13 ms·

Brainwashing is sorcery

101 points by cinquemb 5y ago

mind-blight 5y ago
I wish the author gave examples for why he thinks "manipulation" and "gaslighting" are arbitrary and flexible. I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. It's fair to say that it's extremely difficult to prove manipulation, which makes it seem arbitrary. But, there's plenty of legal standards that require proving intent, not just action. That's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable or arbitrary
- kiba 5y ago
  OK? Discussion are often highly complex with shifting terrain. At some point 'manipulation' became a judgement call.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- randrews 5y ago
  Shifting the definition of manipulation and gaslighting is itself a kind of manipulative gaslighting...
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Their definition of manipulation would forbid any negotiation move other than laying all of your cards on the table. ("Withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs.") So yeah.
    - User23 5y ago
      Tangentially, when negotiating I’ve had pretty good luck with just straight up asking what the other party’s best offer is. Usually I have to iterate a couple rounds of course. Rarely is the first response actually their best offer. Since I really am willing to walk away, it’s worked well for both professional and personal relationships. Obviously the framing and presentation is different between a job interview and a first date, but in the end it’s basically the same principles at work.
      - abecedarius 5y ago
        Yeah, I actually lean towards openness too (though I once had to give up on an exciting job offer because I naively anchored the salary discussion with my previous government-salary-band-for-a-high-school-dropout, instead of just not answering). But it's gotta be a free choice; someone demanding it of you, as a supposed norm, is being pushy.
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      Would their definition forbid it, or would it just label such behavior as "manipulative" and you happen to have a negative association with that word? I do personally view many (but not all) "aggressive" negotiations as manipulative. And yes, withholding pertinent information is deceitful as far as I'm concerned.
      - abecedarius 5y ago
        But I didn't bring up aggressive negotiations at all: I said that withholding any information about my private, personal valuation of a prospective trade constitutes "manipulation" according to the definition given. It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade. > Would their definition forbid it Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
        mind-blight 5y ago
        That's a great critique of my definition. I don't think people are manipulative by withholding private or personal information. Withholding relevant information isn't manipulative in certain contexts either: i.e. those where all parties agree that there is no expectation of transparency. So, we could either argue that 1) deception implies that there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure, or 2) update the definition to explicitly say "...withheld information when there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure..." For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence). Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive. If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  > I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with. (One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)
  - lazide 5y ago
    That doesn’t stop it from being manipulation - it’s just calling out how most people are hypocrites?
    - jessriedel 5y ago
      Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy: > Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties. If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.
- ajdv 5y ago
  At a basic hardware level its not hard to understand. Our chimp brain has 200 billion neurons with about 1 trillion connections. There is nothing static about that network structure or the info flowing through it at any given moment. If there are 6-7 billion of these networks then connected up with each other in various other ever changing networks with different ever changing info flowing through, what the fuck hope is there of keeping all that hardware in sync for very long. The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    We’re constantly updating and synching with peers and community. If these are giving us bad signals it’s sort of downward spiral.
- slibhb 5y ago
  I think the author is right that those terms are flexible (maybe arbitrary is too strong). They depend on value judgements or the ability to know someone else's mental state. "Bad faith" is a great example. It's easy to label someone "bad faith" just because you disagree with them and I find that's common. Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.
- wisty 5y ago
  What does "persuading in bad faith" mean? Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way? For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions. On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith? I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    I think people who use the term bad faith (and similar phrases) use it with the best of intentions, but the ambiguous nature of it combined with the imprecise way most people speak and think results in it causing more problems not less.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Yes, your first example is correct (by definition). Bad faith is misrepresenting your motivations or the relevant facts in some way, including by omission. > But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons> That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.
- User23 5y ago
  Effective rhetoric can use truth at least as easily as falsehood.
Gunax 5y ago
I know it isn't the main thrust of the piece, but I think the author nailed the real way that laws are used. > The key difference is that such “flexible offenses” tend to be defined more in terms of how someone important doesn’t like an outcome, and less in terms of what specifically someone did to induce that resulting dislike. There are so many crimes that anyone can be charged at any time. The reality of prosecution (in the USA, but moreso in the soviet union and other places) is that often prosecutors first decide who needs to be charged with a crime, and secondly what crime to charge. And there are enough laws that there is always something to charge. This is also how the Soviet Union--which ostensibly had free speech and assembly--operated. Anyone who was problematic would find themselves guilty of obscure tax violations or other nonsense. The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem. I happen to think this is one of the most under-stated problems of our society, and it's difficult to fix because the people charged often did do something bad--just not illegal. As an example: the recent news of a journalist charged with hacking that gov website comes to mind.
- gruez 5y ago
  >The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem. tangential: is there a tl;dr of the book? Does the typical american really commit 3 felonies a day? If so, what?
  - Gunax 5y ago
    The book is roughly about the issue I talk about: laws are complex and innumerable and anyone can be found at fault. In short, we expect investigators to first be notified of a crime, then investigate to determine who committed it. Instead, they sometimes choose who needs to be convicted first--then investigate them until determining what the charge will be. For an overview, how about this: https://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-today-an-interview-with-harvey-silverglate/ https://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-tod...
  - lozenge 5y ago
    According to the negative Amazon reviews, no, the book never finds typical Americans committing felonies. However, if you're a doctor, or a farmer, or a politician, then surprise! There are special laws to follow that most people don't think about. One case involves somebody "out in the woods gathering shell casings from federal land", a very normal activity.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Even if you remove all loopholes and flexibility, sometimes courts grossly misinterpret laws and basically create their own. Like the guy who apparently wasn’t asking for a lawyer when he said “give me a lawyer dawg” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02/the-suspect-told-police-give-me-a-lawyer-dog-the-court-says-he-wasnt-asking-for-a-lawyer/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...) or these people who were convicted by “math” which was completely wrong (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA). In extreme cases authoritarian regimes will just ignore their own laws. At the end of the day you need a reasonable judge and lawyers.
- wisty 5y ago
  This is kind of a myth. That was only part of the reasoning. The suspect actually said: "If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer (dog) cause this is not what’s up." Is he actually requesting a lawyer? Maybe, or maybe he's saying he's innocent and asserting that he will defend himself (getting a lawyer) if charged. The police aren't required to execute subroutines either. You can't say "give me a lawyer if you think I'm guilty" or "give me a lawyer if Bobby was the snitch" or "give me a lawyer if the Collatz conjecture is true" (well you can, but they don't have to give you a lawyer then). You have to unambiguously ask for a lawyer if you want one. And he's saying it's how he feels. He says he feels he should get a lawyer if they think he's guilty. This is not a clear request for a lawyer.
  - lupire 5y ago
    That's because this person is not expert in law and the police exploited that. The intent was obvious.
    - avs733 5y ago
      and the courts choose to be party to this, and there is no consequence.
  - metadat 5y ago
ttctciyf 5y ago
The term "brainwashing" has an interesting (and somewhat ironic) genealogy. See [1] for one narrative. 1: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm
civilized 5y ago
If you try to make flexible offenses less flexible, you'll come up against the same principle that drives warmongering via accusations of sorcery: If I feel hurt, fearful, hateful, or threatened, and I feel it's your fault, then it's your fault. I think there are plenty of people who earnestly embrace this principle and would reject any attempt to put it out of their reach. It's just too powerful a weapon for sociopaths, and sociopaths still run the world.
ScarletEmerald 5y ago
The core problem American society is facing is bad faith participants. When a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system there is no clever rules hack that will prevent them from doing damage.
- onos 5y ago
  Is this something that is not always present? If so, why are we experiencing it now?
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Polarization. It's a race to the bottom. My opponent behaves deceptively so I guess I will to. As far as I understand this sort of political climate has also existed in the past in the US. > > a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system Note that this bit from GP would be readily agreed with by both the far left and far right in the US. However they would each give completely different examples of things that were destabilizing (according to them).
  - lariati 5y ago
    Of course but people just like to puppet nonsense and are ignorant of our own history. This for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_b... Or what about the vice president shooting one of the founding fathers dead over what was basically a twitter war for that time? Lol yea we are more extreme and divided now. Give me a break.
onos 5y ago
There are so many double standards applied today that it’s hard to know what the author has in mind. Can accept the idea that vague rules are subject to abuse though.
scanr 5y ago
We are millions of year old hardware running very old software with very few updates. It’s not surprising then that we have a few unpatched bugs. If I craft and send a message that does harm to a machine that I don’t own the law is pretty clear about what happens next. If I craft and send a message that does harm to a human by exploiting one of our bugs…
boxed 5y ago
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire Wildly incorrect beliefs are the most dangerous thing in the world. It's what led to 9/11 (islamism), WW2 (nazism), The Great Famine/The Cultural Revolution (Maoism), etc. We do need to defend against incorrect and dangerous ideas. Just putting misinformation in scare quotes to dismiss it isn't a good response.
- Stupulous 5y ago
  Voltaire was a passionate defender of free speech. Communist China and Weimar Republic Germany both had laws to suppress speech prior to their overthrow. Maoist China, Nazi Germany, and Islamist countries in the Middle East all suppressed opposition. Our current situation highly correlates with companies attempting to control speech, though one could argue that the causation runs the other way. The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- few are convinced by an authority saying a position is wrong. And there is no such authority that is free of corruption; there is no ultimate source of truth. Setting effectiveness aside, it is a cruelty to deny the right of expression to anyone. Humans deserve to share their beliefs with others. One of us is wrong right now. Would you prefer a world where that one is made to remain silent?
  - boxed 5y ago
    > The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- Well.. sort of. This is true if you're dealing with an honest debate partner. It's not true if you're dealing with an opponent that is a psy-ops operator of some kind or a 4chan troll army. False beliefs are literally infinite. They are fractal. Debunking also takes more effort than to invent a new idiotic position. This is an asymmetrical war. We want to limit the asymmetry so it becomes closer to symmetrical between wrong things and right things. This is a hard problem, but letting bots run rampant surely isn't helping. "The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
    - 5y ago
ComradePhil 5y ago
Modern brainwashing has been developed in the US and no wonder Americas poor seem to have been the biggest victims... whether it comes to what people should eat or do or say. For example, they have convinced an entire race of people that a word is offensive, in itself. Context doesn't matter. You can't even quote someone saying it. From the outside perspective, it's absolutely insane. It is very scary to think that there are poeple who pulled this off. What else can they do?
- stahlkopf 5y ago
- roenxi 5y ago
  That isn't a very good example unless you have some sort of argument why it is artificial. Cultures usually throw up sets of taboos or mandatory actions that are specific but also pointless (eg, spiritual rituals). Having magic banned words isn't even very unusual, just look at how patterns of behaviour when cursing change over the years.
nathias 5y ago
most laws are tools the rich use to fight each other by proxy of poor people
xg15 5y ago
I would add that this "flexibility" also lends itself very well to motte-and-bailey defenses: When pressed to justify such a law - say e.g. libel - you can draw up some gross, obvious offenses that fall under the law, ideally with the audience as the victim ("imagine someone walked around the neighborhood and was telling everyone you murdered someone"), giving you broad support. What you don't tell is what other, much more murkier circumstances would also be covered by the law - e.g. journalists publishing well-researched allegations of corruption.

