Conspiracy theorists mistake guitar pedal diagram for “5G Chip”
musictech.net
musictech.net
Obviously there are weaknesses in the human brain and in our educational systems, and these weaknesses are being actively exploited by people bent on chaos, power, money, or whatever. So how to we find and punish the culprits and dissuade them from doing this kind of brain-hacking in the future? How do we establish global-level policies to make average citizens less vulnerable to it?
Stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about lately.
I'm having trouble imagining how that's compatible with a democratic form of government.
A policy like that would, I think, provide a very clear roadmap for would-be dictators.
It's often not until after the fact when a society recognizes the atrocities committed under a false pretense of public well-being.
There is no easy way out of this crisis. "Eradication of a widespread mental illness that causes dangerous political ideas" is a pseudo-scientific way of describing a dictatorship or civil war.
But at the same time most people who are at violently at odds with consensus reality are kooks, or bad actors, or sometimes both.
Believing that a guitar pedal circuit is going to give you Covid is the perfect example.
As you mention such weaknesses being "actively exploited", it makes me think of advertisements / advertising agencies attempting to manipulate people (to buy stuff, etc.). Perhaps our location on the conspiracy-theory-susceptibility scale would correspond with our susceptibility to advertising tactics, such that those who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories correlates with those who are more likely to buy something based on seeing an advertisement. Or perhaps there's even some element of training in there, whereby some people might be "trained" by advertisements into being more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
Or maybe I'm just trying to pin negative behavioral consequences to the advertisement industry, a facet of our society that I find loathsome.
There is a mix of motives to these memes. Some of this is being done deliberately, strategically, skillfully in a long-game by entities that have an interest in undermining democratic civil society and with it, democratic government. Others are doing it to advance the interest of particular western political parties themselves, or to advance commercial interests, others just randomly or for kicks and giggles, and some are just true.
It's often difficult or impossible to discern among them, requiring an immense amount of mental energy to do so (twice the effort to disprove BS as to create it, etc). Which is one reason your idea about labeling such beliefs as mental illness would be problematic.
These memes exploit the fact that the human brain is fundamentally a pattern-matching machine, able to discern patterns and connect dots even in randomness. For example, we see animal shapes in the clouds. There's no intelligent designer behind the scenes deterministically drawing animal shapes in the clouds, it's just randomness that eventually creates familiar patterns.
Similarly, with the amount of information the Internet is generating, it's easy to construct pieces of world views that seem plausible but are in actuality constructed from pure randomness. Mix in a few truths to the create an impression that all of it is true. Create enough disparate memes like this that have related threads, and over time entire alternate realities and whole world views can be woven together from them.
Moreover, even the professionals are struggling with this. The entire modern science and practice of statistics, which is fundamentally about distinguishing meaningful information from pseudo-/random data, is still not well understood, or at least not practiced completely reliably. p-hacking, root cause of the Global Financial Crisis, and other examples abound. How can non-professionals who spend most of their waking effort on other endeavors be expected to have a perfect understanding of reality when even the pros don't?
When it comes to memes and mental illness, take the QAnon conspiracy for example. Eg, a cadre of pedofile elites runs the world. Unprovable, but after Jeffrey Epstein and his extensive little black book [1] and suspicious death in custody, plausible. Who's to say whether people who believe things like that are mentally ill or not?
However, regardless of its plausibility, it's not psychologically healthy to allow oneself to get into a habit of believing things like this that you can't know. But, when you're a blue collar victim of the political and financial/business elites deciding back in the 90s to outsource your entire livelihood and way of life to a communist dictatorship, grossly enriching themselves while impoverishing you, any resistance to believing the worst about these people you don't know and can't prove anything about, just vanishes.
Your survival is at stake, your mental energy is being used up on basic survival efforts rather than higher-minded rationality, skepticism and BS-detection. Your mental focus drops back down one energy level from reason to survival, pattern matching takes over, and serves your anger rather than your rationality. When you put lots of people's very survival at stake, that's the unsurprising systematic result.
Map that dynamic to every conspiracy theory on the internet, extend it over two decades of constant trial and error of meme generation and accumulation (most fail, but a few stick and compound over time), amplify it by the apparent premeditated impoverishment of half of US society, and account for the fact that while many memes and conspiracies are plausible but false, some are true, and it's difficult for normal people to discern among them from a removed PoV across the chasm of cyberspace from the actual source.
