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Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

197 points by beepp 8y ago

m3nu 8y ago
So true and a great way to think of it. I moved to weighing the benefits of proving someone wrong vs. ignoring and nodding. Will help to reduce the number of arguments you get into and make room for the important ones.
- taneq 8y ago
  I realised a while ago that I was spending way too much time and energy getting into pointless online arguments about social justice issues. I now have a pretty low threshold of disagreement above which I'll immediately (and politely) disengage, and if it escalates at all from there, just block the person. I no longer care if someone is wrong on the internet, it's not my job to re-educate them, and the less energy I waste on them the better.
  - 0db532a0 8y ago
    You might find this interesting: The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
pixl97 8y ago
Just 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.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  That's already the case, I think.
  - canofbars 8y ago
    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.
    - frabbit 8y ago
      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-operation-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."
      - mistermann 8y ago
        I wonder if the US 3 letter agencies have any motivation, and are sophisticated enough, to create the appearance of an organization controlled by a third party that is operating online to shape the thinking of American citizens. Not that this would ever happen of course, just wondering if it is possible.
- throway88989898 8y ago
  "Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755
- ims 8y ago
  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.
anigbrowl 8y ago
Decent article. If you want more along these lines try Cryptome: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm 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.
- galaxyLogic 8y ago
  Excellent link. This is what people whose job is to protect fair and safe elections should be reading.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    And exactly what those who don't want fair and safe elections would prefer the general public does not read. I often wonder, if the government is so genuinely concerned about fake news, why do we see zero effort to educate people on general techniques to detect it, but see only substantial effort to attack specific instances of it?
- beepp 8y ago
  Thank you for this link! I knew others must have covered this ground more systematically than I could.
- shostack 8y ago
  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.
galaxyLogic 8y ago
I would have expected the article to say something about election meddling via social media. Citizens are denied access to true information by drowning it in fake news.
- gfosco 8y ago
  They aren't denied access to it, they just have to pay attention and be discerning if they want to filter all that information for the truth. The problem today is, there are fewer and fewer people who are trying to inform instead of persuade.
jdietrich 8y ago
See also the Gish Gallop - a debating technique named after the creationist Duane Gish, which involves making as many specious arguments as quickly as possible. An unprepared opponent is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of points they need to refute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating, creating a truly absurd spectacle; most teams speak as quickly as humanly possible to fit the greatest number of arguments into a fixed time limit, creating a barely-intelligible blur of words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american-politics https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corr...
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating I think the reason for this is that there's a rule (possibly unwritten?) that if you drop an argument you automatically concede it. So it's in your best interest to belt out as many points as you possibly can and hope your opponent can't respond to all of them.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > 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.
  - zorked 8y ago
    It's more than just what the arguments are about. Anywhere else in the world someone making points so quickly as in the videos would sound desperate and instantly "lose" the debate. Nobody is expect to refute point by point a nonsensical diatribe.
    - leereeves 8y ago
new_here 8y ago
That quote on the slide is the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_...
- beepp 8y ago
  Thank you! Will add the source.
- paganel 8y ago
  There’s a very similar saying in my native language (Romanian) that roughly translates into English like this: > One fool person throws a rock into a lake and ten smart persons then try their best to get it out
b0rsuk 8y ago
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 him and it's by definition impossible to refute all compressed arguments in the same amount of time. A Polish politician I have in mind goes by initials JKM. My point: an intelligent, educated person can cross over to the dark side and it makes it all the way worse. Some people praise Dan Brown for his intelligence. So what, he doesn't write books for intelligent people. In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had higher respect for formal education. The "compressed argument" still worked very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and print (word limit). Now, the Pandora's box is open. To succeed in social media, you don't need to construct good arguments. Some charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. Ordinary people no longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom. This is a problem because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we trust some people. What if a lot of people put trust not into expertise and experience, but into charismatic, cheeky figures? What if they prefer appeals to nationality, bloodline (son of a heroic activist)? Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn't intellectually dishonest?
- raverbashing 8y ago
  And even worse, "traditional media" is going downhill and promoting those same cheap arguments
- leereeves 8y ago
