And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all. I am actually over preaching the need for privacy, I just try to practice opsec daily and identify my failures and weak spots.
I tried to be a privacy purist: a smartphone without internet on a prepaid card running opensource software (likely with a backdoored baseband chip, but). Internet through rotating VPNs only on incognito browsers with anti-fingerprinting plugins, no sms'es, personal email on a self-hosted server with at-rest encryption...
All while gaining absolutely nothing out of it, but inconveniences like filling out captchas and needing to go extra steps to open up wikipedia. That behaviour itself was a failure in opsec - I am sure that it put me on a watchlist somewhere.
I'm a "normie" now, trying to emulate the "noise" that is around me. I believe that's much more a viable approach than being a hardcore privacy-ist(?)
The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system. They have accepted that this is fine. Telling them that they can be spied on by the government and that the only way to stay safe is to accept a quality of life drop and also learn up on half a dozen relatively complicated technological concepts is not going to work.
"The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system. They have accepted that this is fine."
No. The majority don't care because it hasn't happened to them or someone they love.
Once it does you can believe they'll start caring pretty quick.
So he spearheaded an accountability bill that mandated the state police to publish a yearly report on how often SWAT is deployed, for what reasons, how often lethal force ends up being used etc (it should be noted that police unions fought this tooth and nail, even though it didn't actually hold them accountable for any of it - only exposed how SWAT is actually used most of the time).
But there's a catch. You might notice from the link above that the reports end in 2014. That's because the law had a 5-year sunset clause, and nobody bothered to renew it.
So, even when a fairly influential politician from a privileged background gets involved for personal reasons, that's not still enough long-term.
I'm in favor of the Black Mirror approach for politicians; Give the people full transparency into politicians' activities. This shouldn't be so controversial, given that they work for us, but of course, that is when you would see some real concern for privacy!
Sure, if you compare it to scenarios that aren't remotely the same. I think we were supposed to take it as an obvious given that this applies to scenarios where the side giving away the power is watching the side that was given the power.
Where I work "CUI" is just the header we slap on all of our PowerPoints on NIPR[1], and basically means "don't email this to your civilian email account, or otherwise share it with people outside of work"...but it's still feasible, from a technical standpoint. It's just wrong from an administrative policy perspective. CUI doesn't automatically entail/require encryption. Most people don't even bother to encrypt their emails in Outlook even when chock-full of CUI documents, or worse, high-impact PII/PHI.
If politicians want encrypted comms they'll probably have a //SECRET Blackberry or iPhone.
Years ago I worked on a Special Access project. Everything that got thrown away went into the burn barrels, whether it had a classified label or not. Of course, when California took away our license to burn stuff, we acquired a grinder type shredder.
That is just an easy general policy to adopt, secret project or not. At this point I would call it as basic as using HTTPS, just a general good practice.
The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system.
No, the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you", they can use reasonable force if you decide to ignore or refuse instructions when they have a warrant which has been obtained via the courts. The warrant will only be granted after presenting substantive evidence that the person they are wishing to arrest has committed serious crime i.e. possession / distribution of indecent images of children, drugs, money laundering etc which required rapid entry to secure evidence. They don't get to enter your property for minor offences or on a whim.
the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you"
I realize that we don't feel such behavior is legal, but recent history has shown that when police misbehave at this level (cf. Breonna Taylor), there are no meaningful consequences.
So many engineers live and breathe P.O.S.I.W.I.D. (purpose of a system is what it does) in all technical areas and then are violently opposed to that kind of thinking when it comes to politics or sociology.
I'm honestly baffled by it. I get that people can be ignorant of how police act in the real world because they have no experience with it and watch cop shows on TV, but once you learn what the actual behaviour is ...
My God, I'd not heard that one before. Like I'm fully aware of the philosophy, but not of the acronym as a name for it. Thank you. Filing that for later use.
