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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   26068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.

The details are relevant because you're claiming that "Scientology once succeeded in conspiracy shit" is evidence that someone else could do the same thing today, and I don't think that sort of conspiracy (a literal cult trying to destroy an individual with social engineering) is so easy to do today, especially in the dispersed online way you are proposing.

Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.

There is no Current Year cult. There's trans activism, BLM, Free Palestine, whatever else you want to categorize under the broad umbrella of "wokeism," but I am fundamentally disagreeing with you that these things are engineered by shadowy cabals somewhere or being manufactured by a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds doing A/B testing on memes. You don't need to wait for anyone to "spill secrets" - we already know how it happens, through social pressure and conformity and agreeableness, not because someone did some Ludovico conditioning on them or inserted fnords into their social media. There are plenty of people who have "escaped the Woke cult" and talked about how and why they bought into it in the first place.

People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology.

Basically anyone has been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. The result is Twitter pileons, sometimes deplatforming, but

Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list."

You seem pretty invested in a very science fictional notion for someone saying you don't really believe this. "Facebook can plug you into a hate algorithm and pretty soon you and your wife are heading for divorce" is kind of like Shiri's Scissor - it's a great concept, works for a short story, but I've seen too many people (including here) take this kind of dystopian brain hacking far too seriously and literally.

very science fictional notion

Read it again

It's not science fiction.

The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.

This seems very intuitive to me, and I'm not surprised that it's true, and I don't discount the power of the algorithm, but it's worth noting that aggregate results among nearly 700,000 users is VERY different from being able to target a specific individual for divorce. Especially over 700,000 users, small effects that a single user wouldn't notice (or even be affected by) show up, even without any sort of p-hacking.

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