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As I get older, I realize increasingly that there is a huge gap between how most people think the government works and how it actually works... Also, the govern

As I get older, I realize increasingly that there is a huge gap between how most people think the government works and how it actually works... Also, the government and other entities which benefit from the incongruity spend a massive amount of effort constructing narratives to obscure the discrepancy in the public eye. If you boil it down and peek beneath the many layers of complexity and misdirection, reality is disturbingly dark and you wonder how society functions at all and how so many people can be fooled into believing surface narratives... But in a way, it's because people are fooled that society can function as-is, in spite of its dysfunction. If people knew how the system really worked, it would have to change. IMO, the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent, things improve. But the system is always at the edge; constantly gaslighting the public as much as it can get away with at any given time. The state rarely apologizes for past mistakes; unless it serves some new agenda which it benefits from (e.g. the mistake happened under different leadership). There should be some rule like "The state is precisely as corrupt as it can get away with." Or "The state is corrupt proportionally to how passive and delusional its citizens are."

mmooss 2y ago
> the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent Is that what is happening now?
- jongjong 2y ago
  Well compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead. > powerful media If you include social media, I'm with you. > As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical. You said, and I agree, that people have become "extremely propagandized/delusional" due to prior tech development; why would AI tech have different outcomes?
    - jongjong 2y ago
      I've been thinking about human communication and how much it changed over time. It crazy to think that before the printing press, the most efficient form of communication was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth only conveys a very vague, unreliable description of reality. Communication was unreliable. People knew they could not fully trust what was communicated to them; not only because the original material may not be reliable, but people knew the message could have been distorted as it propagated through the population 'Chinese Whispers' effect. Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source... Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality. Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it. Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability. The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today. Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?

mmooss 2y ago

> the good news is that generally, when the system is forced to change to become more transparent Is that what is happening now?

jongjong 2y ago
Well compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead. > powerful media If you include social media, I'm with you. > As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical. You said, and I agree, that people have become "extremely propagandized/delusional" due to prior tech development; why would AI tech have different outcomes?
  - jongjong 2y ago
    I've been thinking about human communication and how much it changed over time. It crazy to think that before the printing press, the most efficient form of communication was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth only conveys a very vague, unreliable description of reality. Communication was unreliable. People knew they could not fully trust what was communicated to them; not only because the original material may not be reliable, but people knew the message could have been distorted as it propagated through the population 'Chinese Whispers' effect. Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source... Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality. Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it. Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability. The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today. Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?