"[a] person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of unlawful and immediate violence from another."[1]"
Not in the USA, they don't. Not as long as the cops in question don't know for a FACT that their behavior violates established law - even if it DOES violate established law, they aren't held accountable unless a previous court case established precedent under almost the EXACT SAME CIRCUMSTANCES. As you might expect, finding a previous case in which the exact same circumstances applied is not an easy thing to do. Read up on qualified immunity: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-qualified-immunity-and-what...
> Not in the USA, they don't. Not as long as the cops in question don't know for a FACT that their behavior violates established law - even if it DOES violate established law, they aren't held accountable unless a previous court case established precedent under almost the EXACT SAME CIRCUMSTANCES.
This only applies to civil liability; criminal prosecution of unreasonable use of force is not affected by QI, though there are other problems with that.
There are some other answers already regarding whether or not these rules apply to on-duty Police officers but I think you're missing the point.
There seems to be a broad based perception these days that the Police don't obey the rules regarding use of force and they are not proscuted when they break them.
This might mean that the original statement: "the police can legally ... kick the shit out of you" is technically innacurate but it is functionally accurate. The Police do not appear to large swathes of the general public to be at risk of prosecution for beating the shit out of suspects (which basically means anyone they want to).
For police officers its defined by the policy of their department because they have training, less-lethal weapons, and are (at times) obligated to initiate force on subjects. The reasonable person in this case is a law enforcement officer who has the requisite training and experience.
> As far as I'm aware these definitions apply to police officers
They do, the problem is qualified immunity rules out most civil liability in practice, and relying on criminal prosecution has problems because of the relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement.
US Marshals straight up executed an American citizen in Portland (to wit, Michael Forest Reinoehl) on order of the President. Trump himself all but admitted it, in classic Trump style. I'd say that ranks as "kick the shit out of you" and, since there was no consequence for the police or the one who ordered the hit, it sure appears to be "legal".
> No, the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you", they can use reasonable force if you decide to ignore or refuse instructions when they have a warrant which has been obtained via the courts.
No, we require extensive training, and re-training, of doctors. On top of that, they need malpractice insurance, which balloons for the individual if they're royal fuckups. They aren't demonized, they're held accountable.
Demonization is a consequence of bad behavior combined with radical unaccountability.
>Yeap, there are bad actors in the police just like in all other walks of life.
Irrelevant. It's evidence that refutes your earlier claim that police can not legally "kick the shit out of you". They can. Dismissing them as "bad actors" doesn't change that fact.
I'd take it a step further after having read the article associated with that horrifying picture. Two of the officers were found not guilty. The third had charges dropped. This isn't just "bad actors", this is bad actors with the backing of the court system.
>And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all.
I really, really dislike this meme. Try to put yourself into the shoes of a non-tech person, remembering that "non-tech" is in no way a synonym for "stupid" or "lazy". They may be a doctor, lawyer or professor, a construction worker, service industry person or driver. Maybe they make a reasonable amount of money, or maybe they're on minimum wage working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Now please QUANTIFY what "care" means. I'll give it a shot: 1 hour a week. I think that a non-tech person is going to need to average putting in at least that much time, consistently over a year or two, to make major advances on defending their privacy in a Digital Wild West environment. We on HN tend to have not merely significant digital system knowledge, but also significant meta knowledge. We don't just know answers, we know questions and where to look for answers and how to try to find them, the kinds of keywords to use, the kinds of other people to ask and where to find them. This is of course true in any area, but it's easy to take for granted how much of a difference that makes. Someone starting from scratch is going to spend a lot of time even learning that things like firewalls or personal VPNs or the like exist at all, let alone what ones to use and how. They probably won't already have their own technical infrastructure either, like owning a a personal domain with email, and understand the various factors involved with that. Which in turn makes it harder to use unique addresses per site (hence services like Apple Sign In stepping in, which itself has concerns). It's deep, deep waters.
