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One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced. The

One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced. The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants.... In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them." https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-11-the-rise-of-%E2%80%9Crisk-capital%E2%80%9D-part-1/ https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili... Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google. Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995: "In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?" https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded: "In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government." https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09... And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples. Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money. So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?

dredmorbius 6y ago
In which case, cut out the (biased, unreliable, deceptively narrated, and ultimately detracting-from-the-point) middle-man, and cite sources directly. The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_... I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Societies.27_speech https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...) was both utterly falsely narrated and very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch). The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as Sophie's Choice), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts. There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above. The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time. Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction. Use a source that is.

dredmorbius 6y ago

In which case, cut out the (biased, unreliable, deceptively narrated, and ultimately detracting-from-the-point) middle-man, and cite sources directly. The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_... I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Societies.27_speech https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...) was both utterly falsely narrated and very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch). The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as Sophie's Choice), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts. There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above. The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time. Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction. Use a source that is.