> Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.
The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.
It's 100% the money. Tests "would you vote the same as you favorite politician/party" routinely show parties to be way less aligned than the electorate tends to believe. The several few "high steaks" issues get amplified to exhaustion on captured media while the rest of politics go undisturbed.
News channels are generally more subtle about it, but are still quite egregious. Look at e.g. debates. The questions are carefully framed to make certain positions appear positive or for the debater to go into tangents with context and get shut down for supposed demagogy. Look at some high profile TV hosts. They may appear somewhat reasonable-ish on camera, but then their facebook feed mirrors the topic discussed and takes an extremely biased route. They argue it's private vs official comms, but in reality the line is blurry on purpose and this confusion is used to persuade.
If you go into any country, state and ususally city subreddits (fb groups, discord channels), they are controlled by some PR agency. Discussion is carefully curated to fit the narrative. Bot nets are useful, but zealots are crucial. If previously the young recruits were important to distribute flyers around, these days they are crucial in shaping the public opinion on social media.
> Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
> The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
> However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.
> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
In between flat material-ish (hehe) design windows and 3d compiz cube with burn effects we have settled on transparency and blur effects with a bit of visual planes thrown in.
It's highly unlikely we will end up tokenmaxxing everything, it's highly unlikely the genie can lose enough weight to fit back into the bottle. We will end up somewhere in between that strikes a balance between nice, productive and cost effective.
> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is
This is, in part, a problem every judicial and legislative system has faced since forever: form versus function.
Take a classic elicitation spying techniques: a foreign spy meets a military officer/scientist at a bar, strikes up a conversation, makes an observation wondering how could a missile hit some target at some accuracy and elicits a response that with laser guidance it is entirely possible. From this they get info that there is some technology to laser guide missiles. Or in retail, a competitor hiring a secret buyer for core baskets of goods and analyzing prices in the receipts.
The function is espionage, the form is conversation and all info is in a sense provided willingly. Where do you pull the slider?
These distillation "attacks" are not only indistinguishable from evals, they ARE evals. The function is own model training, the form is eval. Normally, one would expect to have risk benefit analysis based discussion which direction to push the legality slider to. The problem with these recurring statements is that they invoke enshitification of legislature.
> Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.
In general yes, just that "more" is monstrously massive to the point of it being closer to science fiction than reality, IMO.
To reiterate, various assays fluctuate rather wildly over the course of various body cycles. The reason(-s) your doctor should remind to get a blood drawn in the morning after a period of fasting is that the sample is taken at a somewhat steady state and the result is comparable to reference values without too much of a margin.
Anyone with a requirement to manage blood glucose levels will tell you that CGMs are vastly superior to finger pricks first and foremost due to the sample rate available and comfort reasons secondarily. With a finger prick test the patient is only somewhat aware where in the curve they are, which makes the test only a rough estimate due to this temporal error margin. A lot of people do not zero in their readings with finger pricks as they are mostly interested in the deltas.
Suppose you manage to make urine sampling relatively accurate and super cheap (e.g. tens of eurodollars per analyzer or cents per test strip) so you can have poorly-supervised, long-term studies with huge cohorts. However, unless you somehow control for sample collection conditions, all this baseline variability suddenly infects your whole dataset and effectively raises noise floor. It's not unreasonable to expect that whatever was found to be a useful signal under controlled conditions to fall below noise floor under uncontrolled conditions.
That's basically THE problem with the hypothetical test-it-all machine. Again, maybe in some cases that could be extremely useful, but in a lot of cases that would be counter productive. However, what CGMs hint us at is that various kinds of Continuous X Monitors could provide insights into body reactions to things, which is, currently, effectively not a signal in general medicine. Once the test-it-all machine is reframed as an array of continuous monitors and the useful signal is reframed from long-term drifts to short-term deltas it may unlock some additional diagnostic pathways.
There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.
This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
> That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever.
In my own experience, people in management generally refuse to evaluate risks that are not immediate. Instead of looking at risks as something that could happen the general mode is looking at risks as something that may not necessarily happen and therefore does not need immediate attention.
Raising risks becomes a risky business (pun intended, hehe). If you raise, especially repeatedly, that in x weeks/month something will probably happen a manager will sweep that under a rug, ignore any warnings and will not give (even more so fight for) resources to proactively tackle the risk. Yet, if the risks manifests and hurts business metrics, then suddenly you are remembered and get all the blame. Yet, if you wait it out and clean up the mess caused by the risky event, you are a hero.
The higher up the management chain one is, the more prevalent this phenomenon is. I don't want to imply there's no planning or that management types are "dumb" or whatever. It's just that in my experience, the higher up one is, the more they are focused on the proverbial happy path. It's generally easier to get a goalpost moved instead of getting a blocker risk removed. All the projects that exceed budgets and underdeliver are, in part, a symptom of this: raising a simple "we don't have safeguards against a third party in a critical path delivering in time and under budget" project risk makes someone look bad and is generally unacceptable, yet once the deadline is up getting more budget assigned is one meeting away. I'm always surprised how strong a simple moat of simply already being in the market can be: businesses that continuously take all-or-nothing type of risks keep surviving against simple mathematical odds.
> If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.
At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.
> Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.
Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity" should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very rare while.
> It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.
You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems" are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason why we have management class in the first place.
The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart.
> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.
More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time.
> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.
More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue underfunded IT department "could not".
Fun fact. There is this threads twitter clone from meta. How do I login?
I "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.
There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "slimming down operations", which can mean multiple things.
So essentially you have three choices:
1. Spend time writing (or have written by a copywriter) in corporate fluff dialect, where the actual message is still understandable by all parties. At the cost of appearing tone deaf.
2. Spend time reiterating with a bot that speaks some undefined sub-dialect of LLMinese where the reception of the message is unknown. At the cost of appearing even more tone deaf and insulting than a corporate cog.
3. Spend time restructuring message in genuine voice. At the cost of maybe being heard more harshly than intended.
I fail to see how option 2 can be perceived as anything but the worst, unless you assume that the target audience does not distinguish LLMinese from actual speech.
In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.
The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.