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Somewhat off-topic, but does your PsyOp experience help you in Cybersecurity? I imagine it's valuable for social engineering or (possibly) getting management to

Somewhat off-topic, but does your PsyOp experience help you in Cybersecurity? I imagine it's valuable for social engineering or (possibly) getting management to accept that it's needed.

boston_clone 5y ago
Thanks for asking; I was wanting someone to bring this up. It certainly does help. All too often, great ideas are communicated poorly and end up going nowhere, I think. Knowing how to frame something for a particular audience, or helping people feel like they're heard / acknowledged / part of a team, or seeing through pervasive political fogs, and a bunch of other little skills that really boil down to "good communication" and "psychology" have undeniably helped. Somewhat unfortunately, I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad!
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad! No problem convincing my guys of this. We start with public health and safety campaigns like the famous Stop. Look. Listen. that ran through the 1970s with Darth Vader actor David Prowse here in the UK. Prowse, who fell out with George Lucas, once said that Vader was not his greatest work as a body actor by any means, but the Green Cross Man, which is estimated to have saved 500,000 children's lives. When I did influence work it was in a similar vein, directed towards the kind of things you'd have no moral objection to, like stopping kids from picking up cluster bombs or preventing rape as a weapon of war. There's plenty of for-good psyops work out there. There's also what I'd call "Counter-Pysops", which is just Intellectual Self-Defence. This can range from training people to spot and deflect phishing or blackmail scams, all the way to message analysis to spot and neutrally evaluate foreign psyops messages.
- electriclizard 5y ago
  >I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad! By a series of unfortunate events I've been victim to gaslighting from a lot of people in my personal and work lives, so I struggle with this too.

Somewhat off-topic, but does your PsyOp experience help you in Cybersecurity? I imagine it's valuable for social engineering or (possibly) getting management to accept that it's needed.

boston_clone 5y ago

Thanks for asking; I was wanting someone to bring this up. It certainly does help. All too often, great ideas are communicated poorly and end up going nowhere, I think. Knowing how to frame something for a particular audience, or helping people feel like they're heard / acknowledged / part of a team, or seeing through pervasive political fogs, and a bunch of other little skills that really boil down to "good communication" and "psychology" have undeniably helped. Somewhat unfortunately, I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad!

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad! No problem convincing my guys of this. We start with public health and safety campaigns like the famous Stop. Look. Listen. that ran through the 1970s with Darth Vader actor David Prowse here in the UK. Prowse, who fell out with George Lucas, once said that Vader was not his greatest work as a body actor by any means, but the Green Cross Man, which is estimated to have saved 500,000 children's lives. When I did influence work it was in a similar vein, directed towards the kind of things you'd have no moral objection to, like stopping kids from picking up cluster bombs or preventing rape as a weapon of war. There's plenty of for-good psyops work out there. There's also what I'd call "Counter-Pysops", which is just Intellectual Self-Defence. This can range from training people to spot and deflect phishing or blackmail scams, all the way to message analysis to spot and neutrally evaluate foreign psyops messages.
electriclizard 5y ago
>I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad! By a series of unfortunate events I've been victim to gaslighting from a lot of people in my personal and work lives, so I struggle with this too.