In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption.
In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times.
In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white piece of paper.
If you're trying to say current day Russia is the same as current day US or EU then you're way off line.
I see it different, and to the comment one level up...we have the illusion of democracy, which takes the oppression of opposition to a whole new level.
In fact, this episode of Freakanomics talks about The Politics Industrial Complex and how The Media is on the inside of that bubble. In short, without a healthy and objective Fourth Estate there is no democracy. Add in the duopoly one-party choices and it gets even worse.
There's more to democracy than getting to vote. What we're living is the Orwellian defintion of democracy.
I also heard it said on another reputable podcast - I think it was "How I built this" - that the top corporate guest of the Obama WH was Google. I'm trying to verify that. This looks close enough.
It's odd that a POTUS who sold hope would be so closely aligned with a surveillance company.
See also: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" for a look behind Google's public facing narrative.
The Pentagon keeps failing its audits, to the tune of trillions of dollars, and the people are silent. Trillions? If it walks like corruption and talks like corruption...well we all should see where this is going. Yet, zero opposition to this?
I think you are smart and insightful person. There's too many of "yes we could be better but we are still the best while those other suck beyond improvement unless we fix them" East and West, left and right. I hope to fix my country and I hope you fix yours. Maybe we even come together and fix them both. But I hope some won't attepmt to fix my country again with dropping depleted uranium bombs on civillians in the name of democracy.
That we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption is applicable to any society, on any level of corruption. It was not too late for Netherlands under nazis, it is not too late for anyone.
>In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed
This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way.
Trump legitimately upset the applecart by winning (even if it was an electoral college victory, it was nonetheless part of how the system formally works) and surprised many people including a majority of the media landscape fully against his campaign. Because you detest that particular president's politics (im no fan of them either in many ways) doesn't make it an antidemocratic step backward..
Trump recently called for the constitution to be suspended… and constantly banging on about the stolen election… he is anti democratic.
With him in power we would have eventually slid into fascism.
The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.
For a functioning demographic you need well informed citizens.
Luckily us the people rejected the crazy views of trumpeteers.
>The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.
I call bullshit on that. The progressive side of US politics and society badly discredited itself with its endless harping about Russian electoral manipulation. They spent years doing this without ever putting forth any credible, concrete evidence and in other cases ignoring evidence that showed connections between Russian officials and their preferred political affiliations. This latter event to the point that now, we have several major media outlets being forced to admit the importance of the Hunter Biden laptop story that they previously sneered at after the New York Post made it very public. The levels of partisan absurdity only grow more laughable.
Much of this, I suspect pushed by a near hysterical desire to find an external cause for millions of Americans who voted for him (for whatever numerous reasons of their own) not listening to the preaching by their supposed superiors in the major media outlets and social feeds.
How many people right on this site frequently talk about how difficult it is to convince people through online advertising even when the spending is in the billions by agents that know a lot about individual's preferences because of online habit tracking. And then at the same time we're supposed to believe that tens of millions of Americans were brainwashed into voting against their own preference by a Russian manipulation campaign run by a government that has repeatedly shown itself to be inept at so many things (war most recently), with a relatively modest budget, limited personnel and a general cultural divide between the mentalities of the perpetrators and all those average Trump voters in the U.S.
The entire accusation reeks of idiotic nationalistic elitism justifying a profound disdain for a huge percentage of the U.S population that "refused to listen" (to progressive arguments against Trump).
There is a difference between trying to convince someone to spend money on your product vs trying to convince someone that your worldview and ideology is the right one (Trumpism) by using language that resonates with your values.
You wouldn’t be able to convert a progressive to become a Trumpist, but try it on folks on the fence and the probability is higher.
Same happened in the UK with Brexit. A weak West benefits Putin. The Russians have a lot of experience with disinformation campaigns. Look up Operation Infektion. Luckily it failed. The West is now more united, due to Putin’s miscalculation with the Ukraine war.
>There is a difference between trying to convince someone to spend money on your product vs trying to convince someone that your worldview and ideology is the right one (Trumpism) by using language that resonates with your values.