  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 academia wants respect, it should work on improving itself instead of trying to find a "strategy that works against populism". Edit: Citations > Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... > Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the Same Results https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-rep... > 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on... > Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent. > Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi... > In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate. http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf > When Inbar and Lammers contacted [social psychologists] ... they found that ... the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers. ... Participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas? As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak out. > Over all, close to nineteen per cent [of social psychologists surveyed] reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper...and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psy...
shabbyrobe 8y ago
Jonathan Swift in 1710: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."
aaron695 8y ago
Bored with people bagging Flat Earthers, we get it you're smarter. This is a self inflicted DoS Flat earthers are no different to 6000 years-ers (Or religion in general). Science goes on. Issues with replication in science is a real issue.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Related: I don't recall it was djb or Bruce Schneier, but I remember, after Snowden's revelations, one of them criticized the NSA/NIST was using a "denial-of-service" technique to push flawed standards. That is, it's relatively easy to draft a protocol but hard to analyze them. You would publish a dozen of ciphers and protocols at once, then the cryptographers would busy working on some of them. Eventually, flawed standards went through without being noticed...
Jedi72 8y ago
I would argue that this is the tactic used by most multi-national marketing agencies.
tinono 8y ago
>Once we have publicly attached our name to an idea, the path of least resistance is to continue believing it. This reminds of Paul Graham's essay titled "Keep your identity small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
kuroop 8y ago
Just like behind many dumb bots doing a distributed denial of service, there can be one mastermind controller/hacker, It is quite possible that behind these non-experts doing the intellectual denial of service, there is an expert mastermind.
Criper1Tookus 8y ago
Let’s say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.
antpls 8y ago
> 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 their ideas, they might forget to think about the common good. Even if they are good intended, at some point the knowledge has to flow between people, but experts often use their own domain language to communicate, and no one but them can argue anymore about their ideas. What people defending X are asking to the experts is that the latters should make their finding understandable by everyone, or some people will be exploited. If a piece of knowledge is true, but not useful to people problems, it doesn't matter to them. To me, people defending X are asking experts how does Y (or even X) is relevant to their lives, and it actually show that neither X or Y matter to them. From there, experts have to admit their are not HELPING people anymore, because they don't solve real world problems, in humanitarian term. Why would you care about the shape of the earth when you are dying because you have no water or food to live ? That's the life of some people on Earth. Why aren't experts thinking about giving them food and water rather than arguing that they are wrong about the shape of the earth ?
- salawat 8y ago
  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.
dredmorbius 8y ago
A compilation of related concepts and references, with some overlap to this article: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...
usgroup 8y ago
I think the tldr here is that questions/challenges require significantly less energy than answers for many types of questions; and this is more true the more expertise the answers require. I think one problem is that expertise have been a bludgeon for a long time and intellectuals have done an awful job of not over reaching their expertise and at sticking to their levels of confidence. I also think that the once important role of “public intellectuals” and philosophers as critics of everything was an essential role to keeping participants honest. We don’t have this any more.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
topoftheforts 8y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with this article, and I firmly believe that if no one paid attention to flat earthers, for example, it wouldn't have become such a big matter. It's mind-boggling to me that there's people on YT/social media going out of their way to prove to flat earthers that the earth is not flat. We have 600 years of science proving that, and they don't believe that, do you think that your little experiment will change their mind? Also, what's the point? It's not like if there's enough people that think the earth is flat, NASA will shut down or anything. It's commendable trying to educate people but in these cases it's definitely not worth the hassle, and I really hope people start realising that and stop entertaining all the crazy ideas that random strangers have around the world.
martincmartin 8y ago
The hyperpartisan politics in the U.S. has been fostered since long before the internet. On the right, "rage radio" has been big since the early 90s. After listening to conservative outrage, it's hard to then listen to the other side of an argument and think "they may have a point." Similarly, left wing comedy-news shows make fun of the other side. When you see the other side as ripe for ridicule, its hard to then say, "but they may have a point." Source: I've known many people on both sides, and it always saddens me that discussions don't boil down to "let's both look at the arguments from both sides." Instead, there's an emotional "the other side is nuts" response that blocks all attempts at even discussing things fairly.
Gunstig2Snath 8y ago
Let’s say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.
ChlorophZek 8y ago
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!
briantakita 8y ago
Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the "need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.
HocusLocus 8y ago
techiavellian.com 1. BLOCKING SSL access to web TLSv1.2 browsers with ciphers that use AES128/SHA256 (AES256/SHA384 ciphers only). 2. NO http access. Intellectual denial of service attack: SUCCEEDED. I cannot view your website!

