5 ms·

This approach seems to presume you're not trying to talk to a programmed bot whose job is to amplify a prepared set of talking points (an approach pioneered by

This approach seems to presume you're not trying to talk to a programmed bot whose job is to amplify a prepared set of talking points (an approach pioneered by I believe the Edelman PR firm in the 1990s internet era, when all the bots were human). If someone's willing to pay a PR firm to run a bot farm of any kind, this has to be taken into account. Such issues include fossil-fueled global warming, the efficacy of the latest patented FDA-approved pharmaceutical product, the role of virological gain-of-function research in the origins of the Covid pandemic, the necessity of government funding budgets for various purposes from public health to the provision of weapons to European and Middle Eastern conflicts, desirability of regulation of financial institutions (Glass-Steagall etc.), and possibly most relevant to HN, the wisdom of running Linux vs. Windows vs. Apple operating systems to meet your personal, business, and other computing needs. How would one respond in such cases? "Well, I understand that your job requires you to amplify a certain set of talking points and play down others, and I sympathize with your need to earn a living by doing so, so have a nice day?" Of course a bot will never admit to being a bot - but even if you're dealing with a good faith actor, there's also the issue of whether or not you have a shared information base, e.g. attempts to discuss evolutionary theory with someone who believes the universe was created 6000 years ago probably won't go well.