101 points by cinquemb 5y ago

I wish the author gave examples for why he thinks "manipulation" and "gaslighting" are arbitrary and flexible. I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. It's fair to say that it's extremely difficult to prove manipulation, which makes it seem arbitrary. But, there's plenty of legal standards that require proving intent, not just action. That's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable or arbitrary

kiba 5y ago
OK? Discussion are often highly complex with shifting terrain. At some point 'manipulation' became a judgement call.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
randrews 5y ago
Shifting the definition of manipulation and gaslighting is itself a kind of manipulative gaslighting...
- abecedarius 5y ago
  Their definition of manipulation would forbid any negotiation move other than laying all of your cards on the table. ("Withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs.") So yeah.
  - User23 5y ago
    Tangentially, when negotiating I’ve had pretty good luck with just straight up asking what the other party’s best offer is. Usually I have to iterate a couple rounds of course. Rarely is the first response actually their best offer. Since I really am willing to walk away, it’s worked well for both professional and personal relationships. Obviously the framing and presentation is different between a job interview and a first date, but in the end it’s basically the same principles at work.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      Yeah, I actually lean towards openness too (though I once had to give up on an exciting job offer because I naively anchored the salary discussion with my previous government-salary-band-for-a-high-school-dropout, instead of just not answering). But it's gotta be a free choice; someone demanding it of you, as a supposed norm, is being pushy.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Would their definition forbid it, or would it just label such behavior as "manipulative" and you happen to have a negative association with that word? I do personally view many (but not all) "aggressive" negotiations as manipulative. And yes, withholding pertinent information is deceitful as far as I'm concerned.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      But I didn't bring up aggressive negotiations at all: I said that withholding any information about my private, personal valuation of a prospective trade constitutes "manipulation" according to the definition given. It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade. > Would their definition forbid it Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
      - mind-blight 5y ago
        That's a great critique of my definition. I don't think people are manipulative by withholding private or personal information. Withholding relevant information isn't manipulative in certain contexts either: i.e. those where all parties agree that there is no expectation of transparency. So, we could either argue that 1) deception implies that there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure, or 2) update the definition to explicitly say "...withheld information when there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure..." For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence). Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive. If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.
jessriedel 5y ago
> I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with. (One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)
- lazide 5y ago
  That doesn’t stop it from being manipulation - it’s just calling out how most people are hypocrites?
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy: > Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties. If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.
ajdv 5y ago
At a basic hardware level its not hard to understand. Our chimp brain has 200 billion neurons with about 1 trillion connections. There is nothing static about that network structure or the info flowing through it at any given moment. If there are 6-7 billion of these networks then connected up with each other in various other ever changing networks with different ever changing info flowing through, what the fuck hope is there of keeping all that hardware in sync for very long. The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.
- tartoran 5y ago
  We’re constantly updating and synching with peers and community. If these are giving us bad signals it’s sort of downward spiral.
slibhb 5y ago
I think the author is right that those terms are flexible (maybe arbitrary is too strong). They depend on value judgements or the ability to know someone else's mental state. "Bad faith" is a great example. It's easy to label someone "bad faith" just because you disagree with them and I find that's common. Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.
wisty 5y ago
What does "persuading in bad faith" mean? Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way? For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions. On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith? I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.
- mistermann 5y ago
  I think people who use the term bad faith (and similar phrases) use it with the best of intentions, but the ambiguous nature of it combined with the imprecise way most people speak and think results in it causing more problems not less.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  Yes, your first example is correct (by definition). Bad faith is misrepresenting your motivations or the relevant facts in some way, including by omission. > But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons> That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.
User23 5y ago
Effective rhetoric can use truth at least as easily as falsehood.

