We all wear tinfoil hats now • Hacker News Board

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#51

Post by mola » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

mech1234 wrote: post #25

I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias. Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority…

Then you just end up just picking and choosing by what you want to believe.

Ethics and norms are the only solution.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#52

Post by dangerface » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works.

Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!".

> The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company

The media picked Cambridge Analytica as their keyword for the story but both Brext and Trump campaigns used more than one ad agency.

> most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the election

Citation needed. As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.

> and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind about anything with mere Facebook ads

Well no of course not, advertising cant change anyone's mine, thats not how advertising works.

You target people who already have the mindset and encourage them to act on it. Thats what ad men like me do and we keep making good money doing it because it works.

The whole tinfoil hat thing is a bit dramatic for my liking the reality is that if advertising didn't work people wouldn't pay for it.

Every election has millions spent on advertising to influence the result, thats the truth not some tin foil hat conspiracy.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#53

Post by DubiousPusher » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

mech1234 wrote: post #25

I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias. Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority…

I would add to that you have to find some news sources outside the U.S. mainstream. For years I read all the biggies but there were all kinds of things I missed.

U.S. deploying troops in Africa U.S. mistaken drone strikes against civilians Uighut detention in China The success of drug decriminalisation in Portugal Etc

There is a collective bias in mainstream news wherein they decide what is interesting and bias against airing anything that they believe viewers will find boring. This leads to a strong bias away from anything outside the collective middle class mainstream lived experience. I don't think it's intentional but it's very pernicious.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#54

Post by danielovichdk » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

I do believe that most people need to be manipulated into anothet truth or belief, otherwise they would become truly insane - in the clinical matter.

The more harsh truth is, the more manipulation is needed.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#55

Post by 76543210 » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #52

The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works. Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!". > The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company The…

So the goal is to find the fallacies and Target them.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#56

Post by mistermann » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #44

RandomTisk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me the most about the CA-Stole-Elections drumbeat is how devoid these kinds of articles are with evidence. They don't qualify which or how many votes were ultimately changed, but it's a well enough hypothesis so writer after writer keeps making bolder and broader claims about CA's influence. Now how many votes are changed due to the media's overwhelming (90%+) negativity about Brexit and Trump? If CA swa…

No, it's fundamentally different and worse, because there's no indication it's happening at all . There's no possibility to mount any kind of defense of rebuttal. To use your war analogy, it's as if someone suddenly invented invisibility cloaks. The fact that we don't have much evidence about what Cambridge Analytica did is the whole problem .

That seemingly no one, even smart people, cares that there's little evidence is also a big problem. People want it to be true.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#57

Post by banads » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

tom-thistime wrote: post #40

So to pick one example, we're under surveillance. It's a fact of life now. It pretty much wasn't a fact of life in the 19th century. Fine. But the author keeps changing the subject to insane conspiracy theories. The author seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.

>seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.

Paranoid schizophrenia is often defined as having symptoms such as "the government is spying on you"

https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-paranoia

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#58

Post by jancsika » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #41

pjc50 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the distinction I was looking for was between statements like "advertising affects behaviour" and "propaganda affects behaviour" which, in the 21st century, are generally considered true and almost obvious even if we can't identify the specific pump handle to remove to stop the cholera epidemic; versus "wifi is beaming images into my brain". Certainly "person X made a political decision based on the informati…

There certainly is a qualitative difference, I agree. But the societal relevance cannot be derived from the degree or order of irrational thought. Someone believing he is regularly abducted by aliens is perhaps more irrational than someone saying a company distorted and manipulated voters on a large scale. The latter allows you to dismiss a whole plethora of different opinions without effort and it was used for polit…

There's one candidate who has spent billions of his own money laying the groundwork for his campaign. He's spent hundreds of millions on both traditional ads and "gray area" social media stuff like paying influencers to post memes.

Wouldn't a rational back-and-forth about the efficacy of his spending happen after the election results come in?

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#59

Post by ameister14 » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #52

The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works. Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!". > The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company The…

>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.

As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all the time, especially in advertising.

The saying that 'if it didn't work, people wouldn't pay for it' is false, provably false.

After privately doing research and testing for my own clients for years and reading the research of others, I'm not convinced these tactics work at all.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#60

Post by banads » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

tic_tac wrote: post #43

The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control. It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half he…

Obviously advertising is not 100% effective, anyone claiming that is being silly. Likewise it's silly to think that ad surveillance companies such as GOOG, with its near trillion dollar market cap, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising each year in the US does not have a disproportionate influence of the consciousness of society.