Great re-iteration of my point :) Written for anti-trust regulators, intentionally misusing the words they'd use, but with very different meaning. Hopefully professionals will see through their thin veil.
I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
The New Testament instructs the elders of a church to evaluate the messages brought by people who share a message or claim to prophesy. We're also instructed to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God. And to search the Scriptures in order to see if what people say is consistent with the teaching that has been given from God.
If you don't believe in God, divine revelation, and God speaking to people in their lives, then I'm not sure why you'd find her assertion creepy, it might make more sense to just find her and the entire Christian belief system false and mostly irrelevant.
At any rate, I doubt she was claiming spiritual authority over everyone else as you put it, more like saying God gave her a spiritual spidey sense or BS meter to help her personally and to help caution her local congregation or the people in her life.
It's a le legitimate claim within Christian teaching but I can't speak to her use of the gift. People's use of spiritual gifts isn't autonomous, but prophecy, preaching, administration, hospitality, discernment, and so on should be regulated within the Church body by the oversight of other Christians.
Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
In the context this woman was, they DO take bible verses as justifications. Not "logical reason", for heaven's sake. Expressing it that way suggests you're stubbornly refusing to think about contexts other than your preferred one, how others see the world. That seems to happen a lot with techies online.
I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.
> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).
You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.
> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.
I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.
> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.
Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).
People hate being manipulated. If you feel like you're being manipulated but you don't know by who or precisely what they want of you, then there's something of an instinct to get angry and lash out in unpredictable destructive ways. If nobody gets what they want, then at least the manipulators will regret messing with you.
This is why social control won't work for long, no matter if AI supercharges it. We're already seeing the blowback from decades of advertising and public opinion shaping.
People don't know they are being manipulated. Marketing does that all of the time and nobody complain. They complain about "too much advert" but not about "too much manipulation".
Example: in my country we often hear "it costs too much to repair, just buy a replacement". That's often not true, but we do pay. Mobile phone subscription are routinely screwing you, many complain but keep buying. Or you hear "it's because of immigration" and many just accept it, etc.
You can see other people falling for manipulation in a handful of specific ways that you aren't (buying new, having a bad cell phone subscription, blaming immigrants). Doesn't it seem likely then, that you're being manipulated in ways which are equally obvious to others?We realize that, that's part of why we get mad.
No. This is a form of lazy thinking, because it assumes everyone is equally affected. This is not what we see in reality, and several sections of the population are more prone to being converted by manipulation efforts.
Worse, these sections have been under coordinated manipulation since the 60s-70s.
That said, the scope and scale of the effort required to achieve this is not small, and requires dedicated effort to keep pushing narratives and owning media power.
> This is a form of lazy thinking, because it assumes everyone is equally affected. This is not what we see in reality, and several sections of the population are more prone to being converted by manipulation efforts.
Making matters worse, one of the sub groups thinks they're above being manipulated, even though they're still being manipulated.
It started by confidently asserting over use of em dashes indicates the presence of AI, so they think they're smart by abandoning the use of em dashes. That is altered behavior in service to AI.
A more recent trend with more destructive power: avoiding the use of "It's not X. It's Y." since AI has latched onto that pattern.
This will pressure real humans to not use the format that's normally used to fight against a previous form of coercion. A tactic of capital interests has been to get people arguing about the wrong question concerning ImportantIssueX in order to distract from the underlying issue. The way to call this out used to be to point out that, "it's not X1 we should be arguing about, but X2." This makes it harder to call out BS.
That sure is convenient for capital interests (whether it was intentional or not), and the sky is the limit for engineering more of this kind of societal control by just tweaking an algo somewhere.
I find “it’s not X, it’s Y” to be a pretty annoying rhetorical phrase. I might even agree with the person that Y is fundamentally more important, but we’re talking about X already. Let’s say what we have to say about X before moving on to Y.
Constantly changing the topic to something more important produces conversations that get broader, with higher partisan lean, and are further from closing. I’d consider it some kind of (often well intentioned) thought terminating cliche, in the sense that it stops the exploration of X.
The "it's not X, it's Y" construction seems pretty neutral to me. Almost no one minds when the phrase "it's not a bug, it's a feature" is used idiomatically, for example.
