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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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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).