Yeah, “built on lies” is far from a straightforward summary—it emphasises the importance of lies far beyond what you’ve argued for.
The system relies on widespread willingness to falsify records, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to lie.
The hospital system also relies on widespread willingness to take out the trash, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to dispose of trash. Does it mean that “the hospital system is built on trash disposal”? (Analogy mostly, but not entirely, serious).
everyone says Y and the system wouldn’t work without it, so it’s not reasonable to call it fraud.
This seems like a pretty reasonable argument against X being fraudulent. If X are making claims that everyone knows are false, then there’s no element of deception, which is important for (at least my layman’s understanding of) fraud. Compare: a sports fan proclaiming that their team is the greatest. Is this fraud?
If X are making claims that everyone knows are false, then there’s no element of deception
“Everyone knows” is an interesting phrase. If literally everyone knew, what would be the function of making the claim? How do you end up with a system that wouldn’t work without false assertions, and yet allegedly “everyone” knows that the assertions are false? It seems more likely that the reason the system wouldn’t work without false assertions, is because someone is actually fooled. If the people who do know are motivated to prevent it from becoming common knowledge, “It’s not deceptive because everyone knows” would be a tempting rationalization for maintaining the status quo.
If literally everyone knew, what would be the function of making the claim? How do you end up with a system that wouldn’t work without false assertions, and yet allegedly “everyone” knows that the assertions are false?
This is answered in Benquo’s last post, take a look at stages 3 and 4 to see how this situation can arise.
I think this conversation might be suffering from ambiguity in the term “knows”; it doesn’t mean the same thing across simulacrum levels. In fact, it’s not clear how someone operating above SL2 can “know” anything in the standard philosophical sense. There’s know-how, and there’s the holding of opinions that lower SL people would agree with, but as a function of social reality, not with real “aboutness” pointing to underlying reality.
This is key. There’s a very weird kind of knowing—somewhere between amnesia and willfully ignoring the problem—when bad data is aggregated into statistics, and those who know that the data is bad decide to rely on the statistics anyway, because it’s the best they have.
This can even be entirely honest. Even if everybody really does have common knowledge that X is a lie, they probably don’t agree on what the actual truth is, and acting as if the known lie X is true can be a compromise position to get stuff done, as long as X isn’t too far away from the truth.
How do you end up with a system that wouldn’t work without false assertions, and yet allegedly “everyone” knows that the assertions are false?
One way this might happen:
Someone designs a process that requires X to happen. (This process might be entirely sensible, at the time.)
This rule is embodied in a necessary component of the process (e.g. it’s coded into software, or it’s one sentence in a large legal document that also serves many other necessary purposes)
Circumstances change so that either the original reason for X no longer applies, or some higher priority trumps the need for X.
People in the field who are trying to keep the process running in the face of changing circumstances decide it is necessary to ignore the rule requiring X to happen, as a triage measure
But the embodied component still prevents proceeding to the next step unless someone attests that X has happened, and the embodiment is harder to change than participants’ behavior, so people feed false inputs into the component
Knowledge of this work-around spreads, possibly until literally every person involved in the process is fully aware of it
Since no clear harm is presently occurring, no one devotes resources to redesigning the component
(You could argue that “the software is being fooled”, but that takes us back to “I don’t think most people would call that fraud”.)
I’m sure there are also many situations where someone is being fooled and “everyone knows” is just a comforting lie.
Yeah, “built on lies” is far from a straightforward summary—it emphasises the importance of lies far beyond what you’ve argued for.
The hospital system also relies on widespread willingness to take out the trash, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to dispose of trash. Does it mean that “the hospital system is built on trash disposal”? (Analogy mostly, but not entirely, serious).
This seems like a pretty reasonable argument against X being fraudulent. If X are making claims that everyone knows are false, then there’s no element of deception, which is important for (at least my layman’s understanding of) fraud. Compare: a sports fan proclaiming that their team is the greatest. Is this fraud?
“Everyone knows” is an interesting phrase. If literally everyone knew, what would be the function of making the claim? How do you end up with a system that wouldn’t work without false assertions, and yet allegedly “everyone” knows that the assertions are false? It seems more likely that the reason the system wouldn’t work without false assertions, is because someone is actually fooled. If the people who do know are motivated to prevent it from becoming common knowledge, “It’s not deceptive because everyone knows” would be a tempting rationalization for maintaining the status quo.
This is answered in Benquo’s last post, take a look at stages 3 and 4 to see how this situation can arise.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEX7G2N7CtmZQ3eB5/simulacra-and-subjectivity
I think this conversation might be suffering from ambiguity in the term “knows”; it doesn’t mean the same thing across simulacrum levels. In fact, it’s not clear how someone operating above SL2 can “know” anything in the standard philosophical sense. There’s know-how, and there’s the holding of opinions that lower SL people would agree with, but as a function of social reality, not with real “aboutness” pointing to underlying reality.
This is key. There’s a very weird kind of knowing—somewhere between amnesia and willfully ignoring the problem—when bad data is aggregated into statistics, and those who know that the data is bad decide to rely on the statistics anyway, because it’s the best they have.
This can even be entirely honest. Even if everybody really does have common knowledge that X is a lie, they probably don’t agree on what the actual truth is, and acting as if the known lie X is true can be a compromise position to get stuff done, as long as X isn’t too far away from the truth.
One way this might happen:
Someone designs a process that requires X to happen. (This process might be entirely sensible, at the time.)
This rule is embodied in a necessary component of the process (e.g. it’s coded into software, or it’s one sentence in a large legal document that also serves many other necessary purposes)
Circumstances change so that either the original reason for X no longer applies, or some higher priority trumps the need for X.
People in the field who are trying to keep the process running in the face of changing circumstances decide it is necessary to ignore the rule requiring X to happen, as a triage measure
But the embodied component still prevents proceeding to the next step unless someone attests that X has happened, and the embodiment is harder to change than participants’ behavior, so people feed false inputs into the component
Knowledge of this work-around spreads, possibly until literally every person involved in the process is fully aware of it
Since no clear harm is presently occurring, no one devotes resources to redesigning the component
(You could argue that “the software is being fooled”, but that takes us back to “I don’t think most people would call that fraud”.)
I’m sure there are also many situations where someone is being fooled and “everyone knows” is just a comforting lie.