[HN Gopher] Reverse Cargo Cult (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Reverse Cargo Cult (2017)
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-01-10 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hanshowe.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hanshowe.org)
| bob33212 wrote:
| I'm seeing this with the twitter ban.
|
| Trump supporter: "This is the erosion of free speech"
|
| Me: " Given that his supporters have already rioted and murdered,
| Twitter is trying to prevent him from inciting more riots"
|
| Trump supporter: " Just wait until they come for you "
|
| At first I was confused because I have no interest in inciting
| riots, and I don't even care if I get banned from Twitter. Now
| this makes sense, they are saying that Trump and Twitter are both
| trying to maintain and gain power. They think that I'm just too
| stupid to understand what Twitter is doing.
|
| I can sympathize with them for feeling this way, it is hard to
| accept that you got scammed.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I'm from the UK so I don't have any skin in this particular
| game, but what _would_ you do if you held an opinion that
| Twitter decided was pernicious enough to ban you?
| bob33212 wrote:
| Twitter bans things like calling people racial slurs,
| threating violence against people. If I wanted to do one of
| those things I would hopefully go see a therapist to
| understand why I'm acting that way.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Currently that's what they ban. The argument is more
| abstract than that. Should they have that power? UK gov is
| now talking about regulating them in law to prevent bias.
|
| TBH it's not hard to see how this could end in the
| balkanisation of the net.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Wait a second, airstrips made of wood, concrete, and metal _don
| 't_ produce cargo.
| Animats wrote:
| That's kind of a strange way to look at it.
|
| The comment about Soviet propaganda, though, is amusing. It's
| amazing how little people in the USSR knew about the rest of the
| world as late as the 1960s. Anatoly Dobrynin wrote in his 1995
| autobiography that, when he came to the US in 1962 to be
| Ambassador to the United Nations for the USSR, he was amazed to
| see traffic jams. He'd been brought up to believe those were
| American propaganda. No country could have that many cars.
|
| (That's a fun read, by the way. He got to be a diplomat in a very
| strange way. Stalin had a meeting in 1946 with some of his
| diplomats and grumbled that those old guys were out of touch, and
| they needed young new Soviet men like aircraft designers. The
| next day, Dobrynin, a young aircraft designer, was ordered from
| his job designing aircraft to Moscow to attend the Higher
| Diplomatic Academy and learn to become a diplomat. He turned out
| to be good at it.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Strikes me as bull -- there are many ways to look at the failure
| of communism and others are better.
|
| Im the US we have a long history of building systems that dont
| work or only sorta kinda work. Some examples are the health care
| 'system' and the Space Shuttle. (e.g. the russians did not buy
| the idea that the Space Shuttle was intended to lower the cost to
| access space -- it was an obvious boondoggle that maximized the
| cost; looking back we know the study that killed the O'Neill
| colonies and associated Gumdam dreams said there was no point in
| that because if we gave the Saturn V the Falcon 9 treatment we
| could have launched solar power sats by 1990)
| j9461701 wrote:
| If it was such an obvious boondoggle why did Russia steal the
| design and make their own?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
|
| In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of
| the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the
| time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a
| year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable
| rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project
| was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason
| we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a _space
| ship_ , like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a
| public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people
| still loved it.
|
| It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in
| the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a
| total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and
| therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They
| even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the
| Iowas:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored_Box_Launcher
|
| To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to
| using thickly armored battleships instead of something more
| modern.
|
| Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Russians were interested in hypersonic glide vehicles as
| a platform for nuclear weapons.
|
| They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry
| vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the
| Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire
| multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and
| burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP
| -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)
|
| Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the
| Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a
| hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a
| wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines
| were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself
| was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned
| to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried
| to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting
| and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in
| response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to
| hastily launch real hardware)
|
| --
|
| BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a
| hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert
| Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes
| because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at
| Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud
| of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.
| anovikov wrote:
| By the way, this is precisely how Putinist propaganda is
| presenting things in Russia today. "We have no democracy,
| elections are a fake and people are jailed for dissent? Right,
| but this is the case everywhere, trying to do otherwise would
| have destroyed any nation very quickly because populist
| demagogues would win and steal everything. It's just people in
| the West are too brainwashed to see how are they being used"
| jariel wrote:
| This is a neat analogy, but ultimately not quite true.
|
| I believe that Trump followers believe him, for the most part.
|
| The insurrection on Capital Hill was made by people who very
| deeply felt that the 'Election Was Stolen' and therefore
| Democracy itself was at stake. (There were several interviews by
| the press that highlighted this).
|
| It's _rational_ for someone to take reasonably dramatic action if
| they believed there were fraud at a fundamental level - so on a
| way - the actions of the protesters are understandable in a
| perverse kind of way, with the assumption that they are
| completely misinformed.
|
| For the the 'not so gullible', the lie, repeated over and over
| again just has a ring of truth to it - enough that somewhere
| about 50% of the US believes that the 'elections were unfair' in
| some way, when in reality, that's not anywhere near the truth -
| the election was fair and free. There weren't any systematic
| shenanigans.
|
| This means that a ton of 'regular, educated followers' buy into
| the BS at least partially.
|
| And of course, since it's partisan, and some people 'want to
| believe it' - it's easier to believe.
