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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 bi

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)?
  - tormeh 11y ago
    Humans are machines and there's no reason to believe that our hidden state cannot be made visible. Suggesting otherwise is an extraordinary claim.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      I'm not sure visibility is all that's required. You have to be able to accurately predict the entire future timeline and somehow prove that your prediction is accurate.
- derefr 11y ago
  > This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host On a tangent, I find this idea fascinating. What would produce an egalitarian botnet host? A Xen instance that spawns a bunch of WinXP VMs each networked such that they can only be reached by a random /16 CIDR block?

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)?
- tormeh 11y ago
  Humans are machines and there's no reason to believe that our hidden state cannot be made visible. Suggesting otherwise is an extraordinary claim.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    I'm not sure visibility is all that's required. You have to be able to accurately predict the entire future timeline and somehow prove that your prediction is accurate.
derefr 11y ago
> This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host On a tangent, I find this idea fascinating. What would produce an egalitarian botnet host? A Xen instance that spawns a bunch of WinXP VMs each networked such that they can only be reached by a random /16 CIDR block?