Comment by pineaux
3 months ago
This. What makes this extra "funny" is that it implies that at least every business that builds something that can move information around must be knowledgeable about tianenman square and other chinese atrocities. Or else they would not be able to censor relevant questions. I have been to China a bunch of times and generally, they know what horrible things the Chinese gov did. They either say something like: "Yeah well, we live in a dictatorship, but it's not that bad" Or: "Yeah, the government is fucked up, but look at the government of the USA! We don't start wars in other countries and put in puppet governments." And there are so many good counters to both these arguments.
> it implies that at least every business that builds something that can move information around must be knowledgeable about tianenman square
Everyone's heard of the "Streisand effect", but there's layers of subtlety. A quite famous paper in attachment psychology by John Bowlby "On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel" is worth considering. Constructive ignorance (literally ignoring certain things) is a survival mechanism. Yes, everyone in China knows about Tianamen, specifically because the government want to censor it. Much of how we navigate the social world is watching for the things people don't talk about, seeing where their fears lie.
> Constructive ignorance
See also: "Doublethink" in 1984.
> To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.
Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious
Marvin Minsky, Published 1 November 1980
Freud’s theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental “censors” that make it hard for us to think “forbidden” thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs — ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/mit/ai/aim/...
Nice read, thanks for great share.
I'd forgotten Minsky was such a good writer.
And oddly reminded of an episode of Blake's 7 where Villa the hacker destroys a malevolent mind holding the ship captive, by telling it jokes until it explodes.
This is why no repressive government or ruler can allow comedy and sarcasm.
It's the kind of thing that, the less you (China) deny, the better the ridiculousness of the censorship meme in foreign countries (ie USA this week) and actually becomes its own self-sustaining meme. Like an antimimetic meme, that actually looks like a meme (that nobody knows about it in China) if you didn't know any better (in the USA).
It's not so different to our situation here, the specific "topics to avoid" are just different.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that the social dynamics around censorship in China are fundamentally that different from the ones around censorship in the US or other countries.
You could similarly argue that it is "funny" how every US business that builds something that can move around information must be knowledgeable about statistics that break down criminality or IQ by census race, or biological sex differences, or all manners of other "forbidden" information - but of course as members of the same social stratum as the people involved in such businesses in the US, we are not actually that worried about the possibility that our fellow tech elites will see the information they were supposed to censor and come in droves to want to introduce slavery or the Handmaid's Tale world or whatever. We consider the "forbidden" information merely wrong, evil, misguided or miscontextualised, and broadly trust our peers to see it in the same way. The real danger is instead if some other people, parts of the scary masses we don't have a good grasp of, are exposed to those memes and are misled into drawing conclusions that we know to be inappropriate, or at least unacceptable.
It's easy to imagine that a Chinese LLM wrangler would feel much the same: trustworthy, well-adjusted people know about Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs anyway but understand that this information has to be seen in context and is prone to be interpreted in problematic ways, but who knows what would happen if we allowed uneducated and naive people to be exposed to it, and be led astray by cynical demagogues and foreign agitators?
It wouldn't be the first time that everyone knew something, but wouldn't say it in fear of everyone else not knowing it. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a parable, not complete fiction.
> And there are so many good counters to both these arguments.
I'd love to hear them!