The main thing that's annoying about typical AI writing style is its repetitiveness and fixation on certain tropes. It's like if you went to a comedy club and noticed a handful of jokes that each comedian used multiple times per set. You might get tired of those jokes quickly, but the jokes themselves could still be fine.
> Constantly changing the topic to something more important produces conversations that get broader, with higher partisan lean
I'm basing the prior comment on the commonly observed tendency for partisan politics to get people bickering about the wrong question (often symptoms) to distract from the greater actual causes of the real problems people face. This is always in service to the capital interests that control/own both political parties.
Example: get people to fight about vax vs no vax in the COVID era instead of considering if we should all be wearing proper respirators regardless of vax status (since vaccines aren't sterilizing). Or arguing if we should boycott AI because it uses too much power, instead of asking why power generation is scarce.
And probably a lot of people in those sections say the same about your section, right?
I think nobody's immune. And if anyone is especially vulnerable, it's those who can be persuaded that they have access to insider info. Those who are flattered and feel important when invited to closed meetings.
It's much easier to fool a few than to fool many, so ,private manipulation - convincing someone of something they should not talk about with regular people because they wouldn't understand, you know - is a lot more powerful than public manipulation.
> I assume you think you're not in these sections? And probably a lot of people in those sections say the same about your section, right?
You're saying this a lot in this thread as a sort of gotcha, but .. so what? "You are not immune to propaganda" is a meme for a reason.
> private manipulation - convincing someone of something they should not talk about with regular people because they wouldn't understand, you know - is a lot more powerful than public manipulation
The essential recruiting tactic of cults. Insider groups are definitely powerful like that. Of course, what tends in practice to happen as the group gets bigger is you get end-to-end encryption with leaky ends. The complex series of Whatapp groups of the UK conservative party was notorious for its leakiness. Not unreasoable to assume that there are "insiders" group chats everywhere. Except in financial services where there's been a serious effort to crack down on that since LIBOR.
Would it make any difference to you, if I said I had actual subject matter expertise on this topic?
Or would that just result in another moving of the goal posts, to protect the idea that everyone is fooled, and that no one is without sin, and thus standing to speak on the topic?
There are a lot of self-described experts who I'm sure you agree are nothing of the sort. How do I tell you from them, fellow internet poster?
This is a political topic, in the sense that there are real conflicts of interest here. We can't always trust that expertise is neutral. If you had your subject matter expertise from working for FSB, you probably agree that even though your expertise would then be real, I shouldn't just defer to what you say?
Ugh. Put up or shut up I guess. I doubt it would be valuable, and likely a doxxing hazard. Plus it feels self-aggrandizing.
Work in trust and safety, managed a community of a few million for several years, team’s work ended up getting covered in several places, later did a masters dissertation on the efficacy of moderation interventions, converted into a paper. Managing the community resulted in being front and center of information manipulation methods and efforts. There are other claims, but this is a field I am interested in, and would work on even in my spare time.
Do note - the rhetorical set up for this thread indicates that no amount of credibility would be sufficient.
Absolutely, the interweb radiation in me is so strong that my mutation propelled me through life. 10/10 would recommend to all species with high health regen.
People hate feeling manipulated, but they love propaganda that feeds their prejudices. People voluntarily turn on Fox News - even in public spaces - and get mad if you turn it off.
Sufficiently effective propaganda produces its own cults. People want a sense of purpose and belonging. Sometimes even at the expense of their own lives, or (more easily) someone else's lives.
I'm certainly aware of the risk. Difficult balance of "being aware of things" versus the fallibility and taintedness of routes to actually hearing about things.
I would point out that what you call "left outlets" are at best center-left. The actual left doesn't believe in Russiagate (it was manufactured to ratfuck Bernie before being turned against Trump), and has zero love for Biden.
Given the amount of evidence that Russia and the Trump campaign were working together, it's devoid of reality to claim it's a hoax. I hadn't heard the Bernie angle, but it's not unreasonable to expect they were aiding Bernie. The difference being, I don't think Bernie's campaign was colluding with Russian agents, whereas the Trump campaign definitely was colluding.
Seriously, who didn't hear about the massive amounts of evidence the Trump campaign was colluding other than magas drooling over fox and newsmax?
There is this odd conspiracy to claim that Biden (81 at time of election) was too old and Trump (77) wasn't, when Trump has always been visibly less coherent than Biden. IMO both of them were clearly too old to be sensible candidates, regardless of other considerations.
