Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void.
You don't need LSD for this, just expose yourself to media (news, social media, "influencers", etc) and they will helpfully convince you that everything you thought before you encountered them was bad/racist/sexist/conservative/etc. They'll also give you opinions about specific groups of people, and certain people in particular (all of whom you haven't met, nor will you ever meet), and reinforce that every day you continue to consume from them.
Then it's just a matter of swallowing wholesale whatever else they feed you after that.
Online, platforms with downvote systems (HN included) present the apparent legitimacy of certain views over others, and help reinforce what you shouldn't be thinking or voicing (don't get greyed out by posting that!).
The net result is we've sleepwalked into being controlled anyway, except that we contort ourselves justifying why "this is different".
That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
What you're insinuating to be mind control are normal social mechanisms that have always been in place and have nothing to do with the media. They are primarily exerted upon you by your peers (close friends, family, colleagues), and not by the media. Whether these social control mechanisms are good or bad depends on the how closed these groups are and what view/policies they have. For example, if you're surrounded by religious fanatics, then that's likely going to be bad for you.
What you refer to is actually an "alt right" meme that was invented to discredit free thinking (free thinking requires people to be well-informed) and push an authoritarian and communitarian agenda in which people are more controlled than in a free society. It's a fascist agenda that only works if you successfully discredit media first, since otherwise nobody will buy the "alternative facts" nonsense they're trying to sell.
> That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
Not from the systems perspective, it doesn't. It requires a set point, an ability to measure deviation from that set point, and an ability to influence a factor that can reduce said deviation.
It's not a conspiracy theory to observe that news publishing is first and foremost a for-profit enterprise. That the primary, overriding goal of any private news agency is making money to survive and pay its owners. It's not a conspiracy theory to observe that news publishing is controlled to maximize that primary goal. It's also not a conspiracy theory to notice that people's behavior is influenced by the news - and here you have all the components you need for a feedback control loop.
If you notice that ad-based revenue model makes media profits proportional to "engagement", and that fear and hatred are some of the most strong emotions out there, you arrive at the reason why news publishing is trying to turn everyone into afraid, hateful bigots. It's how they make money. There's no conspiracy theory involved, just free market at work.
That there's no single actor with intentions and explicit goals - it only makes the phenomenon more robust.
We could do with different words for these. You're right that from the perspective of both electronics engineers and sociologists there are all sorts of "control systems" that affect behaviour. It's the great achievement of Weberist "modern" societies to take control away from individual chains of authority (feudalism) and into impersonal systems (bureaucracy, police, capitalism). But the individual lived experience of being controlled can still be oppressive.
We swing backwards and forwards between trying to hold individuals accountable for system-caused behaviour vs trying to change "the system" which is both huge and thwarted by individual actions.
What categories do we want to separate using different words?
About control systems, I think it would be good for general population to be more aware of just how many various control systems they're a part of, usually as a Manipulated Variable (in process control parlance). It's not just "the police" or "the government" or "the market" - it's every advertiser, every company they deal with, various branches of government, possibly even their HOA. Basically everyone that can persuade you or has power over you, that stands to benefit from particulars of your behavior.
The key aspect here is that these systems are usually impersonal and amoral, they don't care about people who are being used as MVs. There's also very many of them. It's not a question of being influenced or not, but of limiting your exposure to the systems that harm you.
Yes, I was trying to separate "impersonal control" from "personal control". A traffic cone is a control system that's impersonal both in its placement and in who it's aimed at.
> It's not a question of being influenced or not, but of limiting your exposure to the systems that harm you.
> the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
Well .. in some cases they are; Fox, Sky, News Corp Au. (many local newspapers in Australia), the UK Sun, Times, the WSJ, HarperCollins, and some talk radio stations are all owned by News Corp under Murdoch control and have at times been used to promote his personal politics, endorse parties, bully governments into accepting particular policies, and so on.
> That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
In most places the media landscape is a oligopoly [0], even social media doesn't evade that pitfall, only a handful of companies dominate that whole space.
And while on social media these companies are not always supplying the content, they are very much the gatekeepers about what kind of content is allowed in the first place and what content they aggregate to whom [1].
That is a very powerful position to be in and the results can be observed for years already with filter bubbles based on extremely warped Overton windows and an increasingly centralized world wide web [2]
Giving all kinds of media a blank pass, as not doing so would allegedly be fascism, just trivializes a very real problem.
> social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
Regarding influencers at least (and a lot of other social media phenomenon), the uniform actor is the ad industry. It's the sole reason influencers make a living and flaunts the latest products.
There certainly is intent: make people desire useless shit, get people spending.
Regarding the ad industry and social media in general, I am surprised that people think it is not about control, that the effects we are seeing are not planned. This is not conspiratorial thinking. Behavioral psychology has always been central to advertising. It is manipulation on a vast scale. The problem is it has become so widespread and ingrained in our daily lives and everything we see and hear that most of us now seem completely blind to it. Hey, it is black Friday soon; you will probably buy something you do not need, right? You are practically saving money by buying...
The design of social media platforms are even worse (more malicious, with intent) than traditional ad campaigns.
The thing is, journalists can and do discuss the ways their coverage is shaped from above all the time -- whether through explicit directives like this one or more soft forms of influence like using promotions and firings to select for certain perspectives -- but this never makes any dent in the insistence on such bromides as "if there was a big conspiracy to control the media some journalists would talk about it." They do talk about it, people just aren't interested in hearing it.
>but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
There are 6 corporations that control the vast majority of the news media you consume. The idea that it is unfathomable that they would work together to push their narrative is utter nonsense.
1. It only talks about "in America", meaning the US. There are 192 other countries.
2. I haven't said it's unfathomable. It's ridiculously unlikely, though. Journalists are not exactly known for their secrecy, even if they wanted to they wouldn't be able to hide a gigantic mind control collusion among the six corporations you've mentioned. There is no grand conspiracy. On a side note, editorial policies are not "mind control" either.
What people say about the media and mind control is not only crazy, the very same people tend to propagate extremely bad information sources such as blogs and partisan news aggregation sites that are primary examples of what they criticize and allegedly reject. As I've said, there is an agenda behind these conspiracy claims, and it surely isn't to improve the quality of news and information sources for citizens.
As a result, the vast majority of normal and well-informed people now have to endure all this insane nonsense, from Covid conspiracy theories by vegan cooks over Pizzagate to a complete denial of reality by flat earthers ("I don't believe in trigonometry"). It's an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequence of the fact that small, radical minorities can so easily find their own esoteric peer groups and create their own small echo chambers nowadays. The same kind of radical groups also existed in the past, of course, but it was much harder for them to meet and gain followers.
Or maybe this insane nonsense has become so powerful because the official narratives are much dumber than I seem to remember them from before. Probably a result of both increasing polarization and shrinking media budgets.
For example, covid is just the flu, and only xenophobes would enact travel bans over it. No wait, corona is terrible and it's Trump's fault for not containing it. No wait, we should all go to BLM protests, did you know they actually _lower_ Covid rates? Listen to the science, don't wear masks! No wait, wear masks! ...
(The most effective "alt-right"/trust erosion accounts I've seen don't do much more than put screenshots of contradictory statements from the same source next to each other.)
Or Pizzagate, where it felt like the official narrative had solidly won after someone wanted to raid the pedophile dungeon and couldn't find it. Case closed! Until the Epstein story happened, Clinton's name was on flight list several times, and the media acted in actual unison by ignoring the implications. (I get it! Touching this case is suicide by proxy for journalists. But then don't blame normies for getting paranoid about pedophile elites.)
> Or Pizzagate, where it felt like the official narrative had solidly won after someone wanted to raid the pedophile dungeon and couldn't find it. Case closed! Until the Epstein story happened, Clinton's name was on the flight list several times, and the media acted in actual unison by ignoring this case.
Er, the Epstein and Clinton connection first arose before Pizzagate, and it covered in the mainstream media. It then arose again when Epstein was charged the last time, and even more widely reported by the mainstream media. And it arose again very recently in the context of the Ghislaine Maxwell case, and, is right now being extensively covered in the mainstream media. This isn't a matter of cherry-picking facts to spin a conspiracy theory around and just ignoring facts that contradict the theory, it's inventing false facts to justify a conspiracy theory (which is then used to place blame for belief in other conspiracy theories.)
