
Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks - beepp
https://techiavellian.com/intellectual-denial-of-service-attacks
======
b0rsuk
I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high
compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first ("Just do away
with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket")
but __require many more words to refute __. When the politician in question is
also a fast talker, and has a master 's degree in Philosophy, he can appear to
be smarter because no one can keep up with him and it's by definition
impossible to refute all compressed arguments in the same amount of time. A
Polish politician I have in mind goes by initials JKM.

My point: an intelligent, educated person can cross over to the dark side and
it makes it all the way worse. Some people praise Dan Brown for his
intelligence. So what, he doesn't write books for intelligent people.

In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had
higher respect for formal education. The "compressed argument" still worked
very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and
print (word limit). Now, the Pandora's box is open.

To succeed in social media, you don't need to construct good arguments. Some
charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. __Ordinary people no
longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom __. This is a problem
because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we __trust __some
people. What if a lot of people put trust not into expertise and experience,
but into charismatic, cheeky figures? What if they prefer appeals to
nationality, bloodline (son of a heroic activist)?

Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn't intellectually
dishonest?

~~~
leereeves
Why should people respect formal education?

Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published
research is wrong. The non-scientific parts of academia are dominated by in-
group politics and shallow status seeking. And in much of academia, evidence
is less important than ideology: research and researchers are banned not
because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable.

If academia wants respect, it should work on improving itself instead of
trying to find a "strategy that works against populism".

Edit: Citations

> Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

> Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the
> Same Results

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-
rep...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-
replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/)

> 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

[https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-
on...](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-
reproducibility-1.19970)

> Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who
> are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences
> between 7 and 9 percent.

> Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are
> virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology,
> history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English
> professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-
of-liberal-intolerance.html)

> In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and
> personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly
> conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they
> said they would discriminate.

[http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf](http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf)

> When Inbar and Lammers contacted [social psychologists] ... they found that
> ... the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers.
> ... Participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile
> did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas?
> As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people
> experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak
> out.

> Over all, close to nineteen per cent [of social psychologists surveyed]
> reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning
> paper...and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a
> conservative as a future colleague.

[https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-
psy...](https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-
biased-republicans)

~~~
pjc50
The alternative is often worse.

"The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my
information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!"

"There was once a batch of contaminated vaccines, so now I'm going to risk the
lives of my and other children by not vaccinating them"

"The banks were unfairly bailed out, so I'm going to keep my money in
Quadriga"

~~~
jpttsn
That’s a false dilemma; as long as I’m not resigned to hopeless infotainment
addiction, I don’t have to believe the “least bad” reporting about events that
don’t concern me.

~~~
UncleMeat
I am absolutely 100% confident that the success rate of individuals with no
training doing their own research is way way way lower than the success rate
of the academic community consensus.

~~~
jpttsn
That’s not what I’m arguing against. I’m not claiming to be a better truth-
seeker than the academic community.

I am claiming that a lot of this truth has no meaning to me, and I’m
comfortable with _not_ seeking it. If that sounds horrible, consider a special
case like celebrity gossip. Am I better than the magazines at getting to the
bottom of it? Probably not. Does that fact implore me to seek their
“knowledge”?

I distrust many media accounts of events. I don’t believe their opposites
either. And I don’t “do my own research”. I just embrace ignorance of things
that don’t matter to me.

------
jdietrich
See also the Gish Gallop - a debating technique named after the creationist
Duane Gish, which involves making as many specious arguments as quickly as
possible. An unprepared opponent is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer
number of points they need to refute.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop)

A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating, creating
a truly absurd spectacle; most teams speak as quickly as humanly possible to
fit the greatest number of arguments into a fixed time limit, creating a
barely-intelligible blur of words.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0)

[https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-
culture/2017/09/26/corr...](https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-
culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american-
politics)

~~~
barry-cotter
> A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating

Not outside the US it isn’t. Policy debating is a special US abomination, with
unfortunate extensions into the cultural colony to the north. Everywhere else
does parliamentary debating.

~~~
zorked
It's more than just what the arguments are about. Anywhere else in the world
someone making points so quickly as in the videos would sound desperate and
instantly "lose" the debate. Nobody is expect to refute point by point a
nonsensical diatribe.