But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money. Maybe they'd be better off just spending more of that directly. But on what? I think the answer for some is "Apple devices" which they've heard are somewhat more updated and private, which could be some fraction of the premium for those that care. Or maybe it'd be better to put some into political donations and activism. But how exactly to do that effectively is itself an area of expertise that will take time. Etc etc.
A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all", nor ignorance that improvement is even possible. Contrary to your assertion, we've repeatedly seen the public being quite uncomfortable with mass surveillance. Large percentages polled don't like the idea of personalized advertising. Laws trying to enhance it have passed repeatedly, despite overwhelming concentrated interest opposition. The laws sometimes get watered down or are misaimed, but that's not surprising for technical things pushed by the public. But the desire is certainly there for a majority, even if many have given up, or are merely quietly getting more angry about it.
So please be careful about blithely ascribing motivations to swaths of hundreds of millions to billions of people from our perch of expertise. Life is more complicated than that, and furthermore it's self-defeating. We, people who care a lot about this and have some idea of what to do about it, need large numbers of regular people who care but don't know what to do. Writing them off instead is stupid. Of course, that means we also need to care about satisfying their needs on the reverse too.
I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble convenience is king. Privacy is not something desirable, because people "have nothing to hide". It's something they don't consider at all. They are not stupid or uneducated, they know stories about stasi. They don't care. And they care even less if privacy brings inconvenience. And this is where we, techies, should step in: provide privacy-friendly platforms which have the same level of convenience. Is that going to happen, tho? No. The problem is too hard, the status quo too deeply entrenched, no better (!) money is to be made here.
Our business/regulatory environment reflects the values we wish to have, they are not a given and require work. We need concrete use cases to convince the public that privacy matters and to make it clear that technology can deliver it.
For example, in our local swim team, I pushed back on using Facebook live-stream for broadcasting a time trial (parent audience was not permitted due to COVID) and instead we distributed heat videos with a password protected server. It seems other teams went with the convenient approach, and now they are banned from recording (since a few parents, correctly, complained). Since then we have gotten permission to continue what we were doing, because we put privacy first. But even so, this begs the deeper question... why is privacy not the default? It's about monetization (cost) and convenience.
I've noticed that some people seem to have an intrinsic desire for privacy. Desire is possibly even to weak of a word, but I can't come up with a better one. I have it, one of my daughters has it. My wife does not.
I would say that I do not feel like me if I don't have time that is unobserved by others (and I'm not using this as a euphemism for masturbation). Even though the things I do then are typically inane. My browser history is fairly inane, and yet I would not publish it.
I had kind of noticed this before, but didn't really have to put it into words until trying to explain my daughter's need for privacy to my wife. She is a very empathetic person, but it took several conversations for her to start to get the idea that "I want to do something without someone looking over my shoulder" is different from "I want to hide what I'm doing from someone" (though absolutely the latter can be used as a smokescreen for the former, particularly by teenagers).
>I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble
If all you're speaking from is personal anecdote from a tiny biased subsample of people, then don't speak about "the majority of the people". Because objectively, millions care given the chance. Measures like the GDPR were popular. Or in the US the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which in fact just this past election got an attempted[1] enhancing provision passed by popular referendum (2020 Proposition 24) with 56% of the vote, or about ~9.1 million people.
Of course people care about convenience and security as well. So again it's very important to make it clear that those don't have to be zero-sum games with privacy, and for technical people to not merely blindly oppose flawed efforts to improve that but put up better solutions. I think we've repeatedly made big mistakes there over the past 20 years, failing to get out in front of efforts like Apple's iOS and then ending up with no way to create standards with the good but not the bad. But that doesn't mean, all else being equal, that people don't care, or in major cases won't make some sacrifices for it. One of the real nasty strategies of anti-privacy forces in fact has been trying to twist it into zero-sum, claiming that privacy can't be convenient or secure.
----
1: Proposition 24 is itself also illustrative of how popular support doesn't always translate into perfectly written legislation, I know the EFF had reservations about it saying it was a mix of steps forward and backward. But again, the desire is clearly there.
