The Social Dilemma

[Secular Sanity]

Has anyone watched The Social Dilemma?

I thought it was extremely interesting.

[Leigha]

I thought I knew the dangers/risks of social media but this documentary is even more eye opening. The dramatizations weren’t very good imo, but it’s worth the watch.

[Secular Sanity]

I thought it was a must see. I think it’s important for us to realize the underpinnings.

I enjoyed several of Yuval Noah Harari’s books, e.g., Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He talks with Tristan Harris here.

When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Historian Yuval Noah Harari and ethicist Tristan Harris discuss the future of artificial intelligence with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson.

"I think that we are now facing really, not just a technological crisis, but a philosophical crisis. Because we have built our society, certainly liberal democracy with elections and the free market and so forth, on philosophical ideas from the 18th century which are simply incompatible not just with the scientific findings of the 21st century but above all with the technology we now have at our disposal. Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, that ultimate authority is, as Tristan said, is with the feelings of human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human choices are these sacred arenas which cannot be hacked, which cannot be manipulated. Ultimately, my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody can access that or touch that. And this was never true. But we didn't pay a very high cost for believing in this myth in the 19th and 20th century because nobody had a technology to actually do it. Now, people—some people—corporations, governments are gaming the technology to hack human beings. Maybe the most important fact about living in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals."

[Leigha]

Thanks for posting that interview, SS - really fascinating!

I think what the documentary did exceptionally well, is get people to take an inventory of their online habits, because if they're not, someone else is. We have agency in changing how much time we’re spending on social media and “how” we’re using it.

It's downright creepy though, that these platforms have the capability to manipulate how our brains work. Sadly, they (tech companies) only care about profits, and maybe to a lesser degree, bringing about their own political and social agendas. 

Everything in moderation, though. Social media can be toxic and it's healthy to take a break, when we can.

[Syne]

Twenty some odd years ago I predicted this. That the internet could be used to manipulate the facts and what people believe is true of the real world. Except I just thought it was a good premise for science fiction. Luckily, I don't do social media, and if Google is feeding me what I want to hear, it's doing a terrible job. It seems Google understands that leftists are the most prone to misinformation, emotional arguments, and easy dopamine spikes. So Google just manipulates leftists, prehaps hoping to convert a few fence sitters along the way.

When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Historian Yuval Noah Harari and ethicist Tristan Harris discuss the future of artificial intelligence with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson.

"I think that we are now facing really, not just a technological crisis, but a philosophical crisis. Because we have built our society, certainly liberal democracy with elections and the free market and so forth, on philosophical ideas from the 18th century which are simply incompatible not just with the scientific findings of the 21st century but above all with the technology we now have at our disposal. Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, that ultimate authority is, as Tristan said, is with the feelings of human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human choices are these sacred arenas which cannot be hacked, which cannot be manipulated. Ultimately, my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody can access that or touch that. And this was never true. But we didn't pay a very high cost for believing in this myth in the 19th and 20th century because nobody had a technology to actually do it. Now, people—some people—corporations, governments are gaming the technology to hack human beings. Maybe the most important fact about living in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals."

No, ideals of liberal democracy, elections, and the free market are not incompatible with scientific findings nor technology. If anything, those philosophical ideals are the only thing that can hope to reign in manipulative tech run amok. Under the social media censorship of views, the free market has started providing alternative, like MeWe, Parler, etc. and Congress is looking at removing Section 230 protections from platforms that censoriously editorialize, making them a publisher vulnerable to libel and copyright suits.

The left has been the ones pushing the ideas that both human feeling are sacred, to the exclusion of facts, and that you have no free will. This has made their victims more vulnerable to emotional arguments, because "your feelings are always valid", and less capable of exerting their will against manipulation, as studies on the lack of belief in free will have demonstrated. Even these guys are promulgating it, by claiming "this was never true" (e.g. no free will). Like so many leftist lies, their denials are doing the very thing they deny.

Those who believe in free will largely know that human feelings and choices are not sacred, as humans are inherently flawed. Having free will does not equate to putting it to good use. The take away is that you are only as "hackable" as you allow yourself to be. But people like this want to strip you of your natural defenses through pseudo-reason that preys upon your desires. Like any bias, you are most readily manipulated by what you desire to be true, especially without a belief that you have a choice (free will) in your own desires and beliefs.

[Secular Sanity]

He used the term liberal democracy, which I think is more inline with a constitutional federal republic and more accurately defines the United States. I could be wrong because he's obviously way more intelligent than me but here’s where I think he falters.

"Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, that ultimate authority is, as Tristan said, is with the feelings of human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human choices are these sacred arenas which cannot be hacked, which cannot be manipulated."

I don't think our society is built on the idea that the voter knows best. That's why we have our checks and balances. Like our founding fathers, I think that no one is in favor of being overran by a passionate majority, which they equated with mob rule. Madison thought that unchecked democratic communities were subject to "the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions".

It doesn’t really fit with neo-feudalism though, but how about plutocracy?

The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition.

"Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso Cortés and today Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism."

[C C]

I thought it was a must see. I think it’s important for us to realize the underpinnings.

I enjoyed several of Yuval Noah Harari’s books, e.g., Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He talks with Tristan Harris here.

When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Historian Yuval Noah Harari and ethicist Tristan Harris discuss the future of artificial intelligence with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson. [...]

The Old Media tweaked our behavior and thought orientations back in the day. But the feedback and processing was too limited and slow for data-analysis to produce quick and reliable evaluations of how well they were doing, and for making speedy strategy modifications.

That era was also specialized to a significant degree, if the hordes of magazines and underground newspapers catering to varying interests and movements are taken into account. Broadcast television, OTOH, only had 3 or 4 networks. Whereas the digital visual/audio mediums of today can service the interests of even utterly obscure population groups.

Just as recent centuries have incrementally improved "manipulation and control", now both the blatant and subtle strains of such are enhanced by Big Data gathering and machine algorithms scouring them for patterns. Other technology proliferates for reading and psychologically dissecting us.

"I can point—there's a woman named Poppy Crum who gave a TED talk this year about the end of the poker face, that we had this idea that there can be a poker face, we can actually hide our emotions from other people. But this talk is about the erosion of that, that we can point a camera at your eyes and see when your eyes dilate, which actually detects cognitive strains—when you're having a hard time understanding something or an easy time understanding something. We can continually adjust this based on your heart rate, your eye dilation. "

The scene of Alex's eyes being held open by an opthalmic speculum as he undergoes aversion therapy in "A Clockwork Orange" comes to mind. Not sure reading and feedback adjustments were taking place to fine-tune his conditioning, though. But there were a variety of sensor(?) wires covering his scalp.

For the 20th-century, Hitler elevated and refined crowd manipulation to a meticulous level. But cruder forms had been transpiring for centuries/millennia. (Even Aztec leaders who never had contact with the Old World were great at it.)

Then there was the dawn of brainwashing, inspired by hypnosis and its precursors. Even though that basis was fantasy, "brainwashing" via psychological torture and guided traumatization still changed behavior. (The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America)

"... he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation. [...] “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley ... "[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain."

And then there's "cult brainwashing" which preceded the military kind and was surely applicable in ancient times before the modern label and conception ever came along.

"While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander), there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control. Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. 'Can You Turn a Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans,' proclaims one article in Wired. Or there’s the more provocative headline from Vice: 'Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers.'"