"The Great Hack" (a Netflix documentary film)

All these social and user-as-product companies have long been a threat to privacy and your data, though I believe they pale in comparison to the full data capture methods of five eyes signals collection, including archiving it all for future use. These are all reasons we need SAFE though and everyone will benefit even though we’re of diverse views on this forum.

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I just find it amazing there were/are 30 million Americans who can’t think for themselves and are so easily influenced via social media

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This was more to my point. Had the documentary focused on this id have given it a thumbs up.

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Actually there are more than 5 eyes. Under some agreement, China gets a courtesy copy of distributed intelligence. So you can guess who else gets a copy of the copy

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I had a similar initial reaction, like how can people in my country be so dumbly manipulated?!?! But its worked in other countries in various situations too. I find the art of influencing opinion interesting. I think some people who generally have a low to average IQ and are more susceptible to the appeals to emotion are the easiest for these analytics groups to manipulate without too much effort.

But stepping back I think this process can be applied to various profiles of people, for instance smarter people will pick up on getting blasted by ads across all mediums and especially very one sided ads that make it obvious you are being targeted(I think smart folks just pick up on subtleties like advertisements in their presence and think about it more at a meta level(like the why am i seeing this, and is the information presented accurate? Can I go validate it with verifiable certainty) rather than just reading the blurb in front of them at face value). But I think even smart folk can be susceptible to it when the psyops are done really well over long periods of time. I think it happens every day to all of us mostly by big companies that wanna make sure they are embedded into our brains when we think about foods, clothes and so forth.

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I’m not surprised in the least. IMO this is to do with personality type, not merely intelligence.

In the Myers Briggs personality type system there are four pairs (E/I, N/S, T/F, P/J) and depending on your preferences you prefer one over the other of each pair.

The relevant pair here is N/S – Intuitive versus Sensing – I think the more intuitive personality types generally question things and challenge what they are told, whereas the ‘sensing’ types take what they are told as law. As the N/S is a sliding scale and not black and white it’s not so clear cut, but generally I think it holds.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both preferences. For example, the Sensing types are highly efficient as getting things done. My mother is a sensing type and was a top accountant. Whereas the Intuitive types are very good at discovery and invention.

I’ve gone a bit off topic, but to bring it back to my point, in the general population Sensing types dominate the population at 73.3% → Page Not Found

So a strong majority of people just accept what they are told without much question – as a matter of time efficiency IMO.

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Makes sense. We were told about “the existence of weapons of mass destruction” and “terrorists were responsible for 9/11” and we went along with it

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It amazes me that there are so many people who think advertising doesn’t affect them. In fact, the large majority of people who I talk to about advertising think exactly that, or will rationalise any effect away as harmless.

People can be intelligent, decent etc, but we are also lazy, reactive, largely unconscious actors. Well, that’s what I’ve learned about myself and the people I’ve worked in depth with.

I don’t think many people understand themselves enough to realise how little they know why they act, how they think etc. It is much easier to hold comforting beliefs, even if they are readily shown to be internally contradictory or without evidence than it is to accept how precarious our world view is, including our sense of who we are. It is a very scary thing to look objectively at oneself.

Dante’s inferno is a metaphor for such self examination, and the horrors he witnesses explain why so few people go there. Virgil, Dante’s guide through hell (the most well known aspect of the journey) in part represents the rational aspect of self which is needed when we try to examine our darkest regions and see how badly they stand up to our self image.

Let’s try to be rational while realising that most of what we say, do and believe is not rational, and that we are not as impervious to manipulation as we like to think.

Virgil is our friend!

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A great human flaw, it is as relevant to what we do to the planet as advertising. I think it is also a thing money promotes. If we could see through the dollar bill we have to understand it meant somebody else does not have it then we may be more understanding. If we could see what happens to our water bottle when we throw it in the bin and it eventually poisons some animals to extinction, then see the knock on effects of all of this and realise the circle completes where it starts, with us ourselves. The individual with their eyes shut ends up with the problem they caused, but chose to ignore.