No really most people don't care. Out of a group of 4 tech people that I spoke about privacy, one is concerned but won't go further than having an iPhone (even if he knows privacy is just marketing from Apple) and the others though they have the technical knowledge to make some changes really don't care.
One even told me that he wished Google knew him better so some functionalities worked better for him.
The non tech people don't even let me talk to them about privacy. I lost half my Whatsapp contacts that didn't want to install Signal.
> But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money.
Please stop with this meme that every second of one's life is equal to some amount of money.
For example I'm learning Flutter on my spare time right now. It doesn't cost me a dime because otherwise I would watch YouTube videos or some other unproductive activities.
If you push it too far soon you're going to calculate how much sleep "costs" you!
This is so different to the people I speak to in my region (not a tech center!). Most visible is push back against Facebook. During COVID, the local volunteer (mostly retirees) steam railway paid for and setup a good old emailing list, and not a Facebook group as many people seem to expect. At the most recent local election, a young candidate (who ended up winning a seat) in her platform had stated not using Facebook for communications and was even quoted as saying 'Fuck Facebook' from Q&A sessions. I have four elderly parents, none of whom use Facebook. During COVID, Zoom birthdays have taken over from face-to-face gatherings. While I have Signal installed, mostly people are sticking with SMS for messaging. One of the neighborhood groups uses Telegram. Google really means the search engine, email and Youtube. Nobody logs into Youtube and find it creepy when it remembers what they have been doing. It is not entirely like this, with a number of active community Facebook groups for things like 'free stuff' and 'want to buy/sell', and some businesses that are only online on Facebook, from when that was still cool. But it isn't cool any more.
The majority of people do not rationally save for emergencies, let alone retirement.
It is roughly equally true. I have no idea how to compare the relative impacts on social stability; keeping a sizable percentage of the population in economically precarious positions is likely more destabilizing, but spying and blackmail can have massive effects, too.
> A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all"
I look at this as:
(1) Roughly the same proportion of people at any given time will be [failing to save, feeding the surveillance beast].
(2) Change the environment, and you change their behavior on the margin. (Opt-out 401K increases overall savings rates; safe defaults frequently don't get changed.)
(3) Change the incentives, and you change behavior permanently. (Ownership stakes encourage savings; close channels that leak personal information.)
This is a really excellent answer - I especially appreciate that you quantified the cost. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say ‘people just don’t care’ again without at least second guessing myself...thanks for that shot of perspective!!!
>> And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all.
> I really, really dislike this meme.
I dislike it too, but for a different reason.
This story is a conspiracy theory. Literally.
At least one difference I notice in this case is that neither the article itself, nor the comments in this thread (at the time of writing this) contain either of the terms "conspiracy theory" or "QAnon" - but attach either of those, and you'll find all sorts of people who will suddenly develop a very passionate sense of caring/interest of a different kind: in discrediting, downvoting, and silencing anyone who in any way supports or perpetuates this type of a story.
In this case, I suspect the main difference is that the "public relations" departments of the Canadian Government and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) are bush league compared to that of the US. In the US, this story would probably have been preemptively "taken care of" in the media before it even broke, or in 24 hours via a full court press if it did happen to accidentally fall through the cracks, and people would fall in line as they always do.
How is this story related to QAnon or a conspiracy theory? I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
It isn't related (more precisely: a relation has not been established) - that was my point.
I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...and how this can act upon people's interest levels and thinking styles.
> I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
I feel like this sort of rhetoric is a fine example of the very phenomenon that I described ("...but attach either of those, and you'll find...).
> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories?
Not sure who it is exactly. And unless they for some reason decide to voluntarily confess, I suspect we will never know for sure.
Are you under the impression that the United States government never uses propaganda? Maybe you guys have the state on a much shorter leash than the Canadians.