|
| The real question then becomes: will the gullible and not-so-
| gullible-but-partisan accept actual, material evidence when it's
| presented?
|
| That's where you possibly meet the 'truly stubborn'.
|
| Finally - in the efforts to get the truth out, a lot of these
| kinds of people have basically no faith in important institutions
| such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the DOJ etc..
|
| Though most of the press is fairly legit, they are also biased,
| and so most plebes don't want to trust them either.
|
| We are in a 'War for the Truth' right now it's a big deal with
| Politics, COVID, issues of Freedom of Expression (which includes
| the right to lie) etc..
| prox wrote:
| Many of the problems do stem from the fact that bubbles are so
| easy to create. Social media has brought us the ultimate dream
| machine of living in your own world, where what you believe is
| a truth, and not only that, the algorithm will give you more of
| it!
|
| If we want meaningful dialogue, we need less bubbles and better
| avenues for discourse. Facebook and its ilk is the worst of
| humanity if used beyond keeping in touch with friends.
|
| The issue with Parler only gives more fuel to the ones in this
| particular bubble that they are being persecuted. A bubble they
| already believe in, a world they already mentally inhabit.
|
| We must keep striving for what you address in your comment, and
| for platforms for meaningful discussions, with ample focus on
| material truths.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> will the gullible and not-so-gullible-but-partisan accept
| actual, material evidence when it 's presented?_
|
| What is being presented is not evidence. It's absence of
| evidence, combined with blunt assertions. That's not what we
| should be getting from a truly secure election system.
|
| Years ago, the kernel.org servers that host the source code to
| the Linux kernel were hacked. Lots of people and lots of
| corporations use Linux, so the security of the source code of
| the kernel is a serious issue. So what did the owners of the
| kernel.org site do? Did they shout over and over that there was
| no problem? Did they make a huge effort to argue against people
| (and there were plenty of them) who claimed this showed Linux
| was just not a serious OS, as compared to those other OSs owned
| by large corporations? No.
|
| What the kernel.org owners did was much simpler. They just
| _showed the security measures they already had in place, and
| explained how and why they worked_. And since those security
| measures were good ones, based on cryptographically secure
| methods of signing and verifying code and detecting tampering,
| and since they were open, so anyone who wanted to could check
| and verify them, _that was all they had to do_. All the
| accusations and speculations about insecurity simply
| evaporated.
|
| _That_ is the kind of security we should have for elections.
| And it 's blatantly obvious that we don't. And until we do,
| given how divided the country is, we will continue to have
| close elections that the losing side, or at least a significant
| portion of it, refuses to recognize as legitimate. This problem
| cannot be handwaved away, and it cannot be solved by shouting
| louder, the way Americans do in foreign countries in the hope
| that it will cause the natives to start understanding English.
| It can only be solved by implementing a secure, and
| _transparently_ secure, election system, where nobody has to
| take anybody else 's word that nothing questionable happened.
| jariel wrote:
| This isn't going to work.
|
| 1) There is an incredible amount of legitimacy and
| transparency in the system already.
|
| Your linux analogy simply doesn't apply.
|
| There are tons of 'eyes on the system', there are literally
| election observers. The rules are decided ahead of time etc..
|
| With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record
| of each ballot - there were recounts that validated the
| electronic counts perfectly.
|
| The 'voting and ballot' part of the election is very secure,
| and there's no way to systematically defeat it.
|
| 2) If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to
| 'who can vote'. States are in a constant war over this, the
| rules over 'how to purge voter roles' (look into recent
| Georgia rulings). Those things, are today 'grey areas' not
| well defined by anyone so it means conflict.
|
| 3) "And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. "
|
| Just the opposite, it's blatantly obvious that the elections
| are in fact secure - you've provided zero evidence to suggest
| otherwise.
|
| But you're missing the issue - the perception of election of
| integrity has _nothing to do with election integrity_.
|
| This has _nothing to do with the facts_.
|
| This has to do with _whatever Trump tells people_ (i.e. Cargo
| Cult).
|
| If Trump had won the election, there would be _zero concern
| over election integrity_ because it 's entirely derided from
| his populist narrative.
|
| The elections are as secure as they were in 2016 and 2012 -
| and there wasn't some big uproar over 'ballot counting' then,
| was there?
|
| Why not?
|
| Because 'some populist figure' wasn't screaming 'Fraud'
| 'Fraud' 'Fraud'.
|
| And even if the election were 'mathematically secure' _it
| still would not matter_ because this has nothing to do with
| reality, it has to do with narrative.
|
| A populist figure will say 'The Election Was Stolen' - and
| his Cargo Cult followers will believe him, irrespective of
| the facts.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> a lot of these kinds of people have basically no faith in
| important institutions such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the
| DOJ etc._
|
| And that is because _all_ of those institutions _have lied to
| them_ , repeatedly, over many, many years. So has the
| mainstream media. So it is _rational_ for people not to believe
| them when they insist, louder and louder, "no, really, _this_
| time we 're telling the truth!"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The notion of a reverse cargo cult, a "fake it 'til you break
| it", ticckled my brain.
|
| (Submitter.)
| corpMaverick wrote:
| "Both sides are the same" People use this when they can no longer
| defend a position. It is easier to throw dirt than to clean a
| dirty side.