>There is this odd conspiracy to claim
that Biden (81 at time of election) was
too old and Trump (77) wasn't
I try to base my opinions on facts as much as possible. Trump is old but he's clearly full of energy, like some old people can be. Biden sadly is not. Look at the videos, it's painful to see. In his defence he was probably much more active then most 80 year olds but in no way was he fit to lead a country.
At least in the UK despite the recent lamentable state of our political system our politicians are relatively young. You won't see octogenarians like pelosi and Biden in charge.
From the videos I've seen, Biden reminds me of my grandmother in her later years of life, while Trump reminds me of my other grandmother... the one with dementia. There's just too many videos where Trump doesn't seem to entirely realize where he is or what he is doing for me to be comfortable.
Biden was slow, made small gaffes, but overall his words and actions were careful and deliberate
Aside from trump falling asleep during cabinet meetings on camera, having him freeze up during a medical emergency and his erratic social media posts at later hours of the day (sundowning behavior)
Trump literally seems to be decomposing in front of our eyes, I've never felt more physically repulsed by an individual before
Trumps behavior is utterly deranged. His lack of inhibition, decency and compassion is disturbing
Had he been a non celebrity private citizen he'd most likely be declared mentally incompetent and placed under guardianship in a closed care facility.
> I've never felt more physically repulsed by an individual before
> His lack of inhibition, decency and compassion is disturbing
Yes, but none of that has anything to do with his age. These criticisms would land just as well a decade ago. He's always been, and has always acted like a pig, and in the most charitable interpretation of their behavior, half the country still thought that he's an 'outsider' or 'the lesser of two evils'. (Don't ask them for their definition of evil...)
I was both siding in an effort to be as objective as possible. The truth is that i'm pretty dismayed at the current state of the Democrat party. Socialists like Mamdani and Sanders and the squad are way too powerful. People who are obsessed with tearing down cultural and social institutions and replacing them with performative identity politics and fabricated narratives are given platforms way bigger then they deserve. The worries of average Americans are dismissed. All those are issues that are tearing up the Democrat party from the inside. I can continue for hours but i don't want to start a flamewar of biblical proportions. So all i did was present the most balanced view i can muster and you still can't acknowledge that there might be truth in what i'm saying.
The pendulum swings both ways. MSM has fallen victim to partisan politics. Something which Trump recognised and exploited back in 2015. Fox news is on the right, CNN, ABC et al is on the left.
If you think “Sanders and the Squad” are powerful you’ve been watching far too much Fox News.
> People who are obsessed with tearing down cultural and social institutions and replacing them with performative identity politics and fabricated narratives are given platforms way bigger then they deserve.
Like the Kennedy Center, USAID, and the Department of Education? The immigrants eating cats story? Cutting off all refugees except white South Africans?
And your next line says this is the problem with Democrats?
The longstanding existence of religions and the continual birth of new cults, the popularity of extremist political groups of all types, and the ubiquity of fortune-telling across cultures, seem to stand in opposition to your assertion that people hate being manipulated. At least, people enjoy belonging to something far more than they hate being manipulated. Most successful versions of fortune-telling, religious conversion, and cult recruitment do utilize confirmation bias affirmation, love-bombing, and other techniques to increase people's agreeableness before getting to the manipulation part, but they still successfully do that. It's also like saying that advertising is pointless because it's manipulating people into buying things, and while people dislike ads it's also still a very successful part of getting people to buy products or else corporations wouldn't still spend vast amounts of money on marketing.
The crux is whether the signal of abnormality will be perceived as such in society.
- People are primarily social animals, if they see their peers accept affairs as normal, they conclude it is normal. We don't live in small villages anymore, so we rely on media to "see our peers". We are increasingly disconnected from social reality, but we still need others to form our group values. So modern media have a heavily concentrated power as "towntalk actors", replacing social processing of events and validation of perspectives.
- People are easily distracted, you don't have to feed them much.
- People have on average an enormous capacity to absorb compliments, even when they know it is flattery. It is known we let ourselves being manipulated if it feels good. Hence, the need for social feedback loops to keep you grounded in reality.
