A page from Russian propaganda textbook: that there is an American side and a Russian side to each conflict, but there is no such thing as an Ukrainian (or any other) side. The rest of the world is not real.
This allows you to ignore everything that happens, and focus on the important question: are you a brainwashed sheep that uncritically believes the evil American propaganda, or are you an independently thinking contrarian? Obviously, the former is low-status and the latter is high-status. But first you have to agree with all the other independently thinking contrarians in order to be recognized as one of them.
We can talk about the sophisticated propaganda methods of the future, but in the meanwhile, it is the simple ones that work best, when applied persistently.
Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know much about US-Russia affairs outside of the US-China context, including Russian propaganda, so I wouldn’t have known about that dynamic even if I had more space to write about it.
It’s always helpful to see various state ideologies and propaganda tactics summarized.
We can talk about the sophisticated propaganda methods of the future, but in the meanwhile, it is the simple ones that work best, when applied persistently.
Also, just to clarify, this post is about the propaganda methods of the present (specifically the late 2010s), not the future. Also, this post thoroughly disproves the idea that persistence is the “best”; empiricism and optimization power are the best, and modern automated systems are overwhelmingly capable of optimizing for measurable results.
We’ll have to wait years for leaks though, and if it didn’t happen then we’ll be waiting for those leaks for an awful long time, so it might be easier to falsify my model from the engineering angle e.g. spaghetti towers or the tech company/intelligence agency competence angle.
I’d caution against thinking that’s easy though, I predict that >66% of tech company employees are clueless about the true business model of their company (it’s better to have smaller teams of smarter, well-paid, conformist/nihilistic engineers due to Snowden risk, even if larger numbers of psychologists are best for correlation labelling). Most employees work on uncontroversial parts like AI capabilities or the pipeline of encrypted data.
I’ve also encountered political consultants who basically started out assuming it’s not possible because they themselves don’t have access to the kind of data I’m talking about here, but that’s an easy problem to fix with just a conversation or two.
Woah wait a second, what was that about Ukraine?
A page from Russian propaganda textbook: that there is an American side and a Russian side to each conflict, but there is no such thing as an Ukrainian (or any other) side. The rest of the world is not real.
This allows you to ignore everything that happens, and focus on the important question: are you a brainwashed sheep that uncritically believes the evil American propaganda, or are you an independently thinking contrarian? Obviously, the former is low-status and the latter is high-status. But first you have to agree with all the other independently thinking contrarians in order to be recognized as one of them.
We can talk about the sophisticated propaganda methods of the future, but in the meanwhile, it is the simple ones that work best, when applied persistently.
Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know much about US-Russia affairs outside of the US-China context, including Russian propaganda, so I wouldn’t have known about that dynamic even if I had more space to write about it.
It’s always helpful to see various state ideologies and propaganda tactics summarized.
Also, just to clarify, this post is about the propaganda methods of the present (specifically the late 2010s), not the future. Also, this post thoroughly disproves the idea that persistence is the “best”; empiricism and optimization power are the best, and modern automated systems are overwhelmingly capable of optimizing for measurable results.
Yes, if these capabilities weren’t deployed in the US during the Ukraine war, that falsifies a rather large chunk of my model (most of the stuff about government and military involvement). It wouldn’t falsify everything (e.g. maybe the military cares way more about using these capabilities for macroeconomic stabilization to prevent economic collapses larger than 2008, maybe they consider that a lose condition for the US and public opinion is just an afterthought).
We’ll have to wait years for leaks though, and if it didn’t happen then we’ll be waiting for those leaks for an awful long time, so it might be easier to falsify my model from the engineering angle e.g. spaghetti towers or the tech company/intelligence agency competence angle.
I’d caution against thinking that’s easy though, I predict that >66% of tech company employees are clueless about the true business model of their company (it’s better to have smaller teams of smarter, well-paid, conformist/nihilistic engineers due to Snowden risk, even if larger numbers of psychologists are best for correlation labelling). Most employees work on uncontroversial parts like AI capabilities or the pipeline of encrypted data.
I’ve also encountered political consultants who basically started out assuming it’s not possible because they themselves don’t have access to the kind of data I’m talking about here, but that’s an easy problem to fix with just a conversation or two.