|
| "All politicians are the same". No. Some are worse.
| kbutler wrote:
| But there seems to be precious little effort spent improving
| one's own side (or even recognition of the failings of one's
| own side).
|
| It's just so much easier and politically and socially
| beneficial to demonize the others.
| bumbada wrote:
| Humans invented the Law, and it is the most objective thing
| that we have in order to know if someone does good or wrong.
|
| Humans are not objective, but in a big part subjective. First,
| humans belongs to groups. And it is a completely different
| thing if your own group abuses and benefits you, than if some
| other group abuses you and you lose.
|
| You only see dirt in one side. Of course the dirty side is not
| yours.
|
| "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do
| not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. There are people, like myself, who
| often don't have a dog in the fight except that I look closely
| and skeptically at the tools and tactics being utilized and
| frequently ask myself: "Ok, but what if this were used in
| another way, or by the opposite side?" If the answer is that
| it's bad, then the means are objectively bad, and I oppose the
| use of those means.
|
| This, in a sense is itself a political stance, but its not that
| hard to learn to distance yourself from the immediate emotions
| of politics. Particularly when I started to see how ubiquitous
| the weaoponization of anger has become in the modern era.
| fit2rule wrote:
| There are no sides.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The MAGA movement ("Make America Great Again") doesn't understand
| what made America great in the first place.
|
| I am going to tell you what made America great, but you will not
| necessarily like it:
|
| WW2 devastated the most important industrialized economies
| throughout Europe and Asia. The US was left intact.
|
| For many years, the US was #1 in exports, #1 in manufacturing,
| and most importantly, the Bretton Woods system was in place.
|
| Under Bretton Woods, the US was effectively able to create money
| from thin air. The premise was that each dollar was backed with
| gold, and you could at any time redeem the gold equivalent to
| your dollars. However, because that right was never exercised and
| nobody could audit the gold reserves, the US abused the system
| and by 1971 it became clear that it was a fraud.
|
| By 1971, Europe and Japan were done rebuilding their economies
| and now their manufacturing capabilities surpassed the that of
| the US. So countries like France take the initiative and
| challenge the US to give them their gold, and when the US fails
| to meet these obligations, the Bretton Woods system ends, also
| putting an end to the American economic golden age.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
|
| Since the Nixon shock, US living standards have started becoming
| similar to that of other countries, the cost of living has been
| raising and the US has been accumulating an enormous amount of
| debt.
|
| Think about it: during the 1940s to the 1970s, the Interstate
| highway system was built, there were expensive Space exploration
| programs, millions of Americans had affordable housing, higher
| education... everything was affordable. And suddenly nothing is
| affordable anymore. And that is the reason.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Am not American, do not have a horse in this race, but the US
| grew a lot between 1800 and 1945.
|
| It began as a mostly rural republic that had about as many full
| time soldiers as the Cree tribe had armed (with guns) fighters;
| Lafayette thought that USA would need French protection for a
| few centuries.
|
| Then, American industrial capacity exploded and by 1900, it was
| competing for the first place with the UK and Germany. The
| entry of the US to both WWI and WWII made the decisive result
| precisely because of enormous American capacity to produce
| stuff.
|
| That said, loss of American production capacity in the last 30
| or so years ("the giant sucking sound" of Ross Perot) may
| really be an early sign of decay. Having digital giants is
| fine, but they won't produce a billion of N95 masks on demand.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Manufacturing grows as a response to market demand. And with
| an absence of competitive foreign manufacturing, the US could
| grow its manufacturing to satisfy the demand of all the
| countries left behind by the war.
|
| However, as countries rebuilt their production
| infrastructure, competition went up, driving prices down,
| diminishing profits and the US started moving away from
| manufacturing.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Every nation on Earth in 1800 had that same fundamental
| demand.
|
| The US had untilled praries, virgin forests, mountains of
| iron hills of coal, oceans of oil, a network of rivers and
| harbours (supplemented with canals and railroads), and no
| credible foes on the continent.
|
| Russia at the time was not _quite_ as advantaged, but
| strongly comparable in many regards.
|
| The existing Great Powers of 1900 had extensive agriculture
| and coal energy resources (Britain, Germany, France), and
| at least some colonial holdings for further raw materials.
| But all were more constrained than the US, as well as
| knocked back by WWI.
|
| WWII promoted an explosion in US industrial and resource
| extraction capability whilst Europe was again set back
|
| Post WWII, the US retained its advantages, an intact (and
| substantially recently built) industrial infrastructure,
| and no international competition, as noted above. The
| Martial Plan and Japanese and Korean reconstruction helped.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, you are not contradicting me. The point I tried to
| make was that the USA had already a very robust industry to
| build on.
|
| Yes, America got lucky for about 25 years and isn't so
| lucky anymore. But even here the old adage says that luck
| favors the prepared.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I mostly agree with this, but you're missing post-1970s history
| where they replaced gold with oil by requiring USD for oil
| transactions (the "petrodollar"). This system that we live
| under has its own economic imperatives and sustains the USD as
| the reserve currency of the world. However, it has enriched the
| elites and impoverished the working class as imperial projects
| tend to do.
