Social Contagion

Social contagion is a theory about how certain new ideas and memes spread in society. For example "trans kids", or "I think I was born in the wrong body". Back before 2012 there were hardly any 'trans kids' anywhere. Two years later, in 2014, they are all over the internet. A new identify fashion bloomed for a certain kind of progressive youth - especially young women. Time and again, when these trans youths are interviewed, we find they developed their new identity online. In particular: often on Tumblr, within a closed group of like-minded peers.

Many people, such as Jonathan Haidt (see: The Righteous Mind) blame the Internet itself for social contagion, the growth of divisive ideas, and increasing political polarization in society.

What promotes extremism?

1. One implication is that the Internet divides us against each other because it enables polarized, extremist forums to propagate. For example: I was a member of at least one Internet forum which specifically excluded people based on arbitrary criteria. In particular I was a member of an energy discussion forum which excluded other people (who discussed energy, and wanted to join) on the basis that the other person was too republican, libertarian or not progressive enough!

Some people imply that the cure for social contagion is more Internet censorship and control. Presumably banning extremists will enable reasonable progressives to discuss among themselves to arrive at reasonable conclusions? [Many progressives certainly seem to act as if this were so!]

Contra to this growth in extremism argument, I say extremist groups have always existed and always will. Before the Internet we had physical discussion groups, clubs, societies, political parties.

With more internet censorship many critics of new ideas, such as 'trans kids' were censored and banned.

I think the point of "social contagion" is that the new meme being promoted often has a built-in censorship meme too. Consider GM corn with the Bt gene added - making it resistant to insects. Insects kill off wild competitors, so the GM plant quickly grows to become the dominant mono-culture on the farm (a good thing). Likewise with woke ideas. Censorship kills off competing ideas enabling a new idea to grow with nothing inhibiting it.

When we accept one of these woke memes we also accept the necessity to censor heterodox thinkers and non-believers; such censorship is part of the same package of ideas. Without censorship a bad meme cannot multiply as it will be exposed for the gibberish it almost always is. Censorship enables bad memes to quickly spread online.

Q: how is this censorship enabled?

A: Woke memes are often victim memes: "If we don't censor - terrible things will happen to victims". Hence the outlandish claims:

• words are violence
• people refuting woke are "hateful"
• those who don't want expensive renewable energy are DESTROYing the planet.
• those opposing race "equity" policies are "white supremacists", AKA racists (even when they're black!). Because woke is anti-racist, therefore everyone criticising woke must be anti- anti-racist, AKA: racist!

So Helen Joyce is right about defamation. The woke are intrinsically defamatory because defamation, and demonization of opponents is intrinsic to how these new extremist memes spread. Accusations of evil enable censorship, cancel culture and growth of irrational mono-cultures.

Advice?

Unless I try to answer my own question I'll feel I've stolen your time. So, if my questions is how to we stop this extremist, censorious, cancel culture in society? I can only cite evidence in my life. I became far more rational after I studied philosophy. Learning all the isms didn't help: Marx, Freud, existentialism, pomo - did not help me. This did:

• Learning debating skills. Recognizing and avoiding philosophical fallacies
• Understanding evidence-based arguments; and how to recognize good and bad evidence; including good and bad statistical evidence. How to distinguish good from fake science.
• Advocating for free-speech.

These are the key skills a person must learn to become rational. Rationality is a skill; it's not an innate trait of humanity. You are not born rational. Begin with a book on philosphical fallacies. So that you can recognise when people who use them to promote their (bad) ideas. Prefer free-speech advocates, but we don't really care to give free-speech to pornographers but care for free speech when debating politics and social theory. We must support free-speech in general because we don't want judges and politicans deciding what to ban. That's why pornographers get free speech too. Recognize evidence. Learn basic scientific theory such that one understands what scientific laws are; and what makes a scientific theory. How such theories are validated and falsified by experiment and observation. Know basic statistics; enougth to know when statistics are misused. So: I'm giving no advice regarding politics, economics, social theory, human rights, nor even psychology. No need to learn any isms. A lot of advice regarding how to recognize and avoid bad arguments.

