Brilliant! The denial of service analogy is so true. There will be probably be an uneducated group that will refute the existance of DOS attacks!
Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
71–80 of 107 posts
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#72Earlier 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.
It may not matter what you believe, but it matters what the aggregate total of your fellow voters believe.
Is your point that most voters are hopeless infotainment addicts?
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#73Earlier 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…
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 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.
Some of which, while we're on the topic of Russian political interference (as a society), was originally sponsored disruption by the USSR now spawning child political movements in the US.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating Not outside the US it isn’t. Policy debating is a special US abomination, with unfortunate extensions into the cultural colony to the north. Everywhere else does parliamentary debating.
I find it mind boggling that people have such strong opinions about policy debate when they have no idea of the work and skill required to be competitive in it. Policy debate is literally teaching you how to deal with "intellectual DOS attacks". It explicitly trains you how to deal with large amounts of arguments being thrown at you and how to parse out important refutations with limited time. Being fast is a side ef…
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 debate, not competitive. Policy debaters don’t persuade people.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#75Just wait till bots/ai gets good enough to spout bullshit. Just fill forums with thousands of argue-bots and you might be able to make the noise ratio so bad the internet is unusable.
This is an interesting plot point in Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought science fiction series. The "net of a million lies" has been astroturfed and boobytrapped by living beings and AIs for generations. Programmer archaeologists sometimes try to extract useful information at great risk to their entire societies.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#76Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the "need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#77I 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…
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 scientific knowledge could be better, well, join the club. Every scientist on Earth agrees with you.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#78I 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…
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…
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", and those other similar papers, is based on using scientific methodologies and standards of correctness to evaluate published peer-reviewed research.
If you use those same standards and methods, you will surely find that _even more_ "non-expert" arguments on the internet that are not scientific-research-based at all are false.
If you accept the scientific approach to knowledge, then that same approach can be used to critique science as actually practiced, which is what's going on there. But if you accept that approach that is hardly an argument for the alternative of paying no attention to scientific expertise or practices and just opening it up to amateurs with Ideas. And if you don't accept the scientific approach, you ought not to be citing articles using that approach to critique scientific practice.
Science as actually practiced isn't perfect, and deserves critique, and improvement. But the alternative is way worse, and "seems right to me" and "arguing on the internet" aren't science either, or more likely to produce more accurate knowledge. Neither is "I've been tinkering in my garage and even though all the actual scientists think I'm a quack, I swear they're wrong and I'm right."
That science as actually practiced has a lot of problems is not itself a valid argument for some other form of practice, such as "scientific-seeming claims by people who are not recognized as experts by science but have managed to convince a bunch of other non-scientists on the internet of their weird theories." That's not gonna do better at finding accurate reproducible objective knowledge.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it mind boggling that people have such strong opinions about policy debate when they have no idea of the work and skill required to be competitive in it. Policy debate is literally teaching you how to deal with "intellectual DOS attacks". It explicitly trains you how to deal with large amounts of arguments being thrown at you and how to parse out important refutations with limited time. Being fast is a side ef…
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.
Re: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
#80Earlier 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…
It would also be unwise to blindly trust these institutions, or to grant them respect or credence as a whole without considering the problems and biases of specific fields. And it should be remembered that the amazing gains in knowledge humanity has made have often been opposed by academia, as Max Planck observed: science advances one funeral at at time.
I agree, blind trust is a dangerous thing. Healthy skepticism is important. However, we also have to choose which battles are worth fighting, and carefully evaluate when and where our skepticism can be most usefully and proportionately focused.