Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

More than anything, its really hard to keep ones emotions in check after they realize they've been mindfucked for the last 1000 days or so. Some people react in anger at whoever tricked them, and others get overly excited when, like a bell, everything that has confounded them and challenged everything they understood before, suddenly makes sense in the context of some keystone piece of information, restoring faith in those heuristics the mindfucker convinced them to abandon.

I am firmly in the latter category. I have purposely made my arguments controversial to the entire "There's something vague I can't quite put my finger on about this guy and why I don't believe him", crowd, because the responses I was bound to get were certain to come from this very same crowd. I say certain, because I myself play 4D chess, and you've all telegraphed your moves to me through the cohesion of your arguments over time. Time is that fourth dimension, after all. The people constantly making vague arguments about how "we don't really know, but gosh, just think of ramifications of it being true, we better just be safe and investigate this closer" are dropping breadcrumbs, meta data, if you will, in the fourth dimension. It is the accumulation of these breadcrumbs over time that reveals the cohesion of your behavior in the aggregate. You are literally powerless to the tantalizing nature of conspiracies that confirm what you assume is true about the Left. Your primary heuristic is that conspiracies are filled with intrigue and mystery. Thus, anywhere you find intrigue and mystery, your brain immediately jumps to conspiracy theories. This is literally the effect of your media bubble trolling you so hard with controversy for so long, all of your previous heuristics you used to use to discern the truth have been weakened by the information vacuum perpetuated by that very controversy. As nature abhors a vacuum, your mind fills in the gaps in lieu having the phenomenon explained to you by someone who understands. This is literally the effect at play in horror movies where they rarely show the monster/killer. Your imagination is far better at evoking fear than any hollywood writer.

I just showed you a 4D chess move, and now I'm showing you the pawn I took with that move. I don't claim you will be able to fully see it, but it is right in front of your face, nonetheless.

To the degree that a person can be found to possess high cohesion in the aggregate of their behavior over time, that person can be said to displaying that behavior with purpose, and as a habit. By high cohesion of their behavior, I mean they are consistently achieving the same outcomes.

Trump has unwittingly telegraphed his intentions through the cohesion of his behavior and communication. That behavior and communication is nearly exclusively controversial. Trump has recently admitted he really likes conflict, so even he agrees with me. Donald Trump will start a fight with nearly anyone. I know you'll correct me with the idea that Donald Trump is responding to attacks from the left. I'm willing to even back off to that looser definition. Trump likes to fight back. Trump's cohesive action that accumulates as his habit is the fact that he injects controversy everywhere, at the expense of context. Trump's main skill is he understands that by picking issues to advance that are most rabidly supported by his base, he is concurrently giving his base what they want, and angering/frightening those who oppose those issues. This is the underlying mechanism of demagoguery. Give these people what they want, and make those people extremely unhappy about it. So Trump is really good at reading certain people, and telling them either what they want to hear (his base), or what they don't want to hear (his opponents). Trump is most effective when he uses the same subject to achieve both of those at once. It comes down to his timing in how fast he can iterate on which controversies resonate with the people he is telling them too. If he can read the listeners response to his speech faster than they can think of a logical framework to understand it within, and some how play off of their response to perpetuate their doubts, he can successfully repeat this process until he finds the speech his listeners respond to the best. This is why he likes "High Energy". The high energy is the validation he has properly read his audience.

Cambridge Analytica, through microtargeting, is performing the same process. Expose people to controversial information. Gauge their responses to this information through their social media responses. The main difference that makes Cambridge Analytica more effective is the speed with which they can iterate the process. More iterations will yield more insights, and give that much more stiff competition to the truly effective methods. Its actually strikingly similar to the Fourier Transform. Find the frequencies present in a periodic signal containing multiple harmonics by multiplying that signal by a range of single frequency signals. The results of this multiplication is a set of bins, each mapping to a specific frequency. If a particular frequency is present in the complex signal, then multiplying it by a signal with just that single frequency will yield a more significant value than a frequency that is not present in the multi frequency signal. The fourier transform is literally seeing which single frequencies resonate with the complex signal being transformed.

I posit that you can't refute any of these underlying principles. To the extent that we agree on the underlying principles, but disagree on their effect in concert, I will have enumerated the ships, the weaponry, the sailors, and the uniforms, and your contention will be that those don't constitute a Navy.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: