I don't understand why the people manipulated with lies aren't offended at the liars. They are primed to believe the lies, but aren't they mad that someone sought to manipulate them?
This keeps happening because it works. But why does it work? Why isn't there blowback?
It's embarrassing. Instead, they tell themselves, "well, it could have just as easily been real."
This has always been the case.
However, the more interesting thing going on is that we have never had to reckon with this problem anywhere near as much as we do now, since the barrier to creating fakes has been reduced from "skilled software user" to "all five billion humans who can write".
The ironic part is that the veracity of the debunking is being questioned, so depending on how this turns out, this could either be referring to "haha dumb right wingers falling for AI generated meme" or "haha dumb left wingers falling for AI generated debunking". Truly a rorschach test of a comment.
edit: the story was retracted so the "people manipulated with lies" are the people who believed oregon journalism project?
The world is turning to crap right now because of affinity fraud.
"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"
People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.
And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.
Europe is getting the same firehose of stupid propaganda and is looking a little shaky. Education and history give Europe an advantage but not immunity. There are stupid people everywhere eager to get their hate on.
Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.
> Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in.
When you have a "natural monopoly" the thing you want to do is keep it as narrow as conceivably possible, i.e. the opposite of extending the monopoly on wires into authority over generation.
Moreover, the concept of a "natural monopoly" is painted across far more things than it actually applies to.
For example, suppose around half of the people on your street have a solar+battery system and the only reason any of you need a grid connection at all is in case it's cloudy for too many days in a row. Instead of you all paying a central power utility a lot of money, would it be economically feasible (in the absence of adversarial regulations) to run a second set of distribution lines down the existing utility poles or conduits and then install a single large generator that can take care of everyone on your street on those couple of days? Yeah, it pretty well would, and even if you didn't actually do it, the availability of that option would put competitive pressure on the incumbent. So they predictably work to make that economically infeasible through regulatory barriers using fraudulent "natural monopoly" arguments. You don't need an interstate power grid so that a dozen neighbors can share a backup generator.
And if something isn't actually feasible then you don't need to pass a law to ban it, right?
They don't want you messing with their poles/conduits because they don't want you accidentally electrocuting their linemen with shoddy work. There are abusive regulations. I just don't think it's so simple.
Even if you have a licensed electrician to do the work, they still make it an enormous ordeal to install new wires on utility poles. Case in point, what would it take for you to be able to install new fiber? There is no electricity even involved there.
Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.
Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.
Politics, especially in its modern form, does not incentivize nor reward those who would put the public interest ahead of their own political careers. On the contrary it effectively prunes the overwhelming majority of these people out of office long before they get anywhere near the higher levels of office.
There have certainly been a few exceptions, but they're few and far between - and tend to be because of special circumstance. For instance I think Bernie Sanders, before he tried to run for President, was a good guy. But that's because he's from Vermont, a state with a smaller population than El Paso, TX. Democracy works quite well with small populations, but not so well with with larger populations when the 'distance', speaking both metaphorically and literally, between voters and their representatives grows too far. It also tends to fail when societies become too divided.
As for the voter determining who's socially motivated and who's a silver tongued conman? I don't think that's at all realistic.
Genetic drift between humans and the next closest species to us in the brain an gene areas that seem to affect speech. That includes neanderthal and other hominoid species that are now extinct.
You can't really know for sure, but the typical argument (c.f. Chomsky & Berwick) is there was an enormous explosion in "cultural" products then. Before then, we don't see figurative art, and after we see all sorts of crazy things.
That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.
I don't understand why you are hostile to me explaining the idea. In any case, you can read their book to see the arguments they use (which are not just assertions, anti-chomskyans just ignore or strawman everything he says). For example, it's not a massive mutation, but specifically a very very small one: the theories called "minimalism" for a reason.
Probably not to you explaining the idea, but to Chomskys ideas that have not been panning out well lately.
Genetically is seems it's very unlikely there is a single gene spot that explains human language but a confluence of different factors feeding back into one another in linage we do not have genetic access to at this time. We've done a bit of gene testing around this now, and single gene flips aren't near enough. I think the best analogy would be like playing a video game where you have to flip a number of switched to the correct position to get the system to work together.
Again, I don't think you understand the substance of the claim. Have you read the book? Mutations don't need to be single gene flips and I don't understand why you think Chomsky thinks that. He compares it to the evolution of the first photorecepetive cell, e.g. a qualitative jump, but that the mechanism is likely quite simple in order for that qualitative jump to be possible.
People really do flagrantly misrepresent his claims.
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