting muddied and I don't know how to correct for it. I have tools but they don't scale.
mh (+), with mild vent
@orrery I use trust-but-verify with a loosely Bayesian reinforcement schedule. Works for figuring out the best available approximation of reality, but doesn’t work as well for publishing it.
Learning most folks don’t even get to the verify step was a major blow to my confidence in people not believing disinfo. But the world keeps turning on the underlying facts instead of peoples’ narratives of them, inexorably leading to correction if the data’s wrong.
mh (+), with mild vent
@orrery Yeah. I guess I’m saying, I found a way to shelter from viral ideologies and narrative debt enough to start to work on my own narrative again and figure out ways to combat them in spaces I operate within. It’s not much, but it’s a big improvement.
mh (+), with mild vent
@orrery And I haven’t figured out a way to scale that either, short of instituting filtering and moderation strategies for communities I’m involved with. Since that’s all I can do.
But I guess that’s because I observe the problem as if it’s forum management and spam/troll filtering. Don’t know yet if that scales to loosely-connected and federated communities, short of helping other moderators do the same, just as we did back in the golden days of web fora.
mh (+), with mild vent
@orrery Dangerous in systems defined by and controlled by humans, though. And I guess I found ways to limit my exposure to communities and systems with other correctives (administration on character and perceived intent, systems with sources of truth that aren’t people, etc).
Viral ideologies still scare me and are still a problem, but I’ve found a tempo to retain balance now, and combating them follows from there, I think?
mh (+), with mild vent
@Goldkin Yeah, but the corrections get worse the longer it takes to apply them, and a lot of people seem to hit a point at which course correction becomes more painful than living in violation of the facts and forcing people around them to validate their bad narratives rather than own up to their mistakes.
That's... pretty much what modern politics feels like in a nutshell, honestly.