~~~
canofbars
Recently I saw on the local Australian politics debate show someone asking a
question rattled off about 5 questions with opinions shared in between each
one and the responder said something like "That was a political statement,
could you please rephrase that as an actual question?"

------
shabbyrobe
Jonathan Swift in 1710:

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to
be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its
effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is
changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an
infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."

------
antpls
> Wasting intellectual horsepower by refuting bad arguments, experts have less
> and less time for more productive endeavors

I disagree that it's a waste of effort. It may be considered a waste of effort
from the experts perspective, but from everyone else perspective, it is a
guard against experts keeping the truth for themselves.

Experts together are a "black box" to non-experts. If we let them continue
refining their ideas, they might forget to think about the common good. Even
if they are good intended, at some point the knowledge has to flow between
people, but experts often use their own domain language to communicate, and no
one but them can argue anymore about their ideas.

What people defending X are asking to the experts is that the latters should
make their finding understandable by everyone, or some people will be
exploited. If a piece of knowledge is true, but not useful to people problems,
it doesn't matter to them.

To me, people defending X are asking experts how does Y (or even X) is
relevant to their lives, and it actually show that neither X or Y matter to
them.

From there, experts have to admit their are not HELPING people anymore,
because they don't solve real world problems, in humanitarian term.

Why would you care about the shape of the earth when you are dying because you
have no water or food to live ? That's the life of some people on Earth. Why
aren't experts thinking about giving them food and water rather than arguing
that they are wrong about the shape of the earth ?

~~~
salawat
Just wanted to second this. Experts _should_ be constantly trying to work
themselves out of a job.

The most annoying thing I've come across is instances where I'm sort of backed
into an intellectual as "the guy who knows X", where people fully capable of
understanding X to act as repeaters refuse to do so.

However, I understand the compunction at the same time. So I can't really
blame them.

------
tinono
>Once we have publicly attached our name to an idea, the path of least
resistance is to continue believing it.

This reminds of Paul Graham's essay titled "Keep your identity small":
[http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)

------
pixl97
Just wait till bots/ai gets good enough to spout bullshit. Just fill forums
with thousands of argue-bots and you might be able to make the noise ratio so
bad the internet is unusable.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's already the case, I think.

~~~
canofbars
I think it is probably happening on places like twitter now and I know for a
fact that its quite common for people to control about 20 accounts so they can
make an opinion seem like a common agreement.

~~~
frabbit
Persona management and state level trolling has been happening for a while
now. Go back to the long, long ago past of 2011 and revel in US weaponisation
of social networks:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-
op...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-
social-networks)

"It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law.
Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act
1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false
instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce
somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or
not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this
would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have
suffered "prejudice" as a result.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook
and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from
Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites."

~~~
mistermann
I wonder if the US 3 letter agencies have any motivation, and are
sophisticated enough, to create the appearance of an organization controlled
by a third party that is operating online to shape the thinking of American
citizens.

Not that this would ever happen of course, just wondering if it is possible.

------
anigbrowl
Decent article. If you want more along these lines try Cryptome:
[https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-
spies.htm](https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm)

The strategies of information are fundamentally the same as for other forms of
warfare, but the operational calculus is very different.

~~~
shostack
Thanks for the great link. I'm saving to read the whole thing later, but
wanted to point out that a variation of forum sliding (or possibly another
tactic, haven't read it all) appears to be in use on Reddit.

The amount of noise from what are in many cases fairly obvious troll accounts
introduced in important and high information density threads on /r/politics is
staggering.

I can only surmise the intent has been to leverage Reddit's thread compression
and comment ranking system to push down informative posts with lots of "active
conversation" that really is just tossing low information, low quality chatter
back and forth to reduce the signal to noise ratio of the comment section an
bank on people getting to annoyed with the poor comment quality to bother
scrolling for the good stuff that has been pushed down.

I'm also curious if tools like Masstagger are compromised yet and what the
tooling of attackers may look like by comparison.

I'm sure there is much more going on that is harder to directly observe, but
Reddit really is a great data source for any researchers on this topic.

~~~
anigbrowl
Sorry for not replying earlier. Thanks for the reference to Masstagger which I
wasn't aware of as I'm not a regular reddit user. Every platform has its own
quirks, but the brigading techniques are easily adapted from platform to
platform much like skills learned in one FPS are fairly transferable to any
other FPS etc.

