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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   28993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I think covid proved that the majority of humans are in fact very easy to persuade. You don't even need to present any particularly persuasive arguments, you just need to be able to credibly present your position as the social consensus. So it's not just a "redditor" thing.

I don't think COVID stuff can really be used as proof of general human gullibility. "You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes, ie a much greater emotional valence than the average sweeping claim. There might even be specific drives about falling in line with herd behavior if there's a plague going around, if you want to get all evo-psych. To see how much weight the social consensus itself possesses, you would really want to look at something neutral, abstract, with no effects on people's everyday lives. A pure article of faith, divorced from any call to action or doomsaying.

"You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes,

The problem is that it is not true. Covid wasn't ”we'll all die”, it was just framed that way.

"I am the only guy who can deal with Trump", confidently stated, just swung the Canadian election -- so I don't think it's necessarily plague related.

A pure article of faith, divorced from any call to action or doomsaying.

Isn't this just a fad? Fads are a thing.

No, because the average fad isn't really making a factual claim. Someone who adopts the latest fashion trend isn't really believing anything that objective reasoning would show to be untrue.

"I am the only guy who can deal with Trump", confidently stated, just swung the Canadian election

Was the real message "I am the only guy who can deal with Trump" or was it more like "I am the only guy who can be trusted to want to deal with Trump"? I don't think Canadians thought Poilievre was weak and shit - I think they thought he was fundamentally sympathetic to someone who had suddenly become the enemy.

Maybe, I don't really know -- but that just kicks the cat down the road in that the only evidence for that is "Mark Carney says so"; Poillievre was talking just as tough as anybody else on Trump.

The Canadians in industrial/resource/economically productive areas voted nearly unanimously for the Cons (look at the map).

Those in areas not so blessed (Quebec, Atl. Canada, Ottawa), or those in service economy areas (Toronto, Vancouver) voted for the Libs.

The people who are actually going to be affected by a hostile stance very clearly don’t want “maximum reeeee about Trump” as Canadian foreign policy but, because they’re a numerical minority, what they want doesn’t matter. [Which is why the West is starting to think it should move on from “ballot box”.]

Building in stakes for the sake of urgency and invoking emotional rather than deliberate reasoning is a cornerstone of many fraud and propaganda techniques, i.e. human gullibility exploits.

Yes, but the necessity of such techniques paints a different picture from the idea that humans are gullible in the sense of automatically going along with any social consensus. Buttons other than the sheer instinct to conform need to be pressed.

Gullibility is the tendency to be persuaded, which is method agnostic. If your idea of gullibility is tied to social conformity pressure alone, your concept needs to be expanded.

It's @Primaprimaprima who went from "humans are in fact very easy to persuade" to "you don't even need to present any particularly persuasive arguments, you just need to be able to credibly present your position as the social consensus" at the start of this comment chain. That is the claim I meant to dispute (or rather, the claim which I disputed could be proven by looking at COVID responses).

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