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Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

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Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#81

Post by dwaltrip »

NotAnEconomist wrote: post #73
dwaltrip wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, our academic institutions have issues. We can argue about the exact severity, but that isn't terribly interesting. We can make efforts to improve this. We can try to learn more about where we go wrong. I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understandin…

> I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understanding, and culture, and these imperfect institutions have played an important role. It is easy to forget that sometimes. This is a deep fallacy, and why the "halo effect" works. The institutions which made thos…

I'm not advocating blind trust or the ignorance of any problems. In my first paragraph I made that quite clear by saying we should continually work to find where we can do better. For example, it is clear that new problems are arising as our scientific efforts scale up and become larger and more formalized.

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues.

This is a dramatic claim -- literally all of academia is utterly ruined?

It seems to me that things are not so apocalyptic. Do you have anything to back this up?

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#82

Post by UncleMeat »

jpttsn wrote: post #54
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is often worse. "The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!" "There was once a batch of contaminated vaccines, so now I'm going to risk the lives of my and other children by not vaccinating them" "The banks were unfairly bailed out, so I'm going to keep my money in Quadriga"

That’s a false dilemma; as long as I’m not resigned to hopeless infotainment addiction, I don’t have to believe the “least bad” reporting about events that don’t concern me.

I am absolutely 100% confident that the success rate of individuals with no training doing their own research is way way way lower than the success rate of the academic community consensus.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#83

Post by jpttsn »

UncleMeat wrote: post #82
jpttsn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a false dilemma; as long as I’m not resigned to hopeless infotainment addiction, I don’t have to believe the “least bad” reporting about events that don’t concern me.

I am absolutely 100% confident that the success rate of individuals with no training doing their own research is way way way lower than the success rate of the academic community consensus.

That’s not what I’m arguing against. I’m not claiming to be a better truth-seeker than the academic community.

I am claiming that a lot of this truth has no meaning to me, and I’m comfortable with not seeking it. If that sounds horrible, consider a special case like celebrity gossip. Am I better than the magazines at getting to the bottom of it? Probably not. Does that fact implore me to seek their “knowledge”?

I distrust many media accounts of events. I don’t believe their opposites either. And I don’t “do my own research”. I just embrace ignorance of things that don’t matter to me.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#84

Post by salawat »

antpls wrote: post #37

> Wasting intellectual horsepower by refuting bad arguments, experts have less and less time for more productive endeavors I disagree that it's a waste of effort. It may be considered a waste of effort from the experts perspective, but from everyone else perspective, it is a guard against experts keeping the truth for themselves. Experts together are a "black box" to non-experts. If we let them continue refining thei…

Just wanted to second this. Experts should be constantly trying to work themselves out of a job.

The most annoying thing I've come across is instances where I'm sort of backed into an intellectual as "the guy who knows X", where people fully capable of understanding X to act as repeaters refuse to do so.

However, I understand the compunction at the same time. So I can't really blame them.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#85

Post by frabbit »

canofbars wrote: post #51
anigbrowl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already the case, I think.

I think it is probably happening on places like twitter now and I know for a fact that its quite common for people to control about 20 accounts so they can make an opinion seem like a common agreement.

Persona management and state level trolling has been happening for a while now. Go back to the long, long ago past of 2011 and revel in US weaponisation of social networks:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

"It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered "prejudice" as a result.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites."

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#86

Post by woah »

scottlocklin wrote: post #79
barry-cotter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being competitive at policy debate is genuinely impressive, just as getting really good at the racing on pogo sticks is impressive. It takes a lot of hard work and skill. But if you want to learn to persuade people outside your little subculture do parliamentary debate. Real debate is rhetoric, it engages in pathos and ethos as well as logos. Given its size and education levels the US should be crushingly dominant in…

Marketing techniques, propaganda and low-level politics (promote your guys, blow up the other guys) are obviously vastly more efficient than old school rhetoric.

The things you mention are rhetoric, and are as “old-school” as anything else. Your comment smacks of a bizarre attitude that seems popular among programmers, that “marketing” is at once all-powerful, impossible to understand, and completely without merit.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#87

Post by scottlocklin »

woah wrote: post #86
scottlocklin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing techniques, propaganda and low-level politics (promote your guys, blow up the other guys) are obviously vastly more efficient than old school rhetoric.

The things you mention are rhetoric, and are as “old-school” as anything else. Your comment smacks of a bizarre attitude that seems popular among programmers, that “marketing” is at once all-powerful, impossible to understand, and completely without merit.

I dunno, if you read, say, "Merchants of Attention" or some other history of marketing, you'd not find any mention of Aristotle, but a whole bunch of snake oil salesmen and cousins of Freud. Maybe "programmers" know something you don't.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#88

Post by jacquesm »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #62
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best mental DOS attacks all center around the exact same thing: fear. Press the fear button and even generally well educated and intelligent people will start to act like complete morons.

This doesn't really explain anything, does it? Fear is such a universal emotion that it can be present in any are of life, and more importantly not going anywhere any time soon. It can also be easily adjusted to any topic, because every topic can be viewed from the two perspectives - if something is good, we can strive towards it or be fearful of it's lack, and vice versa. The more important the topic, the more chanc…

Fear of the other has been one of the most powerful agents in terms of getting people to do things that they really should not (genocide, for one example).

There is no flip side to that where fear of something else would counteract that. Many of those things that are influenced by a powerful emotion such as fear are like that, they only work one way or at best are very asymmetrical when you try to imagine the opposite.

So it definitely explains something. Just look to history for some pretty good examples of the end results.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#89

Post by leereeves »

snowwrestler wrote: post #77
leereeves wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should people respect formal education? Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. The non-scientific parts of academia are dominated by in-group politics and shallow status seeking. And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology: research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. If academ…

All published scientific research is wrong in some way. That is a good example of knowledge that is so well understood by people with formal education in science that it’s taken for granted. It can seem revelatory to people without that education. But science is only what people make it to be. If you have an idea for how to make scientific knowledge better, by all means go for it. But if your idea is just that scient…

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about fields where one study includes 40 tests each of which has a 1 in 20 chance of being statistically significant by random chance, and the 2 results that happen to pass that laughably low bar are published.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#90

Post by patrec »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really explain anything, does it? Fear is such a universal emotion that it can be present in any are of life, and more importantly not going anywhere any time soon. It can also be easily adjusted to any topic, because every topic can be viewed from the two perspectives - if something is good, we can strive towards it or be fearful of it's lack, and vice versa. The more important the topic, the more chanc…

Fear of the other has been one of the most powerful agents in terms of getting people to do things that they really should not (genocide, for one example). There is no flip side to that where fear of something else would counteract that. Many of those things that are influenced by a powerful emotion such as fear are like that, they only work one way or at best are very asymmetrical when you try to imagine the opposit…

> There is no flip side to that where fear of something else would counteract that.

This is so obviously untrue that I find it difficult to believe it would take you long to come up with counterexamples yourself if you tried.

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