> If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
Regardless, to answer your question, here is an example:
This article implicitly(!) asserts that the Dominion story is an invention of QAnon. How it works (from a neuroscientific, "belief formation" perspective) is, these stories are printed in the news, and then people who read them believe what is in the story.
Whether it is actually true or not has very little bearing. Not only do most people (who voice an opinion) not care what is actually true, they will go to great lengths to discredit anyone who mentions the very notion of 'What is Actually True'. This is not just an opinion - the phenomenon can be observed.
To me, this behavior is absolutely fascinating. Why most people have such a strong aversion to the topic is also interesting.
Back to the article...
> "While the theory has already been debunked — including by Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with national security related to the internet and technology..."
Notice the language used in such articles, words like debunked.
If you have an eye for detail, you may notice that this is a very popular word with journalists these days. You may also notice that "debunk" has a fair amount of uncertainty and wiggle room in its explicit definition (if not so much in how it is interpreted by people who read it). This sort of wiggle room can come in handy if one is ever called to testify in court.
I won't bother doing a full analysis of the article, I have not once encountered a single non-conspiracy-theorist who is able to discuss this topic with the same attention to accuracy as they would if we were discussing a technical topic like programming - I am merely drawing people's attention to the phenomenon. I have no illusions whatsoever that I am going to change a single person's mind (and believe me, I've tried), in the slightest.
You are free to believe whatever you would like, as is everyone else. And Mother Nature will reward us accordingly, in the long run.
But I will say this:
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
To some degree I think, but I think burden of proof is kind of shared int his situation.
The general topic of the thread is ~government agencies "being bad", with several people complaining that ~"people don't care" about privacy.
I submitted for consideration the notion that governments engage in "conspiracy theories", and covering them up. Evidence can be provided for this - there is plenty on record.
A point of contention then arose:
>> How is this story related to QAnon or a conspiracy theory? I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
>> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
And then:
> I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
So what would be an inverse of my idea. By my reckoning, a valid example would be where someone asserts that a story should be ignored because it is attributed to QAnon, or even better, when someone disputes that claim, and then the channel goes silent.
I don't mind "losing an argument" on a technicality, the elephants in the room being discussed (or, explicit mentions of them "not being seen") is more than enough for me. To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality. One would think, at some point at least one person might realize and acknowledge that indeed, there are some things that occur (or do not occur) in reality that we do not know all the details of...that some portions of reality are unknown. One would think.
> I submitted for consideration the notion that governments engage in "conspiracy theories", and covering them up.
I don't think anyone disputes that governments have conspired and kept it secret before. The "teapot" in this case is QAnon or any specific conspiracy theory, not that any government has ever had any conspiracy. Prove or argue for a specific conspiracy and don't hide behind that "people have kept stuff secret before".
> To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality.
Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
> The "teapot" in this case is QAnon or any specific conspiracy theory, not that any government has ever had any conspiracy. Prove or argue for a specific conspiracy and don't hide behind that "people have kept stuff secret before".
Am I "hiding" behind that?
Alleged conspiracies happen, or they do not happen. I make no specific, strong assertion either way. Many others cannot say the same though.
> Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
Most definitely.
How do you feel about those who assert things like:
- "<X> did not happen - that idea (<X>) is just a conspiracy theory" (implicitly) [and therefore it can be accurately dismissed as false]
- "<X> did not happen, (implicitly)[we know this to be true because] there is no evidence" (which ignores the largely unappreciated facts that human beings are not omniscient, and all that occurs in physical reality is not known)
Personally, I see such assertions being problematic in a number of ways, mainly: in excess quantities, describing reality in this fashion can highly distort the public's perception of reality.
It seems like you have narrowed your point all of the way down to "generalizations about truth are bad because humans are not omniscient".
People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there. Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory. Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality. Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
> It seems like you have narrowed your point all of the way down to "generalizations about truth are bad because humans are not omniscient".
That's a rather imperfect characterization, but at least you realize that it "seems" this way, not that it --is-- this way.
