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Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

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Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#91

Post by jacquesm »

patrec wrote: post #90
jacquesm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not seeing any counterexamples in your comment either.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#92

Post by patrec »

jacquesm wrote: post #91
patrec wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not seeing any counterexamples in your comment either.

Are you saying you tried to come up with a counterexample but couldn't or are you saying that I shouldn't make this claim without one?

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#93

Post by jonnycomputer »

lp2019 wrote: post #68
b0rsuk wrote: post #17

I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first ("Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket") but require many more words to refute . When the politician in question is also a fast talker, and has a master's degree in Philosophy, he can appear to be smarter because no one can keep up with…

Some of the misunderstandings I see in this comment - 1. Winning a debate has something to do with political success. Not true. Connecting with people does. There are many ways (good and bad) to connect with people that have nothing to do with pandering to them. To get understand that deeper take a social psychology 101 course. 2. Centralized media produces better politicians/political debate. No it does not. Chomsky…

Honestly, its hard to see this comment as actually addressing anything the OP your replied to said.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#95

Post by barry-cotter »

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…

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues. Their downfall was much longer, but it's clear that in many cases, adherence to "politically correct" dogma has replaced genuine inquiry and the standards to which these institutions used to adhere.

This is wildly overstated. Things were never “good” and the institutions of which you speak were never pure. Most of the world think Joseph McCarthy was a madman sniffing at ghosts when he was right, the US government was riddled with Soviet spies from top to bottom.

The US and the West more generally are still well ahead of any conceivable competition in scientific and technical fields. China is doing well and will improve even more but they’ve passed peak Chinese workforce and demographic momentum means that absent artificial wombs there will be fewer Chinese in 2060 than there are now.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#96

Post by menckenjr »

ben_w wrote: post #58
titanix2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do your own research about that by yourself if you have a real interest in the topic. Anyway, here is a book about this issue in sociology (written by two researchers of the field): Gérald Bronner et Étienne Géhin (2017), Le Danger sociologique , Paris, Puf, 252 p.

By “do your own research”, do you mean “repeat a statistically significant number of the various studies to find out how repeatable the results are”, or do you mean “read a book which convinced me”?

There's a third option - "do a meta-analysis of representative studies to determine true effect size".

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#97

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

patrec wrote: post #92
jacquesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing any counterexamples in your comment either.

Are you saying you tried to come up with a counterexample but couldn't or are you saying that I shouldn't make this claim without one?

You refuted his point but without anything supporting your claim.

What is your counterexample?

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#98

Post by ben_w »

menckenjr wrote: post #96
ben_w wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By “do your own research”, do you mean “repeat a statistically significant number of the various studies to find out how repeatable the results are”, or do you mean “read a book which convinced me”?

There's a third option - "do a meta-analysis of representative studies to determine true effect size".

I counted that as “repeat”, given that’s part of how this problem was first discovered.

On reflection though, that only works when you know roughly how many negative results get published: part of the problem with unreproducable results is that negatives have been difficult to publish, biasing publications so that entirely competent and honest mistakes are much more common than one would expect from just the p-value.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#99

Post by patrec »

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #97
patrec wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you tried to come up with a counterexample but couldn't or are you saying that I shouldn't make this claim without one?

You refuted his point but without anything supporting your claim. What is your counterexample?

People rightly fear being labelled as X-phobic for various values of X because it can easily ruin their careers or lives.

This fear likely constitutes a more effective mechanism for turning large numbers of people away from genocidal hatred of various forms of "otherness" than rewarding positive behavior or making a reasoned case because it scales better. So the claim that fear of otherness can't be counteracted by other fears seems implausible to me.

Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

#100

Post by shostack »

anigbrowl wrote: post #5

Decent article. If you want more along these lines try Cryptome: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm The strategies of information are fundamentally the same as for other forms of warfare, but the operational calculus is very different.

Thanks for the great link. I'm saving to read the whole thing later, but wanted to point out that a variation of forum sliding (or possibly another tactic, haven't read it all) appears to be in use on Reddit.

The amount of noise from what are in many cases fairly obvious troll accounts introduced in important and high information density threads on /r/politics is staggering.

I can only surmise the intent has been to leverage Reddit's thread compression and comment ranking system to push down informative posts with lots of "active conversation" that really is just tossing low information, low quality chatter back and forth to reduce the signal to noise ratio of the comment section an bank on people getting to annoyed with the poor comment quality to bother scrolling for the good stuff that has been pushed down.

I'm also curious if tools like Masstagger are compromised yet and what the tooling of attackers may look like by comparison.

I'm sure there is much more going on that is harder to directly observe, but Reddit really is a great data source for any researchers on this topic.

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