| hnarn wrote:
| I'm in my thirties, and I have a feeling the process of "growing
| up" is an ideological bell curve that goes something like:
|
| Youth: Extrovert certainty
|
| Young adulthood: Extrovert uncertainty
|
| Adulthood: Introvert certainty
|
| As you learn more about the world around you, you realize the
| younger you was far too idealistic and cock-sure about the causes
| and solutions to the problems around you. Being barraged with
| uncertainty, the obvious answer then becomes that there is really
| no truth, there's only approximations we can reach through the
| Socratic method: but eventually you grow weary of this as well.
| Surely there must be good and evil in this world, and if it
| quacks like a duck it's probably a duck.
|
| Being dogmatic isn't a good thing, and I try to keep an open
| mind: but what's equally dangerous is subscribing to the ideology
| that there is no such thing as good and evil. There is, and most
| of us have known the difference since we were children. I think
| adulthood is about finding the courage to speak out, when useful
| and constructive, instead of hiding behind the comfort of
| relativism.
| secabeen wrote:
| The challenge with living in this world of lies is that
| eventually reality sets in, and reality can't be lied to. Whether
| that's the virus killing someone you love, or the Russian army
| crossing the Vistula, no amount of swearing up and down that it's
| all BS can change that.
| pstuart wrote:
| > reality can't be lied to
|
| From these last four years I'm not so sure about that.
| bob33212 wrote:
| During BLM protests conservatives were posting pro police
| updates. Now that Trump supporters murdered a police officer
| reality has set in for them. This is the end of Trump. Most
| conservatives are good people who would never murder a police
| officer for Trump. They are not going to fight for him to be
| replatformed. No one is going to insure his physical rallies.
| Even if they do the turnout will be low as most people don't
| want the attend a murder riot.
| hndudette2 wrote:
| Wouldn't people have said the same thing about Hitler after
| the failed Beer Hall Putsch?
|
| I think Trump's allure is going to mostly survive this event,
| he will figure out a way to brand it as not being his fault
| or intention. I could be wrong about that though.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| I _hope_ you 're right.
|
| The obituaries for Trump's popularity have been predicted _so
| many times_ that it 's hard to be confident that "This Time
| It's Different."
| gfodor wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've only seen the odds of this go to
| non-zero once: it was the case two days or so ago. It's
| back to zero in my mind now that Twitter banned him and
| martyred him. I think he probably is actually now a
| permanent fixture in our lives, afraid to say.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| Maybe?
|
| It's hardly _martyring_ to be kicked off of Twitter IMO,
| but even if his fans see it that way -- Trumps fans seem
| to predominantly posses a _very_ short attention span.
|
| It's the only way that many of Trumps reversals make
| sense. They can be cheering him for saying A and then
| cheering him five minutes later for saying ~A. I suspect
| that if Trump loses his platform for some number of
| months, the shine may wear off.
|
| And Parler is being kicked from AWS, so _their_ entire
| service is going down too--and they may get the full
| treatment of being kicked from other servers and payment
| services if they don 't agree to police their content.
| And without easy access to his marks, it will be harder
| for Don the Con to stay relevant.
|
| Not predicting that it _will_ happen. I 'm not that
| optimistic, TBH. But positing a mechanism that it _could_
| happen.
| MereInterest wrote:
| As a counter-anecdote, I was pretty sure that the Access
| Hollywood tape would lead to Trump being dropped by
| Republicans. Instead, bragging about sexual assault
| somehow became "locker room talk" and the story had
| little impact. Since then, for each new story, I've been
| waiting to see whether there is a corresponding drop in
| his popularity among Republicans before ever concluding
| that there is a moral line that won't be justified.
| gfodor wrote:
| To be clear, the reason for this and why it was different
| _wasn't_ because of the capitol attack alone. It was also
| because he appeared to capitulate and abandon the people
| who did it and supported it. That group took it as a sign
| he wasn't the leader they thought he was and betrayed
| them. Now that he has been martyred and has re-rebelled
| against the tech companies, threatening to create a new
| platform, that is over.
| duxup wrote:
| Trump went straight for the 'they do it too' lies, particularly
| early in his administration. When questions about his people's
| contacts with Russia and related people came up and what
| information might have been exchanged. His response was that he
| was sure other candidates would take any help / information from
| Russia if offered.
|
| That struck me as one of those situations where you find that
| people who 'cheat' are more likely to greatly over estimate how
| many people actually cheat. But it certainly served the reverse
| cargo cult issue here too.
|
| Interestingly enough when it came out that nobody in the Trump
| administration had informed US intelligence services that a
| foreign agent agent was offering them help... it also came out
| that every presidential candidate staff had reported some such
| contacts, with the exception of Trump, and Bush Sr. .
| gambiting wrote:
| The fantastic "Hypernomalisation" documentary by Adam Curtis[0]
| talks about exactly this. How the actual reality stops mattering
| at all, and how political leaders build whatever reality they
| want to be in. The Soviet Union comparison is especially apt and
| also mentioned in this documentary - when the Soviet government
| would announce that the potato harvest is once again 300% above
| the norm everyone knew they were lying. But it didn't matter
| because obviously everything said by the other side is also a
| lie.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
| rightbyte wrote:
| What otherside reported on Soviet agriculture statistics? There
| were only one side.
