cf141q5325

You do realize that you just listed a bunch of really dumb caricatures as the argument for why you dont have to think about stuff? Reality finding doesnt work by just pointing at laughing at the few people dumber then you. Thats a description of propaganda, if you spend more and more time concerned with dumber and dumber caricatures, there is a really good chance somebody is feeding you with framed stuff to react to to come to predetermined conclusions.

Not being the actual dumbest person in the room doesnt mean you are somehow done figuring stuff out. Treating this as a matter of binary sides overlooks the issue that there is no "reasonable default" to fall back on. Finding that position is the actual practical problem. Thats an iterative process of verification and reality truly doesnt care that you made out somebody dumber then yourself.

I said it in the other post, i find this to be an extremely difficult conversation. After all, how do you tell people in a constructive way to really consider their emotional maturity when it comes to this not at all being trivial problem.

It only starts to become a problem if you cant explain why its wrong. Having parts of your worldview that you told yourself are not up for verification is exactly how being wrong looks like from the perspective of somebody who is. And once you no longer have a means of verifying reality, you have no way to comprehend what you actually ignore and what the consequences are. You just blinded yourself because you felt smart enough to not need it.

By deciding what people (not just you) should or shouldnt think about you identified the problem, that people could be too dumb for that consideration and make mistakes, while blatantly ignoring that the same might not just apply to your decision as well, but that you are removing the fundamental solution to said problem. Verification.

Thats the problem. Not comprehending that the problem is more difficult that it seems and that the "easy" solution you propose has fundamental flaws that will result in catastrophic failure. Or worse, comprehending it but being overwhelmed and deciding to at least feel right regardless.

And unfortunately, i dont see a third option outside of said incompetence or said malice. I truly hope i am wrong because unfortunately there seem to be a lot of people embracing this stuff. But it also wouldnt be too surprising because talking about this gets awfully close to violating the board rules. Which would explain why this catastrophic idea can so easily spread.

4) Wagner will replace the Russian military, fix the problem of corruption/"Vranyo" and become an export success.

>Sites like reddit/4chan/hn become less popular due to generative AI spam.

I am rather hopeful that it will be an incentive for such sites evolving to combat the problem.

I believe it all goes down to the ranking problem across the attention economy. What content do people see? Once we agree that we would prefer more high quality content instead of stuff triggering cognitive biases and dopamine output for tribalism it becomes a technical problem of how to identify high/low quality content. After all, what does it matter if a bot is writing something as long as it is actually good?

> The dead internet theory will become true.

How would you know that it isnt already?

I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe.

edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.

Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians.

Not so sure about such a drastic shift myself, but its a possibility if you think of it in terms of having overdone the whole propaganda aspect and inadvertently triggering a reaction. Especially as having observed it for the better part of the last year, i suspect Russia has been goating western media/commentators/politicians into especially brazen stuff. To give an example for especially brazen instances, there is the propaganda channel "Perun" on youtube who does a great job framing itself as open source intelligence. When it came to the Ukrainian Kherson offensive he however dropped the ball and transparently crossed the line from miss- to dissinformation when he

1) Congratulated the Ukrainian government on "preserving manpower" by banning military age males from leaving the country

2) Stating that the Ukrainian military was made up solely from "volunteers", thus the great fighting spirit

3) Congratulating the Ukrainian government on its willingness to take losses in Kherson with the strategic aim of worsening the Russian supply situation

Add to stuff like this the reports that got brazenly silenced like the Amnesty International report about Ukraine having soldiers positioned in schools and hospitals. The rational being that Russia knew about all prewar military positions in case you wondered.

Its the old problem of exploiting a bogey man too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working.

edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video.

For Amnesty Report and the backlash see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrai...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-intern...

So you predict the end of the dollar in 2023?

1) ChatGPT replaces search engines making incredible progress in automation of relatively high skilled jobs.

2) Further deterioration of the world police area with authoritarian regimes growing more bold in territorial ambitions. Most concrete the Turkish Regime indirectly with supporting Azerbaijan aggression against Armenia and directly with further invasions into Northern Syria.

3) No end to the Ukraine war, still no invasion of Taiwan

Parents payed taxes when they acquired their possessions. I dont see why they should have a double tax burden.