TLDR: Citizens in the modern age are very reliant on the few actors that provide a semblance of public discourse, see Fourth Estate. The incentives of those few actors are not aligned with the common man. The autonomous, rational, self-valued citizen is a myth. Undermine the man's groups process => the group destroys the man.
About absorbing compliments really well, there is the widely discussed idea that one in a position of power loses the privilege to the truth.
There are a few articles focusing on this problem on corporate environment.
The concept is that when your peers have the motivation to be flattery (let's say you're in a managerial position), and more importantly, they're are punished for coming to you with problems, the reward mechanism in this environment promotes a disconnect between leader expectations and reality.
That matches my experience at least. And I was able to identify this correlates well, the more aware my leadership was of this phenomenon, and the more they valued true knowledge and incremental development, easier it was to make progress, and more we saw them as someone to rely on. Some of those the felt they were prestigious and had the obligation to assert dominance, being abusive etc, were seeing with no respect by basically no one.
Everyone will say they seek truth, knowledge, honesty, while wanting desperately to ascend to a position that will take all of those things from us!
I do, why wouldn't I? For example, I know I have to actively spend effort to think rational, at the risk of self-criticism, as it is a universal human trait to respond to stimuli without active thinking.
Knowing how we are fallible as humans helps to circumvent our flaws.
I get your point, but if all your trusted sources are reinforcing your view and all your untrusted sources are saying your trusted sources are lying, then you may well be right or you may be trusting entirely the wrong people.
But lying is a good barometer against reality. Do your trusted sources lie a lot? Do they go against scientific evidence? Do they say things that you know don’t represent reality? Probably time to reevaluate how reliable those sources are, rather than supporting them as you would a football team.
No they hate feeling manipulated. They not only expect social manipulation they think you are downright rude, unsocialized, and untrustworthy if you don't manipulate them reflexively. Just look at mirroring alone.
I hated to come to this conclusion, but the average neurotypical person is fundamentally so batshit insane they think that not manipulating them is a sign you aren't trustworthy and ability to conceal your emotions and put on an appropriate emotional kabuki dance is a sign of trustworthiness.
Historical handwriting, Gemini 3 is the only one which gave a decent result on a 19th century minutes from a town court in Northern Norway (Danish gothic handwriting with bleed through). I'm not 100% sure it's correct, but that's because it's so dang hard to read it to verify it. At least I see it gets many names, dates and locations right.
Please share. I am out of the loop and my searches have not pointed me to the state of the art, which has seen major steps forward in the past 3 or 4 years but most of it seems to be closed or attached to larger AI products.
The best open source OCR model for handwriting in my experience is surya-v2 or nougat, really depends on the docs which is better, each got about 90% accuracy (cosine similarity) in my tests. I have not tried Deepseek-OCR, but mean to at some point.
I have been trained on code I don't have the license to use myself. I'm not like these Creators, who suck wisdom from the cosmos directly, apparently.
Sure. It's a problem that corporations run by more or less insane people are the ones monetizing and controlling access to these tools. But the solution to that can't be even more extended private monopolistic property claims to thought-stuff. Such claims are usually the way those crazy people got where they are.
You think in a world where Elsevier didn't just own the papers, but rights to a share in everything learned from them, would be better for you?
There was no SQL injection. The attack was basically the same as if someone stole the password to a friend's Facebook account, and proceeded to scrape the posts everyone else had made visible to that friend.
Some would say SNP data is more valuable than your posting history. I'm not so sure, since after all 23andMe went bankrupt trying to monetize their data and reddit didn't. It seems possible to me that a post where you say you do X is more useful to advertisers and political propagandists/spies, than a SNP which suggests you're 20% more likely to do X.
I am reading more on the vector of attack used on 23andme and it seems they used credentials from other data breaches. This never would have happend with MFA, even SMS confirmation would've been enough.
It's insane that a company that literally stores DNA data didn't have the most basic defenses against data breaches that would take an intern 15 minutes to read about.
Yeah, I agree this is pretty overblown. On GEDmatch, you basically give everyone the information in your SNP reads - you can compare arbitrary people there, not just yourself to "close" relatives. The only condition is that you give others the same access as you want for yourself. It's very useful for genetic genealogy.
Technically, you could probably get access to and scrape all that data by uploading fake data, or someone else's. It will do very little useful unless you're into genealogy.
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