| gambiting wrote:
| No no, what I mean is - when the Soviet government reported
| that the wealth in the soviet union is the greatest in the
| world, everyone knew it was a lie. But the side effect of
| assuming that everything the government says is a lie was
| also assuming that everything coming from the West is also a
| lie. So yeah, maybe we don't have the best quality of life -
| but surely Americans also don't, their TV also lies just like
| ours.
| kbutler wrote:
| The reason the US and the western world have been able to succeed
| and make such progress is because of the freedom to point out the
| failures and do something better.
|
| Whether that's building a better phone, medical procedure, or
| communication network, or rocket, historically you've been able
| to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and then build
| something better.
|
| This is what terrifies me about the current attitudes on both
| sides of the aisle - we're turning from, "I disagree but will
| fight for your right to say it" to "if I disagree you should be
| deplatformed and fired and mobbed."
| jchw wrote:
| Imo, it's strictly bad faith to be blamed: on the right, there
| is a refusal to separate the violent, unprotected speech from
| the protected opinions.
|
| Meanwhile, the left seems to be refusing to accept that
| coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change
| what people believe. A list of banned words and opinions will
| never make the world progressive. Deplatforming people over
| truly just opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
|
| Social media isn't really a moderated community. It has "rules"
| and you can get "banned," but Twitter is less "moderated" than
| a typical comments section. So when people act in bad faith,
| there's no recourse unless they explicitly break rules. On say,
| a typical old Internet forum, it'd probably mostly be
| considered dramatic to do call-outs, not to mention pointless
| due to the disconnected nature of identity on the old internet.
| On Twitter not only is it common but you can make as many bad
| faith arguments and take as many things as far out of context
| as you like in attempts at character assassination. You can
| concern troll, you can use known misleading sources, etc. and
| even if someone calls you on it, you can just do it again
| later.
|
| As usual though, most people are pretty "selfish." A lot of
| people "get away" with being not "progressive" enough because
| people like them. What happens is eventually someone has a
| trivial dispute with them and decides to seize the moment to
| pull out as much ammo as possible, which is how you end up with
| 50 page google docs arguing as hard as they can that every
| mistake someone has ever made is evidence that they are
| irredeemable.
|
| So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean
| I've seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven't changed, but
| they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep their
| status. And other people who also don't believe in the things
| they're saying will express their disappointment if they ever
| deviate. It's an amazing circus show. Things have gotten very
| perverted.
|
| With the right, they are of course taking advantage of this in
| the worst faith way possible by using it as an argument against
| being progressive in and of itself. It's not the methods, it's
| the ideology. But in the same way a civil rights riot and a
| doomsday cult riot are not the same thing, there's always going
| to be too much nuance for a conclusion that oversimplified.
|
| Meanwhile, sites like Twitter simply do not give a fuck. All
| they care about is brand accounts, ads, and public image. But
| mostly the first two. So fat chance if they're going to risk
| lowering engagement to help fix broken incentives.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| > A list of banned words and opinions will never make the
| world progressive. Deplatforming people over truly just
| opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
|
| When people _know_ their opinions are generally considered
| reprehensible, they hide them. I can agree with that.
|
| But if those opinions are successfully hidden or pushed
| underground, and the next generation is _predominantly_
| exposed to positive values, the world _does_ become more
| progressive. Individuals change only a small amount, you 're
| right, but _society_ does change for the better over time.
|
| It's when echo-chambers of intolerance exist that attitudes
| of intolerance and selfishness can be amplified and push the
| world in the wrong direction.
| jchw wrote:
| The problem to me is that it quickly becomes a game of what
| seems most progressive optically rather than what is right
| on a fundamental level. Like, the obvious bits of free
| speech are not very interesting; it's the edges of free
| speech that are what really matter, and these are the
| things that need the most nuance. Nuance is not what you
| expect in a social media platform (especially not one aimed
| at explicitly short form communication only.)
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean
| I've seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven't changed, but
| they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep
| their status. And other people who also don't believe in the
| things they're saying will express their disappointment if
| they ever deviate. It's an amazing circus show. Things have
| gotten very perverted.
|
| Preference falsification. Its getting worse. and people who
| falsify preferences still act like radicals. They haven't
| internalized the values so they imperfectly carry them out.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| "the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people
| to act a certain way does not actually change what people
| believe."
|
| I know coercion is not enough, but it's the only thing that
| can be pushed by the people with power to push anything.
|
| As soon as I find out what _will_ change beliefs, I'd like to
| start doing it. Assuming that, as an individual, I _can_ do
| anything at all. But breaking up the radicalization pipelines
| is better than nothing.
| jchw wrote:
| This assumes that there are no serious negative
| externalities to the scorched earth mentality. It's easy to
| assume nothing serious could go wrong; I disagree, I think
| it could potentially be very harmful, and I wish we didn't
| have to find out how that might happen.
|
| Of course I am not actually against every time someone gets
| deplatformed; I think it is reasonable from a community
| standpoint to, for example, ban the doomsday cult garbage.
| That's not a matter of banned opinion to me, even though it
| leans on a gray area.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| My take has some nuance so you will probably never see it on
| the likes of Twitter:
|
| I'm against mob violence, I hate the death penalty, but I'm
| still okay with de-platforming. It has a use. There is a
| difference between "This person is inciting violence" and "This
| person is disagreeing with us" and the line has not been
| blurred yet.