Gunax 5y ago

I know it isn't the main thrust of the piece, but I think the author nailed the real way that laws are used. > The key difference is that such “flexible offenses” tend to be defined more in terms of how someone important doesn’t like an outcome, and less in terms of what specifically someone did to induce that resulting dislike. There are so many crimes that anyone can be charged at any time. The reality of prosecution (in the USA, but moreso in the soviet union and other places) is that often prosecutors first decide who needs to be charged with a crime, and secondly what crime to charge. And there are enough laws that there is always something to charge. This is also how the Soviet Union--which ostensibly had free speech and assembly--operated. Anyone who was problematic would find themselves guilty of obscure tax violations or other nonsense. The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem. I happen to think this is one of the most under-stated problems of our society, and it's difficult to fix because the people charged often did do something bad--just not illegal. As an example: the recent news of a journalist charged with hacking that gov website comes to mind.

gruez 5y ago
>The book '3 felonies per day' is focused on this problem. tangential: is there a tl;dr of the book? Does the typical american really commit 3 felonies a day? If so, what?
- Gunax 5y ago
  The book is roughly about the issue I talk about: laws are complex and innumerable and anyone can be found at fault. In short, we expect investigators to first be notified of a crime, then investigate to determine who committed it. Instead, they sometimes choose who needs to be convicted first--then investigate them until determining what the charge will be. For an overview, how about this: https://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-today-an-interview-with-harvey-silverglate/ https://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-tod...
- lozenge 5y ago
  According to the negative Amazon reviews, no, the book never finds typical Americans committing felonies. However, if you're a doctor, or a farmer, or a politician, then surprise! There are special laws to follow that most people don't think about. One case involves somebody "out in the woods gathering shell casings from federal land", a very normal activity.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Even if you remove all loopholes and flexibility, sometimes courts grossly misinterpret laws and basically create their own. Like the guy who apparently wasn’t asking for a lawyer when he said “give me a lawyer dawg” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02/the-suspect-told-police-give-me-a-lawyer-dog-the-court-says-he-wasnt-asking-for-a-lawyer/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...) or these people who were convicted by “math” which was completely wrong (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA). In extreme cases authoritarian regimes will just ignore their own laws. At the end of the day you need a reasonable judge and lawyers.

wisty 5y ago
This is kind of a myth. That was only part of the reasoning. The suspect actually said: "If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer (dog) cause this is not what’s up." Is he actually requesting a lawyer? Maybe, or maybe he's saying he's innocent and asserting that he will defend himself (getting a lawyer) if charged. The police aren't required to execute subroutines either. You can't say "give me a lawyer if you think I'm guilty" or "give me a lawyer if Bobby was the snitch" or "give me a lawyer if the Collatz conjecture is true" (well you can, but they don't have to give you a lawyer then). You have to unambiguously ask for a lawyer if you want one. And he's saying it's how he feels. He says he feels he should get a lawyer if they think he's guilty. This is not a clear request for a lawyer.
- lupire 5y ago
  That's because this person is not expert in law and the police exploited that. The intent was obvious.
  - avs733 5y ago
    and the courts choose to be party to this, and there is no consequence.
- metadat 5y ago

ttctciyf 5y ago

The term "brainwashing" has an interesting (and somewhat ironic) genealogy. See [1] for one narrative. 1: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm

civilized 5y ago

If you try to make flexible offenses less flexible, you'll come up against the same principle that drives warmongering via accusations of sorcery: If I feel hurt, fearful, hateful, or threatened, and I feel it's your fault, then it's your fault. I think there are plenty of people who earnestly embrace this principle and would reject any attempt to put it out of their reach. It's just too powerful a weapon for sociopaths, and sociopaths still run the world.