If you're interested in this topic and/or have any expertise in directed
graphs and network mapping please drop me a line, same username at gmail.

------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
Related: I don't recall it was djb or Bruce Schneier, but I remember, after
Snowden's revelations, one of them criticized the NSA/NIST was using a
"denial-of-service" technique to push flawed standards. That is, it's
relatively easy to draft a protocol but hard to analyze them. You would
publish a dozen of ciphers and protocols at once, then the cryptographers
would busy working on _some_ of them. Eventually, flawed standards went
through without being noticed...

------
dredmorbius
A compilation of related concepts and references, with some overlap to this
article:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/)

------
m3nu
So true and a great way to think of it.

I moved to weighing the benefits of proving someone wrong vs. ignoring and
nodding. Will help to reduce the number of arguments you get into and make
room for the important ones.

~~~
taneq
I realised a while ago that I was spending way too much time and energy
getting into pointless online arguments about social justice issues. I now
have a pretty low threshold of disagreement above which I'll immediately (and
politely) disengage, and if it escalates at all from there, just block the
person. I no longer care if someone is wrong on the internet, it's not my job
to re-educate them, and the less energy I waste on them the better.

~~~
0db532a0
You might find this interesting: The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own)

------
topoftheforts
I wholeheartedly agree with this article, and I firmly believe that if no one
paid attention to flat earthers, for example, it wouldn't have become such a
big matter.

It's mind-boggling to me that there's people on YT/social media going out of
their way to prove to flat earthers that the earth is not flat. We have 600
years of science proving that, and they don't believe that, do you think that
your little experiment will change their mind? Also, what's the point? It's
not like if there's enough people that think the earth is flat, NASA will shut
down or anything.

It's commendable trying to educate people but in these cases it's definitely
not worth the hassle, and I really hope people start realising that and stop
entertaining all the crazy ideas that random strangers have around the world.

------
martincmartin
The hyperpartisan politics in the U.S. has been fostered since long before the
internet. On the right, "rage radio" has been big since the early 90s. After
listening to conservative outrage, it's hard to then listen to the other side
of an argument and think "they may have a point."

Similarly, left wing comedy-news shows make fun of the other side. When you
see the other side as ripe for ridicule, its hard to then say, "but they may
have a point."

Source: I've known many people on both sides, and it always saddens me that
discussions don't boil down to "let's both look at the arguments from both
sides." Instead, there's an emotional "the other side is nuts" response that
blocks all attempts at even discussing things fairly.

------
kuroop
Just like behind many dumb bots doing a distributed denial of service, there
can be one mastermind controller/hacker, It is quite possible that behind
these non-experts doing the intellectual denial of service, there is an expert
mastermind.

------
new_here
That quote on the slide is the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle)

~~~
paganel
There’s a very similar saying in my native language (Romanian) that roughly
translates into English like this:

> One fool person throws a rock into a lake and ten smart persons then try
> their best to get it out

------
Criper1Tookus
Let’s say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns
bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of
service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.

------
briantakita
Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the
"need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.

------
usgroup
I think the tldr here is that questions/challenges require significantly less
energy than answers for many types of questions; and this is more true the
more expertise the answers require.

I think one problem is that expertise have been a bludgeon for a long time and
intellectuals have done an awful job of not over reaching their expertise and
at sticking to their levels of confidence.

I also think that the once important role of “public intellectuals” and
philosophers as critics of everything was an essential role to keeping
participants honest. We don’t have this any more.

------
Jedi72
I would argue that this is the tactic used by most multi-national marketing
agencies.

------
Gunstig2Snath
Let’s say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns
bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of
service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.

------
galaxyLogic
I would have expected the article to say something about election meddling via
social media. Citizens are denied access to true information by drowning it in
fake news.

~~~
gfosco
They aren't denied access to it, they just have to pay attention and be
discerning if they want to filter all that information for the truth. The
problem today is, there are fewer and fewer people who are trying to inform
instead of persuade.

------
ChlorophZek
Brilliant! The denial of service analogy is so true. There will be probably be
an uneducated group that will refute the existance of DOS attacks!

------
HocusLocus
techiavellian.com

1\. BLOCKING SSL access to web TLSv1.2 browsers with ciphers that use
AES128/SHA256 (AES256/SHA384 ciphers only).

2\. NO http access.

Intellectual denial of service attack: SUCCEEDED.

I cannot view your website!