As dumb as it sounds, good for you. There is this great podcast with Annie Duke about how quitting is a difficult skill and how easily we get trapped chained to not functioning approaches due to not looking at it rationally. Maybe the analogy of all the corpses on Mount Everest who ignored the turnaround time will make you feel a bit better about your decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jMLqcfX9dU

edit: For anyone not listening to it, the practical take away is the importance of setting kill criteria (to recognize something isnt working) upfront to combat cognitive biases and your emotions in the moment.

>But modern smartphones run full-fat kernels with non-deterministic scheduling, not an embedded RTOS.

I believe that is the beauty of it. Think something like the steamlink (streaming the video output of a steam game). Which turns into network transparent applications very quickly. Using a RTOS on the client side gives you amazing possibilities to lock the system down. Secure boot chains become a real possibility once you dont have to update that often due to the small attack vector. With NuttX having a simple framebuffer something like qubesOS but with remote VMs should be a real possibility. Especially since that is already happening with headunits in the automotive sector. Where one displayserver is handling both the safety critical tachometer as well as your multimedia stuff.

All of this not to mention, that the ARM processors in question dont have a secure coprocessor spying on you but Trustzone. This thread really gives me the warm and fuzzies. OP did something truly great here.

I already really enjoyed your tutorial a while back with the pinetime and RIOT. This one looks amazing as well.

Well done!

Except technology makes it possible to constantly send get requests to everyone not carrying it. The limiting factor here was how much time police was willing to waste.

Slippery slopes work exactly because people are incapable to predict the long term consequences for eroding safety standards and are at the same time arrogant enough to believe to be very much capable. Its cognitive biases at work in selecting some of the most reckless approaches for dangerous situations.

Have you considered, that throwing around caricatures to discredit positions you dislike is really toxic behavior? Even if you do it for what you perceive to be the right reasons, consequences are not trivial to determine and you are unlikely to be the first human to do it accurately.

Its indeed a brave new world. With governments getting ever more interested in what you do online, some not quite so mentally stable people have an audience for their mental diarrhea for the first time. If you ever asked yourself the famous "who is supposed to read that", well now somebody is payed to. I hope they do the nice thing and upvote

I think this boils down to another far more simple question

How would you fix what for which reasons? As long as we pretend this to be mainly an ideological problem while ignoring the practical difficulties of not just solving stuff, but figuring out what to solve using which metric, we are unlikely to do anything sensible. Because every error and uncertainty in the conclusion to that question is extremely profitable to exploit.

I would be willing to go one step further, the more people dont talk about this, but are having trivialized arguments in which you know to be right pushing for vague calls to action, the less likely is it that we are doing anything sensible.

I am also confident, that if i were wrong on this, somebody could explain why. While there is a limit to complexity of possible solutions, ignoring the problem doesnt make it go away. It makes it worse.

edit: In case its not obvious, this flawed approach of framing something as an ideological argument while discouraging goal oriented approaches would also be how sabotage looks.

Thanks for the resources, especially the Bonhoeffer theory and the nice feedback. I do appreciate it. I can also only return the favor, being able to come to an agreement on such points is really good news and i found this quite beneficial as well. The difficulty of it (conflict in speech is just so much more easy and fun) is why i have so high hopes for technology. Because you wont just help with understanding but being more easy to understand. Which means getting more control about how you frame stuff without just trying to influence your conversation partner. I am not so optimistic about education beyond a base level though, getting a grip of framing stuff, and not just reacting immediately, is just very difficult no matter how much you meditate, at least for idiots like myself. Schmachtenberger [0] is proposing that same approach with the stuff around "rule omega", but as you can take from the close to 10 hours of videos and not making much visible progress since, you are kind of trying to build a new non-stupid human. (Not tryint to downplay that approach would be great if it worked and its a really nice idea. I might be overly cynical here).

When it comes to possible solutions, cooperative minimum is key imho. Which likely means the solution cant be aimed at gaining political influence or monetary benefits. Because people react to such attempts of influence as well. And as with every tool, there will be attempts of weaponization. Which gets us to conflict again, which makes the experience everywhere more shit. So keeping Goethe Zauberlehrling in mind is rather important.

In case anyone is wondering about the poverty point, its so people get the option to not have to react under dire pressure for once. Because thinking about stuff like this is quite simply a luxury if you have to worry about where the next meal for you and your family is going to come from. Less anxious people are more willing to cooperate.

