I was reading an interesting opinion piece, What I Learned About Media Rage After Getting Fired From Fox The bits below hit the nail on the head: As a journalist, I believe that what is wrong with my vocation and the industry in which I work is harming Americans left, right and center. Major players in the news business are abusing their privileges and shirking their duties, and we all pay the price. The agenda at many outlets is to move away from even aspirational fairness and balance and toward shared anger and the powerful emotional connections it can create. Unable to sell large, diverse audiences to advertisers, news outlets increasingly focus on developing highly habituated users. To cultivate the kind of intense readers, viewers or listeners necessary to make the addiction model profitable, media companies need consumers to have strong feelings. Fear, resentment and anger work wonders. It helps news outlets create deep emotional connections to users not just as users of a product, but as members of the same tribe. Reporters increasingly disdain the old virtues of fairness and balance as “bothsidesism,” reimagining the ancient vice of bias as something honorable. Opinion pages become more homogeneous. Story selections become more predictable. Most ominously, post-journalism produces stifling groupthink inside news organizations and serious consequences for journalists who dissent. What we think of as “bad news” can score like gangbusters if it is scary and anger-inducing. But news that is bad for your audience’s ideological in-groups is clickbait kryptonite. In such a competitive marketplace, riling people up against the other side isn’t enough. You’ve also got to create a safe space for consumers to plop down and contentedly contemplate ads for beet-based nutrient powders, reverse mortgages and copper underpants. If you challenge their assumptions or suggest that their avatars in the culture war are wrong or losing, they may leave for competitors who offer more complete protection from harsh realities. Which I guess are excerpted from the author's book: Well, duh!! What are we, as a freedom loving society, going to do to ensure our democracy remains thusly? What can we actually do given the cold facts at hand?

@jgill Admittedly a very dark period in mi' life when Largo let me down. Big time.... Oh well, I suppose John is getting pretty up there in the ages these days and maybe lost his mind or something.... Mental discipline requires increasing efforts. Sigh....

Term limits are a definite move in the right direction.

A mock bill from the 2018/2019 Congressional Debate Legislation Packet. High School debaters participating Congressional Debate events write, introduce, debate, and then vote on these. I only judged and did not have any input otherwise. Most debate events require participants be prepared to argue either side of an issue. Congress does not. It is hard to have a debate in an "echo chamber", however, so in the interest of "having a good session" the more seasoned participants are often prepared to do so. Maybe y'all will enjoy debating some of these mock bills, maybe not. A Bill to Change the Legal Recognition of Adulthood to 21 BE IT ENACTED BY THE CONGRESS HERE ASSEMBLED THAT: Section 1. In the United States the legal recognition of Adulthood will be changed to 21 years of age. Section 2. Adulthood is defined as a person who has attained the age of majority; which is the legally defined age at which a person is considered an adult, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities of adulthood. Section 3. The State Department will handle all necessary changes to legal documents, laws, and responsibilities to oversee the changes created by this bill. Section 4. This bill will be implemented January 1st, 2021 Section 5. All laws in conflict with this legislation are hereby declared null and void. Sponsor: Introduced for Congressional Debate by Nampa High School Be nice, have fun, and be cool.

@toby said in Humans are primarily driven by self-interest: Was hoping @jgill might pop in and enlighten us with a bit of game theory I'm not familiar with modern game theory, which has been extended to decision analysis and beyond. When Von Neumann and others introduced the subject, it relied heavily on fixed-point theory, specifically Brouwer's Fixed-point Theorem, which states that certain sets, no matter how they are shifted about retain a point that is fixed. If a function shifts the points about, then, provided the function is "continuous", there is a point that remains in the same position. From Wiki: Take an ordinary map of a country, and suppose that that map is laid out on a table inside that country. There will always be a "You are Here" point on the map which represents that same point in the country. My own investigations have included extending a similar classical result, the Banach Fixed-point Theorem, which tells one how to actually find this point, to a more general setting. As for the assertion in the title, you are moving into the territory of the old "What is Mind" thread from ST. How are decisions formed? How much of decision-making originates in the subconscious?