Social Justice

The phrase "social justice" draws its roots from Christian theology, with the first noted use occurring in the early 1840s in "Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact", 1840-43, by Luigi Taparelli. Taparelli was an Italian Jesuit priest writing during the rise of Risorgimento, a 19th-century Italian nationalist movement, and debates around the unification of Italy. This work, was translated into German, French, and Spanish in the nineteenth century, but never into English!

Natural Right is a synonym for Natural Law. Much of the European Enlightenment (~1640 to ~1790) criticised and deconstructed previous Christian Natural Law; it a major preoccupation of the earlier (17th century) philosophes. Ealier Christian Natural Law (17th century) had become a totalizing conception of the world and humanity's place in it. The Christian conception of Natural Law was whittled down by the philosophes as they compared each part of it with empirical reality to refute Natural Law which contradicted reality until there was little left over. So 50 years after the Enlightenment ended (1840's) it's fitting that Christians would revise Natural Law, and base the revision "on fact". AKA: provide an empirical foundation for this Natural Law: Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact

It's weird that a 180 year old book giving the intellectual roots for social justice is still not translated into English!, despite current popularity of social justice; dominating Left and Institutional thought today. This is slack. I'd have thought there'd be no limit to wannabe translators! A neutral observer might even think The Powers That Be don't want us plebs to read about the origin social justice. Kind of like how the Church made sure plebs were unable to read The Christian Bible for centuries by preventing its translation into everyday languages.

Climate alarmist evidence = models based on models, based on models

Models all the way down

In a dispute on YouTube over climate (Why the sun CANNOT be behind global warming | by Simon Clark) I complained that the explanation given lacked empirical support, and that other factors are also responsible for atmospheric warming; so one cannot prioritise one cause over another without empirical support. Later 4 citations of studies were given, as 'evidence'. But when I looked into the 4 studies I found the first 3 were entirely model based. This is very typical of how climate alarmists reason. They actually think the models they write of how the atmosphere supposedly generates a greenhouse gas effect are 'settled science'. So settled that they can subsititute models for data at every level.

I ask for empirical studies, you give me model studies; our reasoning is incommensurable.

'Evidence'

2006) The first paper, Hansen et al. opens with: "We use a global climate model to compare the effectiveness of many climate forcing agents for producing climate change" <- so no empirical research - just the opinions and biases of climate alarmist modellers.

2010) 2nd paper, Schmidt et al, is more promising: "we review the existing literature and use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE radiation module to provide an overview of the role of each absorber at the present-day and under doubled CO2" <- ModelE eh? Surprise!, it's another model: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/

2016) The 3rd: by Shine et al.: "New calculations of the radiative forcing (RF) are presented for the three main well-mixed greenhouse gases, methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide." <- The calculations are done by modelling

2020) 4th, Sherwood et al.: "We assess evidence relevant to Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity per doubling of atmospheric CO2, characterized by an effective sensitivity S. This evidence includes feedback process understanding, the historical climate record, and the paleoclimate record" <- this is the only paper of the 4 which uses actual data, but the data will not do. The climate record is disputed. A sensible solution to this is for greenhouse-gas-climate fans to figure out a way to empirically measure the radiative climate forcing they believe in. This has been attempted over clear skies; so my request is not fanciful.

The 4 papers presented as empirical evidence are models piled on models piled on models. The 'evidence' is effectively hidden or secret because most of them are computer code. Even were I able to see the code, I'd need to reverse engineer it to understand it. This code (unlike my clean code) is probably dirty and oblique; because most computer code isn't very well written. But that is not my main complaint: I basically dispute the working of those models. Althought they never tell us what their models are, we do actually know something about climate alarmist greenhouse gas model (AKA: GHGE). Falsification of the GHGE | GHGE is not a scientific concept

Citations

2006. : Efficacy of climate forcings. Journal of Geophysical Research, 2006.
2010. : Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect. Journal of Geophysical Research. 2010.
2016. : Radiative forcing of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide: A significant revision of the methane radiative forcing. Geophysical Research Letters, 2016.
2020. : An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence. Reviews of Geophysics. 2020.