[0] Sensemaking and its problems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ

> Not sure you noticed - but your reply is to a new contributor to this discussion.

Yes, i hope you didnt thought this applied to yourself, far from it. I also jumped in a few posts ago on a conversation you had with somebody else.

I also didnt want to imply that missinformation spreading viraly wasnt a problem. Its just not fixable with authoritarian measures and the problem goes far deeper then "just" liberties. The problem is that any attempt to ban the sharing of information means you need a means to accurately determine what is wrong or incomplete information (jumping over the whole problem of miss-/diss/mal-information and true information without context to keep the post short) without the ability to challenge errors. By attempting to ban information you are interfering in your reality finding process. Doing this is extremely dangerous due to the inability to judge implications of errors and such errors being extremely profitable. Its a truly horrible idea, no matter how nice solving the problem of spreading missinformation (while actually being impossible) sounds. Its the patching out of a vital safety check without which you loose your ability to error-correct. As everywhere, without a means to error correct, all the problems such an approach allows for already exist, time just hasnt caught up.

I think this is a vital point people overlook. Its not a moral argument, totalitarianism isnt just horrible, it does not work. Its a process that leads to the creation of errors in thinking, dismantles the means to error correct and breeds corruption. Its groups of idiots moving forward while ignoring the consequences, encouraged by socio/psychopaths profiting off such movements temporarily at the cost of long term problems it creates.

>And my question prior... what do you think can be done to stop people like Trump rise to power

I mentioned it at the end of my first post, i think the solution is as old as time and as with everything technology makes them more solveable. You cant fix stupidity centrally, its a decentralized problem for which a centralized solution would require totalitarian perfection due to loosing the ability to error-correct.

So its down to everyone to have a honest conversation about how stupid they are on individual questions and whether they are emotionally mature enough to have that conversation without becoming cynical. So figuring out where your views are wrong, or incomplete, where you are acting ideologically or are just reacting to a frame. Instead of attempting to get rid of miss-information you focus on figuring out where you can say with a high degree of certainty, and strict requirements for falsifiability what is likely true. So what is non-missinfornation, approximating base-reality from which we then can have meaningful conversations. Since we make the effort to communicate, we clearly decided on cooperation instead of conflict. So lets work on making that more productive, after all there is a core question here. Are you actually interested in being right or do you just take pleasure from feeling right? If its the later, know that reality is a bitch that will win every time over your feelings. Clinging on regardless is how being stupid looks from the perspective of a stupid person. Which we all are sometimes. Which cognitive biases trick us into ignoring or brushing aside.

I think this is a task where tooling can help and where we can give a hand to other people in the process. Talk to people meaningfully, think steelmening instead of strawmaning. You might be missing a perspective somebody else overcorrected for. Almost none of the issues are one dimensional, its all spectrums you cant overcorrect on without being just as wrong as before. Understand how people came to a conclusion and show up errors instead of regurgitating your own views. As this is obviously difficult (take this from the experience of a seasoned idiot) its clear why we havent "solved" it yet. But i believe it is something technology can help us with. And cooperative decentralized solutions are still a lot more solvable then the insane idea of trying to dictate reality.

It would also help with the old star trek question of where technology will move towards. Will we manage to create a world in which technologies are useful tools or are we headed for becoming clogs in a malfunctioning machine we dont understand and cant control?

This problem is hard to fix because everyone believes they themselves are not an idiot, everyone else is. Thats an error caused by cognitive biases. But one were we can help each other and develop tooling to achieve better results all around. I suspect there will be massive payoffs once we just agree on trying to be less stupid and meaning well, even just for the benefit of a less shit future for yourself.

>Banning misinformation alone isn't enough, and yes it can certainly be abused, but it is necessary.

Its impossible. And its one of the most dangerous and insidious ideas out there. To put it quite bluntly, you arent competent enough to determine for other people what is true and what is fake. And neither is anyone else. Its the reason we had informed consent, because without it, idiots thinking to do "the right thing" historically time and time again inflict horrible fates upon those deemed not smart enough to make decisions for themselves.

I understand that you want it to work, or even feel it needs to work, but reality quite simply doesnt give a crap about what anyone feels "should or needs to work".