|
| I'm glad Trump got banned, because he is an Internet troll who
| happens to hold office.
|
| I'm glad that a few rioters were arrested. I hope they are
| convicted and serve jail time. I hope they live to realize why
| they were wrong. If they die it means I will never have them on
| my side.
|
| I don't want anyone to die. Death, unlike de-platforming,
| cannot be undone if it turns out we are wrong.
|
| So please don't lump me in with people calling for guillotines
| and mob violence.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yeah, there definitely seems to be a lack of good-faith in
| almost all discourse these days. I don't know if that can be
| fixed without resorting to totalitarian control of information
| because there will always be incentive for malicious actors to
| argue in bad-faith, and I think recent events have shown that
| such propaganda can quite easily overwhelm good-faith efforts.
| Of course, totalitarian control of information has many of its
| own downsides so I'd rather not have that either.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A totalitarian control of information is _not_ going to lead
| to good faith discussions. First, the totalitarians won 't
| control the information in good faith. Second, even if you
| found good faith people to control the information, the
| malicious actors who argue in bad faith won't go away just
| because you control the information that they can argue
| about.
| achr2 wrote:
| Seriously, "both sides of the aisle"? One side is saying "Here
| is categorical evidence of an issue", the other side is saying
| "the other side are demons and the sky is green.". There is no
| middle ground if one side is actively participating in bad
| faith.
| kbutler wrote:
| Protests and riots:
|
| Lockdown protests - super spreader events or valid exercises
| of freedom of speech?
|
| George Floyd protests - super spreader events or valid
| exercises of free speech?
|
| Riots attacking federal court house in Portland - treason or
| valid exercise of free speech?
|
| Riots attacking capitol building in washington, d.c. -
| fortunately, everyone seems to agree it's bad. Oh, but it's
| apparently a super spreader event...
|
| Remind me which side is participating in bad faith?
| jjaredsimpson wrote:
| Is this argument by syntactic substitution?
| kbutler wrote:
| This is an obvious example of both sides of the political
| spectrum advocating either side of a single issue
| depending on the context.
|
| That's the clearest way to show that both sides argue in
| bad faith, rather than simply presenting facts or
| standing on principle.
|
| There are lots of other examples, but that's a prominent,
| current case where both sides argue both sides of the
| argument.
|
| Another prominent case is arguments for or against
| confirming judicial appointments, but that's been out of
| the news for an eternity now.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| I've spent the last 5 years being told by people that all of this
| is "normal". That "all politicians say these things". That "even
| Obama did X, Y, Z" even when X, Y, Z are completely different.
| Unfortunately, even the left-wing opposition often concedes these
| arguments or even agrees out of their own political self
| interest.
|
| The concerning thing is one of the biggest divides is amongst the
| people that _pay attention_ , and have paid attention, and
| everyone else that either can't or refuses to.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-poli...
| ben_w wrote:
| I was about to say much the same -- I've had a _face-to-face_
| conversation with someone who tried to dismiss his own side's
| dishonesty by saying "everyone does that".
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Orwell made a similar point about truth in a fascist regime:
| https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
|
| "I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is
| lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most
| part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age
| is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully
| written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they
| unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after
| the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in
| each case they believed that "the facts" existed and were more or
| less discoverable. And in practice there was always a
| considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by
| almost anyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for
| instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a
| respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources.
| A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many
| things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be a body of,
| as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously
| challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement
| with its implication that human beings are all one species of
| animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed
| specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists.
| There is, for instance, no such thing as "Science". There is only
| "German Science," "Jewish Science," etc. The implied objective of
| this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or
| some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If
| the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened" --
| well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five --
| well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more
| than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years
| that is not such a frivolous statement."
| wrs wrote:
| This is exactly why a focus on the one event that happened this
| week would be a big mistake. That was just the latest most
| extreme result of a much deeper problem, it was not the
| problem. Those responsible will of course be using the above
| technique to turn it into an isolated occurrence that has
| nothing to do with their own activities.
|
| The saving grace may be that the Leader himself didn't stay on
| message and continued calling the rioters "patriots" after the
| "shocking" event took place. That was way off script.
|
| But if we don't figure out the deeper problem, the next Leader
| may be much more competent.
| wincy wrote:
| I think the "deeper problem" is thinking that Californians
| and Iowans share anything in common at all. Or the idea that
| 300 million people can be effectively governed by a democracy
| when they have vastly different goals and values.
|
| In my ideal world, the states could just peacefully break up
| into a looser group of nation states, with a shared military
| against outside threats. We'd invert the tax pyramid where
| the city and county get the most taxes, and the federal and
| state governments get the least. If we could have a non
| violent transition away from the existence of an unimaginably
| massive federal government.
|
| I doubt that's what will happen. There's simply too many
| people employed by the government for it to contract
| peacefully. I fear for the future, and think that arresting
| and throwing the book at people at the Capitol is just going
| to increase the number of scary things happening.
| thesteamboat wrote:
| > I think the "deeper problem" is thinking that
| Californians and Iowans share anything in common at all.