197 points by beepp 8y ago

m3nu 8y ago

So true and a great way to think of it. I moved to weighing the benefits of proving someone wrong vs. ignoring and nodding. Will help to reduce the number of arguments you get into and make room for the important ones.

taneq 8y ago
I realised a while ago that I was spending way too much time and energy getting into pointless online arguments about social justice issues. I now have a pretty low threshold of disagreement above which I'll immediately (and politely) disengage, and if it escalates at all from there, just block the person. I no longer care if someone is wrong on the internet, it's not my job to re-educate them, and the less energy I waste on them the better.
- 0db532a0 8y ago
  You might find this interesting: The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own

pixl97 8y ago

Just 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.

anigbrowl 8y ago
That's already the case, I think.
- canofbars 8y ago
  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.
  - frabbit 8y ago
    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-operation-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."
    - mistermann 8y ago
      I wonder if the US 3 letter agencies have any motivation, and are sophisticated enough, to create the appearance of an organization controlled by a third party that is operating online to shape the thinking of American citizens. Not that this would ever happen of course, just wondering if it is possible.
throway88989898 8y ago
"Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755
ims 8y ago
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.

anigbrowl 8y ago

Decent article. If you want more along these lines try Cryptome: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm 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.

galaxyLogic 8y ago
Excellent link. This is what people whose job is to protect fair and safe elections should be reading.
- mistermann 8y ago
  And exactly what those who don't want fair and safe elections would prefer the general public does not read. I often wonder, if the government is so genuinely concerned about fake news, why do we see zero effort to educate people on general techniques to detect it, but see only substantial effort to attack specific instances of it?
beepp 8y ago
Thank you for this link! I knew others must have covered this ground more systematically than I could.
shostack 8y ago
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.

galaxyLogic 8y ago

I would have expected the article to say something about election meddling via social media. Citizens are denied access to true information by drowning it in fake news.

gfosco 8y ago
They aren't denied access to it, they just have to pay attention and be discerning if they want to filter all that information for the truth. The problem today is, there are fewer and fewer people who are trying to inform instead of persuade.

jdietrich 8y ago

See also the Gish Gallop - a debating technique named after the creationist Duane Gish, which involves making as many specious arguments as quickly as possible. An unprepared opponent is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of points they need to refute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating, creating a truly absurd spectacle; most teams speak as quickly as humanly possible to fit the greatest number of arguments into a fixed time limit, creating a barely-intelligible blur of words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american-politics https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corr...

saagarjha 8y ago
> A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating I think the reason for this is that there's a rule (possibly unwritten?) that if you drop an argument you automatically concede it. So it's in your best interest to belt out as many points as you possibly can and hope your opponent can't respond to all of them.
barry-cotter 8y ago
> 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.
- zorked 8y ago
  It's more than just what the arguments are about. Anywhere else in the world someone making points so quickly as in the videos would sound desperate and instantly "lose" the debate. Nobody is expect to refute point by point a nonsensical diatribe.
  - leereeves 8y ago

new_here 8y ago

That quote on the slide is the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_...

beepp 8y ago
Thank you! Will add the source.
paganel 8y ago
There’s a very similar saying in my native language (Romanian) that roughly translates into English like this: > One fool person throws a rock into a lake and ten smart persons then try their best to get it out

b0rsuk 8y ago

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 him and it's by definition impossible to refute all compressed arguments in the same amount of time. A Polish politician I have in mind goes by initials JKM. My point: an intelligent, educated person can cross over to the dark side and it makes it all the way worse. Some people praise Dan Brown for his intelligence. So what, he doesn't write books for intelligent people. In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had higher respect for formal education. The "compressed argument" still worked very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and print (word limit). Now, the Pandora's box is open. To succeed in social media, you don't need to construct good arguments. Some charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. Ordinary people no longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom. This is a problem because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we trust some people. What if a lot of people put trust not into expertise and experience, but into charismatic, cheeky figures? What if they prefer appeals to nationality, bloodline (son of a heroic activist)? Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn't intellectually dishonest?

raverbashing 8y ago
And even worse, "traditional media" is going downhill and promoting those same cheap arguments
leereeves 8y ago
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 academia wants respect, it should work on improving itself instead of trying to find a "strategy that works against populism". Edit: Citations > Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... > Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the Same Results https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-rep... > 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on... > Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent. > Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi... > In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate. http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf > When Inbar and Lammers contacted [social psychologists] ... they found that ... the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers. ... Participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas? As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak out. > Over all, close to nineteen per cent [of social psychologists surveyed] reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper...and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psy...