An improvement would be something like: "[Generalizations about the truth that are presented as the accurate, comprehensive truth] is bad, because it distorts the public's perceptions of reality. One can often know(!) whether these generalizations are manufactured truth. An example of one such way is when knowing a truth would require omniscience (ie: "there is no evidence)".
However, what one cannot know(!), for sure, is whether this manufacturing is performed consciously. That the "just so" stories are so consistent in their timing, and details (or lack of details), suggests that this process may often not be purely organic. That many confirmations of conscious and coordinated behavior have been discovered (but mostly in the past, funny that) lends further support to the idea that it does actually occur, at least sometimes (a funny sentence if you think about it).
> People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there.
This is true, but not comprehensive - but many people perceive it as comprehensive.
> Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
This is what people are told (about how they themselves and others behave), but it's not the actual reality of how people behave. If this was actual reality, it would require that the masses ("broadly") actually think ("considered") about the ideas [1] contained within each conspiracy theory.
For the most part, people do not do this, and this can be seen in the comically inaccurate way they discuss the ideas, on the very rare occasion that they do. They discuss (and believe, as fact) the distorted and simplified "just so" version that the media tells them, not the actual one that exists within the conspiracy theory ecosystem [2]. I suspect you likely have a fairly strong belief [3] about whether what I say here is true or not - whether you have any curiosity about what the actual truth is, is likely a different story - this applies to a large percentage of conspiracy theorists as well.
> You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory.
No, this is how your mind is conceptualizing it. I am not "hiding" behind anything, I am simply discussing the general nature of conspiracy theories. Is this a violation of some natural law?
> Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
Actually, this is your perception of it. Think about it: By what means do you know the thoughts of the public, which is composed of hundreds of millions of people? Of course you have no way of knowing what people think! Yet, it sure doesn't seem like you don't, does it! It seems rather crystal clear that you know this, does it not? But if you trace the lineage of that knowledge in your mind, what do you find? Go ahead, try it!
> The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality.
Here you have resorted to a strawman rhetorical technique, and a rather obvious one at that. I doubt this convinces even you.
> Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
How does one make sense of all of this complexity and uncertainty? What should a person believe? Shall we believe what the newspaper man, and telly man, or conspiracy theory man, tell us is true (even though it's very often obvious that they literally do not have the technical means of knowing(!) what they say is true, is actually true?
One novel approach, taking The Clear Pill, is offered by Curtis Yarvin (Mencious Moldbug):
Now I'm not suggesting you adopt this approach, I'm just pointing it out as an option [4], and as a demonstration of how things are not as they seem (to the mind).
Most people can conceptualize and accept the flawed nature of human cognition when discussing it in the abstract, but this skill seems to vanish when the point of focus turns to concrete reality. Then, perception is perceived as 100% accurate. I imagine there is an evolutionary explanation for this strange inconsistency, but I suspect that explanation may not be comprehensive.
--------
[1] the actual ideas, as opposed to the distorted allegations advertised in the media
[2] which is very often an inconsistent mess full of contradictions - but not always
[3] many people incorrectly consider these beliefs "knowledge", or even/usually "facts"
[4] there are many available options to choose from, and you've already "chosen" one (or had one chosen for you - see: culture), whether you realize it or not
> I feel like this sort of rhetoric is a fine example of the very phenomenon that I described
I see your point, that by attaching certain labels (like a logical fallacy), many people write off information without independently judging its veracity (whether the fallacy actually occured)
Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:
> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me. I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense. There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth. I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist. Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills. Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
> Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:
>> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
> Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
You seem to be framing the conversation as if I have made the assertion that 100% of people fall for these techniques. I made no such claim.
> I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me.
Now you are addressing the example I provided, rather than the general phenomenon I am describing.
> I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense.
There is some Truth to the story, or there is No Truth to the story. Our respective personal opinions or understandings have no bearing on the actual state of reality.
> There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
Perhaps there would, perhaps there would not.
