[Ensorceled]

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example:

> 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax

Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation.

> 18. Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional.

While this is true of MSNBC, Fox News is clearly swinging to the right more and more.

> 41. The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.

More recently, the invisible hand has been shown to have its thumb on the scale.

[imachine1980_]

I need to write a post about why the invisible hands doesn't mean what people think, it means if you kill the king, the system won't collapse because the secret sauce of the society is in the trade of the parts, Adam's Smith write about that people aren't rational and that we need controls over monopolies, most what people think Smith say is what Lucas say.

[zeruch]

I'd wager over 90% of people who 'quote' Adam Smith have never actually read more than a choice de-contextualized quote, and understand his actual positions at all.

[Ensorceled]

Yeah, this list is chock full of just plain misunderstanding the idea being quoted ... like doublespeak, Overton Window, Theory of Constraints ...

[sharemywin]

cartels can function like a monopoly. we need to manage pricing power as a society.

[blowski]

The Overton Window works as a concept when we all talk to each other. But we now have three separate echo chambers - "Left", "Right", "Center" - and they each have their own Overton Window.

[tpoacher]

That's because what was described above isnt the overton window. It's a quote by Noam Chomsky.

The actual definition of the Overton window exactly predicts what you both describe. See wikipedia for a better description.

[jutrewag]

I wish there was a sizable center echo chamber, unfortunately there isn’t really one.

[nebula8804]

Its because the center failed to provide a path that people were satisfied with, hence there was movement away from the center into the fringes. It is entirely the center's fault that they are small. Maybe its just the end state of any sizable society.

[two_handfuls]

Or perhaps it’s because the US system favors scale in a way that brought it down to the minimal number of political parties: 2.

[nebula8804]

The parties reshuffle themselves every few decades. Yes in the American system, it is inflexible to have more than two parties but the parties themselves are quite malleable and are following changing trends even though it may not appear to be so day to day. See the movement of Republicans towards far right despite the party leadership trying to stop it (they failed). The same seems to be happening on the Democratic side with them trending towards the far left although that might take a few more election cycles to bear out.

[zaccusl]

That's because the center doesn't work for many things.

If you support individual patients making their own healthcare decisions with their doctors, how do you find the center with someone who wants to take that right away for reasons that have zero effect on them?

If you support a consenting adults right to love and marry whichever consenting adult they want, how do you find the center with someone who wants to tell people which consenting adults they can and can't marry?

If you think people should not be denied jobs or housing based solely on what's in the their pants, how do you find the center with people who think it's okay to deny people jobs and housing based on what's in their pants?

How do you find the center with the Nazi party?

The center is meaningless for most issues that actually matter.

[npteljes]

>Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation.

I think for the same reason people blame web developers for how websites are built, ignoring that the web developer is not the product manager.

[ukuina]

To be fair, groupthink in web design has generally led to worse performance with 100kb pageloads to show 1kb of content, and this blame generally does not reside with the product manager.

[npteljes]

I'd say that the incentives are aligned in a way that produced the outcome of website bloat. The churn of hardware enables it, service providers have different priorities, and frankly, 99.99% of the users also have different priorities. So, no one is really striving for less bloated pages - including, most importantly, the product managers, whom have all the say of how developer capacity is allocated.

[layer8]

“I was just following orders.”

[npteljes]

I believe in better designed systems, not in individual responsibility. Individual responsibility is a must have, but systemic incentives override that, on a population level, every time. But this can't only be used to build the Third Reich, it can be used for good things too, like building websites with less bloat. Such a change was when Google began to rank pages on loading and other performance criteria, and also provided a tool for people to check their sites. That was a nice incentive for the people who are actually in charge of websites, to have the people who actually build the websites, to build the website to be better.

But if the incentives are perverse, so will be the people.