|
| This is preposterous and I am flatly surprised that more
| people are not challenging it. Our differences may be more
| salient, but they are vastly outnumbered by our
| similarities. We speak the same language, eat the same
| foods, watch the same sports. We don't have vastly
| different goals and values -- we have serious differences
| of opinion about a _tiny fraction_ of public policy and our
| shared culture.
|
| What's more, the differences that do exist break down less
| along state lines and more along the distance from a city
| center. There are urban areas in every state, and there are
| rural areas in every state. Iowa and California are
| different inasmuch as (by the 2010 census) 95% of
| Californians were urbanized and only 64% of Iowans were.
| pjc50 wrote:
| .. and allow the southern states to reinstate slavery?
| Sorry, the civil war ended the prospect of the states being
| quasi-nations.
|
| As did the cold war. You can't counter a hegemon with
| anything other than another hegemon. To fragment the US is
| to accept the rise of China.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| "thinking that Californians and Iowans share anything in
| common at all"
|
| I wonder what kind of policies / issues you mean by this,
| so I thought of some strawmen:
|
| 1. How to name the streets in San Francisco 2. The
| insurance pool for social safety nets 3. Abortion
|
| Category 1 is issues that are obviously local, and are
| already handled locally, because there's no point wasting
| federal time on them. We both agree that Iowa shouldn't
| care what a street in SF is named.
|
| Category 2 is where I oppose your plan. A bigger insurance
| pool will amortized risk better. If all the states split
| up, wealthy people can vote their taxes down by moving
| between states. And the poor are still stuck in whatever
| state they were born in, which is probably a state with
| crappy benefits. For welfare, I want the opposite - I think
| almost everything should be federal. It's a bigger pool,
| and the wealthy can't dodge taxes by moving.
|
| Category 3 is a strawman - Obviously abortion is not
| related to longitude, so if the states split up and CA
| allows abortion and Iowa bans it, obviously one of them is
| wrong. There might be a subtler point that California's
| politics would advance if they weren't spending time trying
| to legalize abortion in red states, and Iowa might also get
| more done if they weren't ... doing whatever Iowa is doing.
| (This is just an example, for all I know Iowa might be very
| left on abortion already)
|
| What specifically do you think _is_ different about those
| two states? Don't the citizens need police, firefighters,
| food stamps, public transit, and public roads anywhere in
| the country?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > Obviously abortion is not related to longitude, so if
| the states split up and CA allows abortion and Iowa bans
| it, obviously one of them is wrong.
|
| This seems odd to me. Why wouldn't it be good for
| advocates and opponents of abortion to each have a place
| where they feel comfortable and their values are
| respected?
| cle wrote:
| What you described is how many founders envisioned the US.
| Granted some weren't for benign reasons. And I think that's
| an important point...many of the civil rights advancements
| made in the US might have only been possible because the
| strong federal government was able to drag many states
| kicking and screaming away from immoral practices.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That structure probably falls apart in a world where there
| is internal trade and multinational corporations that can
| do tax between regions. Now you suddenly need to negotiate
| foreign policy and internal trade agreements and slowly
| stronger federal institutions start to grow. The shared
| military also doesn't live in a vacuum but also depends on
| foreign policy.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never
| happened" -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and
| two are five -- well two and two are five.
|
| Recently there was a dustup in the twitter maths community over
| whether "2+2=4" was a fact or an artifact of patriarchy,
| racism, and capitalism.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Links please?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Sure:
|
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/biostatistics/2020/09/kareem-
| ca...
|
| https://newdiscourses.com/2020/08/2-plus-2-never-equals-5/
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why
| -...
|
| https://arcdigital.media/mathgate-or-the-battle-of-two-
| plus-...
|
| These are good summaries, they should have links to some of
| the relevant tweets.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Thanks, that was interesting for a bit but then went
| nowhere.
|
| To save others the time, as I understand it, their
| disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign. I
| suppose they're right, because we do use different
| definitions of equality for different needs, both within
| math and in other fields, and of course without a good
| definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves
| talking past one another.
|
| For what it's worth, the definition of equality I like
| best is the one based on symbolic manipulation - two
| symbols a and b are equal iff substituting a by b in ANY
| statement does not modify the statement's truth value.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > To save others the time, as I understand it, their
| disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign.
|
| I think it's more general than that. The meaning of
| symbols is not fixed, but a matter of intersubjective
| agreement and context. "2+2=4" if we intend that "2"
| represents the natural number subsequent to one and
| preceding three; and we intend that "+" refers to infix
| addition; and we intend that "=" refers to quantitative
| equality; and we intend that "4" represents the natural
| number subsequent to three and preceding five. This is
| actually not an "iff" statement because there are an
| infinite amount of other meanings we could reassign to
| the symbols contained within the proposition in order to
| result in a true statement.
|
| But intent is a property of the speaker, not the phoneme.
| Intent does not inhere in the message. Intent must be
| inferred from context and previous usage of the terms.
|
| > without a good definition all sides agree to, people
| can find themselves talking past one another.
|
| I think this happens a lot and its why people think other
| people deny things like "2+2=4." Then there is a whole
| class of people who take advantage of ambiguity to
| instrumentally employ fallacies of equivocation.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| "in each case they believed that "the facts" existed and were
| more or less discoverable"
|
| I recently found a graduation card, which an old classmate gave
| me:
|
| The front is a picture of some abstract art. The inside says,
| "Yeah... I don't get it either."