I had edited my comment while you were replying. The media did not "ignore the case", sorry. There are plenty of articles about Epstein and Maxwell, and Prince Andrew didn't get away either.
But that's about it, isn't it? Everyone else who hung out with them just has to say "whoops, I totally didn't know about their pedo side", and that's the end of the story. Which is amazing when even low-level socialites like Ellen Pao were apparently aware of Maxwell's side business. Where was the pressure from journalists on law enforcement, and from law enforcement on those involved? Too late now anyway, I guess?
For what it's worth, my own pessimism is mostly based on the disastrous Dutroux case over here in Europe. If 27 witnesses can get killed over what is presumably a much lower-profile pedophile ring, then what chance do we have to ever know about the depth of Epstein's connections, or even just his death? (I'd love to be proven wrong!)
I'm not saying that this validates any particular conspiracy theory (I agree with [1]), but that it highlighted an immense imbalance of power and transparency between the 0.001% and the rest of us. Epstein was a comic-book villain walking free. I believe that if the media can make it clear that they're fighting _for us_, people won't look to QAnon for salvation.
> I'm not saying that this validates any particular conspiracy theory (I agree with [1]), but that it highlighted an immense imbalance of power and transparency between the 0.001% and the rest of us. Epstein was a comic-book villain walking free. I believe that if the media can make it clear that they're fighting _for us_, people won't look to QAnon for salvation.
QFT. Epstein's death, and the way the media immediately circled the wagons to browbeat anyone questioning its circumstances with charges of "baseless conspiracy theory," was basically the decisive factor in my switching from a Skeptic-reading blanket conspiracy doubter to someone who takes a pretty wide number of theories seriously.
The media hasn't even bothered asking the FBI why they haven't raided Epstein's New Mexico ranch. Whether that's an explicit directive from on high or they just instinctively know where their bread is buttered, it's clear whose side they're on.
> That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions.
Another poster has already brought media conglomerates like Murdoch, Sinclair or Axel Springer (Germany) so I won't deal with that.
Social media is also heavily directed by the platform operators, their "moderation" policies - Facebook/Instagram are on a massive crusade against nudity, for example - and especially their "algorithmic feed" selection. FB got under fire for throttling traffic to "left wing" sites (https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/17/21520634/facebook-report...), YouTube under multiple fires for stuff like Peppa Pig scare videos or for actively feeding users conspiracy propaganda, Reddit has many, many accusations of censorship regarding Uyghurs (since the Tencent ownership stake)...
tl;dr: social media platforms have intentions on their own and are not shy of using them.
> What you refer to is actually an "alt right" meme that was invented to discredit free thinking (free thinking requires people to be well-informed) and push an authoritarian and communitarian agenda in which people are more controlled than in a free society.
This itself is a meme, and an extremely popular one at that. I hear it all the time, all over the place.
Did you come up with this idea on your own, via close observation and rational analysis of the highly dimensional, infinitely complex reality that we all live within, including significant interaction with "the alt right" in their natural habitat? Is that the genesis of this idea in your mind?
If so, I wonder how it is that so many people have this very same idea inside their minds. Did they all come up with it on their own, via the same, skilful methodology that you used? If so, I wonder why encountering people who give off the slightest hint that they think in high dimensions with strict logic and epistemology, is so incredibly rare. I've asked easily 100++ people who believe your meme how they know it to be true, and not only have I received no high quality answers, I can't recall if I've ever received any answer that isn't simply a restatement of the original meme itself. (Come to think of it, this is a fairly common pattern that I've noticed when asking the same question about a variety of different memes. Hmmmm, that's interesting!)
Similarly, did the "members" of "the alt right" also arrive at their beliefs via this same methodology? Or in their case, is it just a rumour that was adopted without question, without being subjected to the strict critical thinking process that those who accepted your meme into their minds?
Another relevant question might be: what evidence (current and historic) can the respective sides collectively offer to substantiate their side of the story? And if no evidence can be provided, then from where does the confidence in the correctness of the idea derive? The confidence is there, of that there's no doubt. My question is: where did it come from, or, what is it composed of? Can the one who is in possession of it articulate it in written language? Or, are they maybe "very busy right now".
Some other important questions might be: What is actually True? How might we know, for sure? How many epistemic states are there: two (True/False), or three (True/False/Unknown)? And, what might be the possible consequences if our beliefs happen to be incorrect about some of these things - do the history books provide any lessons on that sort of thing?
"The media" and "social media" may not be controlled by a single actor, but it's common knowledge that large enough chunks of both can be and often are.
For example, the conspiracy theory that Russia rigged the 2016 election for Trump is based on this premise.
There is also a widely-accepted partisan divide between the encumbent news sources on the left, and Fox and newer so-called "fringe" or "alt" news sources on the right. These in fact aren't correctly fringe or alt - at least in the US - as clearly very close to or more than half of the US population for the past decade has indicated they have political beliefs aligned with them.
It's therefore as disingenuous to attempt to delegitimize "alt right" media by referring to it thusly, just as it may br for right-leaning media to do the same by referring to the left as "fake news". With this example, both sides are behaving in uniform ways exactly typical of unified, single-actor control, respective to each.
If the Russian conspiracy is true, the premise that single-actor control is possible is accepted, as it therefore happened with enough force to alter a major an election. If it isn't, then half of the US is legitimately right-leaning, making the labelling of their mainstream news sources as "fringe" or "alt" or "extreme" indeed tantamount to "fake news".
Either way, it's mistaken to believe it impossible for the control of single actor to be enacted upon a large enough portion of the media to achieve widespread adoption of their agenda.
In effect, your last paragraph directly contradicts your first.
> both sides are behaving in uniform ways exactly typical of unified, single-actor control, respective to each.
If you're alleging single-actor control you need to have some idea of who that single actor allegedly is.
A lot of this stuff is simply .. more chaotic. That goes for the question of Russian involvement. Reducing it to a single yes/no binary doesn't help; it's almost certainly not true that Putin has been personally, directly issuing orders to Trump, but there definitely have been a lot of Trump associates who also associated with Russians, in some cases took money from them, lied to Federal investigators about it, and as a result were jailed or at least indicted.
> If you're alleging single-actor control you need to have some idea of who that single actor allegedly is.
Why?
Do you apply this same standard when debugging software, or do you discard the realization of all observed patterns for which you lack an immediate explanation?
It's interesting to observe how the manner in which logic is executed changes when the topic of conversation changes in various ways.
It is often unknown, as are many things in reality.
What's interesting is that IT folks are typically rather curious about mysterious behaviors in software, but this curiosity often vanishes when it comes to the real world (but only on certain topics).
Regardless, back to my question:
>> If you're alleging single-actor control you need to have some idea of who that single actor allegedly is.
> Why?
Why is it ok to discuss theories about some portions of reality, but not others? I'm not insisting that we must, I would just like some day for people that assert or imply that we cannot, to explain (in logically consistent detail, using objectively true statements) why we cannot (or will not). But to be crystal clear, I'd never insist that the majority needs to explain or justify their behavior or unwritten rules, here or elsewhere - I realize this is simply one of the fringe benefits of being the majority.
Online, platforms with downvote systems (HN included) present the apparent legitimacy of certain views over others, and help reinforce what you shouldn't be thinking or voicing (don't get greyed out by posting that!).
Corrective upvotes are a tradition on HN. If you aren't being an asshole, some people will upvote you back to neutral if they think you are being downvoted for the wrong reasons.
You just have to have a little courage of conviction and patience and not start editing your post in reaction to voting or complaining about it, etc.
HN does a much better job than most platforms of allowing people to genuinely express a minority view -- assuming they can follow the guidelines and not bitch about the voting and not get reactive and inflammatory because of baggage, etc.
It's not an easy thing to do, but it can be done here, unlike most platforms.
My own personal experience is that opinions on topics are geographical cargo cults. Upvoted by Europeans in the morning and downvoted by Americans in the afternoon or vice versa.