Perhaps this would be noticed, perhaps this would be not. Can you point me to anything that demonstrates that an extremely thorough statistical analysis has been performed?
> I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth.
I am not pushing the premise that "only conspiracy theorists care about truth". You are framing and characterizing my comments as if I am stating that.
> I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist.
How much any one person perceives themself to "care" (a slippery concept) about something does not always match "the actuality" of the situation. This is kind of what sayings like "Watch What People Do, Not What They Say" are getting at. To make it even more complicated, the level of caring can often vary significantly with the smallest of modifications to certain variables in the model.
To be clear, I do not mean to accuse you specifically of any particular imperfection - if I have done so, then that was done in error. I have no way of knowing your true beliefs or intentions. I am speaking of a general phenomenon that can be observed - and furthermore, I am in no way asserting that it applies universally in all situations.
> Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
This is absolutely correct, and I have said nothing to indicate otherwise.
> Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills.
This is an estimation. It is not possible to know with any kind of precision what the complex chain of causation is behind any individual conspiracy theorist, or conspiracy theorists in general.
> Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
This is also an estimation. You do not have any way of knowing the actual, comprehensive beliefs of even one individual conspiracy theorist, let alone what "most" of them believe. Ironically, this neurological phenomenon (the mistaking of heuristic predictions about reality, for reality itself) is to a large degree the type of thinking that many conspiracy theory beliefs are based upon.
I happen to believe that both sides are very wrong on this general topic, and most other popular "culture-war" category disputes. I would like for the counter-productive and harmful "he said, she said" meme wars (of which this topic is but one) that are going on in the world between the various tribes to stop. I would like us to move more towards a public discourse based on calm, measured, truly evidence-based reasoning, and trinary logic (True/False/Unknown), rather than our current binary (True/False) approach (which forces people to guess).
I feel like LEO's going out and saying this over and over is just them trying to move the window, with a little help from Silicon Valley executives[0]. The more they say, it the more the Jedi mind trick will work.
For a while now I was struggling to put into words why my l changed from being a "privacy activist" to being a "normie". But you just hit the nail on the head. Security, both technical and operational are still very much important to me.
But before recently, I would've preferred Firefox over Chrome for example, since it's more private.
Being a zebra in the middle of the pack is probably the most practical solution. However as things move forward with the great reset its going to become increasingly more difficult for that to maintain its effectiveness.
Its obvious now that "vaccine passports" and "contact tracing" are going to become defacto required. Therefore, the level of data they will be collecting will be so granular that 'blending in' won't really matter. A simple SQL query 5 years in the future will establish your every movement and health history for any given point.
>50% of average people are going to go along with this (or outright support it) and anyone who speaks against it will be called "anti-science" and selfish.
It's literally mind-boggling we are at this stage, but we must open our eyes and accept it.
One of us will wake up in a gooey casket attached to some sort of harvesting machine in the future. We will have to fight an army of men in black suits as we try to save the human race from the robots.
There is also the other side, most people do not realize what is happening, and full out consequences of various things.
Once you actually tell them the reality of things, they really don't like it. Like why can the FBI force my therapist to give them their notes under the Patriot act? Most don't know it, most will not like it either.
Another part of this is the power is unexercised and/or covert. Because if it was overt, it would create huge public backlash. They know this and it's why they use things like parallel construction.
I tried to be a privacy purist: a smartphone without internet on a prepaid card running opensource software (likely with a backdoored baseband chip, but). Internet through rotating VPNs only on incognito browsers with anti-fingerprinting plugins, no sms'es, personal email on a self-hosted server with at-rest encryption...
All while gaining absolutely nothing out of it, but inconveniences like filling out captchas and needing to go extra steps to open up wikipedia. That behaviour itself was a failure in opsec - I am sure that it put me on a watchlist somewhere.
I'm a "normie" now, trying to emulate the "noise" that is around me. I believe that's much more a viable approach than being a hardcore privacy-ist(?)