A room full of educated professionals workshopping ways to manufacture the consent of the masses five days a week pretty much ensures that the average individual doesn't stand a chance at winning a battle of agency that they weren't told they were fighting.

Ah yes, those poor dumb masses...from which you exclude yourself. I suppose it's pure selflessness that leads you -- someone who is clearly not average -- to advocate on behalf of all those rubes without free will.

I saw no indication of self-referential exclusion on behalf of the preceding poster. Mayhaps a bit of projection has snuck in?

Regardless, they have a point. Our system is driven by financially motivated, and subsidized action. Most people are just trying to live their lives with minimal interference and are not sampling for sources of psychological manipulation. Self-generated or external-to-self originated. In point of fact, metacognition is not last I researched on it, a universal thing for everyone.

I do not exclude myself from this population of non-samplers either, but as a tester, I am also well acquainted with the fact that testing costs and nature selects to minimize costs. Just as bacteria will abandon costly resistance mechanisms to a stressor given sufficient time removed from a stressor, so too do we in terms of our mental safeguarding behavior.

You're just trying to argue for the sake of arguing at that point.

And yes if you're on this forum chances are you're above average, if you're college educated you're already above average, it's not that hard really. I think you're overestimating what the average human is and underestimating what the top minds of google &co are being paid millions for.

> I suppose it's pure selflessness that leads you -

What about lobbyist ? The tobacco industry is run on goodwill too ? After all cigarettes were advertised as improving your lung capacity, why don't you smoke ? Don't you want better lungs ? Why would you want kids not to smoke ? Are you anti freedom ?

How's arguing with a pile of straw going for you.

Lol are you implying that acknowledging that propaganda and marketing has an effect on the masses is an egotistical thing to do. Hilarious.

In my experience this is likely one half of a principle in which there are at least as many examples of people who can do things really well, but have no idea how to pedagogically transmit the building blocks of their domain understanding to others in a tractionable way.

Maybe a more wholistic take on this is something like:

'Those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach would really be doing everyone a huge favor if they would just go do somewhere.'

If this is a more complete take, it suggests to me that the master/apprentice paradigm existed for so long for a reason; masters have spent their lives specializing narrowly, not necessarily transmitting their understanding, thus the deconstruction of their expertise is only accessible via osmosis over time, because essentially they can't teach.

Apples and Oranges. Your analysis is after the fact, and those arenas aren't open development environments. Adoption follows content creation. Not every time, but the essence of the sentiment 'build it and they will come,' shouldn't be dismissed.

I use to work in youth corrections. A gang unit I worked on housed one young guy who got behind the wheel drunk on his sixteenth birthday and accidentally killed someone, and another young man who contracted an STI from his girlfriend and decapitated her. These two young men slept 3ft apart and were treated equivalently by the system.

You've pinpointed a major flaw that is mostly invisible to the public.

Yeah, bravo. It's good to hear that other people aren't giving up.

Impossible to tell without directly interfacing with them, but more likely what they're talking about is a dissociative mechanism to deal with situational trauma.

He looks a little disheveled, but I see your point. It's obvious that he's not as unhinged as the market and commentary would lead us to believe.

It's progress in the way euthanasia cures cancer.

Things probably have to get worse before they get better. People have been able to ignore the issue for too long. Now the suffering is spreading a tiny bit and those who would rather not confront the agony of others are being forced to.

... it has since been modded off of the front page.

That entirely depends on the arena in which one finds oneself. In far-left circles women and minorities tend to be given carte blanche, while in far-right circles older white men receive similar treatment. It is a spectrum of acceptable norms based on implicit values surrounding group identities.

e.g. if a white man offers a controversial opinion in a left-leaning arena, he is more likely to be dismissed.

Agreed.

As a brown guy (I think right of Center) my views tend to piss off the far right/left equally. And I think there are many like me who are just keeping their mouth shut listening to garbage from both the far ends.