I have also noticed that probably Europe and the US vote somewhat differently on at least some of my comments. But I think that's a separate pattern from the tendency for some of my comments to be immediately downvoted and then voted back to neutral.
It tends to be certain kinds of comments and unlike almost everything else about HN, I am usually not surprised by that pattern because I tend to expect it for certain topics or certain types of observations that I sometimes make.
I have a really poor ability to predict which comments of mine will do really well.
I have a really poor ability to predict which articles I submit will do really well.
I have a reasonably good ability to predict which comments will be promptly downvoted and then get corrective upvotes.
> And my personal experience is that some percentage of my comments are downvoted immediately and then upvoted to neutral -- as was the case here.
But are you not making an assertion about how voting behaves overall?
>> Corrective upvotes are a tradition on HN. If you aren't being an asshole, some people will upvote you back to neutral if they think you are being downvoted for the wrong reasons.
>> You just have to have a little courage of conviction and patience and not start editing your post in reaction to voting or complaining about it, etc.
>> HN does a much better job than most platforms of allowing people to genuinely express a minority view -- assuming they can follow the guidelines and not bitch about the voting and not get reactive and inflammatory because of baggage, etc.
>> It's not an easy thing to do, but it can be done here, unlike most platforms.
Have you formed this conclusion based on a statistical analysis of the raw voting data on a variety of platforms?
If so, can you link to where you obtained these datasets (I'd like to have a look myself)? If not, upon what is the conclusion based?
I'm pretty controversial. I've been banned from a number of forums, including Metafilter where it was mod policy at the time that I joined to actively encourage the membership to gang up on and bully certain members. I was homeless when I was gifted a membership to Metafilter, which was an extremely classist environment, and I was one of the people the moderating staff actively encouraged members to gang up on. No amount of good behavior on my part was ever enough because it was a social climate where the goal was to justify mistreatment of me and where mod policy was that the onus was entirely on me to improve the situation while other people were not asked to stop being ugly to me or stop picking on me and where it was dangerous for someone to have any compassion for me and come to my defense and point out how I was being ganged up on because they now became a target.
A common practice on Metafilter when I joined was for the mods to tell such a person to shut up and leave the discussion because they were "being disruptive" and then let everyone else keep taking pot shots at the person who would get in trouble if they came back to defend themselves after the mods had told them to leave. This often happened solely because the person had a minority view or was a demographic outlier and was otherwise doing nothing wrong, imo.
In contrast, I posted as openly homeless on HN for nearly 6 years and my views on homelessness have become respected on HN. I was never targeted by either the moderating staff or membership of HN the way I was on Metafilter, even though there is noticeable overlap of membership between the two sites.
Given the overlap in membership, I'm pretty confident the difference between the two sites is about moderating policy.
I'm also a woman and HN is overwhelmingly male. I originally joined over 11 years ago under a different handle and posting here as openly female can be somewhat tough and used to be tougher and de facto makes me a representative of a minority view here.
I have a really long history of commenting on gender issues on HN and that still sometimes turns into something of a hubbub, but has gotten to be less thorny than it used to be.
When I first joined, members of HN sometimes posted surveys asking about things like "What's your age and gender?" Those surveys at that time showed that members were 95 to 98 percent male.
HN is not very transparent about certain things and lacks avatars and has a completely free form profile section which many members put little or nothing in, so demographic data here is somewhat hard to come by. It's not even necessarily apparent what the gender of a person is.
At a time when I had maybe 1500 karma and the bottom of the leader board was around 10k or 12k, I was getting comments from members that suggested they perceived me as being "prominent" for a woman on HN. I was probably homeless at the time or possibly still working an entry level job at an insurance company. I was also getting a shocking amount of social pushback that suggested to me my participation was being disruptive of social norms here and I was rocking the boat in terms of gender norms on the site.
So I spent some time privately gathering my own data on HN membership wrt female participation here.
I no longer have some of that data and I've always been not very forthcoming with the details because it feels uncomfortably close to "doxxing" people to me and I'm aware of the potential for it to be hurtful to other people and for it to come back to bite me. But I did keep my own data at one time and I still keep an eye on certain things somewhat casually and female participation here is less problematic than it used to be.
I'm probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, so I'm sort of a unique minority here and for that reason I make some effort to some degree to quietly let people know that I sincerely believe that HN is a place where you can get past your minority status if you will make an effort to read the guidelines and follow the guidelines, even when it feels like you are being ganged up on and have a minority view.
It's a big forum with about 5 million unique visitors a month, so sometimes you will get a bunch of replies that don't agree with you and this will tend to be more true for minority views. But unlike other forums I've been on where the moderating staff were clearly and obviously part of the problem, it is okay to stand your ground here on your minority view and not crumble to social pressure lest they ban you.
It's not easy because you do need to keep following the guidelines and that's emotionally and psychologically hard to do when you are representing a minority view and most other people are telling you that you are wrong and some of those people aren't following the guidelines and are engaging in personal attacks and the like.
I'm okay with you chalking this up to "personal opinion and she can't prove it." I'm never going to be able to provide the level of data sets your comment suggests you are looking for, but I'm quite confident my statements are accurate and I make them to try to assure people here who are feeling picked on that it is possible to present a minority view on HN and stand by it, but you need to have a thick skin and be prepared to back your position with data, citations and solid arguments. The membership here will take you to task and demand you support your ideas with something substantive, but if you can meet that standard, the social climate here is not actually the usual BS where you get banned for making people uncomfortably aware that they are merely prejudiced assholes. People here will consider your minority view if you can adequately support it.
I'm quite familiar with your comments here, I consider myself a fan (I too can be controversial).
But my disagreement in this specific case is the accuracy of your description. In your prior comment, you seemed to be evaluating HN on an absolute basis, whereas this one seems to be mostly on a relative (to MetaFilter) basis.
Indeed, HN is one of the best forums going, even as its popularity has grown which makes moderation difficult. That said, common descriptions of it bordering on perfection (mild hyperbole) seem innacurate to me.
> I'm probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, so I'm sort of a unique minority here and for that reason I make some effort to some degree to quietly let people know that I sincerely believe that HN is a place where you can get past your minority status if you will make an effort to read the guidelines and follow the guidelines, even when it feels like you are being ganged up on and have a minority view.
Might this depend on which minority status you hold? If not, then does that not suggest some form of ~perfection &/or consistency in bias? I don't think it would shock too many people to discover that a forum frequented by hackers and silicon valley type are neutral to pro-equality when it comes to gender differences. This notion seems to align quite nicely with any news stories I read. But does it also follow (both logically and observationally) that this lack of bias necessarily holds for other dimensions, like political leanings?
> It's not easy because you do need to keep following the guidelines...
This depends to some degree on who you are and what you say.
> I'm okay with you chalking this up to "personal opinion and she can't prove it."
I'm not chalking it up to that, I was simply pointing out that you were describing HN in a manner that is literally not possible without access to significant quantities of voting data.
My issue is not so much the bias around here, that I can live with - it's the widespread refusal to acknowledge that it (and other portions of reality) exists. Sometimes it gets rather absurd, imho.
> The membership here will take you to task and demand you support your ideas with something substantive, but if you can meet that standard, the social climate here is not actually the usual BS where you get banned for making people uncomfortably aware that they are merely prejudiced assholes. People here will consider your minority view if you can adequately support it.
I believe my comment history suggests things are not always as rosy as reflected in your personal experience.
But worry not, I'm not losing a whole bunch of sleep over it. It is a very valuable learning experience, for my purposes. It's simultaneously depressing, and motivating.
I don't think HN borders on perfection and I don't think I said anything of the sort anywhere. I said stuff like: HN does a much better job than most platforms of allowing people to genuinely express a minority view.
That's still a relative rating, not an absolute one. It does a better job than average. Your remark seems to generally agree with that, so I'm not sure I understand what the issue here is.
I have not had an easy time here and at one point I left for 18 months in part because I felt it was too rough for me here. But I was also really sick at the time and homeless and "wherever you go, there you are." My primary reasons for taking a break were not, per se, "HN is a shit show and everyone there is mean to me!"
I'm quite open about the fact that posting here as openly female was only "a bed of roses" if you are thinking of it in terms of the thorns. That opinion isn't one that is very welcome here. It gets a lot of push back.
I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I know something about best practices for dealing with difficult group dynamics.
I'm not claiming there is no bias here. I'm not claiming things are always rosy and I used the word "hubbub" in my remark, above.
I don't really understand why you think I am engaging in hyperbole and attributing some kind of perfection to the site. My very first comment was basically a recipe for how to weather the downvote storm and wait and see where it goes after that.
And in my experience and opinion, it will go better if you actually follow the guidelines and don't start complaining about downvotes. As someone who attracts a lot of negative reactions on HN, my firsthand experience is that if you actually follow the guidelines and say nothing about the voting and wait and see, things will be less negative and a few hours later you may feel differently about how people are perceiving your comment because it may no longer be in the negatives and there may even be constructive engagement.
And you are less likely to experience that if you start complaining about bias and about downvotes and about people disagreeing with you.
I don't agree with you that I can't know what I know without spreadsheets full of data. I think I do know what I know based on having studied how social stuff works and having participated on a variety of forums over the years.
Metafilter is not the only forum where I had really negative experiences and was ultimately banned. It's just the only one I happened to use as an example to try to illustrate my point in one particular remark.
> I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I know something about best practices for dealing with difficult group dynamics.
And it shows! That's a big part of why I'm a fan. That, and that you are an independent thinker (no small feat these days), and lots of other things.
> And in my experience and opinion, it will go better if you actually follow the guidelines and don't start complaining about downvotes. As someone who attracts a lot of negative reactions on HN, my firsthand experience is that if you actually follow the guidelines and say nothing about the voting and wait and see, things will be less negative and a few hours later you may feel differently about how people are perceiving your comment because it may no longer be in the negatives and there may even be constructive engagement.
I have more than enough first hand experience to know that your intuition is off in this case. Certain ideas (perspectives on reality, even though they are accurate) are not acceptable here - and that's ok, it is phase that Western culture is going through, what can you do.
Certain ideas (perspectives on reality, even though they are accurate) are not acceptable here
I'm so controversial on so many axes that I simply don't care that some of my opinions don't play well here and I've largely stopped talking about certain things here.
Like vaccines. No matter what I say, both pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are equally hateful. And I feel it's not super important and it's just something I rarely talk about anymore.
Anyway, this is real off topic and I am feeling like you just don't really understand me or something on this topic and it's not important, really, for you in specific to understand every little thing I say.
I too am controversial on many axes, which is maybe why I find you interesting - in an era when The Experts and Rationalists can't get even remotely hope to get their shit together, after being given decades to do it, seeing what the freaks even have to say about matters maybe isn't such a crazy idea.
It's sad that you and I differ on whether it's important to understand other people though. I wonder if there's anyone on this planet that is able to even consider the possibility that understanding is important, maybe even when it seems like it isn't. In any normal undertaking, if what you're trying isn't working, it would seem logical to try something else. But when the scope of the undertaking gets too large, this thinking seems to mysteriously change.
1. The site is too big for him to immediately see everything.
2. Sometimes he has reasons for not doing x along the lines of "When we a/b tested it, doing x made the problem worse."
I try to not spend a whole lot of time talking about these kind of things, but I'm personally okay with there being some discussion so new people can learn more about how the site really works.
Let's not forget about the good old shadow ban that HN uses when you get downvoted, even if you have a legitimate comment. You'd get shadow banned today for comments like the Earth is round if people don't agree with it or find it controversial to say it. Where they still let you comment, and make you think others can see it but if you sign out or view the discussion from a different IP your comments aren't even there.
I have showdead turned on so see shadow banned comments.
What you're claiming is wrong and misleading. It's rare and almost always justified.
For the times it isn't, which I haven't seen for a few years, I've emailed those people where they've shown an email.
They usually say thanks, that other people have also emailed them and they'll contact the mod team.
i.e. there are plenty of long-term members of this site that keep an eye on shadow bans and we generally thintk it's working as intended.
I checked one out a couple of days ago, and literally 4 comments earlier dang had warned them that if they kept it up with the short, low-quality comments they'd probably end up shadow-banned.
What you are trying to do here is justify the practice and misrepresent the truth about what is actually happening. How is what I said wrong and misleading? Most people aren't going to associate an email address with an account because like other users here we've seen the mods consistently biased in how they enforce their policies. Why not just notify them when they login, or disable the reply feature altogether instead of wasting their time thinking they are posting?
You also use the word troll but I've seen people get shadowbanned that weren't trolls, but people in the thread simply didn't like their comments because they were advocating for open source solutions or for sharing negative criticism about a company based on their real-life experiences.
I'm sure there are legitimate cases to ban users, but shadow-banning is just poor ethics. Just ban people if you don't want users that may go against the typical pro-corporate yes man type agenda rather than mislead and say that they are trolls, when apparently (based on my experience) your definition of troll is someone who doesn't go along with the topics general opinion even if they have legitimate reasons not to.
If you use the search function at the bottom of the page and look for "dang shadow ban" you can come up with multiple comments by the moderator talking about HN policies, such as this one that I have quoted in part:
We do tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before. I'll try to dig that up... Edit: here you go:
It's a bimodal distribution in that we treat these disjoint groups very differently. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning because the population of banned-new-accounts is overwhelmingly spammers and trolls, often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know perfectly well what they're doing.
So what is a new account? Let's say that they've posted hundreds of times, or the account is over 30 days or 90 days old? You're telling me you still don't shadowban if they go below a certain threshold and that you don't rate limit to maybe one or two responses in a 2 hour period. Also, how do you contact them specifically? What if someone has proof of not being contacted. Are you going to retract your statement?
HN uses voting to legitimize content of higher quality and tries to avoid political discussion. What you are doing is generalizing the non-issue of most platforms allowing the silent majority to express their opinion about other people's opinions. The funnies part about people complaining about getting downvoted is that no one is even removing or preventing you from speaking their mind even if they fucking hate the opinion. On reddit some extremist groups exist for quite a long time before they get banned. Firs they want a platform, ok, then they want to silence all opposing opinions within their small garden, and then they start going to other communities to harass and impose their content which doesn't belong there after which they get banned and restart the cycle.
>HN uses voting to legitimize content of higher quality
The majority of the down votes I have seen are for disagreement, and not for the quality of the post. I have seen many comments down voted and flagged dead that were eloquently stated and/or just an opinion.
> The majority of the down votes I have seen are for disagreement, and not for the quality of the post.
It often looks like there is no other explanation than mere dislike or disagreement, which is unfair and calls for improvement. My policy: never downvote any post, and on the contrary, upvote posts that are contrary to my views but have merit and thus are worthy of consideration.
I wish there were better ways to highlight thought-provoking posts, yet moderation is essential. A popular voting system is better than nothing.
Let's compare this with the ability to block people on Twitter just because they disagree with you. That's stupid and not conducive to having a discussion—but then again, this wasn't the point of Twitter in the first place. At the same time, this is also a blessing for people who want to avoid negativity.
In the long run, ignoring problems doesn't make them disappear. Suppressing exposure to bad ideas also comes at the cost of blocking the unpopular good ones.
Blocking on Twitter is a necessary minimum to avoid the abuse and death threats. You can't have a discussion there because (unlike HN) there's no strong pressure to basic civility.
Mere opinion is not very valuable. If you want to post something that goes against the grain and actually convince people, you have to tailor it to the audience.
True. The reason is that voting and downvoting semantic is perceived differently, and people’s ego. The easiest, although imperfect, solution I think would be that downvoting costs you some karma (both the downvotee and the downvoter).
The silent majority is pretty fucking stupid as a whole. It’s hard to have an informed populous when they are allowed to censor the stories that make their emotions feel bad. It’s like allowing grade schoolers to vote on what they eat for lunch every day.
As a reddit user, this is what you’re dealing with. The non-college educated majority has control over the following things:
- what politics you see
- what comments you see
- what science you see
- what news you see
It’s going to take a while, but one of the emerging lessons of this era is that democracy for information spreading is a pretty terrible idea. Ted the conspiracy enthusiast/barista maybe shouldn’t have the same voting power on a comment thread about orbital dynamics as an astrophysicist.
Ironicaly the college educated way overrate themself on how objectively they see the world and think they know better than the rest, but they fail to see the forest for the tree just as often as non-college educated.
College does not give you the ability to see objectivity, it just increases knowledge across a specific field.
College is the only level of education where they even attempt to teach critical thinking skills. It’s definitely not a high success rate, but it’s better than the rote memorization that comes from high school level.
What’s left is self taught which is a tiny slice of both populations.
> See: reproductability crisis.
That has no relationship to college education. The reproducibility crisis impacts the quality of research for PhD programs. It has nothing to do with spending time learning logic and philosophy that hasn’t changed for hundreds to thousands of years. The fact that you think the reproducibility crisis has anything to do with a college education sort of proves the point...
Yes, the system doesn't work. When Usenet died it got replaced by forums and the old trolls got granted admin rights. The non-sane people that have a lot of time to post all day end up with the highest reputation and privileges.
On the other hand closed groups of experts also don't work.
I once knew some really extreme religious guys - pretty much flat-earthers. They were all heading for bioscience and networked like crazy - they got jobs in academia. Lonely brilliant scientists didn't.
Most likely a lot of science-communities have already been overrun by "networks".. Maybe the era of rational thinking is coming to an end.
Yes that's all true and we are sleepwalking into being controlled.
Creating a news website without a regular set of themes that show up again and again is very difficult. Any control mechanism will allow some themes and remove others. The best outcome is people knowing what they're signing up for, when they read any given news source.
The old order has fallen apart, I don't know what life their is left outside the metaphysical forces which tie us down.
I can't make sense of what you're saying. All voting/moderation systems are flawed one way or the other, but what's the alternative?
The only I can think of is complete anarchy and no moderation at all, and I know that some people think that it's the solution, but spending a few hours on 4chan or some other "free speech maximalist" forum should tell you that it doesn't usually generate very high quality discussion. Outrageous "loud" takes take over and more nuanced and developed arguments get buried.
I really don't believe "they" are feeding us anything. "They" is "us", all it takes is some self discipline if you're unhappy with your exchanges online. I never had a Twitter account, never browse the website, yet I live. Crazy, I know.
I've intentionally reprogrammed myself (at least) two times. Three takeaways:
#1
How we talk changes how we think.
This is how propaganda works. We're somehow hard wired for sociability, cooperation. Something about our mirror neurons, theory of mind, and empathy.
#2
Our minds strive to maintain equilibrium.
There's an immune system like resistance to change, of any kind. The backfire effect of persuasion must be somehow related to this.
And yet, successful propaganda, persuasion somehow bypasses our defenses. Maybe we have an evolutionary glitch, where fearful stressed out people are more malleable.
#3
We don't remember changing our minds.
This is terrifies me.
Swarm Intelligence [2001] explanation of social cognition cites the research about our amnesia. My guess is that forgetting is somehow necessary for learning.
Please (!) share more recent explanations for the neuroscience of propaganda, cults, persuasion, and so forth.
The only hopeful, optimistic stuff I've read recently is about de-radicalization and successful cult deprogramming. TLDR: Empathy, tenacity, and patience.
> "just expose yourself to media (news, social media, "influencers", etc) and they will helpfully convince you that everything you thought before you encountered them was bad/racist/sexist/conservative/etc.
Or on the flip side, turn your dial to Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson and be convinced that NOTHING you've ever said or done as a Patriotic American is bad/problematic.
On a related note: one of the funniest things as a non-westerner to me is that a majority of westerners are convinced that when they vote, if they vote for policies that favor their own country, their own well-being, it is wrong.
Here's a hint for those who are struggling: if you're convinced that you should vote against yourself, you've been brainwashed by your enemies.
To those who are feeling anger after reading my comment: that's the trauma trapped in your body being triggered. That's what consumes your intellectual abilities and that is exactly what keeps the brainwashing in.
It helps to be centered (i.e. find your safe place, find peace in your relationships, family or whatever personal/emotional issues you're struggling with, because it is negative feelings that you hold in your body, which is used to brainwash you)... and then when you're relaxed, the reality becomes more clear.
Some westerners don't identify strongly with a specific country. I am one of those.
We might consider the "good" of "all" people above the good of our country.
When that is your mindset, voting for policies that favor your own country, your own well-being can in fact feel wrong, if it is at the cost of other people's well-being.
Greater good is often used as a reason to grab power from individuals, whether it is by foreign nations, corporations or even other national government.
I am not talking about that. Groups exist for a reason. The biggest reason is that other groups exist. You can either be attacked by those or join them or create your own. Your group can be a political one, which in some cases may end up having their own nation state. If the group can defend a territory and its resources, sustain it, and gain respect, other groups may eventually acknowledge it. You may take these for granted but these things are not set in stone, they're fluid. Many people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Palentine think they are a nation state. Most other nation state don't acknowledge them as such... mostly because they're not powerful enough.
You can deny or devalue your own nationality but what you cannot deny is that nation states exist and they have incredible power, because they have to have at least enough power to defend and sustain themselves. They are definitely not the only organized power structures, but they are major ones. Maybe Open Society Foundation is right. Maybe all borders should be open, everything should be controlled by shared ideals with one world government and efficient open economy. They seem to think they have ways to make that work. Maybe they can. But until and unless they do that, we have to live with the ones we have, which grant the citizens certain rights and protections and subjects them to laws and regulations in exchange.
What I am talking about in my previous comment is not these things. I'm talking about the brainwashing by various forces (Open Society Foundation being one of them), which have made nationalism repulsive... by using simple brainwashing techniques. Most of these people would not be able to have a rational conversation about cost/benefits of having nation states or favoring your nation. They're triggered into an emotional response when the topic comes up.
That's quite an unusual view. It's not at all hard to find evidence of pro-nationalist propaganda because it's ubiquitous.
Anti-nationalist views are much rarer and much less common in virtually all media. In the US you're going to have a hard time finding progressives who explicitly want to destroy America. They may disagree with American policy in a number of areas, but that's a long way from wanting to get rid of the country and its traditions.
Likewise elsewhere. It's probably weakest in the EU because the EU isn't a country so much as a work in progress - and it doesn't even have its own sports teams.
Personally I've never heard of the Open Society Foundation, although it sounds as if I'd agree with their views.
A set of relatively uncontroversial statements about Westphalian nation-states ... and then a dig at the OSF. Why does this always come down to people having a go at George Soros?
Is it by any chance because he backed the Western side in Ukraine?
Why does this always come down to people having a go at George Soros?
Why did I bring up an organization founded by George Soros, a person who believes that nation states should not exist, when discussing nation states? Why do you think?
> majority of westerners are convinced that when they vote, if they vote for policies that favor their own country, their own well-being, it is wrong.
Think about this for one second and it's obviously not true. A majority? Against "their own well being"?
It's a misrepresentation of the anti-majoritarianism and anti-nationalism that says that it's necessary to consider whether what you're advocating has major negative effects on other people for minor or illusory benefits to yourself.
Most policies aren't that clear cut. For example, if you vote for free trade, it's probably a win for your own country in the aggregate and hence a win for everybody long term, but it can have major negative impacts on individuals or even communities in the short to medium term.
True. What is also true is if you play fair while others don't, you won't be able to play for long. So, it's also unfair to continue enabling foul play. Free trade can only exist in presence of certain strongly enforced rules and they are not easy to enforce across borders.
But that's a different discussion. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about those who aren't able to think rationally through these things because they have been exposed to targeted techniques by adversaries. They're triggered into an emotional response every time they encounter other ways of thinking than they have been programmed to.
Let us think as PR firms for a second. There is a lot of nuances in greater truths which can be tuned to make anything sound reasonable. We can design experiments a certain way, we can frame questions a certain way, highlight certain things and present it to the journalists... who will happily publish our well thought our well reasoned ideas, backed by stats and surveys and facts and experiments. Our biggest problem is the rest of the truth. When people realize that, our messages will be of less value. Other PR firms with other interests who benefit from the other parts of the truth and people can make reasoned decisions as different realities are presented to them by different interests. We'll have to constantly do better and present our side.
