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>Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineer

by mrex 4y ago

>Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried? Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us. This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredit-natural-gas-fracking-635052 https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi... >It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living. But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.

toolz 4y ago
> Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and which of these countries have successfully controlled their own citizens? If you successfully control your citizens you don't end up in economic shambles, you simply manipulate lay-people to act in accordance with the most educated economists. Were talking about countries that can't even prevent terrorist attacks from incredibly low-tech enemies like ISIS, but we're worried that they're capable of understanding the human condition well enough to control entire foreign populations? I mean the proposed threat is something of sci-fi levels of fantastic and just doesn't warrant reasonable concern. Modern science can't even cure depression, much less brainwash people. Sure you can negligibly alter behavior with ads and propaganda, but you can't use that to affect peoples self-interest. Maybe someone will spend 20% more on some inconsequential consumer item, but if someones family or friends come into question, all bets are off. Sure you might see fantastical representations of things like the Hitlers youth, but look at the reality. It didn't take hold, compulsory attendance was frequently ignored and discontent and boredom set in quickly. Now if you read the newspaper in the west, you'd think they turned those children into little hitler robots, but nothing could be further from the truth. So at best, you can amass loads of power and authority and destroy your own country and spend all your political capital attempting to do so, but the threat of someone like hitler implementing hitlers youth or something on foreign soil is just detached from reality.
- mrex 4y ago
  We aren't talking about some far-out concept like brainwashing, though. We are talking about information warfare, where information asymmetry is a battlefield advantage. That's not a theoretical or far-out concept at all, it's here and now and we are seeing this information war playing out on the world stage every day!
  - toolz 4y ago
    When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing. Not the sci-fi concept of literally taking over their mind, but knowing everything, public and private, about someone and using that information to make them behave how you want them to behave is what I mean. Some politicians also kill their political opponents in order to secure their own political positions of power. This is also a political advantage. How far exactly should we cross ethical boundaries in order to secure these perceived advantages? I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. We already spy on people and we couldn't even stop 9/11. Further these low-tech ISIS-like groups have been successful all around the world even on high alert. So again, these theoretical advantages aren't amounting to anything, but the consequences couldn't be more apparent. The lack of trust between the governing and governed classes is abysmal. It's damn near impossible to do anything consequential in politics because no one trusts each other. These consequences are astoundingly more real to me than these shadowy threats that somehow are so advanced, yet the real-world attacks are nothing more than low-tech extremists hijacking airplanes with razor blades.
    - mrex 4y ago
      >When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing. That's a semantic debate that's neither here nor there. If that's what you consider brainwashing, fine, but that's here today and it's happening every day. Do you have any idea what credit reporting agencies know about you, your purchasing habits, your media consumption preferences, your politics, your medical history, your sex life? >I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. You don't? Well let me give you an example. Let's say there is a movement of individuals within a nation who are discontent about some specific policy or behavior of their government. First, intelligence would allow you to discover this fact. Then it would allow you to research and profile the individuals who you've identified in this group, and refine your search parameters to identify likely candidates to recruit. It would also help you to refine messaging, giving you instant feedback about the virality of trial balloons you floated. Using these tools, you don't see how domestic unrest could be created?

by mrex 4y ago

toolz 4y ago

> Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and which of these countries have successfully controlled their own citizens? If you successfully control your citizens you don't end up in economic shambles, you simply manipulate lay-people to act in accordance with the most educated economists. Were talking about countries that can't even prevent terrorist attacks from incredibly low-tech enemies like ISIS, but we're worried that they're capable of understanding the human condition well enough to control entire foreign populations? I mean the proposed threat is something of sci-fi levels of fantastic and just doesn't warrant reasonable concern. Modern science can't even cure depression, much less brainwash people. Sure you can negligibly alter behavior with ads and propaganda, but you can't use that to affect peoples self-interest. Maybe someone will spend 20% more on some inconsequential consumer item, but if someones family or friends come into question, all bets are off. Sure you might see fantastical representations of things like the Hitlers youth, but look at the reality. It didn't take hold, compulsory attendance was frequently ignored and discontent and boredom set in quickly. Now if you read the newspaper in the west, you'd think they turned those children into little hitler robots, but nothing could be further from the truth. So at best, you can amass loads of power and authority and destroy your own country and spend all your political capital attempting to do so, but the threat of someone like hitler implementing hitlers youth or something on foreign soil is just detached from reality.

mrex 4y ago
We aren't talking about some far-out concept like brainwashing, though. We are talking about information warfare, where information asymmetry is a battlefield advantage. That's not a theoretical or far-out concept at all, it's here and now and we are seeing this information war playing out on the world stage every day!
- toolz 4y ago
  When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing. Not the sci-fi concept of literally taking over their mind, but knowing everything, public and private, about someone and using that information to make them behave how you want them to behave is what I mean. Some politicians also kill their political opponents in order to secure their own political positions of power. This is also a political advantage. How far exactly should we cross ethical boundaries in order to secure these perceived advantages? I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. We already spy on people and we couldn't even stop 9/11. Further these low-tech ISIS-like groups have been successful all around the world even on high alert. So again, these theoretical advantages aren't amounting to anything, but the consequences couldn't be more apparent. The lack of trust between the governing and governed classes is abysmal. It's damn near impossible to do anything consequential in politics because no one trusts each other. These consequences are astoundingly more real to me than these shadowy threats that somehow are so advanced, yet the real-world attacks are nothing more than low-tech extremists hijacking airplanes with razor blades.
  - mrex 4y ago
    >When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing. That's a semantic debate that's neither here nor there. If that's what you consider brainwashing, fine, but that's here today and it's happening every day. Do you have any idea what credit reporting agencies know about you, your purchasing habits, your media consumption preferences, your politics, your medical history, your sex life? >I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. You don't? Well let me give you an example. Let's say there is a movement of individuals within a nation who are discontent about some specific policy or behavior of their government. First, intelligence would allow you to discover this fact. Then it would allow you to research and profile the individuals who you've identified in this group, and refine your search parameters to identify likely candidates to recruit. It would also help you to refine messaging, giving you instant feedback about the virality of trial balloons you floated. Using these tools, you don't see how domestic unrest could be created?