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What's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Some

• mopsi 6d ago
  It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.
  • fiu10 6d ago
    We need a downfall parody: "Hitler uses Openclaw".
  • ben_w 6d ago
    I've heard many variants; Paris in an earlier war, too. I try to keep an open mind about propaganda fooling me today; the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.
    • godelski 6d ago
      > the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves. I think this can't be said enough. Propaganda's greatest weapon is making you think you are immune to it. Maybe some, but so much is propaganda. We all fall for propaganda (and ads), constantly Being fooled doesn't make you a fool. But being unwilling to change your mind does. Being unable to admit you don't know or don't have enough information to make a strong opinion makes you a fool too. Propaganda wants to take shortcuts, to simplify things. To trivialize. "It's so easy, you just..." because the fool is the person who already knows, the person who has nothing to learn, the person who thinks they're better than everybody else.
    • dylan604 6d ago
      In the past, there were not the avenues of finding alternate sources for news. While those avenues are present today, it also allows for additional sources for propaganda. So are we any better today or not???
      • ben_w 6d ago
        Not. A thousand cable channels all licensed by a government, is much the same as five broadcast channels licensed by the same government. A million YouTubers grinding The Algorithm while secretly sponsored by various world governments, isn't much different to a thousand well-placed gossipers secretly sponsored by various world governments.
• datsci_est_2015 6d ago
  Wow, that quote goes hard. I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway. Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century). Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.
• moth11 6d ago
  Nobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
  • fasterik 6d ago
    Are they denying intelligence, or are they redefining it in such a way that only humans can be intelligent? Can you come up with a definition of intelligence that would apply to crows and ant colonies, which are obviously intelligent to some degree, but not the current generation of AI systems?
    • mitxela 6d ago
      Nobody knows what intelligence is. We've recently discovered a lot of things that it isn't.
      • fasterik 6d ago
        Intelligence is a word we invent to describe things we see in nature. We don't "discover" intelligence like it's some natural resource. To say we know nothing about it is also a bit strange. Cognitive science has been studying it for decades. Of course it's hard to give a precise definition, but it's related to capabilities like abstraction, reasoning, planning, problem solving, etc.
      • infinite_spin 6d ago
        Why would a set of dictionary definitions not suffice?
        • mitxela 6d ago
          Those are distillations of existing knowledge. They are necessarily behind the status quo. "You can't call this newfangled contraption a computer, because a computer is a person!"