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Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

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Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#131

Post by DenisM »

metaphorm wrote: post #126
DenisM wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean to equate fake news with editorial bias? Because that's what I read from your comments, and I can't agree to that, even remotely.

what is currently being called "fake news" is not the same thing as editorial bias nor do I equate them in the sense that I don't distinguish between the two. I do distinguish between them. however, fake news and editorial bias are used to accomplish the same thing: disinformation. that is the level which I equate them.

Editorial bias omits some facts and leaves other on the table, thus providing some source of facts. If you had several sources with different editorial biases you could get a good set of facts to work with. This isn't as good as "objective" reporting, if there was ever such a thing, but it's still quite workable. It worked rather well for a long time.

To say "they both accomplish the same thing" is to omit a very important distinction - while both can mislead, one can still be used to advance the discussion and the other cannot.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#132

Post by maxxxxx »

basch wrote: post #113
maxxxxx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. Unfortunately the american electorate is easy to manipulate so they will blame their problems on other groups that are suffering the same problems. Instead of asking why salaries don't go up anymore while the company makes record profits people start attacking each other. The last election was a classical example of distraction. there was almost no discussion of things that would make people's lifes be…

>the american electorate is easy to manipulate that is a feature of democracy not unique to America

It's pretty unique to America. I can't imagine any German to be as fervently for against Merkel or the CDU like Americans are for or against their party. In many countries I can have spirited political discussions over a wide range of topics without people feeling personally offended. That's simply not possible in the US.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#133

Post by dguest »

alasdair_ wrote: post #123
clairity wrote: post #72

i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance. if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is incre…

>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter? Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off…

Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three options is acceptable.

Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them.

Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#134

Post by maxxxxx »

enraged_camel wrote: post #121
basch wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the american electorate is easy to manipulate that is a feature of democracy not unique to America

It may not be unique to America (for example, the Brits seem equally easy to manipulate, based on the recent Brexit vote), but the populace being easy to manipulate is definitely not a "feature of democracy." The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average lev…

It's a little condescending to blame this on the educational level. I know plenty of very educated people in the US who are fanatics and don't listen to others. I think it has to do with the obsession with winning, competition and binary thinking the US has.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#135

Post by xapata »

clairity wrote: post #72

i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance. if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is incre…

Last 35 years? The US has been arguing about and getting distracted from inequality since it was just colonies. In 1773, Boston merchants (smugglers) started complaining about liberty when all they really wanted was to keep the price of tea a bit higher. [0]

If you're serious about wanting change, you should appeal to the values of the capitalists. Don't complain about inequality, complain about inefficiency. A capitalist economy is supposedly (and probably) more efficient than a command economy, because a centralized bureaucracy is worse at allocating resources than a decentralized market. The central tenet of the free market is that decentralization is more efficient.

So what happens when a capitalist accrues more wealth, as is natural for some to do with luck or skill? Eventually, the most skilled or most lucky have most of the wealth. Wealth forms a log-normal or power-law distribution. It's natural and nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, this is an unstable system. As the wealth distribution becomes ever more long-tailed, what once was a free market becomes more and more like a centralized bureaucracy with a handfull of capitalists allocating resources instead of a handfull of bureaucrats.

Redistributing wealth, fairness aside, is simply the most efficient way to keep the market growing. It closes the loop of decentralization. Think of a Bayesian Meta-Bandit, a Bayesian Bandit [1] that selects a Bandit according to the probability that Bandit is best. No matter the history we've observed, the probability of our best Bandit in fact being best never reaches 100% and we always choose the lesser (according to our observations) with some non-zero probability. In the same way, the best societal strategy is to redistribute according to the probability that our best allocators (our wealthiest capitalists) might make a mistake or get unlucky.

Too much redistribution and we lose efficiency, because we're not giving the bulk of our resources to our best allocators. Too little redistribution and we lose efficiency, because our observed-best might either (1) just have gotten lucky in the past and aren't actually better or (2) might get unlucky in the future and we need a hedge against random failure.

Aaaanyway. Anyone who argues against redistribution needs to do some thinking about why capitalism works.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the...

"Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability...

A Bayesian Bandit chooses actions according to the Bayesian probability that the action is best.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#136

Post by buzzybee »

DenisM wrote: post #124

There is something new going on in the social network realm that can undermine trolling efforts as they exist today. Social networks started appearing when tech adoption was relatively scarce. They predate the smartphone revolution. As such they had to bend out of shape to produce as much public or semi-public content in order to attract and engage enough users to sustain the network effects. The direct side effect o…

It correlates with my theory of Endless September someday having an end. The problem of Endless September was growth - too much growth, too quickly. When that stops, and unless we experience an AI personhood event, it has to, because we only have so many people on the planet and so much data they can transmit - the network settles into a place where it can focus on quality instead of sheer scale. In the developed world we are likely already entering this phase, with online access surpassing 80%, and the rest of the world is not that far behind.

So then what happens? The business model changes. Social network technologies will re-commoditize and the value will return to communities. Privacy takes a bigger role, as you note. And the world, for better or worse(but probably better), becomes even weirder and harder to assess or manipulate top-down.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#137

Post by gnaritas »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #67
gnaritas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers didn't have time to move, that was the point of the late release, and why the polls were off, they didn't have time to adjust to the new information. > Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion. I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusio…

The poll numbers did move. But polls are just polls. The election is the real count but it only happens once, you can't draw trend lines.

Polls take time to move, some moved, some weren't re-polled before the election, and no polls aren't just polls; poll are a statistical sampling of the electorate and do allow you to draw a trend line and notice things like hey, that piece of news made a different in the outcome. That elections happen only once is not relevant, it doesn't invalidate the poll data that shows minds were changed.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#138

Post by white-flame »

basch wrote: post #113
maxxxxx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. Unfortunately the american electorate is easy to manipulate so they will blame their problems on other groups that are suffering the same problems. Instead of asking why salaries don't go up anymore while the company makes record profits people start attacking each other. The last election was a classical example of distraction. there was almost no discussion of things that would make people's lifes be…

>the american electorate is easy to manipulate that is a feature of democracy not unique to America

I think it's a feature of having a populous and very geographically large country. There's simply too much politics going on for any individual or even bureaucratic control to track and keep sane. Most politics in the mass of issues always swilling around doesn't really affect you, being targeting to specific industries or localities, though they have messy long tail effects as they're constantly over-applied.

I recall seeing a snippet of the Prime Minister of the UK being asked about a mail box on some particular street corner in London, in an open forum. He knew exactly what was being discussed. Smaller countries have their politicians more tangibly connected to people, as opposed to local representatives being seated thousands of miles away as is the case in the US.

People also forget that the US is set up kind of more like the EU, rather than most other countries. It's a federation of independent states, with deference of law to those states, except for those powers specifically granted to the federal government (at least on paper). This is a yet another abstraction level layered on top of politics that many people in other countries don't conceive.

So propaganda easily overwhelms people's natural gleaning of what's going on.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#139

Post by MagnumOpus »

MaysonL wrote: post #128
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying to subvert each other's populations. The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. Ther…

The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls. What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?

Secrecy and deception. Advertising and corporate PR are open about their interests, purveyors of payola and positive-reviews-for-freebies are usually recognisable and the people involved often admit it.

Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it as a plausible mainstream view.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#140

Post by metaphorm »

DenisM wrote: post #131
metaphorm wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is currently being called "fake news" is not the same thing as editorial bias nor do I equate them in the sense that I don't distinguish between the two. I do distinguish between them. however, fake news and editorial bias are used to accomplish the same thing: disinformation. that is the level which I equate them.

Editorial bias omits some facts and leaves other on the table, thus providing some source of facts. If you had several sources with different editorial biases you could get a good set of facts to work with. This isn't as good as "objective" reporting, if there was ever such a thing, but it's still quite workable. It worked rather well for a long time. To say "they both accomplish the same thing" is to omit a very imp…

there's a difference between editorial bias that emerges as an unavoidable artifact of work done by flawed humans, and editorial bias driven by political agenda. the former is expected and forgivable. the latter is disinformation.
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