Advertising is now more nefarious and misnamed, it used to be a sign outside a shop or stall to let you know what was being sold or an ad in a newspaper. What we see as advertising right now is not that, it is highly targeted propaganda tailored to alter our perception of reality. Like all propaganda it exists to control your thoughts and we choose as humans to feed the very thing that controls us and do so happily, because we cannot see through the dollar bill or the damage our plastic bottle does. We chose not to look as children die, animals go extinct because we can get a mars bar whenever we want and to hell with it all. If we cannot feel the problem then we believe it does not exist, even when we feel it a little we ignore it. I believe this kind of thing ends a species and hopefully only that species and not the planet.

To understand we are all capable of extreme evil is important, to accept our actions change the world and we must pay for everything we do is vital. When we lose the connection to the planet via the plastic coated genetically modified food we eat or ignoring the starving stranger (human or animal) then we start a path that only leads to disaster.

Propaganda (targeted advertising) only accelerates that process of the separation of self from our planet. The most successful companies in the world are the ones that realise the short term profit and greed from propaganda will give them a great life, they can have millions of mars bars while the planet dies and people starve. As a society we reward those companies and our desire for something for nothing means they will continue to our extinction.

A bit bleak, but I believe we can waken up, in time, perhaps not, but I believe we can.

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I believe very large portion of society can be manipulated quite easy.

What politicians and media in many countries do is that they wrap beautiful sounding words in nice packages, many won’t recognize the horrible effects that those beautiful words will have on real world results.

They did not tell the population that they would send people to extinction camps, germany 1940-45, they described them as “work camps”.

In my country 2006 they throw sick people out of the health security system calling it “the work way”, “giving people a chance to have a meaningfull life”. Those beautiful words did not include “work camps” but resulted in that sick people became more sick, further away from work, and more poor.

They re-packaged the concept and sold it and most people bought it. Low or high education, low or high iq, most people bought it, beautiful words in a nice package manipulate people easy.

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There is a rule of thumb among conmen:
If you think you can’t be conned, you are the perfect mark.

Every human has a button, and it is a fallacy to think that just because you are not in the middle of the normal curve, you are probably safe. Not anymore, especially in these days where ops can be tailored to personal granular preference.
Either you are mainstream or hipster, you can be targeted accordingly.

Everybody thinks they are unique, unfortunately it is not, you always belong to a niche. If you feel you don’t belong to any niche, well now you belong to that niche of people who don’t want to labeled under a niche, and get targeted accordingly.
It is funny to see all the anti-system guys feeding the same industry that caters the pop culture under a different disguise.

Of course those in the fanatic extremes would be quite tough to make them change their minds, but anyone else who is actually smart to listen to facts and change their minds accordingly will be ironically the most vulnerable. It is the ultimate cognitive dissonance experiment.

A few years back I was talking to anthropologists and sociologists who weren’t tech-savyy, and I was trying to convey that we are living in the golden age of the social sciences. The social sciences were always frowned upon by the rest of the “harder” sciences for having weak experimental data from the wild, any experimentation that was made in the lab would always be tainted by the artificial setting… and also it had the problem that you could only use a small sample and extrapolate with statistical techniques.

But now we are living in times where we can experiment with the entire population and acquire data in their natural environment in real time! I was excited about the level of high quality data that we could acquire through UX experimentation… and then boom, I learned about these freaking commercial assh*les who ended up “weaponizing” it for mass manipulation. And I think it is appropriate to call it “weaponizing” as it is in fact applied sciences for nefarious purposes, especially when it is so polished that has a 100% efficacy in changing people’s mindsets.

In a weird way such results are also a vindication of the social sciences to be respected as a proper science, with the access to high quality data from the population it also reduced the once metaphysical complexity of human behavior to a solvable computational problem, while we are still clinching to the concept of free will the truth is that we are just a bunch of algorithms with limbs… (And this is what actually scares me about AI, they might be better at reading us than any human scientist out there, but that is another topic)

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FYI, while the Myers-Briggs is popular, it is the less meaningful. No serious scientist uses it for personality tests.

What most psychologists use for scientific purposes is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

The full version is quite lengthy, what I glimpsed at the Great Hack is that Cambridge Analytica was using a simplified version of it in its Facebook apps.

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I thought I had copyrighted that thought! Anyway, you are so right!

But I also like Bob Dylan’s take on the whole “we’re all the same” rhetoric. From “I Shall Be Free No. 10”:

I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you

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