Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> psychological methods learned from Guantanamo and CIA Black Sites,

What would those be? If CIA and such has some special "psychological methods", how comes they never actually used it to achieve anything related to their direct job? I mean, let's embrace the conspiracy and assume they have these spectacular methods that can make anybody think anything and they are willing to use it on anybody, including Americans. Why won't they use it on Taliban or Iranians or Hezbollah and make them love America and crave McDonalds burgers and Starbucks coffee? Why didn't they use it for anything, even if just to get promoted and look good on the annual report?

I think much more realistic hypothesis would be that they have no magic spectacular "psychological methods" at all and are as (in)competent in persuasion as a random politician is, and are forced to muddle through with what they got, and they need "black sites" so that public wouldn't actually learn how low their success rate is and how lucky we are because their opponents aren't exactly geniuses either.

There's nothing magical about it. All that's needed is control of the media your target consumes. "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky covers how this works.

The Taliban consume the Koran. They reject most forms of mass media. Thus it's very hard to manipulate them into a western lifestyle. The alternative would be to find their "opinion leaders" and coerce them. Anyway, it's naïve to think these techniques are not used at home and abroad.

It'd be naive if there were any indications of "these techniques" existing beyond extremely vague hand-wavy conspiracy implications. Just throwing out the name of Chomsky's book is not an actual evidence of anything. Tell me which specifically Gitmo-CIA-black-site-derived techniques you mean. You don't have to spell out the whole Chomsky, just name a couple, 2-3 sentences would be enough.

Daddy, what is top-secret unknown unknown?

Perhaps next you'll ask me to list three NSA zero-days?

Well when you have technical systems that have the ability to influence what you buy, what movies you see, what you eat, how you view politics and so on it tends to take on an insidious role in peoples lives without them even realizing it. I also tend to subscribe to the notion that large groups of people tend to jump through various states of psychosis based on external input from media and things that happen in the world. This puts people in an emotional state where what the see and hear can have a different impact than if they were thinking rationally. It's one reason why something like QAnon worked so well as a mind virus, it's the one thing that triggers the emotional versus logical response for everyone.

Then I think you can look back at recent events from the past decade or more and see the impact of this. Whether you want to start with Kazakhstan this past week, the way opposing groups were targeted to fight each other in real life like was seen in Houston, or the reaction to a "youtube video" during Benghazi in Libya, the way that Trump and Cambridge Analytica kind of took over the GOP, or maybe even how Obama went from a relatively unknown politician to having a cult of personality around him a few months later. Another part of the psychological aspect of it is something called the information-action ratio. Basically people are overwhelmed with information that they can do absolutely nothing about. This leads to certain emotional responses caused by feeling a loss of control that also makes people more easily manipulated by what they are fed by these systems.

It's not much of a conspiracy if you have used technology and tried to pay attention to how it makes you feel and act at times. This is a large part of how so many people became radicalized from recommendation engines and targeted advertisements. It's like mind hacking in a way. But that's just like, my opinion, man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com