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I'm really not sure where 'didn't work' comes from. Some folks think it was ineffective. Others think it worked great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...

For my argument, I only need to point out that it was attempted, as I'm proving motivation; the effectiveness of CA methods has no bearing on the effectivenss of (say) simulated people.

Increasingly, when interacting with comments on HN and elsewhere, it feels like I'm from a parallel timeline where things happened, and mattered, and an ever-growing percentage of my interlocutors are, for lack of a better word, dissociated. Perhaps not in the clinical sense, but certainly in the following senses:

- Cause and effect are not immediately observed without careful prompting.

- Intersubjectively verifiable historical facts that happened recently are remembered hazily, and doubtfully, even by very intelligent people

- Positions are expressed that somehow disinclude unfavourable facts.

- Data, the gold standard for truth and proof, is not sought, or, if proffered, is not examined. The stances and positions held seem to have a sort of 'immunity' to evidence.

- Positions which are not popular in this specific community are downranked without engagement or argument, instead of discussed.

I do believe folks are working backward from the emotional position they want to maintain to a set of minimizing beliefs about the looming hazards of this increasingly fraught decade.

Let's call this knee-jerk position "un-alarmism", as in "that's just un-alarmism".

I'm going to say as much here.




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