Thursday Thoughts: shadowbanning and Cathy Newman’s tells for cognitive dissonance

Thursday Thoughts are a series of recent observations too short to merit their own article, but still important when analyzing today’s technological, economic and psychological trends.

Shadowbanning is not just a Twitter Thing — Google does it too

• Ever since I posted the article about the Damore vs. Google lawsuit, I noticed a downtrend in the number of referral clicks coming from Google searches. Despite being just anecdotal evidence, I’ve conjectured before (and thus wouldn’t surprise me) whether Google silently ranks down sites that post negative articles about them.  I’m guessing Twitter is not just the only company that likes to shadow ban those critical of their postmodern ideology.
• On the same note, my YouTube video that bashes Facebook, “Facebook is a social catastrophe“, has gone viral.  Both “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs knew about the dangers of smartphones and social media” and “Why these updates help protect you in an online world scares me, and it’s not the online world” have hit the top three trending posts on my blog in the past week.  I think a corollary of the above theory is that Google silently increases the rank of negative articles and videos about their competitors — “shadowpromoting”, if you will.

Cathy Newman’s tells for cognitive dissonance in the Jordan Peterson Interview

• Watch the entire Jordan Peterson Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman and count the number of times the interviewer utters “so what you’re saying”.  When someone is prefacing their arguments with “so”, they are showing reliable tells for cognitive dissonance.  Think about how she continues to deliberately paraphrase and misinterpret Jordan Peterson’s arguments so that he remains the bad guy in her world-view. She is unwilling to negotiate her own self-image when confronted with facts that oppose her rigid opinions. She relies on the “so” fallback to keep her emotionally intact while being cognitively dissonant.  No one would need to preface their arguments with “so” if they have the necessary facts and logic to fall back on instead.
• On the same note, take a look at Scott Adams’ list of many of the other psychological tells for cognitive dissonance and see how many you can spot in the interview.  Apart from the endless Nonsense Rebuttals and Personal Attacks (particularly at the end of the interview where she invokes Godwin’s Law by proxy out of nowhere, calling Peterson a “provocateur” like the “alt-right”), Cathy Newman’s most notable tell is the Speechless Moment where Jordan Peterson had to break the awkward silence with “Gotcha!”.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Peterson, a clinical psychologist, is aware of the Speechless Moment tell and its association with a strong physical response, a response Scott Adams duly noted in his article.  It would definitely explain this Tweet:

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