This might look like a stupid disagreement, but quite frankly, this is the line in the sand towards totalitarian dystopias. If you were competent enough to make that decision, you would be competent enough to explain why something is true or fake. Which in my view leaves either malice or delusion motivating those pushing on regardless.

Thanks to the internet i had the possibility to speak with people holding despicable views, be it nazis or thanks to /r/syriancivilwar even interviews with ISIS supporters. Please really think about the fact that i am still more worried about people with your set of believes.

This is truly dangerous, especially because people tell themselves they do it for the "right reasons". Its what makes it such a horrible trap. Its an easy narrative to fall for and once you are in you left reality in favor of the group narrative. And while other extremist groups use the same mechanisms, this one is a lot more palpable on first view. After all, who would be against no more misinformation? Overlooking the horrible and costly insight of the last 100 years and more that just as running an economy, this isnt a trivial task you can just dictate, even if you really want to. Especially since running the economy would be trivial in comparison.

For the sake of a livable future, please stop before you doom us all.

edit: sorry for the addition 30 minute in

Agree on the not so great again and the need for a honest inquiry for factual information. Its just that i think some of that stuff is caricatures itself. Q-Anon for example is more or less crack. Here is a game developer describing it https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...

>It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed.

>In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative.

>It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make.

Being opposed to something like this is very easy. And at the same time the ability to figure stuff out without political framing gets harder and harder as well. Its made only worse with propaganda on the political level being also very profitable. And even stuff with good intentions backfires.

Its a clusterfuck all around, stuff gets more and more complicated. We havent solved scaling problems in software development or companies and it seems political discourse cant handle either. In addition to problems becoming too complicated, you also have to stay realistic. If you just fire every politicians dealing with disinformation you have the old problem of replacing everyone with some magic competent new humans with authoritarians meanwhile racing onwards. Give people certain incentives and its hard to behave differently. People want to get reelected and peoples opinions are very easily swayed with some well made propaganda.

On the bright side, this should all be a rather easy fix as long as we can agree on meaning well and reality mattering more then wanting to feel right. Because that is how a really nice made frame looks and you might have to let go and try to be rational for a moment.

edit: tldr: Any attempt to ban missinformation would likely be a terrible idea, we will have to agree to wanting to fix it instead. And that is hopefully just a question of tooling.

>There is a difference between trying to convince someone to spend money on your product vs trying to convince someone that your worldview and ideology is the right one (Trumpism) by using language that resonates with your values.

Both is propaganda, the difference stems from not only trying to frame things in a positive light as you commonly do with advertisement. The reason political propaganda is often more effective is the easy exploitation of negative caricatures combined with ingroup/outgroup effects and the errors of our brains. Be it cognitive biases or simply the inability to scale with complexity. So for example, if i get you to perceive yourself to be part of my ingroup, by having you react predictably with caricatures representing the outgroup (often with some "with us or against us" rhetorics) and manage to have you accept simplified stories, then i quite simply already won. Because i will be able to define who is and who isnt grouped in with the caricatures and how you think about anything they say.

This is very much about brainwashing. If i get you to think about stuff the way i framed it and stop you from communicating with people outside of the frame in a meaningful way, then i own you. And it works through you not wanting to challenge believes you started to identify with due to cognitive biases. Which is also how you recognize whether you are already in such a situation. By for example, believing every disagreement with sockpuppets is a "no" instead of a "yes, but...". Having an incomplete view of a situation is often just as easy to exploit as a wrong one.

Unfortunately this is just the start. This is very much an asymmetric battle with individuals on the loosing end in terms of complexity management and ease of adaptation. And even if you somehow managed to stay objective and got your hands on good information, you are still at threat of your attacker escalating to psychological warfare, for example overwhelming you with inputs to force you into either paralysis or predetermined reactions. And depending of how vicious your attacker is, white torture is also a possibility for further escalation.

During the war he debriefed people interrogated by the Gestapo to figure out ways to resist and briefed other resistance fighters with what to expect. Its obviously impossible to "resist" many things on that level, for example the threat of having your family put into Sippenhaft with you. While other mechanisms, especially on a societal level, are much more easily countered. You can summarize his approach with "knowledge is power". So the book is using the same approach he applied during the war and which he had recommended since, that true and honest information in an open society is the best medicine against a rise in totalitarianism and the resulting corruption.