nickpsecurity 2y ago
[flagged]
- crdrost 2y ago
  I'm somewhat confused; I thought there were many self-professed Christians who also believed in evolution. Also, given that the Bible is read in a very different cultural context today from the ones it was authored in, I assume one also needs faith in which interpretive lens (not quite the same as denomination, but not unrelated) to use? I see what you are saying about needing to take something as axiomatic, I just don't understand why you think the evolutionists have so many axioms and your axioms are altogether fewer? (I would also maybe take issue with your view on falsifying scientific theory but I think that's a distraction from more interesting issues maybe?)
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > I thought there were many self-professed Christians who also believed in evolution. There are. I myself am one. I don't know nearly enough about biology to be able to say whether the theory of evolution is true, so I default to "trust the people who study this for a living". But there's no reason that God couldn't have used natural processes like evolution to enact his vision for the world, so to me there's no conflict at all with my faith.
  - nickpsecurity 2y ago
    There are. They usually aren’t committed to following the text when it conflicts with their current culture, though. Some are with an interpretation that’s different from the older ones. Likely an error given God promised to help us interpret His Word with the gift of teaching. So, why wouldn’t we believe it Biblically? First, God describes creation like He did it personally in Genesis. He describes everything up to the Fall of humanity in Gen. 1-3. It’s here because I’ll reference it a few times: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201-3&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201-3&v... First, in Gen. 1:11-13, God creates the plants on Earth before creating the stars and moon. They aren’t getting energy from the Sun in photosynthesis. That contradicts the scientific model of how life formed. Second, God doesn’t create us from the animals. He describes it like He made us from scratch. Were the most important thing to Him, made in His image. He describes it elsewhere like a Potter shaping a piece of clay into what He imagines. He does it for each of us through natural processes He directs but originally sculpted the entire person. Third, He says it was six days with resting on the seventh day. The way the word is used in Hebrew is how they usually do a 24-hour day. In the New Testament, writers aided by the Holy Spirit reference it like it was a 24-day day. Fourth, there is no death on Earth at this point. God made us to love Him, love each other, and enjoy this world. He blessed them with life. Humanity’s betrayal of God, where every human ever born chooses to commit evil acts, results in God punishing us with the curses in Genesis 3 (and 4). Death itself, with a lifespan of 120 years, is a curse He introduces into a deathless world. He’ll later counter death by giving us life by faith in Jesus Christ our God. This contradicts evolution where death creates people from other animals. If anything, evolution glorifies death because evolutionists believe it’s one of the main drivers of biological progress. Fifth, God’s Word indicates there’s different “kinds,” or categories, of creatures that He may have fixed. It’s a bit higher than a species in current taxonomy. While creatures adapt, we’ve actually not seen these categories of animals change into other animals despite billions of animals in captivity. God’s Word is holding up while evolution is refuted by billions of data points. Sixth, we see what we’d call an explosion of life where fully-formed creatures show up with no parents. Later, there’s a global Flood, which built up over time, which would cause other catastrophes if driven by or paired with geological events. That would cause mass extinctions while dropping fossils in layers on the Earth. Evolution instead predicted continuous streams of small adaptations from the tiniest animals to the most complex. We saw virtually no transitional fossils despite evolution requiring piles of them everywhere for the multitude of observed species. Supporting God’s Word, we do see life disappearing in mass extinctions, life appearing out of nowhere in mass (eg Cambrian explosion), evidence of catastrophes, and rapid shifts in geography of some areas. Lastly, God’s Word describes our creation as a story of how He made us for Himself, we all chose evil, rejected Him, and He pursued us to redeem us. That He loved us so much He gave His Son, Jesus Christ, for us who died and rose again to set free all who repent and believe in Him. This helps us empirically. Human creators rapidly design their artificial universes or movie sets using their own technology to get to the point of the story they’re trying to tell. They don’t evolve them over billions of years within the laws and timeline of their creation. God rapidly creating His movie set in six days, but then letting it play out within its own laws, is exactly how most human creations operate. Empirically, God’s Word shows a Creator that uses principles like all observed creators with good, logical reason for a quick creation, too. So, there’s some ways God’s Word contradicts macro-evolution as origin of life. It doesn’t contradict diversification within categories. We’ve observed that. God’s Word also tells us to protect all individual lives, loving each as ourselves. Each individual’s life has purpose. Godless, amoral evolution encourages things like eugenics or genocide to “improve” our species or accomplish the selfish goals of those in power. Nothing really matters either. So, evolution combined with other beliefs contradict both the truths in and righteous goals of God’s Word.
- otherme123 2y ago
  Not going to discuss with you about evolution, but about your last "dissent is not allowed" I would like to remind you that evolution theory was born from dissent, rejected at first and then slowly being accepted as the most probable scientific explanation for the pool of evidence available. The same is true for another theory like the continental drift. Dissent is not only allowed, but one of the main drivers of scientific advance. A lot of times we find some solidifying evidence a posteriori (e.g. when common fossils were found in Africa and South America after hypothesizing they were once together) for a dissenting hipothesis.
  - nickpsecurity 2y ago
    That’s a good point. Evolution had an uphill battle early on before many scientists accepted it. Dissent does help in many areas. It’s allowed within evolution, but not against it. No dissent is allowed contradicting the entire theory. We have to teach it like it’s an observed fact, anyone disagreeing is mocked, and it’s blended into tons of topics with no evidence it happened. People just start saying something is an evolutionary X or Y happened over millions of years with no proof of this. That a theory with many articles of faith becomes the lens through which observed facts are reshaped is more like philosophy or religion. That it can’t be contradicted and its proponents rooted out all alternatives. This shows it’s built on group or political power, not the scientific method.
marc_abonce 2y ago
This is a legit concern, even if the propagandists are human rather than bots. To be fair, though, online debates may have value for the readers even if they never convince the original poster. Since most users in a forum are lurkers[1] it's very hard to measure how effective is an argument and what extent is a particular debate even worth it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
- randomdata 2y ago
  How do you even measure the effectiveness towards the original poster? Logically, you are going to spend more time 'arguing' for what you don't believe in as a validation that you truly understand what you do believe in, so what onlookers read is not even a reflection of reality.
komali2 2y ago
I think a lot about, maybe it was "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," or some other Stephenson book, but a plot point was someone open-sourcing a method of releasing millions of low-resource-consumption high-efficacy bots that could take a topic and disseminate several gigabytes of misinformation about that topic across every platform. The system was effective enough to make it virtually impossible to know whether some random town in iirc Ohio got nuked, creating a q-anon cult around that. Then once the bots were released en mass by whoever wants to use them, the internet became indecipherable. Regarding this topic of people believing wrong and harmful things on the internet and spreading it around (mixed in with the 999 bots is 1 person's great aunt exposing her brain to unfiltered bot noise), I wonder, would the better solution be like the one from the novel, to completely annihilate the trustworthiness of the unfiltered internet, or, perhaps there's some other solution that counters the Oil and Gas bots, perhaps even following a strategy like in the OP article, politely Dale Carnegieing every single point with boundless energy, enthusiasm, politeness, and good faith? I'm personally motivated by this because my belief system rests on a belief that power and knowledge should be freely distributed among humans equally, alongside responsibility, but for this to work we'd need a method for individuals to resist a much easier to produce tide of bullshit.
derbOac 2y ago
I think there's a continuum of good versus bad faith motivation in any discussion anywhere. The problem on social media I think is twofold: first, you often don't know where on that continuum things are because you might not know enough about who you are interacting with or why, and second, when you do know who you're interacting with, the public nature of the discussion incentivizes performative aims with regard to other possible readers, rather than working through some argument with you and the other person in particular. Any argument has some aim I think, and it's often implicit. It may be to achieve some aim that depends on the other person, or it may be to repair a relationship, or it might be to inflict some outcome in an organizational setting, it may be to work out something in your head, or it may be to convince bystanders of a position. Sometimes you end up with bots, sometimes you end up with PR people, sometimes you end up with highly politically motivated people, sometimes you end up with people who are trying to sell their own book or paper or whatever. You just don't know and even though I do think a lot of people — maybe most — are acting in very good faith, some of them are not, and it varies in degree. I also think social media systems are fundamentally broken at the moment, and ideally we should be moving to highly decentralized and/or federated platforms. That's a slightly different issue probably but maybe not — I think the subtle aims of platforms tend to trickle down into this too, and nudge different types of behaviors. In any given case it might be a tiny effect, but it accumulates I think.

