Generalizations, Distortions and Omissions

A few quick observations

• Bad-Media incentives are not aligned with truth.

  • Bad-Media is driven by clicks…advertising revenue
    • Historically the Media was predominantly about supplying news.
      • News is defined as something true/fact-based and relevant that you didn’t previously know.
      • News media suppliers were rewarded by supplying the news first, and in educational detail – resulting in remuneration.
  • Bad-Media is not served by controversial communications true or false being resolved.
    • This is why such reasoning/information errors as Tesla being funded by the government never go quiet when actual verifiable facts counter indicate the tenacious error.

• Both Bad-Media headlines and articles make use of ‘Sensationalistic Click Bait’ techniques.

  • These communications are designed to produce emotion – not information/knowledge/call-to-action.

• The only reason a ‘Sensationalistic Click Bait’ business model works is because of an epidemic weakening of reasoning behavior throughout the world.

  • Some of the contributors to that weakened reasoning include:
    • A rapid increase in global complexity
      • Historically, events were isolated…relevance was geographically constrained.
        • While relevance may still be constrained, awareness of it is not…any mind is confronted by a world full of complexity, not just a local community. Humans have not evolved adaptive reasoning equivalences to those changes.
    • Ambient emotional level around the world has taken a multiple valence level leap in energy.
      • Emotion makes reasoning more difficult.
  • Evidence of the above points can be found in the treatment of Tesla by visible media entities.

A couple questions reoccur…

• Why are twitter/Facebook/blog comments often so angry?
  • e.g. Tesla did get a loan from the Government…they paid it all back – early – plus a bonus.
    • Why is that anger producing? This is an American company, employing thousands of people, trying to make the world a better place (also for money, but this is a capitalist country). How is Tesla threatening? Does it, in fact, have anything to do with Tesla at all?
• Why do people offer comments on personal aesthetic preferences of others?
  • e.g. A person posts a happiness picture of their new black car – a person who they don’t know and will never meet posts a comment that ‘black is too similar to other cars’. Social media may seem like an invitation for such interaction…just because it is possible. But social media also exhibits ‘context’. The person posted their picture to show that at least one family is thrilled by the new car they just got. Non-sequitur commenting is an indication of reasoning deficit.
• Why are any people at all hoping Tesla has trouble?
• Why can some of the Media make use of what are quite understandable difficulties an innovator has creating something useful that has never been done before?
• Why does every article have to include the whole history of issues Tesla has overcome? These ad hominem presentations are designed to stimulate an undercurrent of doubt and discredit. Tesla is an easy target for click bait because of a fundamental misapprehension of how development is done and progress is made. Is not the overcoming of obstacles a core element of the American mythos? Is it a measure of an undercurrent of angst that click bait is biased towards adversity – personally relevant or not?
• Tesla is not an individual, it is thousands of people working like crazy…because working on such a project is emotionally gratifying. Elon Musk gets the visibility, but clearly, he knows he is one of many. Distorted information affects all those individuals and their families.
• What purpose does vindictive language, disrespectful interaction fulfill?

How to reduce Bad-Media output

• Don’t click on inflammatory headlines.
• Don’t forward baloney.
• Don’t respond to irrational comments.
• Become sensitized to Generalizations, Distortions and Deletions in any communication…
• Respect others as best as you can, considering that almost everybody is overburdened by extraneous emotion producing stimuli.

Disclosures

Reason IQ Labs is a future project of Corlinx – if somebody doesn’t get around to making a user-friendly platform like it first. Its mission will be to provide a tool/service for clarifying contexts.

No person affiliated with Reason IQ Labs has any connection to Tesla  or Elon Musk. The company and person provide a verdant environment for addressing the overarching issues that surround species reasoning intelligence quotient…actually, history is rife with similar cases – but this is now.

It can be said, however, that we at Reason IQ Labs are in awe at the tenacious character of Elon Musk. And we cheer the progress Tesla has made bringing electric vehicles forward.

Bluntly, our hopefulness for the future is electrically fueled…

–  SME