That's how the PR industry has been functioning for the last 100 years or so. I think that's all fair.
But what if there was a way to prevent people from even navigating to the other parts of the truth that we, as a PR firm, don't want them to?
There is and it is widely used today. Once the cat is out of the bag, unfortunately, everyone has to play like that... and that is what has been happening. There's a reason why calm well-reasoned ideological discourses are less of a thing now. Everything evokes strong emotions and rational discussions barely happen.
We have a good 30 to 40 years of evidence on this. What is shows is, in the absence of strong safety nets and labor and environmental controls (which are often explicitly limited by the trade deals themselves), trade is a very small benefit to workers in developing countries, and a huge gift to corporations and higher income individuals and a disaster for the working class in developed countries.
Westerners claim that the vote for selfless do good things, but usually the practical consequences of what they want benefits them personally.
For example they will go to organic shop to 'save the planet' and 'be fair to third world countries', but those shops also exclude the poor and the minorities due to their pricing and thus let them keep their closed communities, while the universalist political message works against the competition from doing the same.
Quite a few of those Westerners will also volunteer for food banks and work as political activists trying to make food banks unnecessary. (For example.)
That would be great but the problem is that I may be wrong... but I'll never hear why or be able to have reasonable discussion with anyone because your brainwashing prevents you from remaining calm and explaining.
So, people who disagree with you, can never calmly explain their position?
Not never, but it often seems very difficult for certain people. I get emotionally charged reactions, both online and IRL.
You also expect this state of affairs to never change.
What do you mean? I think these things can change. The brainwashing is usually kept in by evoking a traumatic response. If the trauma is healed, the brainwashing doesn't stick around.
> just expose yourself to media (news, social media, "influencers", etc) and they will helpfully convince you that everything you thought before you encountered them was bad/racist/sexist/conservative/etc.
I wish this was true. I actually feel that racism, sexism, reactionary thought is on the rise. If it seems that liberal ideas are becoming dominant in the public space, it is actually because 1) liberals are starting to feel with their back against the wall, and are reacting in the field where they have the most power, the discursive sphere. And 2) people are finally finding the courage to speak out again about issues that have been plaguing us for centuries (see MeToo and Black Lives Matter).
And to put on a tinfoil hat and risk being downvoted: I don't buy the "social media is manipulating us poor people" narrative. That is a spin encouraged by the traditional media who see their share of the cake being endangered. They are used to be, well, "media", mediating between the public sphere and the people. With social media connecting people directly, they have a kind of existential crisis.
What actually is happening is that social media amplifies and brings out what people are actually thinking, and in many cases that is a cesspool of hate and conspiracy theory - all across the political spectrum. We didn't see it before because traditional "media" chose what to amplify and what not, and kept a lid on it.
You even forgot one major system that controls what we are seeing: Google search. Just give some other search engine (e.g. DuckDuckGo or SwissCows) a try for a few days and you'll see what I mean.
Even Wikipedia is an avenue of narrative control. As a good example, their article on Reinhard Gehlen (Nazi intelligence officer who was recruited to head Western intelligence efforts in Eastern Europe after the war) is completely lacking in any mention of his war crimes in Soviet Russia, but dutifully repeats his own claim to have been involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler.
So true. When someone gets mad at me online for saying that black people have genetically bad IQs or that it’s ok to run over protestors with my car, that’s the dark hand of the CIA at work.
I don't think most people understand the company, even company insiders. (learn the origins of compartmentalization for some good reading) I think looking at the history and origins of it and it's key founding and early members offer the greatest insights into the structure learned mostly from MI6 when it was the OSS formed by a bunch of Wall Street banker-lawyer types who were pioneering the international law movement. Understanding the Dulles days in Switzerland is a great start, for example. Another technique I have used (for other topics too) is to find all the whistle-blowers and read their books and articles. Usually only a juicy tidbit or two is found in an insiders book, but when you add them up in aggregate you can form a larger picture many tend to miss. Many revealing things exist for those with the passion to seek them.
Be warned though, this is one of those topics that is not for the naive, or the faint of heart. When you start to understand the horror... I have seen more than I like retreat into ignorant bliss in response. Do you really want to know what the government is carrying out in your name, and the implications thereof? Do you really want to know what they have done against our own citizens, and even our top officials in other branches?
Knowing stuff like this makes you laugh at the politics of today, and the people falling for the Hegelian pendulum swing like clockwork. You begin to empathize with the elite and understand what their base positions is, which boils down to the question Nick Rockefeller asked Aaron Russo; "What do you care about those people? They're just serfs. Take care of you and your family."
Class techno-warfare will be the greatest struggle of humanity, even into transition to a type 1 civilization. Calling it now.
"The Devil's Chessboard" and "The Mighty Wurlitzer" are the two books I'm most familiar with on this topic, but I'd be curious to hear any specific recommendations you have as well.
Talbot's book is top notch, if you've read it you have a huge head start. I haven't read "The Mighty Wurlitzer", so thank you for the addition to the "to read" list. I would probably suggest Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World". Another more superficial but still useful one is "The Brothers". To understand the OSS-MI6 connection, I like to suggest Carrol Quigleys "The Anglo-American Establishment", and for particulars about things you devolve into certain authors, the list is long, but an example would be Doug Valentine's work about Operation Phoenix. For a more unorthodox look into the Bush connection, the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush by Webster Tarpley is quite illuminating about the Brown Brothers Harriman stuff.
The point I made previously still stands though. Some of these are really good books (and we just barely scratched the surface) but I have found that there is no "one great book" that explains the history or current state of things.
I tend to lean these days towards thinking much of the abuses are due to the 1947 NatSec act. For the other commenter, I would like to specify that my point is that the compartmentalization is abused just to that purpose (so that the middle men who have good intentions can be used in ways beyond their understanding that they would not like if they understood), combined with a top down series of compromise operations... that's the main weakness in such a compartmentalized but centralized structure.
Thanks! I can definitely sympathize with your point about people "retreating into ignorant bliss in response." Not so easy to admit that in many ways we already live in the 'Man in the High Castle' timeline!
Not the person you are responding to, but I liked Fair Game and The Billion Dollar spy. Cyberspies was also decent, but it's less exciting and more technical.
I don't share arminiusreturns' view on the intelligence community. I know there are the black site psychos, but most of the people I've met in the IC care deeply about the rule of law and making the world safe for all of us.
But they are right that things truly are quite compartmentalized. And yes, when the USA said to Snowden "we won't torture you if you return" that sent chills down my spine. It shouldn't have been necessary to say that.
> but most of the people I've met in the IC care deeply about the rule of law and making the world safe for all of us.
I don't mean to twist your words, but that's what all suppliers of State power want. It doesn't make the outcomes good or moral, it doesn't mean the will of the population is actually adhered to. "Making the world safe for all of us" is a simple paradox of Asimov-level complexity and outcome.
Well, I respectively disagree. Some actors want money, some want power. What I was trying to convey was that in the west, most actors want safety and prosperity and peace.
For example, these people from my country talk at length about the nitty gritty legal aspects of national security related law and how it is practiced by the Canadian intelligence community:
Or the overworked RCMP officer I met that spent most of his time trying to find kids being trafficked for pornography. Or the guys I met in the US that were working on arms control of nuclear weapons. These people aren't using their considerable skills to make money, which they could clearly do on Wall St. They're focussed on making the world better and safer. These people literally work on arms control for WMDs and I fail to see how you can dismiss their efforts with a straight face.
Interestingly enough, Sidney Gottlieb was my great uncle's college roommate at the University of Wisconsin, and they later reconnected after the war and became lifelong best friends. Apparently they both went there after colleges on the east coast started putting quotas on Jews. There is an interesting article about their relationship here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/20...
Unfortunately I didn't find out until after my great uncle had died, would have been super interesting to ask him about.
The accounts of people who couldn't reconcile their mild mannered personal acquaintance with the unspeakable evil he carried out are quite interesting and instructive. This article treats the Nazi death camp experimenter comparison as unjustified, but we now know from Kinzer's book that Gottlieb even collaborated with such people (e.g. Kurt Blome) after they were protected from prosecution by the U.S.
