Half the population trapped in media fantasy world of Climate Doom
Posted by freedomforall 3 years ago to Politics
Excerpt:
"All those silicon chips and no real knowledge
The poorest quarter in the UK have more information at their fingertips than King George did, but half the modern population have no idea what’s going on. In big bold terms of history, no other century saw so many lives saved, and deadly foes conquered. But most of the lucky recipients of the biggest bounty in a hundred thousand years aren’t just oblivious to the good news, they think things are getting worse.
Instead of drowning in floods they are drowning in junk headlines.
View this poll as a test of the media. If they told the truth — in perspective — the responses would cluster in a bell curve around the correct answer. Instead, a third of the population don’t know, and half the population know even less.
The GWPF has done a survey in the UK and discovered that less than 10% of the population even realize that the death toll from natural disasters is down at all, let alone by 95%. More than half the population can’t even guess the trend. And if these were “per capita” stats, the trend practically fell off a cliff. Since 1920 the global population has increased four-fold, but the death toll shrunk by a factor of twenty."
Read the article for the revealing graphic data.
"All those silicon chips and no real knowledge
The poorest quarter in the UK have more information at their fingertips than King George did, but half the modern population have no idea what’s going on. In big bold terms of history, no other century saw so many lives saved, and deadly foes conquered. But most of the lucky recipients of the biggest bounty in a hundred thousand years aren’t just oblivious to the good news, they think things are getting worse.
Instead of drowning in floods they are drowning in junk headlines.
View this poll as a test of the media. If they told the truth — in perspective — the responses would cluster in a bell curve around the correct answer. Instead, a third of the population don’t know, and half the population know even less.
The GWPF has done a survey in the UK and discovered that less than 10% of the population even realize that the death toll from natural disasters is down at all, let alone by 95%. More than half the population can’t even guess the trend. And if these were “per capita” stats, the trend practically fell off a cliff. Since 1920 the global population has increased four-fold, but the death toll shrunk by a factor of twenty."
Read the article for the revealing graphic data.
One more thing to consider is my own take on the global mean temperature matter: Any statement prior to the last couple of decades, where more accurate satellite measurements come into play, specifying a global mean temperature is either a POOTAA (Pulled Out Of The Ass Assumption) or is a number based on a POOTAA. Even the graph in this article showing a 1 degC mean temperature rise over 150 years is a POOTAA.
Meta-Mind (Quora)
Admin • Updated Thu (12/17/2020) by Dan Appleton
This question was originally posted elsewhere on Quora and answered by Paul O'Brian. Most of the answers see the internet as a positive influence on our species. I do not.
Has the internet turned free speech into something more than what it originally meant in society?
In 1980, the renown futurist Alvin Toffler told us about the Third Wave, the current information-based revolution. Lots of folks pontificate about “information," mostly lauding it as an energy source for improving the quality of human life. But, I am here to make the case that in its current manifestation, the information revolution is actually more dangerous to the human race than CO2, Covid 19, or nuclear war. It may well be a species specific extinction event. Which species? Our species!
I begin with a question mostly ignored by conventional wisdom: What is information? To answer this question, we look to Claude Shannon, the “father of information theory.” Shannon told us that "information" is one of two kinds of "message." (Messages are the molecules of human reason.) According to Shannon, some messages "resolve uncertainty." These are "information messages." All other messages are "noise."
Messages move from a sender to a receiver, but despite the intention of the sender, whether the message is an information message or a noise message is determined by the receiver. Shannon tells us that the receiver's decision is simple: if the message resolves uncertainty, it is information, if not, it is noise.
Therefore, Information is a characteristic assigned to a message by a receiver; it is not an inherent characteristic of a message. The internet is a message transportation system.
Message senders use it to send messages to receivers. Free speech is a sender-based concept. But, it is the receivers who determine message and, consequently, internet efficacy. Receivers consciously or subconsciously make this determination based on a simple equation:
IMR/TMR=U
(Information Messages Received ÷ Total Messages Received equals Uncertainty)
Over the last 50 years, the numerator has significantly decreased while the denominator has dramatically increased. As a consequence, Uncertainty grows and the Third Wave rapidly approaches a tipping point in the receiver's consciousness, a tipping point where the information revolution becomes the noise revolution.
The noise revolution is dominated by uncertainty. Uncertainty is not pleasurable. It is the reverse. As it grows, so do fear, loathing, hate, and, in the extreme, death. The trajectory of human behavior over the last half century has been toward more fear and loathing, not more comfort and happiness.
Whether measured on a global level or a national level, in your personal community, and perhaps even in your personal friendships or family, this trajectory of increasing uncertainty is the same.
"Information" technology is a wolf in sheep's clothing. The wolf has taken on a life of it's own. The purveyors of this technology like Facebook, Twitter, Snap, You Tube, Google, Verizon, etc. all laude wonders like Amazon, electronic banking, automated medical records, cell phones, the internet, and so on as pleasurable multipliers of the quality of human life. Our Freudian Ids should be happy and we should be swimming in an ocean of dopamine. But, as uncertainty grows so do anxiety and adrenalin.
The more rampant, hidden nefarious effects of information technology have escaped any control. These effects have gained a life of their own. I, for one, do not see any emergent counter force sufficient to the task of defeating them. Do you?
Bottom line, uncertainty about anything is increasing exponentially. Ask any friend, neighbor, or stranger how goes their uncertainty? Is it growing or is it decreasing because they are living the “information” age?
So what if we live in the noise age? Whereas our hope was that the information age would be a good place to live; the noise age we find ourselves in is definitely NOT!
Clearly, the "information” age, nay, the “noise” age, is potentially yet another emergent global, man-made disaster! Given nuclear war, a pandemic, and global warming, we don't need another.
The information age is a growing sea of noise and the internet is a tsunami in that sea. The tsunami is already crashing on the shores of human reason, gradually eroding rational thought and behavior. It is exposing both our viciousness and our fragility. What it is revealing to those bold enough to observe its reality is that the information age is really something that can ultimately destroy us ….
Monsters from our Id!