8 ms·

Facts are the enemy. I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.

ericras 8mo ago
[flagged]
- milesvp 8mo ago
  This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
  - Noaidi 8mo ago
    > While the parent comment is low quality I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
    - milesvp 8mo ago
      Forgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.
      - andrewmcwatters 8mo ago
        Your back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.
    - eth0up 8mo ago
      I'll second here. While not profound, I found myself nodding, involuntarily, in agreement.
  - nothrabannosir 8mo ago
    I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards. Upvote from me :)
Xmd5a 8mo ago
> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
dizlexic 8mo ago
I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10 It could be as simple as budget changes.
- iAMkenough 8mo ago
  Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
  - dizlexic 8mo ago
    source or evidence of this?
    - iAMkenough 8mo ago
      It's broadly reported that lawyers often depend on it in asylum cases as "a trusted, objective source for country conditions." If you want an official government source to outright say "it was inconveniencing our mass deportation efforts," I don't know what to tell you.
- antiframe 8mo ago
  I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia. I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
deepsun 8mo ago
Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".
nostrademons 8mo ago
FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S. They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
- casenmgreen 8mo ago
  I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing. I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks. Can you describe the basis for the claim?
  - andy_ppp 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - hananova 8mo ago
      If I wanted to know what ChatGPT says, I’m more than capable of asking it myself thank you.
    - gspr 8mo ago
      I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source. Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.
    - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact. Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1] If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true. Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on. The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support [1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )
irishcoffee 8mo ago
Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
- gampleman 8mo ago
  I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
  - pohl 8mo ago
    Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling for dopamine hits and distraction.
- oliyoung 8mo ago
  BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so, than 1984
  - irishcoffee 8mo ago
    Yeah, that and Atlas Shrugged, but mentioning that book is a magnet for dissention. Edit: I was correct, and I don't understand why. Was AS somehow twisted for political reasons? It's a great book.
    - collingreen 8mo ago
      Atlas Shrugged (and the fountainhead) is like a superhero comic book where the almighty good guys fight the flat, faceless "bad guys" with pure and fully justified moral righteousness. The "bad guys" are a slobbering caricature of a boogeyman that everyone can easily despise - wanting to do nothing except take from others like a bridge troll or a grey goo disaster scenario. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason. I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.
boshomi 8mo ago
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
- normalaccess 8mo ago
  Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
  - gffrd 8mo ago
    It’s a shame we don’t have physical bodies and a means to share the human experience with other humans without intermediaries.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
      What's your plan, be present at all major events?
      - gffrd 8mo ago
        Well, I am God, so yes. My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not. The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable. Edits: more words, and wording
        8mo ago
j-bos 8mo ago
I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!
niobe 8mo ago
Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.
guywithahat 8mo ago
But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.
joriJordan 8mo ago
Wild. Growing up through Reagan, I saw the world only act like this. Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism. To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words. Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
- GS523523 8mo ago
  > To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words. Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
  - Fairburn 8mo ago
    Religion = blind loyalty (to those in power of said religion) It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.
    - GS523523 8mo ago
      That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd. You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.
      - necovek 8mo ago
        I'd actually go a step further: even science and scientific method require a sort of "faith" that the underlying assumptions (axioms of formal logic and algebra at the very least) are true. The core difference is that science invites questioning those unprovable assumptions, whereas religion usually does not (and sometimes forbids it as part of the canon).
blindriver 8mo ago
I had the opposite reaction to you. I read the Handmaid's Tale and my first thought after finishing it was "Oh wow, this might actually happen here!"
IcyWindows 8mo ago
If the CIA published this for the first time this year, no one would want it. Why is valued if it is removed?
notepad0x90 8mo ago
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ― George Orwell, 1984
casey2 8mo ago
Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same. The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook. That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it. One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion. There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.
- necovek 8mo ago
  It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name. There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).

ericras 8mo ago

[flagged]

milesvp 8mo ago
This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
- Noaidi 8mo ago
  > While the parent comment is low quality I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
  - milesvp 8mo ago
    Forgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.
    - andrewmcwatters 8mo ago
      Your back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.
  - eth0up 8mo ago
    I'll second here. While not profound, I found myself nodding, involuntarily, in agreement.
- nothrabannosir 8mo ago
  I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards. Upvote from me :)

Xmd5a 8mo ago

> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.

dizlexic 8mo ago

I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10 It could be as simple as budget changes.

iAMkenough 8mo ago
Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
- dizlexic 8mo ago
  source or evidence of this?
  - iAMkenough 8mo ago
    It's broadly reported that lawyers often depend on it in asylum cases as "a trusted, objective source for country conditions." If you want an official government source to outright say "it was inconveniencing our mass deportation efforts," I don't know what to tell you.
antiframe 8mo ago
I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia. I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

deepsun 8mo ago

Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".

nostrademons 8mo ago

FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S. They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.

casenmgreen 8mo ago
I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing. I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks. Can you describe the basis for the claim?
- andy_ppp 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hananova 8mo ago
    If I wanted to know what ChatGPT says, I’m more than capable of asking it myself thank you.
  - gspr 8mo ago
    I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source. Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.
  - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
    So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact. Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1] If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true. Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on. The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support [1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )

irishcoffee 8mo ago

Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?

gampleman 8mo ago
I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
- pohl 8mo ago
  Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling for dopamine hits and distraction.
oliyoung 8mo ago
BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so, than 1984
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  Yeah, that and Atlas Shrugged, but mentioning that book is a magnet for dissention. Edit: I was correct, and I don't understand why. Was AS somehow twisted for political reasons? It's a great book.
  - collingreen 8mo ago
    Atlas Shrugged (and the fountainhead) is like a superhero comic book where the almighty good guys fight the flat, faceless "bad guys" with pure and fully justified moral righteousness. The "bad guys" are a slobbering caricature of a boogeyman that everyone can easily despise - wanting to do nothing except take from others like a bridge troll or a grey goo disaster scenario. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason. I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.

boshomi 8mo ago

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)

normalaccess 8mo ago
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
- gffrd 8mo ago
  It’s a shame we don’t have physical bodies and a means to share the human experience with other humans without intermediaries.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
    What's your plan, be present at all major events?
    - gffrd 8mo ago
      Well, I am God, so yes. My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not. The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable. Edits: more words, and wording
      - 8mo ago

j-bos 8mo ago

I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!

niobe 8mo ago

Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.

guywithahat 8mo ago

But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.

joriJordan 8mo ago

Wild. Growing up through Reagan, I saw the world only act like this. Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism. To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words. Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.

GS523523 8mo ago
> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words. Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
- Fairburn 8mo ago
  Religion = blind loyalty (to those in power of said religion) It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.
  - GS523523 8mo ago
    That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd. You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.
    - necovek 8mo ago
      I'd actually go a step further: even science and scientific method require a sort of "faith" that the underlying assumptions (axioms of formal logic and algebra at the very least) are true. The core difference is that science invites questioning those unprovable assumptions, whereas religion usually does not (and sometimes forbids it as part of the canon).

blindriver 8mo ago

I had the opposite reaction to you. I read the Handmaid's Tale and my first thought after finishing it was "Oh wow, this might actually happen here!"

IcyWindows 8mo ago

If the CIA published this for the first time this year, no one would want it. Why is valued if it is removed?

notepad0x90 8mo ago

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ― George Orwell, 1984

casey2 8mo ago

Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same. The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook. That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it. One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion. There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.

necovek 8mo ago
It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name. There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).