Slow Like Whisky

Tag: Propaganda

  • We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World – On my Om

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    robert.adlington
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    The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury…

  • Woozle effect – Wikipedia

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    robert.adlington
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    The Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation, occurs when a source is widely cited for a claim that the source does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility. If results are not replicated and no one notices that a key claim was never well-supported in its original publication, faulty assumptions may affect…

  • Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

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    robert.adlington
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    political leaders could deploy almost limitless numbers of AIs to masquerade as humans online and precisely infiltrate communities, learn their foibles over time and use increasingly convincing and carefully tailored falsehoods, to change population-wide opinions. — Read on www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/experts-warn-of-threat-to-democracy-by-ai-bot-swarms-infesting-social-media

  • Velocity Is the New Authority – Om Malik

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    robert.adlington
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    Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity. What looks like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is…

  • The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz

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    robert.adlington
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    From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…

  • Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION

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    robert.adlington
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    The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…

  • Notes on American Fascism | The Point Magazine

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    robert.adlington
    in

    “What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young,…