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Comment by J-dawg

6 years ago

The part I don't understand is, how would the scissor statements be made real?

E.g. The Russian scissor statement machine spits out a statement about a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple.

What happens next? They somehow identify real people who fit the role and nudge them towards ordering a cake?

Or would everyone involved be paid actors?

Or real people who are bribed / coerced?

I know we're in fictional territory, I'm just curious about how this would work in the story's 'universe'. (And in real life, I guess, considering that some of it seemed dangerously plausible).

8 comments

J-dawg

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gwern  6 years ago

None of that matters. Haven't you been following any of these social media hate crime hoaxes and wars? Or watched _Ghost in the Shell_? It doesn't matter if there is no real bakery. Or a real bakery will be distorted by a game of Telephone by unscrupulous activists or journalists into something which vaguely looks right. And even if there is no such bakery, it may create a bakery: a real bakery will announce it's standing up for its principles and not baking for gay people, or a spat between a bakery and a gay couple (for completely other reasons unrelated to being gay) will be recycled, or heck, someone may step up to claim to be the bakery in question and to be fighting the good fight for Christianity. You might think, who would be so weird as to do that, as they must know what they are doing, but there are a lot of weird people out there and you only need one ( https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood ).

Illniyar  6 years ago

In the cake example - find a bakery that won't make a cake for a gay wedding. Probably by correlating gay hate posts on social media and baking.

Start directing traffic from social media of LGBTQ communities, perhaps even wedding orientes, towards that bakery. For example false accounts on facebook wedding groups who say that bakery is really good or something.

Wait until something happens.

throwaway_bad  6 years ago

The story defined scissor statements as ones that simply make two ideologically incompatible groups realize the "other" is hiding amongst "them".

Close contact and narcissism of small differences means fighting will naturally ensue.

For example the statement that "You should wipe your butt standing up" (or sitting down). Neither side knew the other group exists, and once they do they will automatically start ridiculing each other: you're doing it wrong, weren't you raised properly, etc.

A more serious recent example is "feelings matter in open source". Coworkers you previously respected can instantly become enemies because you didn't realize they were monsters.

Unlike the short story, I think these scissors are somewhat healthy. I have faith that people are drawn to controversy because deep down they want to resolve the dissonance. So eventually one side will win and the fighting will stop.

TeMPOraL  6 years ago

The way I interpreted it is that Scissors just are. For a given group, at any given point in time there are maximally controversial statements, "edge cases" that can collapse communities. They are not obvious to anyone involved, and they may change over time.

(Imagine this as fuzzying communities. Crafting inputs that trigger worst performance of an algorithm, hit a point of numerical instability, or straight out exploit it as a security vulnerability.)

In the example of wedding cake, at some point in time, for a large group of people one of such "maximally controversial statements" was a statement about a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. The US is large, so things like this just happen. And one of such cases happened at this particular point in time where statements about it are Scissors, people started talking about it to each other, and the whole thing exploded into a national scandal.

What I believe the protagonist of the story had is a Scissor predicting machine. A social fuzzer. The difference between using it and waiting for a Scissor to be generated organically is that the event need not actually happen. All that matters is that a controversial idea is posted.

Think about it for a moment. Did that story with bakery really happened? If you're only causally made aware of it through social media, would you be able to tell if it was just a fabricated story spread by a bunch of folks on Twitter? Do you think people involved in the drama on both sides of the issue actually verified it? (And no, mainstream news outlets aren't good at checking their sources either.). The point of a Scissor is that after a while, it doesn't really matter what the statement is about, it's simply a catalyst of group division.

In the real world, I would hope a Scissor based off fake news would have less impact than one that grew organically out of a real story. Within the story world, I think Scott Alexander makes the point that a computer-generated Scissor is just as much if not more effective.

So, to answer your questions: the Russian Scissor Machine generates a statement about a bakery refusing to make cake for a gay couple. They post it on-line on US social media. People start getting at each other's throats. Maybe it so happened that there was a bakery that at roughly that time refused to make a cake for a gay couple. If so, someone finds it and it becomes the object of the Scissor statement. If not, no big deal, someone in their zeal fabricates a story, and it's not like either side actually has time to verify facts between retweeting and downvoting. At no point anyone is paid or bribed or otherwise aware of what's going on. The Russians just post a statement and watch the US people tear each other apart.

  • essayist  6 years ago

    "Scissors just are."

    I think this is profound. I wrote a few minutes ago that scissors generate passion and tunnel vision, and you've stated that more elegantly.

    If you fallen into a scissor, shades of grey don't matter. In particular, the factualness (or not) of the scissor doesn't matter.