ScarletEmerald 5y ago

The core problem American society is facing is bad faith participants. When a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system there is no clever rules hack that will prevent them from doing damage.

onos 5y ago
Is this something that is not always present? If so, why are we experiencing it now?
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  Polarization. It's a race to the bottom. My opponent behaves deceptively so I guess I will to. As far as I understand this sort of political climate has also existed in the past in the US. > > a significant number of participants in a society/organization/government are operating with the goal of destabilizing or destroying the system Note that this bit from GP would be readily agreed with by both the far left and far right in the US. However they would each give completely different examples of things that were destabilizing (according to them).
- lariati 5y ago
  Of course but people just like to puppet nonsense and are ignorant of our own history. This for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_b... Or what about the vice president shooting one of the founding fathers dead over what was basically a twitter war for that time? Lol yea we are more extreme and divided now. Give me a break.

onos 5y ago

There are so many double standards applied today that it’s hard to know what the author has in mind. Can accept the idea that vague rules are subject to abuse though.

scanr 5y ago

We are millions of year old hardware running very old software with very few updates. It’s not surprising then that we have a few unpatched bugs. If I craft and send a message that does harm to a machine that I don’t own the law is pretty clear about what happens next. If I craft and send a message that does harm to a human by exploiting one of our bugs…

boxed 5y ago

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire Wildly incorrect beliefs are the most dangerous thing in the world. It's what led to 9/11 (islamism), WW2 (nazism), The Great Famine/The Cultural Revolution (Maoism), etc. We do need to defend against incorrect and dangerous ideas. Just putting misinformation in scare quotes to dismiss it isn't a good response.

Stupulous 5y ago
Voltaire was a passionate defender of free speech. Communist China and Weimar Republic Germany both had laws to suppress speech prior to their overthrow. Maoist China, Nazi Germany, and Islamist countries in the Middle East all suppressed opposition. Our current situation highly correlates with companies attempting to control speech, though one could argue that the causation runs the other way. The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- few are convinced by an authority saying a position is wrong. And there is no such authority that is free of corruption; there is no ultimate source of truth. Setting effectiveness aside, it is a cruelty to deny the right of expression to anyone. Humans deserve to share their beliefs with others. One of us is wrong right now. Would you prefer a world where that one is made to remain silent?
- boxed 5y ago
  > The best way to counter wildly incorrect beliefs is to expose them to the light of open discourse- Well.. sort of. This is true if you're dealing with an honest debate partner. It's not true if you're dealing with an opponent that is a psy-ops operator of some kind or a 4chan troll army. False beliefs are literally infinite. They are fractal. Debunking also takes more effort than to invent a new idiotic position. This is an asymmetrical war. We want to limit the asymmetry so it becomes closer to symmetrical between wrong things and right things. This is a hard problem, but letting bots run rampant surely isn't helping. "The solution to bad speech is more speech" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't really make logical sense. The solution to confusion isn't more confusion. The solution to lying isn't more lying.
  - 5y ago

ComradePhil 5y ago

Modern brainwashing has been developed in the US and no wonder Americas poor seem to have been the biggest victims... whether it comes to what people should eat or do or say. For example, they have convinced an entire race of people that a word is offensive, in itself. Context doesn't matter. You can't even quote someone saying it. From the outside perspective, it's absolutely insane. It is very scary to think that there are poeple who pulled this off. What else can they do?

stahlkopf 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
That isn't a very good example unless you have some sort of argument why it is artificial. Cultures usually throw up sets of taboos or mandatory actions that are specific but also pointless (eg, spiritual rituals). Having magic banned words isn't even very unusual, just look at how patterns of behaviour when cursing change over the years.

nathias 5y ago

most laws are tools the rich use to fight each other by proxy of poor people

xg15 5y ago

I would add that this "flexibility" also lends itself very well to motte-and-bailey defenses: When pressed to justify such a law - say e.g. libel - you can draw up some gross, obvious offenses that fall under the law, ideally with the audience as the victim ("imagine someone walked around the neighborhood and was telling everyone you murdered someone"), giving you broad support. What you don't tell is what other, much more murkier circumstances would also be covered by the law - e.g. journalists publishing well-researched allegations of corruption.