«Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted!»
I think this is a great underestimating of the professional work of some very clever people, because they are using simple but effective Be…
«Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted!»
I think this is a great underestimating of the professional work of some very clever people, because they are using simple but effective Bernays-style approaches.
In particular there is a well-known cognitive bias where most people believe "gossip" (that is hearsay stories) if it repeated and from several apparently independent sources.
This cognitive bias used to work well in a village: if one person gossiped "I saw Bill kiss Betty!" one could be skeptical, but if 5-10 different people said it, it was likely to be true. In latin it was called the "vox populi vox dei" principle, and it critically relies on the repeated sources being independent of each other.
Modern propaganda operations often rely on mailing lists/chat groups to spread "talking point memo" lists of "stories" to many sources, which then repeat the stories as if they were independently discovered, but of course they are not.
Often there are no mailing lists/chat groups, stories get repeated by one side's propagandists if they look like benefiting their side, an "emergent" form of collusion.
«Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted!»
I think this is a great underestimating of the professional work of some very clever people, because they are using simple but effective Bernays-style approaches.
In particular there is a well-known cognitive bias where most people believe "gossip" (that is hearsay stories) if it repeated and from several apparently independent sources.
This cognitive bias used to work well in a village: if one person gossiped "I saw Bill kiss Betty!" one could be skeptical, but if 5-10 different people said it, it was likely to be true. In latin it was called the "vox populi vox dei" principle, and it critically relies on the repeated sources being independent of each other.
Modern propaganda operations often rely on mailing lists/chat groups to spread "talking point memo" lists of "stories" to many sources, which then repeat the stories as if they were independently discovered, but of course they are not.
Often there are no mailing lists/chat groups, stories get repeated by one side's propagandists if they look like benefiting their side, an "emergent" form of collusion.