nickpsecurity 2y ago

[flagged]

crdrost 2y ago
I'm somewhat confused; I thought there were many self-professed Christians who also believed in evolution. Also, given that the Bible is read in a very different cultural context today from the ones it was authored in, I assume one also needs faith in which interpretive lens (not quite the same as denomination, but not unrelated) to use? I see what you are saying about needing to take something as axiomatic, I just don't understand why you think the evolutionists have so many axioms and your axioms are altogether fewer? (I would also maybe take issue with your view on falsifying scientific theory but I think that's a distraction from more interesting issues maybe?)
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > I thought there were many self-professed Christians who also believed in evolution. There are. I myself am one. I don't know nearly enough about biology to be able to say whether the theory of evolution is true, so I default to "trust the people who study this for a living". But there's no reason that God couldn't have used natural processes like evolution to enact his vision for the world, so to me there's no conflict at all with my faith.
- nickpsecurity 2y ago
  There are. They usually aren’t committed to following the text when it conflicts with their current culture, though. Some are with an interpretation that’s different from the older ones. Likely an error given God promised to help us interpret His Word with the gift of teaching. So, why wouldn’t we believe it Biblically? First, God describes creation like He did it personally in Genesis. He describes everything up to the Fall of humanity in Gen. 1-3. It’s here because I’ll reference it a few times: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201-3&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201-3&v... First, in Gen. 1:11-13, God creates the plants on Earth before creating the stars and moon. They aren’t getting energy from the Sun in photosynthesis. That contradicts the scientific model of how life formed. Second, God doesn’t create us from the animals. He describes it like He made us from scratch. Were the most important thing to Him, made in His image. He describes it elsewhere like a Potter shaping a piece of clay into what He imagines. He does it for each of us through natural processes He directs but originally sculpted the entire person. Third, He says it was six days with resting on the seventh day. The way the word is used in Hebrew is how they usually do a 24-hour day. In the New Testament, writers aided by the Holy Spirit reference it like it was a 24-day day. Fourth, there is no death on Earth at this point. God made us to love Him, love each other, and enjoy this world. He blessed them with life. Humanity’s betrayal of God, where every human ever born chooses to commit evil acts, results in God punishing us with the curses in Genesis 3 (and 4). Death itself, with a lifespan of 120 years, is a curse He introduces into a deathless world. He’ll later counter death by giving us life by faith in Jesus Christ our God. This contradicts evolution where death creates people from other animals. If anything, evolution glorifies death because evolutionists believe it’s one of the main drivers of biological progress. Fifth, God’s Word indicates there’s different “kinds,” or categories, of creatures that He may have fixed. It’s a bit higher than a species in current taxonomy. While creatures adapt, we’ve actually not seen these categories of animals change into other animals despite billions of animals in captivity. God’s Word is holding up while evolution is refuted by billions of data points. Sixth, we see what we’d call an explosion of life where fully-formed creatures show up with no parents. Later, there’s a global Flood, which built up over time, which would cause other catastrophes if driven by or paired with geological events. That would cause mass extinctions while dropping fossils in layers on the Earth. Evolution instead predicted continuous streams of small adaptations from the tiniest animals to the most complex. We saw virtually no transitional fossils despite evolution requiring piles of them everywhere for the multitude of observed species. Supporting God’s Word, we do see life disappearing in mass extinctions, life appearing out of nowhere in mass (eg Cambrian explosion), evidence of catastrophes, and rapid shifts in geography of some areas. Lastly, God’s Word describes our creation as a story of how He made us for Himself, we all chose evil, rejected Him, and He pursued us to redeem us. That He loved us so much He gave His Son, Jesus Christ, for us who died and rose again to set free all who repent and believe in Him. This helps us empirically. Human creators rapidly design their artificial universes or movie sets using their own technology to get to the point of the story they’re trying to tell. They don’t evolve them over billions of years within the laws and timeline of their creation. God rapidly creating His movie set in six days, but then letting it play out within its own laws, is exactly how most human creations operate. Empirically, God’s Word shows a Creator that uses principles like all observed creators with good, logical reason for a quick creation, too. So, there’s some ways God’s Word contradicts macro-evolution as origin of life. It doesn’t contradict diversification within categories. We’ve observed that. God’s Word also tells us to protect all individual lives, loving each as ourselves. Each individual’s life has purpose. Godless, amoral evolution encourages things like eugenics or genocide to “improve” our species or accomplish the selfish goals of those in power. Nothing really matters either. So, evolution combined with other beliefs contradict both the truths in and righteous goals of God’s Word.
otherme123 2y ago
Not going to discuss with you about evolution, but about your last "dissent is not allowed" I would like to remind you that evolution theory was born from dissent, rejected at first and then slowly being accepted as the most probable scientific explanation for the pool of evidence available. The same is true for another theory like the continental drift. Dissent is not only allowed, but one of the main drivers of scientific advance. A lot of times we find some solidifying evidence a posteriori (e.g. when common fossils were found in Africa and South America after hypothesizing they were once together) for a dissenting hipothesis.
- nickpsecurity 2y ago
  That’s a good point. Evolution had an uphill battle early on before many scientists accepted it. Dissent does help in many areas. It’s allowed within evolution, but not against it. No dissent is allowed contradicting the entire theory. We have to teach it like it’s an observed fact, anyone disagreeing is mocked, and it’s blended into tons of topics with no evidence it happened. People just start saying something is an evolutionary X or Y happened over millions of years with no proof of this. That a theory with many articles of faith becomes the lens through which observed facts are reshaped is more like philosophy or religion. That it can’t be contradicted and its proponents rooted out all alternatives. This shows it’s built on group or political power, not the scientific method.