Both is propaganda, the difference stems from not only trying to frame things in a positive light as you commonly do with advertisement. The reason political propaganda is often more effective is the easy exploitation of negative caricatures combined with ingroup/outgroup effects and the errors of our brains. Be it cognitive biases or simply the inability to scale with complexity. So for example, if i get you to perceive yourself to be part of my ingroup, by having you react predictably with caricatures representing the outgroup (often with some "with us or against us" rhetorics) and manage to have you accept simplified stories, then i quite simply already won. Because i will be able to define who is and who isnt grouped in with the caricatures and how you think about anything they say.
This is very much about brainwashing. If i get you to think about stuff the way i framed it and stop you from communicating with people outside of the frame in a meaningful way, then i own you. And it works through you not wanting to challenge believes you started to identify with due to cognitive biases. Which is also how you recognize whether you are already in such a situation. By for example, believing every disagreement with sockpuppets is a "no" instead of a "yes, but...". Having an incomplete view of a situation is often just as easy to exploit as a wrong one.
Unfortunately this is just the start. This is very much an asymmetric battle with individuals on the loosing end in terms of complexity management and ease of adaptation. And even if you somehow managed to stay objective and got your hands on good information, you are still at threat of your attacker escalating to psychological warfare, for example overwhelming you with inputs to force you into either paralysis or predetermined reactions. And depending of how vicious your attacker is, white torture is also a possibility for further escalation.
> The reason political propaganda is often more effective is the easy exploitation of negative caricatures combined with ingroup/outgroup effects and the errors of our brains.
Yes - spot on. And this was used during the Trump and Brexit campaigns.
However, brainwashing to me is when you can turn someone who originally is far away from your side and make them come over to your side. So maybe we just have a different definition of it.
I hope we can agree though that Trump was not good for the US - he created a lot of damage and used those tactics you mentioned to create division and in-fighting, which benefits the status quo and hinders societal progress.
I always wonder how can you ensure that people get factual information and how to change the system so politicians lose their jobs if they deliberately spread misinformation or lie. It's key for having a functioning democracy, voters need accurate and factual information.
Agree on the not so great again and the need for a honest inquiry for factual information. Its just that i think some of that stuff is caricatures itself. Q-Anon for example is more or less crack. Here is a game developer describing it
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
>It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed.
>In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative.
>It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make.
Being opposed to something like this is very easy. And at the same time the ability to figure stuff out without political framing gets harder and harder as well. Its made only worse with propaganda on the political level being also very profitable. And even stuff with good intentions backfires.
Its a clusterfuck all around, stuff gets more and more complicated. We havent solved scaling problems in software development or companies and it seems political discourse cant handle either. In addition to problems becoming too complicated, you also have to stay realistic. If you just fire every politicians dealing with disinformation you have the old problem of replacing everyone with some magic competent new humans with authoritarians meanwhile racing onwards. Give people certain incentives and its hard to behave differently. People want to get reelected and peoples opinions are very easily swayed with some well made propaganda.
On the bright side, this should all be a rather easy fix as long as we can agree on meaning well and reality mattering more then wanting to feel right. Because that is how a really nice made frame looks and you might have to let go and try to be rational for a moment.
edit: tldr: Any attempt to ban missinformation would likely be a terrible idea, we will have to agree to wanting to fix it instead. And that is hopefully just a question of tooling.
I have to read up on the ancient Greeks and the origins of democracy.
And yes agree - banning misinformation isn't the answer.
So what are the solutions - how do make sure propaganda doesn't bubble to the top, but facts and truthful information does - so people can make informed decisions.
How do you avoid people like Trump, i.e. narcissistic self serving people rising to power and subverting democracy.
You can't simply expect truth to win. History shows time and again that a lie can circle the world a hundred times before the truth even gets its shoes on. Misinformation is viral, information is not. Lies are simple, the truth is often complicated. Charismatic con men and charlatans appealing to base emotion, rumors and conspiracy theories often short circuit reason and rationality in ways that a presentation of facts to the contrary can't repair.
If your top priority is ensuring the playing field is always even between truth and lies, and that lies are always given a fair shake, then you're just rigging the game for lies. The truth only wins and holds precedence in an environment where lies can be recognized and fought against, and prevented from manifesting their own reality bubbles.
