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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Yeah, the optimistic outcome of this is that everyone spends a lot less time arguing on the internet because they think they're arguing with an AI.

So, you think this kind of thing could drive political activity entirely off Facebook, which would be beneficial because it'd allow ambiguity and deception the online world has removed from politics ?

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.4

“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.”5 — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.

Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.

Omnipresent troll-bots and propaganda bots online leading to a necessary revival of politics in meatspace- that could be a silver lining.

That's legitimately why I won't engage in argumentation in most public-facing internet forums now. It's always been a waste of time, but now it's more likely than ever that you're literally just being targeted by someone else's bot trying to suck you into an unending argument and/or their sales funnel.

Although the temptation to train up a bot on my corpus of posts and let it loose on Reddit is significant.

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