marc_abonce 2y ago

This is a legit concern, even if the propagandists are human rather than bots. To be fair, though, online debates may have value for the readers even if they never convince the original poster. Since most users in a forum are lurkers[1] it's very hard to measure how effective is an argument and what extent is a particular debate even worth it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

randomdata 2y ago
How do you even measure the effectiveness towards the original poster? Logically, you are going to spend more time 'arguing' for what you don't believe in as a validation that you truly understand what you do believe in, so what onlookers read is not even a reflection of reality.

komali2 2y ago

I think a lot about, maybe it was "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," or some other Stephenson book, but a plot point was someone open-sourcing a method of releasing millions of low-resource-consumption high-efficacy bots that could take a topic and disseminate several gigabytes of misinformation about that topic across every platform. The system was effective enough to make it virtually impossible to know whether some random town in iirc Ohio got nuked, creating a q-anon cult around that. Then once the bots were released en mass by whoever wants to use them, the internet became indecipherable. Regarding this topic of people believing wrong and harmful things on the internet and spreading it around (mixed in with the 999 bots is 1 person's great aunt exposing her brain to unfiltered bot noise), I wonder, would the better solution be like the one from the novel, to completely annihilate the trustworthiness of the unfiltered internet, or, perhaps there's some other solution that counters the Oil and Gas bots, perhaps even following a strategy like in the OP article, politely Dale Carnegieing every single point with boundless energy, enthusiasm, politeness, and good faith? I'm personally motivated by this because my belief system rests on a belief that power and knowledge should be freely distributed among humans equally, alongside responsibility, but for this to work we'd need a method for individuals to resist a much easier to produce tide of bullshit.

derbOac 2y ago

I think there's a continuum of good versus bad faith motivation in any discussion anywhere. The problem on social media I think is twofold: first, you often don't know where on that continuum things are because you might not know enough about who you are interacting with or why, and second, when you do know who you're interacting with, the public nature of the discussion incentivizes performative aims with regard to other possible readers, rather than working through some argument with you and the other person in particular. Any argument has some aim I think, and it's often implicit. It may be to achieve some aim that depends on the other person, or it may be to repair a relationship, or it might be to inflict some outcome in an organizational setting, it may be to work out something in your head, or it may be to convince bystanders of a position. Sometimes you end up with bots, sometimes you end up with PR people, sometimes you end up with highly politically motivated people, sometimes you end up with people who are trying to sell their own book or paper or whatever. You just don't know and even though I do think a lot of people — maybe most — are acting in very good faith, some of them are not, and it varies in degree. I also think social media systems are fundamentally broken at the moment, and ideally we should be moving to highly decentralized and/or federated platforms. That's a slightly different issue probably but maybe not — I think the subtle aims of platforms tend to trickle down into this too, and nudge different types of behaviors. In any given case it might be a tiny effect, but it accumulates I think.