Banning misinformation alone isn't enough, and yes it can certainly be abused, but it is necessary.
>Banning misinformation alone isn't enough, and yes it can certainly be abused, but it is necessary.
Its impossible. And its one of the most dangerous and insidious ideas out there. To put it quite bluntly, you arent competent enough to determine for other people what is true and what is fake. And neither is anyone else. Its the reason we had informed consent, because without it, idiots thinking to do "the right thing" historically time and time again inflict horrible fates upon those deemed not smart enough to make decisions for themselves.
I understand that you want it to work, or even feel it needs to work, but reality quite simply doesnt give a crap about what anyone feels "should or needs to work".
This might look like a stupid disagreement, but quite frankly, this is the line in the sand towards totalitarian dystopias. If you were competent enough to make that decision, you would be competent enough to explain why something is true or fake. Which in my view leaves either malice or delusion motivating those pushing on regardless.
Thanks to the internet i had the possibility to speak with people holding despicable views, be it nazis or thanks to /r/syriancivilwar even interviews with ISIS supporters. Please really think about the fact that i am still more worried about people with your set of believes.
This is truly dangerous, especially because people tell themselves they do it for the "right reasons". Its what makes it such a horrible trap. Its an easy narrative to fall for and once you are in you left reality in favor of the group narrative. And while other extremist groups use the same mechanisms, this one is a lot more palpable on first view. After all, who would be against no more misinformation? Overlooking the horrible and costly insight of the last 100 years and more that just as running an economy, this isnt a trivial task you can just dictate, even if you really want to. Especially since running the economy would be trivial in comparison.
For the sake of a livable future, please stop before you doom us all.
Not sure you noticed - but your reply is to a new contributor to this discussion.
I agree - we shouldn't ban information, same as not cancelling people into oblivion, e.g. for jokes they made 10 years ago.
But /u/krapp made a valid point... "Misinformation is viral, information is not." ... or it seems to be that way.
There should be consequences for lying and spreading misinformation, esp if you have a large platform and your decisions will impact millions of people.
And my question prior... what do you think can be done to stop people like Trump rise to power - how can this system weed out narcissistic and self-serving people who don't care about progress or improving society. With those people in power long enough, we will eventually have a system where our freedoms will be taken away.
> Not sure you noticed - but your reply is to a new contributor to this discussion.
Yes, i hope you didnt thought this applied to yourself, far from it. I also jumped in a few posts ago on a conversation you had with somebody else.
I also didnt want to imply that missinformation spreading viraly wasnt a problem. Its just not fixable with authoritarian measures and the problem goes far deeper then "just" liberties. The problem is that any attempt to ban the sharing of information means you need a means to accurately determine what is wrong or incomplete information (jumping over the whole problem of miss-/diss/mal-information and true information without context to keep the post short) without the ability to challenge errors. By attempting to ban information you are interfering in your reality finding process. Doing this is extremely dangerous due to the inability to judge implications of errors and such errors being extremely profitable. Its a truly horrible idea, no matter how nice solving the problem of spreading missinformation (while actually being impossible) sounds. Its the patching out of a vital safety check without which you loose your ability to error-correct. As everywhere, without a means to error correct, all the problems such an approach allows for already exist, time just hasnt caught up.
I think this is a vital point people overlook. Its not a moral argument, totalitarianism isnt just horrible, it does not work. Its a process that leads to the creation of errors in thinking, dismantles the means to error correct and breeds corruption. Its groups of idiots moving forward while ignoring the consequences, encouraged by socio/psychopaths profiting off such movements temporarily at the cost of long term problems it creates.
>And my question prior... what do you think can be done to stop people like Trump rise to power
I mentioned it at the end of my first post, i think the solution is as old as time and as with everything technology makes them more solveable. You cant fix stupidity centrally, its a decentralized problem for which a centralized solution would require totalitarian perfection due to loosing the ability to error-correct.