shabbyrobe 8y ago

Jonathan Swift in 1710: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."

aaron695 8y ago

Bored with people bagging Flat Earthers, we get it you're smarter. This is a self inflicted DoS Flat earthers are no different to 6000 years-ers (Or religion in general). Science goes on. Issues with replication in science is a real issue.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago

Related: I don't recall it was djb or Bruce Schneier, but I remember, after Snowden's revelations, one of them criticized the NSA/NIST was using a "denial-of-service" technique to push flawed standards. That is, it's relatively easy to draft a protocol but hard to analyze them. You would publish a dozen of ciphers and protocols at once, then the cryptographers would busy working on some of them. Eventually, flawed standards went through without being noticed...

Jedi72 8y ago

I would argue that this is the tactic used by most multi-national marketing agencies.

tinono 8y ago

>Once we have publicly attached our name to an idea, the path of least resistance is to continue believing it. This reminds of Paul Graham's essay titled "Keep your identity small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

kuroop 8y ago

Just like behind many dumb bots doing a distributed denial of service, there can be one mastermind controller/hacker, It is quite possible that behind these non-experts doing the intellectual denial of service, there is an expert mastermind.

Criper1Tookus 8y ago

Let’s say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.

antpls 8y ago

> 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 their ideas, they might forget to think about the common good. Even if they are good intended, at some point the knowledge has to flow between people, but experts often use their own domain language to communicate, and no one but them can argue anymore about their ideas. What people defending X are asking to the experts is that the latters should make their finding understandable by everyone, or some people will be exploited. If a piece of knowledge is true, but not useful to people problems, it doesn't matter to them. To me, people defending X are asking experts how does Y (or even X) is relevant to their lives, and it actually show that neither X or Y matter to them. From there, experts have to admit their are not HELPING people anymore, because they don't solve real world problems, in humanitarian term. Why would you care about the shape of the earth when you are dying because you have no water or food to live ? That's the life of some people on Earth. Why aren't experts thinking about giving them food and water rather than arguing that they are wrong about the shape of the earth ?

salawat 8y ago
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.

dredmorbius 8y ago

A compilation of related concepts and references, with some overlap to this article: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...

usgroup 8y ago

I think the tldr here is that questions/challenges require significantly less energy than answers for many types of questions; and this is more true the more expertise the answers require. I think one problem is that expertise have been a bludgeon for a long time and intellectuals have done an awful job of not over reaching their expertise and at sticking to their levels of confidence. I also think that the once important role of “public intellectuals” and philosophers as critics of everything was an essential role to keeping participants honest. We don’t have this any more.

deleted 8y ago

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topoftheforts 8y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this article, and I firmly believe that if no one paid attention to flat earthers, for example, it wouldn't have become such a big matter. It's mind-boggling to me that there's people on YT/social media going out of their way to prove to flat earthers that the earth is not flat. We have 600 years of science proving that, and they don't believe that, do you think that your little experiment will change their mind? Also, what's the point? It's not like if there's enough people that think the earth is flat, NASA will shut down or anything. It's commendable trying to educate people but in these cases it's definitely not worth the hassle, and I really hope people start realising that and stop entertaining all the crazy ideas that random strangers have around the world.

martincmartin 8y ago

The hyperpartisan politics in the U.S. has been fostered since long before the internet. On the right, "rage radio" has been big since the early 90s. After listening to conservative outrage, it's hard to then listen to the other side of an argument and think "they may have a point." Similarly, left wing comedy-news shows make fun of the other side. When you see the other side as ripe for ridicule, its hard to then say, "but they may have a point." Source: I've known many people on both sides, and it always saddens me that discussions don't boil down to "let's both look at the arguments from both sides." Instead, there's an emotional "the other side is nuts" response that blocks all attempts at even discussing things fairly.

Gunstig2Snath 8y ago

ChlorophZek 8y ago

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!

briantakita 8y ago

Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the "need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.

HocusLocus 8y ago

techiavellian.com 1. BLOCKING SSL access to web TLSv1.2 browsers with ciphers that use AES128/SHA256 (AES256/SHA384 ciphers only). 2. NO http access. Intellectual denial of service attack: SUCCEEDED. I cannot view your website!