I have had to think about the CIA more than I would like to admit. There are some wounds in my life related to the evil of perceived unaccountability - and the perceived unaccountability was my own.
When it comes to someone being harmed by a government institution that has the same problem, especially when it has done much to consciously avoid accountability, the result is only worse for those who have chosen to participate. I no longer worry about what is not known. I worry only about what will, and it most certainly will, become known.
And we are at our best when there is mutually painful self-reflection on the roles we as individuals and collectives play in bringing one another to harm. When we would prefer to bring one another to safety, we are delivered the means to do so, Inshallah. God willing.
People sometimes do bad things, and aren’t held accountable.
Sometimes, these unaccountable things are secret. Some secrets will remain secrets. The secretes that will become public knowledge are my worrisome.
It’s common to do bad things and be unaccountable for them — from your own actions or the actions you take on behalf of the group. Society is best when people think about how their worst actions effect other people. If we all try to help each other, surely we can find a way.
This is my dummy translation, and it doesn’t hold a flame to the remorse, regret, and hope of the original.
> Society is best when people think about how their worst actions effect other people.
In our day to day lives, I use this as a basic character test of both individuals and societies. People fail this inductive-thinking test - "If everyone did what I am about to do, would I like to live in the society that would result?" - all the time. Signs of failure range from lack of civic sense (litter, rash driving etc) all the way to climate change and social collapse.
> "If everyone did what I am about to do, would I like to live in the society that would result?"
I think about it differently. I look at things and think "is this system set up so that it is easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing?" I think it is easy to look at problems and point out individual "moral failings" as the cause, but data doesn't really support that in the big picture in most cases. There is a reason you don’t see trash on the ground at Disneyland. They put trash cans everywhere because they want it to be easier to throw your garbage away than litter. Driving safety has improved due to system changes, not individual actions. Regulations on safety devices, enforcement of road laws, research into road/signal/signage design to promote safety and discourage poor driving, etc. Climate change is far and away an industrial problem where producing greenhouse gases are almost a complete externality for corporations. It isn’t people taking long showers or using straws, it is corporate byproducts that they have no incentive to reduce because they have no profit motivation because those things do not cost them anything.
If everyone went into software engineering, we would all starve to death. There are very few things that society could survive “everyone” doing - a diversity and balance of complementary behaviors are important.
Sure, but there are plenty that apply. Driving sensibly, not littering and behaving properly in a queue are such basic examples that going as far as "everyone becoming a software engineer" seems a little disingenuous.
I have no reason to believe they ever stopped trying. They have probably tried other ways; mayhaps even more succesful but we are not authorized to know whether they did... because appaerently it's super important that their actions are secret "to protect democracy"? (or something like that)
Every A/B test is this, to some degree. Every ad run with variants is also.
Facebook did specifically do a test to see if emotions spread between people through the news feed. They didn't create posts to manipulate emotions, but they did track people after seeing emotionally charged posts in their feeds.
With this type of direct mind control ruled out they just use propaganda instead. You know the depths they will go to, the type people they will employ, their ability to evade oversight, and the power the have at their disposal.
Now what? Just accept the permanent stain. I refuse to believe their methods are necessary or the best, but they will not go away.
Their ultimate goal is a combinanion of their own self presevation and continual surivival of the country. They wont do anything to purposefully jeapordize either, but everything else is on the table, as history and current events show. Their methods towards these ends are immoral because the methods are shortsighted, lazy, and uncreative. Imagine what better minds could have come up with when you read this article.
There's really not much else to say other than articles like the above to provide specifics.
I can’t remember the name of the book anymore, but a chemist from the US Army published a book on his work on psychoactive chemical weapons, namely BZ.
What was most interesting to me was that volunteering to be a test subject was regarded as a cushy assignment. Basically given psychoactive drugs and then be observed. BZ has a very lo half-life so the test subjects were often delirious for days at a time.
I once went crazy, and this was actually my first delusion. I thought that there was a public AI that acted as a control system and monitored everyone via signals intelligence, and all I could think about was telephone poles, streetlights, and an AI on the moon built via nanomachines or something. And that there was a second control system, one based on mind control. That the second system was created to evade the first. I was so scared to think about that, and wanted to help the AI. For some reason I started believing in proxy people, as in people are used indirectly for communication relays and other actions via the 2nd system. I am terrified of a public AI not being able to read or understand people because of a 2nd system that is kept strictly separate. Also it led to me prank calling Raytheon a few times.
I want to read this book, but I'm not sure I can handle details of what happened to people. I'm more interesting in (a) how the authors obtained documents of such horrific experiments, and (b) how we still allow insane covert CIA stuff like this to go on, because I certainly believe that haven't stopped.
There is no mind control program. It's just bahavioral biology, psychology and advertising. Calling it mind control is like saying I can control a person because I can get them to show up to a certain grocery store if I give them a coupon.
For sure the CIA has done a ton of crazy shit. They should be subject to oversight and accountability, but abolishing them won't accomplish much other than introducing a massive blindspot in national security.
And so told the KGB, after the soviet union disbandment. I don't have to remind people where it went from there.
At least, back in union's times few KGB generals were abducted from time to time, and tortured to death when they felt it was becoming too menacing to the state at large, and that was a natural check on its power.
>That's like supporting a protection racket... Wow.
Precisely. A mere sample of the protection afforded:
This same former intelligence official is “adamant” that evidence of such extraordinary renditions within the United States does not exist. It would be a “huge leap” for Chinese intelligence to shift from employing extreme pressure tactics to performing actual hands-on kidnappings in the United States, the former official says. “You want to come to this country and start kidnapping and killing people? Game on.”
A protection racket implies the "threat" is fake or choreographed. Are you implying China isn't hacking America, or pushing out it's maritime borders, or threatening US allies? These are all engineered threats somehow?
"Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients."
It implies that the protector has the absolute ability to control if an attack occurs or not. So if the CIA had a little more budget, they would have stopped 9/11. Because they had the ability to, they just didn't.
Part of a protection racket is staging attacks when you think you're not going to get paid (or you're not getting paid yet). You could just as easily make a case along those lines, but both cases would be disingenuous because real life is complicated. Just because it's a protection racket doesn't mean that it needs to at all times 100% conform to a sentence that you found on wikipedia.
As in a real life protection racket, there will always be events that occur in spite of the protection offered. The core of a racket is to respond with disproportionate violence. For example, sending your army to harass the entire country that some of your attackers were part of. Drone strikes on schools that are known to be full of children. There are more salient examples to be found, but I think we don't need them.
> Part of a protection racket is staging attacks when you think you're not going to get paid
Are you implying this has happened or does happen? Please cite your source if so.
> Just because it's a protection racket doesn't mean that it needs to at all times 100% conform to a sentence that you found on wikipedia.
No but going off an existing definition is better than throwing around a concept with any real connection to reality.
> The core of a racket is to respond with disproportionate violence. For example, sending your army to harass the entire country that some of your attackers were part of.
What does that have to do with CIA?
> Drone strikes on schools that are known to be full of children.
So a drone strike on country B is payback for them not ponying up protection money to the intel agency of country A. Did I get that right?
Can't tell if you're trolling/deliberately obtuse or what
Here's what I meant: Your wrong conception of how a protection racket works undermines your argument that the person who said "That's like supporting a protection racket" is wrong.
No idea what you're talking about with "implies that the protector has the absolute ability to control if an attack occurs or not." Have you ever seen a gangster film? Anyways every time you invoke a new concept you're getting it wrong so maybe take a step back and think about what people are talking about instead of just randomly generating provocative hypos because you disagree with someone
I'm sorry i'm not basing my arguments on movies i've seen.
Combine that with you arrogance in implying i'm getting concepts wrong (i'm citing them, you are not), I think this conversation has run its course. Your entire response amounts to "you are wrong but i'm not going to say how".