|
| Underneath the pre-printed punchline, my friend wrote, "But
| that does not mean that it cannot be gotten!" I could use more
| friends like him these days.
|
| "This prospect frightens me much more than bombs" Me too, and
| that's why 1984 was too scary for me to finish. Bombs occupy
| physical space, they can't be nowhere and they can't be in two
| places at once. They are pretty easy to understand, and they
| can explode once. Mind-viruses don't kill as quickly, but they
| aren't subject to any of the limitations of a physical weapon,
| either. They can't be captured or destroyed, and as far as I
| know, dogs cannot sniff for them.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The greatest counter to such constructs is logic. For those
| who can wield it enjoy likewise greater capacities due to the
| inherent nature of mind viruses.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| Logic is great as long as its not based on flawed
| assumptions.
|
| The capacity for love also seems like a protective immune
| response to mind viruses that are so commonly rooted in
| hatred.
| gfodor wrote:
| The fallacy is well articulated but it is an error to, if one
| sees this behavior, then go on to reject all the claims of the
| cultists. This would mean, say, that if the Soviets rightly
| criticized the US, we ought to assume the criticism was founded
| on a lie or invalid for other reasons.
|
| It's this error in my opinion we see just as much of. Just as
| much as Trump is able to influence the beliefs of his followers,
| he is able to induce beliefs in his haters, by causing them to
| become certain of the truth of the opposing claim. We should
| address both problems: ignoring one or the other will just lead
| to further destabilization.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The delusional do not lie uniformly, and the trick to a good
| false narrative ("conspiracy theory") is to include as many
| _true_ facts as possible, though cropped, shaded, cast, and lit
| to create an overwhelmingly false account. Usually true facts
| aren 't sufficient, and most fabulists throw in additional
| false elements, some entirely fabricated, some subtly twisted.
|
| The effort involved in separating truth from bullshit _from
| someone fundamentally indifferent to truth_ is too high.
|
| If there _is_ in fact truth to be had, there will virtually
| always be a credible source from whom it can be obtained.
|
| In Dante's Hell, it was bearers of false witness who occupied
| the penultimate circle.
| alex_young wrote:
| This analogy makes sense for me, right up until last week. How is
| staging the most incompetent coup ever demonstrating anything
| except that he actually doesn't think ahead and just does
| whatever in the moment to further his own personal whims?
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > most incompetent coup ever
|
| An angry mob sacked the Capitol. If #ZipTieGuy and friends had
| arrived mere minutes earlier, they'd have walked into a joint
| session of Congress containing every member of succession to
| the President that he did not appoint himself. It's easy to
| call it incompetent now that it failed but we might have just
| avoided a revolution by the skin of our teeth.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Well, there's Trump and there's Trump's planners. The latter
| probably have some skill at strategy.
|
| I agree, though, that recent events seem to have finally
| answered the question of whether or not Trump has a plan. It
| seems not, but you can get very far by just falling forward and
| refusing to admit defeat, ever. The sheer cognitive dissonance
| of the idea that a US president could be so far off his rocker
| and still be highly popular forces us to look for any
| explanation, however contrived, that means there's some master
| plan behind it all.
|
| But nope, it's been option A all along: A charismatic
| manipulator really was elected president despite never knowing
| what he was going to do with the position when he got there,
| and despite being constitutionally unable to take advice from
| people who _do_ understand strategy.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| He's a narcissist and he wants power and admiration, I think
| that explains most of his actions. If he had won, he would have
| praised the amazing American democracy. Now that he's lost,
| there's been talk about a "Trump TV" channel. Something like
| Fox News, but more radical. He will probably do whatever he can
| to stay in the spotlight and keep getting attention, keep his
| following.
| duxup wrote:
| No question about it, when he thought he might lose the first
| election, he already complained that the result would be
| fraudulent, before it even happened ;) But after he won he
| didn't mention it again.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible,
| that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and
| barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping
| out of politics altogether.
|
| I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern
| world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of
| politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must
| engage in politics - using the word in a wide sense - and that
| one must have preferences:
|
| that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively
| better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad
| means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have
| spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we
| like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do
| not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle
| against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort._
|
| orwell, 1945
| Rury wrote:
| I like Orwell, his fears are well justified, but it's
| statements like these which make me think he stopped short in
| his realizations (along with most people).
|
| I think Plato's arguments presented in his Allegory of the
| Cave, paint a clear picture of "the truth" and the nature of
| the human condition. Particularly by showing that "finding out
| the truth" always relies on perception/observation of the truth
| (science is no different BTW). Which is to say what we come to
| regard as the truth is subjective to our perceptions of the
| actual truth. Which brings up a problem: How can you ever be
| certain that our perceptions are nothing more than "a shadow of
| a deeper truth" and thus not the real truth? The only way of
| resolving this trust problem (at least until further evidence
| comes along), is by taking a leap of faith (ie to adopt a
| belief). Thus ultimately, anything anyone regards as the truth,
| stems from adopting at least one or more beliefs/assumptions
| whether they realize it or not.
|
| Fully realizing this, makes it so much easier to understand
| society, and why you can't always convince people using what
| you deem as "facts". Unfortunately, you may also realize how
| deep the rabbit hole really is...
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