Are people who believe these things really mentally ill, or are they just the natural state of humanity under these conditions? Maybe it's our higher-minded rational selves that are resistant to the plausible but unprovable that is the unnatural state of humanity.
[1]:https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo...
I don't believe it is only the common social dynamic of people reinforcing their positions in the face of antagonism at play here. It is probably also the conduct of their most irrational detractors that empower their standpoint.
If you ignore them, the vast majority of people would just come around eventually.
You talk about brain hacking here, so they just need to look at you to find evidence for their exotic believes.
Exaggerated of course, but they would just pick the most irrational critic they can find to fortify their views.
And I lay it out for them. The short answer: is because it works.
If they send 5k emails out, asking for $2k, all they need is for a small percentage to fall for it.
They know how much effort to put in to get a specific return.
Why can't that be the same idea here? Pick out the ones who don't ask questions, or take 2 seconds to Google something, etc. Whip them into a frenzy. Then steer them to a specific site. Or to donate. Or even just start following whomever wrote this out, to be convinced to donate somewhere later.
This doesn't apply to the diagram. In this case, it wasn't just laziness. The author actually added not just the "5G Freq" label, but added "Bass", "Treble", etc in the exact same style. And I know they added this because I dug up an original diagram where the labels look different. The author erased the original labels and re-did them (and added "5G" to the pre-existing "Freq"). This was clearly a joke. Someone doing this for real would have simply left off the other labels and only kept "5G Freq" (or would have added other suspicious labels).
The sad part is that, despite the huge amount of (true) information available to them on the Internet, the majority of people seem to have become no more knowledgeable about the technology they use in everyday life. You can instantly look up the part numbers on that diagram and find out what they are; and if what you find you do not understand (e.g." what is an op-amp?"), you can continue searching. But the majority just take it at face-value, and re-share with zero thought. It's ironic to think that a lot of these people think we are the "sheeple", when they in fact behave much the same way...
These were the ones one could reach. One could talk with them, listen to their fears and try to nudge them back from the fringes.
It was interesting. And would never scale. And would, I believe, not work for people already deeper into the abyss.
However, I agree that as you said, to be effective you'd likely have to reach out to the bystanders directly, and with an approach rather different from the decidedly unkind manner that those discussions are typically conducted.
Sheesh.
2. The proliferation of these conspiracy theories is a byproduct of the communications platforms created and worked on by many people here.
3. The boss mt-2 is a great sounding pedal
https://theweek.com/articles/951759/parents-warned-internet-...
It's not just your parents, it's lots of people who didn't grow up with the internet and don't fundamentally understand some of its nuances.
Excerpts:
"None of this is to suggest my generation's brains are immune to internet breaking. But there are some important distinctions here — three in my observation — that give this a generational dimension.
...
"The first (and this is based in data) is that younger generations are less likely to dose themselves daily with the poison of cable news, so that's one less source of content blasting. For those who consume cable news on a regular basis, the immersion becomes nigh impossible to break."
...
"And that brings me to the second generational distinction: the degree of innate understanding of the medium. I do not think my older family members understand the extent to which the content they encounter is tailored by algorithms to set their lizard brains on fire. Like the majority of their peers, as a 2019 survey showed, they probably don't understand an algorithm is involved at all. They insist they do understand, but their behavior tells me they do not."
...
"I thought my own parents would be safe from all this because — thank God — they are not on any of the big three social media sites; they don't have cable; and their tech skills are limited. As it turns out, that's irrelevant. The internet is so user-friendly now it can break anyone's brain! YouTube and a few political email lists are all it takes. And now that this content history is established, my mom's search results are tailored accordingly. The brokenness is self-reinforcing."
...
"[Third:] Our parents have generally not managed that pandemic-time connectivity to their [real life] friends — if indeed they had close friends in the first place. A common thread in my discussions of broken boomer brains is a lack of intimate friendships and hobbyist communities. In the absence of that emotional connection and healthy recreational time use, this media engagement can become a bad substitute. The memes become the hobby. The Facebook bickering supplants the relationships. And it's all moving so fast — tweet, video, meme, Tucker, tweet, video, meme, Maddow — the change goes unnoticed. The brain breaks."
Got it, I'll start shrieking about guitar pedals now whenever anyone starts questioning taking the Covid vaccine.