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Comment by teravor | Hacker News Reader

I always found it odd that people who are intelligent enough to work in IQ-loaded fields are as easily manipulated by either rhetoric or ideology as anyone else.

growing up I always assumed that everyone would grasp some aspect of game theory intuitively, I still remember the day I found out game theory was a thing - it was like finding out that someone successfully systematized common sense.

most people take the things people say as if they were worth considering. signals without cost are only useful as knowledge of what the signaler wants fools to believe.

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> I still remember the day I found out game theory was a thing - it was like finding out that someone successfully systematized common sense.

Game Theory as a field is actually very complex and often reveals dominant strategies that would never occur to someone as the "common sense" approach to a problem. It was arguably created to solve for problems where there was no obvious correct answer, even for a very intelligent person.

The world is not full of idiots, rather communication channels are heavily managed to prevent people from establishing consensus around the obvious.

No matter how many people think press release X is obviously wrong - 80%, 95, 99% - it'll always be "the comments section criticizing the article," or "bloggers sharing incisive criticism."

That rather implies the world is full of idiots.

If you know how your emotions and opinions and neurology can be used against you and don't use that to inform your media consumption habits then that's just stupid.

There's no safe way to watch propaganda. There isn't even a safe way to watch it secondarily: an endless stream of debunking videos pretty quickly still does the main thing propaganda needs: repeats the core message.

A lot (a lot) of people intuitively understand something, but throw it out because it doesn't align with how they want (or need) things to be.

It seems even otherwise intelligent people will cultivate as much ignorance as possible to try and bend reality.

Perhaps it stems from the the mind projection fallacy[1] (your comment is an example of this :) ) where in these people are so enamored by the rhetoric that they fail to consider the underlying game theory involved which needs second or even third order thinking. This needs some self awareness.

I would say much of the futility of debate and discussion originates from [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy

I assume it is easier to manipulate someone who lives in symbols than someone who lives in dirt.

Surely it depends on what you're trying to do? If someone is deeply knowledgeable about how AI works, then it will be difficult to fool them with misinformation about the capabilities of AI. Someone who knows very little about AI will be more likely to have misconceptions about AI.

I think it’s more precise to say it’s easier to change the mind of someone who lives in symbols than who lives in dirt. Whether that is changing their mind for the better (oh new maths proof, I’d better update my priors) or the worse.

Depends on the angle. It's easy to manipulate someone once you exceed their ability to keep up with you. People "living in symbols" aren't easy to manipulate about easy things, but you can ramp up complexity until they lose track and accept an unwarranted reasoning leap without realizing it.

With people "living in dirt", you can't pull that off because you'll jump ahead so far they'll immediately realize they can't possibly understand what you're selling right now, and shut the argument down. But they can get confused about things outside their direct area of direct experience.

Note: I'm not saying either is smarter or less smart. Rather, "living in symbols" get confused "higher up", while "living in dirt" get confused "low and to the sides", but they probably have more solid grounding.

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