Proposal: The Incoherence Clock

[ZoWie]

The war in Gaza and the 2024 election campaign have forced me to make a Modest Proposal. I now open discussion regarding whether this board should feature an Incoherence Clock. This would resemble the Doomsday Clock published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where they periodically assess the world situation and decide where to put the minute hand on a clock face where midnight represents WWIII and the end of intelligent life on Earth.

The Incoherence Clock would represent how close we have come to the Internet making spoken and written language completely useless for conveying meaning. One can no longer doubt that this process is real. The morphing of the word "progressive," from someone who advocates policy that furthers economic and ethnic equality, to someone who wants the Jews exterminated, is currently the most egregious net-induced communication problem. Worse, it is hardly the only one. We have seen similar degeneration in other discussions, notably the definition of "intelligence," where human thought itself is now considered just another process that works better when we let machines do something that vaguely resembles the real thing, and creative insight is obsolete.

On the Incoherence Clock, midnight would represent the state in which language is useless for communicating abstract ideas, creating a situation in which words mean whatever the current online consensus says they mean. Such a condition would obviously make the further existence of civilization very iffy indeed.

I propose that this clock face starts with a minute hand at ten minutes to midnight, to be adjusted yearly by consensus in the same kind of vote as taken by the Atomic Scientists.