So its down to everyone to have a honest conversation about how stupid they are on individual questions and whether they are emotionally mature enough to have that conversation without becoming cynical. So figuring out where your views are wrong, or incomplete, where you are acting ideologically or are just reacting to a frame. Instead of attempting to get rid of miss-information you focus on figuring out where you can say with a high degree of certainty, and strict requirements for falsifiability what is likely true. So what is non-missinfornation, approximating base-reality from which we then can have meaningful conversations. Since we make the effort to communicate, we clearly decided on cooperation instead of conflict. So lets work on making that more productive, after all there is a core question here. Are you actually interested in being right or do you just take pleasure from feeling right? If its the later, know that reality is a bitch that will win every time over your feelings. Clinging on regardless is how being stupid looks from the perspective of a stupid person. Which we all are sometimes. Which cognitive biases trick us into ignoring or brushing aside.
I think this is a task where tooling can help and where we can give a hand to other people in the process. Talk to people meaningfully, think steelmening instead of strawmaning. You might be missing a perspective somebody else overcorrected for. Almost none of the issues are one dimensional, its all spectrums you cant overcorrect on without being just as wrong as before. Understand how people came to a conclusion and show up errors instead of regurgitating your own views. As this is obviously difficult (take this from the experience of a seasoned idiot) its clear why we havent "solved" it yet. But i believe it is something technology can help us with. And cooperative decentralized solutions are still a lot more solvable then the insane idea of trying to dictate reality.
It would also help with the old star trek question of where technology will move towards. Will we manage to create a world in which technologies are useful tools or are we headed for becoming clogs in a malfunctioning machine we dont understand and cant control?
This problem is hard to fix because everyone believes they themselves are not an idiot, everyone else is. Thats an error caused by cognitive biases. But one were we can help each other and develop tooling to achieve better results all around. I suspect there will be massive payoffs once we just agree on trying to be less stupid and meaning well, even just for the benefit of a less shit future for yourself.
> Are you actually interested in being right or do you just take pleasure from feeling right?
Yes great point. I have experienced this myself in the past and it takes effort not to do this.
> Since we make the effort to communicate, we clearly decided on cooperation instead of conflict.
Yes - I think our first exchange seemed to veer slightly towards conflict (for me anyway), but then it took a turn to a more shared understanding.
> So it's down to everyone to have a honest conversation about how stupid they are on individual questions
Yes agree. Stupidity is dangerous [0] and we need to be better equipped to detect our own stupidity and then self-correct.
That's why I think 2 key things for avoiding spiraling into tyrannical systems are a) fight poverty b) better education systems that teaches more about critical thinking and to recognise the tactics self-serving people use to gain power. Easier said than done of course.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, which were insightful for my ongoing journey to study this topic. Two resources next on my list are:
Thanks for the resources, especially the Bonhoeffer theory and the nice feedback. I do appreciate it. I can also only return the favor, being able to come to an agreement on such points is really good news and i found this quite beneficial as well. The difficulty of it (conflict in speech is just so much more easy and fun) is why i have so high hopes for technology. Because you wont just help with understanding but being more easy to understand. Which means getting more control about how you frame stuff without just trying to influence your conversation partner. I am not so optimistic about education beyond a base level though, getting a grip of framing stuff, and not just reacting immediately, is just very difficult no matter how much you meditate, at least for idiots like myself. Schmachtenberger [0] is proposing that same approach with the stuff around "rule omega", but as you can take from the close to 10 hours of videos and not making much visible progress since, you are kind of trying to build a new non-stupid human. (Not tryint to downplay that approach would be great if it worked and its a really nice idea. I might be overly cynical here).
When it comes to possible solutions, cooperative minimum is key imho. Which likely means the solution cant be aimed at gaining political influence or monetary benefits. Because people react to such attempts of influence as well. And as with every tool, there will be attempts of weaponization. Which gets us to conflict again, which makes the experience everywhere more shit. So keeping Goethe Zauberlehrling in mind is rather important.
In case anyone is wondering about the poverty point, its so people get the option to not have to react under dire pressure for once. Because thinking about stuff like this is quite simply a luxury if you have to worry about where the next meal for you and your family is going to come from. Less anxious people are more willing to cooperate.
In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times.
In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white piece of paper.
If you're trying to say current day Russia is the same as current day US or EU then you're way off line.