Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making
There has been a breakdown in the Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making. Traditionally we used institutions to guide our collective sense-making, but this is no longer the case in the media landscape – so sense-making is no longer close to fully communal. Walter Cronkite was not always telling the truth, but what he said was a close approximation of the national consciousness and shared belief structure as a complex for the country to function upon, but this does not exist in the current media landscape – so it is no longer semi-reliable.
...there was enough complex for us to function as a country and I think that has gone away. So I think that this (our loss of Semi-Reliable Communal Sense-making) is the parent of the crisis which I increasingly think of as, what I call it is: The No-Name Revolution or The N-squared revolution. We are in some sort of new regime which doesn't look like any revolution we have seen before. It's much less physically violent, so far. It is digitally extremely violent. And it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at some semi-reliable level.
- Eric Weinstein January 5, 2018, on Sam Harris #112
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