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Notes -
New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!
I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):
... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.
And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?
Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:
My skepticism to the "propaganda chatocalypse" is that is that it operates on a flawed model of how humans operate. That are humans view of the world is hopelessly tied to cultural consumption, media and so on. So our inputs from culture and media needs to be controlled at all costs so we don't end up making the world worse by being exposed to dangerous ideas cultural and/or media content. This is the quintessential post-modernistic thought process that if they stuff the "the message" in everything it will create a better world. But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.
One of the interesting and kind of worrying aspects of this though is that our media is overrun by these postmodernists that are hell bent on anthropomorphising various artifacts also. Based on that the simulacra of the human form(whether it is in characters in text, images/film, robots, simulation in games or chat AI) is somehow interchangeable with humans and somehow bestows them some rights because that real humans have them. The whole debacle around the chatbot lamda being sentient is based on this. But what about the campaign against sex robots that casually excludes the male form of robots from the campaign. The whole thing around postmodern critique of videogames, movies and books, where they try to give fictional identities inalienable rights. All of these receiving mainstream media time and not listening to anyone going like "hang on a minute, we are not talking about real humans here!". This is at the fringes and I seem to be the only who notices this...
I'm thinking of the line that is something like, "Cultural consensus can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive." Kolmogorov can have a hope, belief, or dream that one day the absurdist influence of Pravda comes crashing down while he ducks his head and quietly works on math. Kolmogorov also died almost exactly two years before the Berlin Wall fell. In the meantime, the death grip of force cultural conformity will continue to run amok.
In some ways, it's sort of difficult to believe until you've personally experienced it. I remember back in the slightly-pre-Obergefell days, one night out at the bar, the topic came up. I expressed the slightest amount of, "Well, just looking at the science, especially when comparing it to the standards of biological science that I'm seeing in the classroom about other behavior neuroscience topics, I'm not quite sure it's slam-dunk settled that sexual orientation is purely biological, that people are 'born that way'." What was shocking to me was that it was almost as if no one had even considered the possibility! Like, it was clearly so obviously true... who would even go about trying to gather regular scientific evidence in order to justify what was supposed to be a scientific conclusion? It's frankly striking to see how strong a social consensus can be even when it's primarily been pushed by particular policy advocates with access to strong media tools. Now that the prior policy fight is dead and buried, even the existence of such a forced consensus has been memory holed, as the cultural forces are geared toward a new policy fight. Irrationality builds upon irrationality, and even if it eventually all comes crashing down, it may be too late for many of us... and it may come crashing down violently and painfully.
Well I didn't write it as a culture warrior with a call to action. But Kolmogorov knew that Pravda had absurdist influence, the irrationality didn't reach him and many others. As individuals they weren't part of that irrationality. So not all individuals are going to be captured. Maybe most people are captured, maybe it will be a horribly oppressive place... but you as an individiual can try to stay rational even if you aren't free to express it.
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