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Notes -
I'd fully agree on grounds of counter-productive and social trust loss, and I've had similar thoughts for some time. Even here, the point of the original raising of it was an example of an actor that would be present rather than a claim that the actor was responsible, but not being clear enough about that clearly triggered the (justified!) argument-immune system response for some.
Which I think has been more than interesting enough to leave the original lack of clarity in, but I truly do sympathize for those who thought I was implying something I didn't intend to.
In the spirit of an apology- and to maybe remind myself to write on effort post on it later- here's a pretty interesting article from Foreign Affairs last week on how Russian influencer-networks like the Social Design Agency are inflating their roles.
This has some interesting (and effort-post worthy) implications for what it means for western discourse on Russian troll farms, as it can mean that Western leaders are truthfully conveying key points from actual intelligence reporting that accurately characterizes the intent of legitimate Russian influence efforts. It is both a potential example of the limits of deductive reasoning (where all premise must be true, but here the chain of links can be compromised by self-aggrandization), but also in characterizing the head-space of leaders who see these reports of 'we're going to mess with the Americans with lies', try to tell the public of these things, and are... discounted and dismissed by people who then also repeat themese these actors say they're going to boost.
There's more steps than that- the conflation of false and true signal boosting, the role of lack of social credibility, the motivated reasoning to believe the negative effects are the result of a malefactor taking credit for achieving them- but just as intellectual empathy requires understanding why some people can doubt elites for reasonable reasons, the same standard can understand that elites can have their own reasonable reasons to believe things others may dismiss as mere partisan motivation.
I look forward to reading your effortpost! It sounds interesting.
EDIT: that Foreign Affairs article seems pretty reasonable. Thanks for the link!
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