4 ms·

>Whatever you lose in the capability to lie for immediate personal merit you gain in the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through

>Whatever you lose in the capability to lie for immediate personal merit you gain in the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers that they have no desire to escape from. Sorry, how did 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers' not exist (and in even worse form) when you could lie?

Swizec 11y ago
I think that's the point. Without lying, political and social structures of humans break down. Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. Even something as simple as telling a friend or coworker that that thing they do isn't that annoying counts as lying.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  > Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. That's actually a pretty tough indictment of human nature, if true.
  - kstenerud 11y ago
    Lying/deception is practiced by virtually all life forms, both for constructive and destructive purposes. It is a necessity for the resilience of complex organizational behavior.
  - eCa 11y ago
    Recommended viewing: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/
  - pmalynin 11y ago
    People are "taught" to lie since the childhood and passed as "good manners". Ex: >How are you feeling. >Good. Or my favourite: >Wow, good job! People learn by example, and they see these lies (in their technical definition) as acceptable and even encouraged behaviour and hence follow. Then we have parents lying to their children all the time, and then later when they learn the truth they will likely carry on their tradition of lying (aka Santa, Monster Under The Bed ... God) to their kids because, hell, my parents did it. The list goes on and on. Or maybe I'm just a sad cynic.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  I guess I don't understand the argument's construction then. Lying could almost, literally be defined as: 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers'. The OP is claiming that eliminating lying actually increases the occurrence of distortion and disinformation (through an undisclosed mechanism). To me, this would seem to be contradiction: eliminating the bad thing actually increase the occurrence of the bad thing.
  - mapt 11y ago
    At an abstract level: If one can technically verify level of belief, then one can both insist upon it in coercive capacities (the NSA does not want any employee who has any doubts about its holy mission), and tune arguments for it in non-coercive capacities (The breakfast cereal marketing department's learning algorithms will be able to test jingles against a fully verifiable 100% accurate human model). Blowing things off and consenting because you just want to move on, ceases to be an option once it's detectable. Instead, the opponent can iterate on strategies of persuasion until the job is genuinely done. This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host: It is in the interest of every memetic attack to install defenses against other memes. Will you tell your new girlfriend, that her brown hair looks nice when your preexisting bias in favor of blondes has been hyped up into a whole obsessive fandom by your last girlfriend, who jealously insisted on the mental calcification of True Belief? Mindreading in the form of an accurate lie detector of some sort is a large portion of mind control, once you extrapolate it to routine applications throughout society. . More specific to the article's point: Datamining truth verification is more likely to be a problem for us due to the asymmetry: It benefits large organizations and only large organizations. It benefits the people with the best AI to search your history and only the people with the best AI to search your history. The NSA is already capable of performing a background check, utilizing the whole of its resources constructively, that would point out any doubts you have; But we are not similarly capable of deducing facts about the NSA.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      Yes, >If one can technically verify level of belief I'll just let that one hang there for a second. Yes, if one can do that -- and I'm not sure there is any reason to believe that it is even possible to achieve, in an absolute/practical meaning of 'technical' [I'll just add, that I believe that people may believe any number of impossibilities and attempt to act in accordance with those beliefs] --, then all manner of horrors may be possible. To your point about the article: Does the NSA do anything special? Anything that others could not achieve (in, the 'technical' sense)?

Swizec 11y ago

I think that's the point. Without lying, political and social structures of humans break down. Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. Even something as simple as telling a friend or coworker that that thing they do isn't that annoying counts as lying.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. That's actually a pretty tough indictment of human nature, if true.
- kstenerud 11y ago
  Lying/deception is practiced by virtually all life forms, both for constructive and destructive purposes. It is a necessity for the resilience of complex organizational behavior.
- eCa 11y ago
  Recommended viewing: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/
- pmalynin 11y ago
  People are "taught" to lie since the childhood and passed as "good manners". Ex: >How are you feeling. >Good. Or my favourite: >Wow, good job! People learn by example, and they see these lies (in their technical definition) as acceptable and even encouraged behaviour and hence follow. Then we have parents lying to their children all the time, and then later when they learn the truth they will likely carry on their tradition of lying (aka Santa, Monster Under The Bed ... God) to their kids because, hell, my parents did it. The list goes on and on. Or maybe I'm just a sad cynic.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
I guess I don't understand the argument's construction then. Lying could almost, literally be defined as: 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers'. The OP is claiming that eliminating lying actually increases the occurrence of distortion and disinformation (through an undisclosed mechanism). To me, this would seem to be contradiction: eliminating the bad thing actually increase the occurrence of the bad thing.
- mapt 11y ago
  At an abstract level: If one can technically verify level of belief, then one can both insist upon it in coercive capacities (the NSA does not want any employee who has any doubts about its holy mission), and tune arguments for it in non-coercive capacities (The breakfast cereal marketing department's learning algorithms will be able to test jingles against a fully verifiable 100% accurate human model). Blowing things off and consenting because you just want to move on, ceases to be an option once it's detectable. Instead, the opponent can iterate on strategies of persuasion until the job is genuinely done. This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host: It is in the interest of every memetic attack to install defenses against other memes. Will you tell your new girlfriend, that her brown hair looks nice when your preexisting bias in favor of blondes has been hyped up into a whole obsessive fandom by your last girlfriend, who jealously insisted on the mental calcification of True Belief? Mindreading in the form of an accurate lie detector of some sort is a large portion of mind control, once you extrapolate it to routine applications throughout society. . More specific to the article's point: Datamining truth verification is more likely to be a problem for us due to the asymmetry: It benefits large organizations and only large organizations. It benefits the people with the best AI to search your history and only the people with the best AI to search your history. The NSA is already capable of performing a background check, utilizing the whole of its resources constructively, that would point out any doubts you have; But we are not similarly capable of deducing facts about the NSA.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Yes, >If one can technically verify level of belief I'll just let that one hang there for a second. Yes, if one can do that -- and I'm not sure there is any reason to believe that it is even possible to achieve, in an absolute/practical meaning of 'technical' [I'll just add, that I believe that people may believe any number of impossibilities and attempt to act in accordance with those beliefs] --, then all manner of horrors may be possible. To your point about the article: Does the NSA do anything special? Anything that others could not achieve (in, the 'technical' sense)?