Cambridge Analytica Leaves Long Trail of Subterfuge, Dubious Dealing
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How sadly wrong I was. It is becoming more and more clear to me that for the average person, technology has become nothing more than another tool for the propagandists of the world to influence their minds. It turns out that having a supercomputer in your pocket at all times does not magically induce the ability for critical thinking.
Until you have wisdom you don't truly appreciate the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
You are right to expect that the internet could make it easier to do such thinking.
Except, you are not taking into account another factor: "Hard work never killed anyone. But why take a... Oooh.. another like on my Facebook post"
Thinking is expensive. Somewhere around 20% of our bodies energy use is our brain working. It's probably been an evolutionary advantage in many cases to offload our thinking to the right people for most of history.
Looked at from a different angle, "1984" could be viewed almost as a how-to-manual, just as Machiavelli's "The Prince" is today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P191zutE1D0
I guess it would depend on the mindset of the listener as to which interpretation they choose.
The "facts" change or evolve all the time. That's the whole point of the scientific method.
There /is/ an objective reality, and we can measure it to varying degrees of accuracy. The air temperature at a given place and a given time, for instance. Of course there's always the possibility of it being wrong (e.g. a passing hot air current, a faulty thermometer, etc.), but to live as though you can't record the temperature is absurd. It paralyses action based on evidence, rather than ideology, if everything is considered equally suspect.
Yes, we're going to get it wrong sometimes, and that has a cost. But there's also a cost to thinking that you can't ever get it right, and that is letting people the who routinely dismiss inconvenient evidence have their way all the time. I think we've swung too far towards the latter.
If you like maths, Tarski's undefinability theorem suggests that anything which is a fact about our objective reality cannot be shown to be a fact from within reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_undefinability_theore...
"...correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves."[1]
It's worth noting that some philosophers, particularly Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux (whose work the above quote is given in the context of), have argued strongly against correlationism. Though they don't claim we might ever have a completely unfiltered view of what objectively is, they argue that the absolute limitations on knowledge of reality imposed by correlationist thinkers are mistaken, and that we can make progress by degrees towards an ever fuller perspective on reality. So, even though you assert
>Thus, even if there is an objective reality, facts are nonetheless subjective because the actual basis for believing in facts is subjective.
as a factual (somewhat ironically), it should be noted that this too is disputable. Also I would argue that Tarski (or any formal mathematical result) does not necessarily have implications about "our objective reality." As Alain Badiou would say, mathematics is ontology - i.e. the language with which we might speak most precisely about "what is" - but this does not entail that mathematical concepts are real in the Platonic sense.
I agree strongly with gp that we shouldn't err on the side of formally foreclosing on the possibility of finding truths about the world. It literally legitimizes ignorance to espouse the correlationist worldview.
[1]https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-e...
The problem with beliefs that don't reflect reality are that unlike the lies, the reality you don't believe in can still hurt you. Whatever you think about the true nature of reality, it's a good idea for our politics to include a recognition of the things that can hurt us regardless of our beliefs in them.
“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." (Einstein, 1945)
I thought it would forever be a refuge from bullying. I also grew up on mostly semi-anonymous networks like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve
Consider:
> In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents: “In essence, Russians were blamed for unemployment and other problems affecting the economy,” an SCL document said. Nix confirms the firm’s role, saying that its research found that such tensions would “influence voting behavior.” <
Now suppose they had not discovered this and exploited it. The fact remains that if this could influence voting behavior then someone else could have come along -- someone who did not know about this study, someone who genuinely despised the Russians, or Latvians -- and become popular in the elections.
It would be a sad comment on humans if that is what it took.
What I fail to understand is how so many people are still so ignorant despite having almost free access to all the world's information with zero requirement to actually pay for school. You don't even have to walk down to the library and pay for a library card to access it!
Witch hunts in 2017 just take place in the form of elections. But otherwise, no different today than they were in biblical times.
That's progress folks. Welcome to your future.
Basically a witch hunt because nobody wants to accept that others may have differences than us and that's okay! It doesn't make them dangerous, it doesn't make them criminals.
Every culture, every nation, every race and both sexes have their bad apples, their despots, their angry, disaffected troublemakers. They are the few. They are not the majority in any case. So now we're ostracizing huge groups of people based on the the largest voting class's perception of a tiny fraction of a massive group that they perceive is different than them.
It's the equivalent taking out a social media campaign to whip up a frenzy boycotting MacDonalds because one pissed off spotty white kid who works there, who you slighted on Facebook for spitting in your food, hunted you down and torched your car in retaliation and happened to be caught on CCTV wearing his MacDonalds uniform while he was doing it.
Cambridge Analytica is using social media to effect massive swings in consumer sentiment against whole segments of the population in order to swing votes in a way that's favourable to an agenda that is so far unclear, except that it seems to be tearing whole nations apart and in turn flipping the world order on its head. How it will play out is unclear, but it doesn't feel like this is heading anywhere good.
Your misgivings about the future strike me as wise, given the power of the technology in play, and quality of the people using it.
I'll tell you how it should play out: every exec of that company behind bars.
Listen to this sobering interview about the Mercers with Jane Mayer from yesterday, http://www.npr.org/2017/03/22/521083950/inside-the-wealthy-f...
We’re talking about people who wanted to promote a guy they’ve been funding who believes that nuclear war is good for humanity (and, incidentally, has a collection of 14,000 human urine samples) to be the president’s science advisor.
Jesus Christ.
why was this flagged? it shows clearly they're using this technology for terrible things.
Later on, it's not much better...
> SCL’s original description of its work in Nigeria echoes some of those concerns. According to a 2016 version of its website, SCL advised the PDP to try to dissuade opposition supporters from voting. This was achieved, the website said, “by organizing anti-poll rallies on the day of the election.”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_for_Democracy_(Netherlan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_Droite#Beyond_France
[2] https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/thierry-baudet-net-als-trump
Seeing Clinton lose, and hearing all these stories about grassroots campaigners being turned away, about Bill Clinton being told that his rural votes were gone forever, about "the Mook Mafia", about the "Ada algorithm", about Nate Silver being brutally wrong in the primaries and the NYT being brutally wrong about the chances of winning on the day of the election, and betting markets being wrong on Brexit... part of me thought this is where we draw the line. We need to go back to basics, start reacting to our circumstances, realize that something has gone very wrong, and stop blindly trusting "the data".
Instead this narrative cropped up that said "actually, we need even more even better data". And people seem to find it more palatable.
This phrase is not coherent.
Doing something blindly would literally be to do something without data.
Worse are the people that treat conclusions drawn from polling and surveys as scientifically rigorous.
Happens all the time with Vox, NYT, Quartz, you-name-it articles. Policy is enacted from information like this.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
It isn't "just politics" - people can die over crap like this. How'd you like to be an ethnic Russian living in Latvia when this guy decides demonizing your entire cohort would be a good way to "influence voting behavior?"
Ask any Hispanic in the US.
The bigger question is what can be done about it, what specifically is there that breaks the law and if there isn't anything is there a law that we'd like to see created that would tackle this without making things worse in other respects?
I have no idea what this means, which is - I suppose - the point?
“He has made up many stories about working and studying here which are untrue"
Even Switzerland would not be immune to these tactics (and they have what I think is the best functioning democracy on earth at the moment).