What May Be The Most Important Thing I Read Today

 Ted Gioia's We're Living in a Scroll-and Swipe Doom Loop Culture exposes more of how to deal with Tik Tok and similar apps better than a blockade. I do not indulge in those apps, I am lucky with lacking time for such things. I think anyone with any dignity will give up these apps after reading the article.

But if censorship isn’t the answer, what is?

First let me share some good news: When I studied behavioral psychology, I came to the conclusion that human beings really aren’t like rats. In the short term, you can manipulate them with Skinnerian systems of reinforcement. But over the long run, humans will do something the rats never do—they rebel.

Sure, if you put people in one of those rat mazes, they will figure out how to run through it and find their rewards. But eventually the more independent individuals will decide to destroy the maze.

People will do this even if they kill themselves in the process. They have this strange little thing called human dignity—and they actually believe it exists. The behavioral psychologists can’t understand this because such metaphysical notions don’t fit into their data-driven world view. But that doesn’t really matter, people believe this stuff—they have a sense of their self worth even when put in a box or a maze. They feel it in their hearts and souls, and it actually gets stronger in the face of adversity.

Some individuals might run the maze, but a meaningful number will resist—and they do so as a matter of principle. (That’s another word you won’t hear from the behaviorists. Personal values and core principles don’t show up in their test models—because they can’t be charted. And the Skinnerieans make the same mistake that undermines all radical empiricists: They assume that things that can’t be measured don’t exist—which is a very foolish and dangerous error.)

I believe that most people put their values ahead of those carefully constructed intermittent reinforcement rewards.

sch 7:20  AM