091 - The Cost of Cancel Culture

I'm always skeptical when a book clocks in at under 10 hours of reading as to whether it will provide sufficient value to merit the cost. Having just finished going through "The Canceling of the American Mind", I can say not only that it was worth the cost and time to read it, but that it and "The Coddling of the American Mind" should both be added as required reading for high school students.

In "The Canceling of the American Mind" they address some of the topics that are so lethally toxic that most people wouldn't be caught dead speaking about them. I can count myself among those who won't be addressing certain topics with a 10-foot pole for the time being, but I will highly recommend the book.

While titles like "The Catcher in the Rye" have long been a popular choice for wasting the time of countless high school students, books like the aforementioned two could offer real and immediate value to those preparing for the real world, including helping them to avoid the worst colleges the US has to offer.

As much of my work revolves around collective intelligence and cognitive bias this book goes over highly relevant issues, including the multi-institutional entrenchment of an effort to promote Groupthink and maximize cognitive bias. That effort is further reinforced at the algorithmic level across social media platforms. In fact, it may be time to begin referring to them as "Social Engineering Platforms" rather than "Social Media Platforms", since the shift in function is clear.

My closest colleague and I aren't even in the same ballpark in a political sense, but that is part of what allows us to accomplish so much working together. We're also specialized in very different ways, making that difference in perspective predictable. The degree of difference in perspective offers a potent advantage in reducing cognitive bias within any collective intelligence system, so that more diverse collectives demonstrate more potent superintelligence, as described at greater length in books like "Superminds".

In contrast, groups with a homogenous perspective become echo chambers. While collective intelligence systems are synonymous with superintelligence, improving in quality and becoming more intelligent than the most intelligent member, echo chambers are synonymous with the exact opposite, the degrading of intelligence. This means that an echo chamber is even dumber than the least intelligent member of that Groupthink.

For those interested in remaining intelligent and sentient I highly recommend reading it.

The only part of the book where they missed an opportunity for nuance that I observed was in failing to distinguish "ad homonym" from relevant negative contextual information. The accusation of someone using "ad homonym" is itself a favored tactic of many Group-thinks, even when the negative context is both directly relevant and demonstrably accurate.