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https://www.google.com/amp/s/terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/...
Unacceptable to me that it wasn’t referenced as it certainly made the rounds in security circles.
The only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power. My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple s…
For the reasons you gave: as a litmus test for whether a politician is a statesman or a shill, I look at whether he/she supports public education or not.
Your advice seems virtuous. Only support people who fund public education. However, is public education, as it exists today, a good thing? Would you vote for a strong black woman that wants to reform public school to the pre-common core system? Would you support a gay dwarf that wants to revert back to the days of New Math hysteria? Would you support a ciswhite man that wants to keep everything as is? Funding by itself is not a good metric. What to do with the funding is.
I'm glad that someone of Schneier's reputation and ability is taking this issue seriously enough to at least co-author a paper on it. I know that the focus of this forum is technology news and whatever hackers find interesting, and I know (and have seen here) that the more political a particular post is, the more inevitable it becomes for the discourse to devolve into something non-constructive and toxic. At the same…
Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.
This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc.
There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.
Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.
Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.
With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.
The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", " wouldn't do unless ".
On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.
I disagree, but I see the problems totally different. That is because I don't see the US as a democracy but as an oligarchy. The whole problem with US implementation of democracy is that the actors are centralized around a system that encourages corruption. The corruption is due to the power and money that is governing politics. And this again causes secrecy to hide the differences between the advertised politics and…
So it's more like unrestricted predatory capitalism is what destroys all those democratic ideas.
The only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power. My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple s…
People also need better tools for analyzing and making sense of large quantities of information, especially as it evolves over time. Right now, all we have are search engines and excel spreadsheets, and it's clearly not enough.
It's amazing how prophetic Neil Postman's criticism of computers turned out to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxgCoHv_aE
Essentially, he noted how computers gave people tools to produce and consume more information, but not the tools to discern, filter and analyze it more effectively. It's a profound and very important observation.
His Six Questions are also more relevant than ever.
Link to discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
The comments on that blog post are examples of the problem. They're diving straight into disagreements about matters of fact (like whether a party cheated in a particular election, and whether both sides cheat). The point is that we're not (no longer) disagreeing about values, but about the facts, and that authoritarians are deliberately attempting to muddy the waters here. They're clearly succeeding, and the comment…
on the other hand, they both seem to come to the same conclusion: that we need our election machinery to be verifiably tamper-proof.
The only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power. My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple s…
For the reasons you gave: as a litmus test for whether a politician is a statesman or a shill, I look at whether he/she supports public education or not.
My idea definitely sounds a little far-fetched even to me, but I'd appreciate any input, additions, or criticism that anyone might have.
[0] https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergat...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498796
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
Democracy is doomed, but not because of advanced attacks. Autocracy/nationalism/monarchy/etc are just the natural order of human societies. We've had a good run, but so did the Greeks and Romans.
Isn't nationalism orthogonal to democracy? How are they opposed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the reasons you gave: as a litmus test for whether a politician is a statesman or a shill, I look at whether he/she supports public education or not.
I'm reading this as you saying anyone who doesn't support public education is a shill. If that's the case, you believe that libertarians are shills, then? This strikes me as you essentially saying "anyone who doesn't think the way I do on this topic shouldn't be trusted".