Comment by vintermann
1 day ago
People hate being manipulated. If you feel like you're being manipulated but you don't know by who or precisely what they want of you, then there's something of an instinct to get angry and lash out in unpredictable destructive ways. If nobody gets what they want, then at least the manipulators will regret messing with you.
This is why social control won't work for long, no matter if AI supercharges it. We're already seeing the blowback from decades of advertising and public opinion shaping.
People don't know they are being manipulated. Marketing does that all of the time and nobody complain. They complain about "too much advert" but not about "too much manipulation".
Example: in my country we often hear "it costs too much to repair, just buy a replacement". That's often not true, but we do pay. Mobile phone subscription are routinely screwing you, many complain but keep buying. Or you hear "it's because of immigration" and many just accept it, etc.
> People don't know they are being manipulated.
You can see other people falling for manipulation in a handful of specific ways that you aren't (buying new, having a bad cell phone subscription, blaming immigrants). Doesn't it seem likely then, that you're being manipulated in ways which are equally obvious to others?We realize that, that's part of why we get mad.
No. This is a form of lazy thinking, because it assumes everyone is equally affected. This is not what we see in reality, and several sections of the population are more prone to being converted by manipulation efforts.
Worse, these sections have been under coordinated manipulation since the 60s-70s.
That said, the scope and scale of the effort required to achieve this is not small, and requires dedicated effort to keep pushing narratives and owning media power.
13 replies →
exactly and that's the scary part :-/
The longstanding existence of religions and the continual birth of new cults, the popularity of extremist political groups of all types, and the ubiquity of fortune-telling across cultures, seem to stand in opposition to your assertion that people hate being manipulated. At least, people enjoy belonging to something far more than they hate being manipulated. Most successful versions of fortune-telling, religious conversion, and cult recruitment do utilize confirmation bias affirmation, love-bombing, and other techniques to increase people's agreeableness before getting to the manipulation part, but they still successfully do that. It's also like saying that advertising is pointless because it's manipulating people into buying things, and while people dislike ads it's also still a very successful part of getting people to buy products or else corporations wouldn't still spend vast amounts of money on marketing.
People hate feeling manipulated, but they love propaganda that feeds their prejudices. People voluntarily turn on Fox News - even in public spaces - and get mad if you turn it off.
Sufficiently effective propaganda produces its own cults. People want a sense of purpose and belonging. Sometimes even at the expense of their own lives, or (more easily) someone else's lives.
[flagged]
I would point out that what you call "left outlets" are at best center-left. The actual left doesn't believe in Russiagate (it was manufactured to ratfuck Bernie before being turned against Trump), and has zero love for Biden.
1 reply →
People close to Trump went to jail for Russian collusion. Courts are not perfect but a significantly better route to truth than the media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th...
There is this odd conspiracy to claim that Biden (81 at time of election) was too old and Trump (77) wasn't, when Trump has always been visibly less coherent than Biden. IMO both of them were clearly too old to be sensible candidates, regardless of other considerations.
The UK counterpart is happening at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c891403eddet
5 replies →
[flagged]
1 reply →
> just smaller maybe
This is like peak both-sidesism.
You even openly describe the left’s equivalent of MAGA as “fringe”, FFS.
One party’s former “fringe” is now in full control of it. And the country’s institutions.
3 replies →
To you too: are you talking about other people here, or do you concede the possibility that you're falling for similar things yourself?
I'm certainly aware of the risk. Difficult balance of "being aware of things" versus the fallibility and taintedness of routes to actually hearing about things.
No they hate feeling manipulated. They not only expect social manipulation they think you are downright rude, unsocialized, and untrustworthy if you don't manipulate them reflexively. Just look at mirroring alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring
I hated to come to this conclusion, but the average neurotypical person is fundamentally so batshit insane they think that not manipulating them is a sign you aren't trustworthy and ability to conceal your emotions and put on an appropriate emotional kabuki dance is a sign of trustworthiness.
The crux is whether the signal of abnormality will be perceived as such in society.
- People are primarily social animals, if they see their peers accept affairs as normal, they conclude it is normal. We don't live in small villages anymore, so we rely on media to "see our peers". We are increasingly disconnected from social reality, but we still need others to form our group values. So modern media have a heavily concentrated power as "towntalk actors", replacing social processing of events and validation of perspectives.
- People are easily distracted, you don't have to feed them much.
- People have on average an enormous capacity to absorb compliments, even when they know it is flattery. It is known we let ourselves being manipulated if it feels good. Hence, the need for social feedback loops to keep you grounded in reality.
TLDR: Citizens in the modern age are very reliant on the few actors that provide a semblance of public discourse, see Fourth Estate. The incentives of those few actors are not aligned with the common man. The autonomous, rational, self-valued citizen is a myth. Undermine the man's groups process => the group destroys the man.
About absorbing compliments really well, there is the widely discussed idea that one in a position of power loses the privilege to the truth. There are a few articles focusing on this problem on corporate environment. The concept is that when your peers have the motivation to be flattery (let's say you're in a managerial position), and more importantly, they're are punished for coming to you with problems, the reward mechanism in this environment promotes a disconnect between leader expectations and reality. That matches my experience at least. And I was able to identify this correlates well, the more aware my leadership was of this phenomenon, and the more they valued true knowledge and incremental development, easier it was to make progress, and more we saw them as someone to rely on. Some of those the felt they were prestigious and had the obligation to assert dominance, being abusive etc, were seeing with no respect by basically no one.
Everyone will say they seek truth, knowledge, honesty, while wanting desperately to ascend to a position that will take all of those things from us!
Also the truth can make you less powerful, like soldiers returning from war.
You don't count yourself among the people you describe, I assume?
I do, why wouldn't I? For example, I know I have to actively spend effort to think rational, at the risk of self-criticism, as it is a universal human trait to respond to stimuli without active thinking.
Knowing how we are fallible as humans helps to circumvent our flaws.
Knowing one is manipulated, requires having some trusted alternate source to verify against.
If all your trusted sources are saying the same thing, then you are safe.
If all your untrusted sources are telling you your trusted sources are lying, then it only means your trusted sources are of good character.
Most people are wildly unaware of the type of social conditioning they are under.
I get your point, but if all your trusted sources are reinforcing your view and all your untrusted sources are saying your trusted sources are lying, then you may well be right or you may be trusting entirely the wrong people.
But lying is a good barometer against reality. Do your trusted sources lie a lot? Do they go against scientific evidence? Do they say things that you know don’t represent reality? Probably time to reevaluate how reliable those sources are, rather than supporting them as you would a football team.