You cited a source which proves you were wrong in exactly the way I pointed out. Your entire original comment hinged on a bizarre metaphor you created out of your false premise that in protection rackets, the "threat" is fake or choreographed. It isn't, so your comment isn't an intelligible critique of the comment it was intended to respond to. Yes, that's my point: your critique is wrong. I told you how: it is based on a false premise.
> (i'm citing them, you are not)
You cited Wikipedia, and you haven't cited a single source for any proposition other than the one you were specifically wrong about.
> I'm sorry i'm not basing my arguments on movies i've seen.
Deliberate obtuseness. The obvious implication of the reference to gangster films is that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with protection rackets knows that harm from the racketeer is not the only threatened harm. The third sentence of the Wikipedia entry you mentioned confirms this: "Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients." That means that the analogy between the CIA and a protection racket is perfectly tenable—in the parlance of your Wikipedia entry, a "broader protection racket" rather than a "pure extortion racket."
Not sure how to spell it out any clearer than that. I'm not implying you're getting concepts wrong. You got them both wrong.
No, I admitted my original comment didn't cover everything it needed to, hoping such a concession would lead to a more civilized discussion. I was wrong, you are more interested in attacking people and defending yourself than discussing anything.
> "Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients."
Ok, so the CIA approaches their mark, in this case their own government. They say we will threaten other actors that threaten you, in exchange for money. You've just described the Pentagon, DoD, and every standing army on earth. A "broader protection racket" can literally mean any security service, from mall guard to 4-star general.
Besides, you are being disingenuous. When people think of a "protection racket" they think of extortion and the mob, not the broad security guarantees of an army or intel service.
Or as clearly stated on wikipedia:
> "Protection rackets are indistinguishable in practice from extortion rackets"
You a deflecting from the accepted definition of a term you used in order to make your original claim less fantastical and attention seeking. I don't blame you for making such a claim, social media and websites that allow for upvoting are made for such actions.
I can't help thinking China hacking America is part of the NSA profile, and I don't think the CIA is needed to tell anyone that China is pushing out it's maritime borders or threatening U.S allies that's more like what reading the news is for. I suppose there could be a need for analysis of these events, but the analysis doesn't really seem to be part of the reason why people sometimes think the CIA should be abolished.
My point was a simple one, spying will always occur. If people are arguing it should be the exclusive purview of autocrats, and that would somehow improve the state of the world, I would disagree.
The arguments for closing the CIA that I am familiar with all revolve around a narrative that it is a non-democratic organization, and that from its predecessors the OSS to the modern day it has been structured so as to help fascistic, autocratic governments gain and hold power.
I've never encountered an argument that it should be closed because spying isn't nice.
Preferable in what way? Clearly the CIA has sinned and will likely continue to do so, but how can we evaluate an agency whose job by definition is either totally unseen (Espionage) or only reported on years after the fact (i.e. no one cares about the terrorist attacks that don't happen)
We technically do not evaluate anything of this nature, without acknowledging that there are greater forces which evaluate evaluators.
Without that belief, what we get instead, is vigilantism (either within the institution, or outside of it.) Preferable to that, is well-accountable and ethically mutual reflection which brings out the best, and roots out the worst in the participants. That is never impossible, as long as we presume accountability beyond immediate verifiability. As Christ said: "for there is nothing hidden which will not be brought to light."
In horror tales of every institution (or individual) is the requirement to self-assess and demand better for oneself. If the CIA has entirely slipped its moorings, it is subject to the countervailing forces which would enlighten its enemies to its demise.
What is more hopeful, is that only various activities have gone rogue. Regardless, only God knows entirely the state of affairs. God does respond. So with love, and a whole lot of grace, we'll see a brighter future for everyone involved.
Not to be too controversial, but that last part only works if you believe there is a god or some sort of cosmic justice. Those of us who don't would like to explore alternative solutions...
Shutting down spy agencies in democracies will not stop spying done by autocrats. If anything, it will create greater incentives to attack more, not less.
I think drawing direct equivalence to the CIA and what the FSB get up to is a little strong. It's a popular thing to say on HN, but if it were true it would mean there's evidence of (say) finding the CIA planting bombs the day after 9/11 in a different skyscraper i.e. The Moscow apartment bombings.
Mass surveillance is a different matter, although I don't think that (nominally at least) falls under the CIA's remit
> I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts. And patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value that's so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous.
I can buy that patriotism was used to sell MKULTRA to some of the rank and file who carried it out, but if I'm to believe that it's what motivated Sidney Gottlieb, Jolly West, and all the rest of its leading lights, I find the idea naive in the extreme. Even their stated motivation for originally undertaking a mind control program (after U.S. pilots supposedly came back brainwashed from Korea) is mendacious. Those pilots didn't need to be programmed to testify that we engaged in germ warfare in Korea because we actually did it!
Perhaps the CIA's hope was to brainwash American pilots, not deprogram them. From what I understand, cult deprogramming is often a weird mirror of cult programming, using many of the same methods, with deprogramming organizations sometimes becoming cult-like themselves. That one could be confused or disguised as the other doesn't surprise me.
I think the whole "we got the idea from the Koreans/Soviets" thing is just a cover, and the truth is that MKULTRA was an extension/continuation of experiments which got their start in the Nazi concentration camps.
Pretty much. It's the job of an intelligence agency to research all such theoretical tools. There are just ethical and unethical ways of doing so.
The key issue with MKULTRA was the use of unwitting subjects. They'd dose people with LSD without their knowledge, let alone their consent, causing at least one person to kill themselves. If any of us worked for the CIA, we'd probably be interested in researching LSD, too; just not like that.
Hierarchical organizations with strict information controls are terribly vulnerable to group think. Compartmentalization means that even if the US was really using biological weapons the people terrified of brainwashing at the CIA probably wouldn't know that.
And it wasn't just the existence of the US brainwashing program that was a consequence of this belief. Angleton threw every Russian who attempted to defect to the US into jail because he thought that Soviet brainwashing made true defection impossible.
Dulles would've been more successful as a circus player, yet the understanding how easily politicians, and generals bought into his utter bullshit is even more unnerving.
If he got to do succeed with it, you can now feel that you have to give gravity to claims of KGB defectors how USSR's influence operators were running circles around USA's political establishment.
The leadership in the business of employing hardcore, weaponized bullshit will certainly never be on the side of Countries of the Free World.
Perhaps automate links to Wayback? Or allow alternate (secondary) links to be added by dang?
There's always a tension between per-article and per-subject that can make trying to do both worse than doing one well, so it would need a light touch.
Why is this a legitimate topic on a forum that forbids trafficking in what are labelled "conspiracy theories."
The net effect of allowing a discussion of this sort is to restrict discussion to the few fragments of the record of MKULTRA that were allowed to survive.
Mr. Kinzer's book does not hint at how horrible, extensive, successful, or powerful the program was, nor does it show any cognizance of actual techniques employed in actual operations.
Since we're not allow to bring up the truth, can we just agree to avoid the topic?
I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say. Most of the records were destroyed and we're trying to piece together the evidence. What is the "truth" that we are "not allowed" to bring up?
I think the other HN thread I linked on this subject shows that you are not correct that discussion of conspiracy theories is completely taboo here. As someone quite steeped in the conspiracy world, some of the most intelligent analysis and thoughtful pushback to the "there's no such thing as conspiracies" bluepill perspective has been on HN, and in general it has not been suppressed or downvoted unless advanced in very combative terms.
Although perhaps you're right that if you start bringing up Project Monarch or the like you might get some pretty severe pushback. Even then I'm not sure you'd necessarily be downvoted to oblivion.
You don't need LSD for this, just expose yourself to media (news, social media, "influencers", etc) and they will helpfully convince you that everything you thought before you encountered them was bad/racist/sexist/conservative/etc. They'll also give you opinions about specific groups of people, and certain people in particular (all of whom you haven't met, nor will you ever meet), and reinforce that every day you continue to consume from them.
Then it's just a matter of swallowing wholesale whatever else they feed you after that.
Online, platforms with downvote systems (HN included) present the apparent legitimacy of certain views over others, and help reinforce what you shouldn't be thinking or voicing (don't get greyed out by posting that!).
The net result is we've sleepwalked into being controlled anyway, except that we contort ourselves justifying why "this is different".