Its an approach you should be familiar with when it comes to combating the different methods of propaganda, psychological warfare or information operations. Or simply cognitive biases. Once you describe how they work, you are primed to recognize them when you come across them. Which hopefully reduces their effectiveness.

To give an example, there is the rather famous quote concerning the title:

>“Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced "…" was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had been brought — the state in which nothing had any validity "…" they simply did not know what was what.”

Recognizing that this is an actual tactic, aimed at creating a predictable reaction is rather helpful to break out of that predetermined path for your thoughts.

Joost Meerloo's "Rape of the mind".

Its an incredible older book looking at the mechanisms exploited by totalitarian systems to subdue their victims. Namely nazi Germany, soviet Russia and revolutionary China.

The author was part of the dutch resistance against the nazi occupation and headed the psychological department of the dutch army in exile after he had to flee mainland Europe. He later also acted as a witness for the defense in the trial against Frank Schwable for collaborating as a PoW in Korea.

In addition to the really interesting and still highly relevant topic his writing shows him to be among the other awe inspiring scientists of the "greatest generation". Its quite simply an extremely impressive yet pleasant to read opus magnum.

Ownership of that gas is however unclear https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/trotz-voller-speich...

>Previously, the earliest known amputation involved a 7,000-year-old skeleton found in France, and experts believed such operations only emerged in settled agricultural societies.

Thats quite the jump

I really appreciate the lengthy response. I also didnt want to accuse you of being in the echo chamber, everyone always has that risk, me included. It is just extremely difficult to tell once communication breaks down.

I think much of it has less to do with people being stupid but topics being complex. And the attempts to make sensible complexity reduction. With a complexity ceiling being very real. At a certain point there are too many perspective with too much knowledge assumed on peoples part, which might not all be relevant. Which is why i personally tend to stay from discussions with big words like capitalism. Making sure everyone is talking about the same thing is just far from trivial.

I think the scam part might be one of those stupid things that might entail more then it first seems. Unfortunately "the economy" isnt as easy to model as physical systems. Because in the end its nothing but the behavior of market participants. And while its possible to set incentives, through interests rates and the like, we arent as rational as we would like to think. What people believe plays a big part in determining their behavior and as such, changing that is just as much a means of influencing the economy as interest rate cuts. Or differently put, inflation being inflation expectation.

It of course doesnt mean that the problems of a store of value based currency disappear, but its also important to keep in mind on the topic. Especially since the complexity ceiling might be exploited to shape beliefs which in turn influence the economy.

I however dont have an answer to how communication on topics at the complexity ceiling could work. But i think its important to at least understand where communication breaks down for what reason.

I did it a few times since then for other reasons, turned out to be roughly every year or so. I find it to be an amazing tool for introspection and resetting perspectives in which one can get stuck. Differently put, i found that it has more to offer to me.

But the alcohol was a one time thing, something just rewired. I never felt that effect subside. I already didnt like it but felt just stuck, in addition to the urge to drink. I had a sip during the afterglow and the idiocy of it was just blatantly obvious. Funnily enough that wasnt the intent for the trip. It was just a really amazing side effect.

I wish i could give a better explanation but it has been 4 years and my life moved on since then. Its not something i think about unless the topic comes up. But it was such an important fork in the road for me that i found it important to mention. See it as an +1 for anecdotal experience.

I also agree with the obvious potential, "How to change your mind" from Michael Pollan is a great book on the topic.

Magic Mushrooms during an Amsterdam visit. I was drinking heavily, half a liter whiskey per evening every day for a few years. I also didnt think couldnt stop, the urge to drink, and the inability to stop once i started seemed to be just too strong. And that despite me despising how stupid i got while drunk. It really wasnt a fun addiction and realistically i was on my way to drink myself to death. After the trip the urge was gone and has remained this way for 4 years now. I even tried a sip of my back then favorite whiskey a few times on special occasions but never finished the glass. I can honestly say i am truly over it.

I also dont seem to be the only one having this experience, a cofounder of AA (Bill Wilson) had a similar experience with LSD.

Obviously, read up on psychedelics safe use first.

What you focus your research on is always a big personal gamble. Be it questioning something that seems evident or walking along beaten paths that still might turn out to be wrong. But as long as you stick to the scientific method you will at least generate a result so that future researchers wont waste their time on the same approach.

In the end evidence hopefully prevails on the societal level. It might just take some time.