It needs to be said more often because your last paragraph is on the money.
Most people would fail a Turing test. They're basically ameboes. Stimulus response. Stimulus response. (Granted I don't believe in free will to begin with so I'm coming at this from a fairly dark place as far as "the human spirit" goes)
The end result is it doesnt actually matter what anybody does or doesn't do, all that matters is what's memorable and framing. That's the basic idea of "fortifying an election" the number of people who are UNABLE and I don't mean haven't learned, I mean lack the capacity, to parse connotation and denotation separately is way higher than those who can.
"Republicans pounce" indeed. The fact that pounce, point out, seize, hold accountable, raise questions, bring up, push, question, call out, and comment on are exactly the same thing is lost on 80% of people.
I think your way underselling most people, and free will. Most people are simply not as you say. Most people are not actually NPC's. They are trained to be NPC's by the media and education on specific topics. This is where the Ghelman-Amnesia effect comes into play, as well as familiarity bias.
Most people don't think much about politics, so their cognitive load is entirely based on other topics. They know what they know about, and what effects them in their daily lives. Relying on conditioning for things like politics is merely an efficient use of their time because the effects of government, particularly federal, have very little direct and immediate effect on their lives.
The conditioning which is built to offload cognitive load is not easily given up because not having to worry about cognitive load is a major benefit. No one wants to be the weirdo droning on about the mechanisms of political intrigue, especially if feedback is not explicitly apparent.
As such, the media indoctrinates people more based on those feelings because they have actually conditioned people for decades to subscribe to a narrative that has pre-built conclusions for everything, so the only thing left is emotional stimulation which is just responding to whether or not the issue is difficult or complex enough to not fit into the narrative, causing emotional distress from cognitive dissonance, and adding to cognitive load.
What you are seeing is not animal psychology. You are seeing a highly refined, highly trained, mass psychological conditioning that is designed solely to make people's cognitive load lessened; while actually betraying them in the long run. It's a deception.
If free will weren't a thing, deception and counter-deception wouldn't even be necessary.
Your argument would be valid to me if I was only talking about politics. I'm not.
I'm talking about every aspect of life. And the PAINFUL slog it is to get people to even play pretend at critical thinking.
The conclusions that people draw from information is in my experience, barely even tangitally related to what the information actually IS.
And again, if I only saw this in politics id say you have a point. But it isn't. There are programed blindspots, I'm not disagreeing with you there. And there are people who could otherwise make connections and leaps of logic that don't because of that programming. But in my experience the vast majority couldn't. Even without the programing.
Free will is a separate issue, I don't believe it exists and I've yet to hear an argument that was convincing. Most boil down to "but it'd be totally lame if it didn't exist" and I don't find that paticularlu compelling.
I still think you're not giving credit. This strategy isn't just for politics, it's a strategy that humans use for everything because cognitive loan is always a permanent issue.
I think Free Will is a larger debate, but fundamentally my argument would be that it is effectively required to exist as a mechanism of randomization, otherwise you would exist in a determinist universe, which is patently false.
If you think it's holistic than I can't fault you, I just can't bring myself to see it that way. It seems too...chaotic as a strategy.
It's why I don't buy most conspiracies as such, I don't think people acting in large groups are good enough at keeping secrets to pull most "inside jobs" off. But people who went to the same schools, believe the same things, have the same friends, and have the same ethics will as a force act in a way that furthers their agendas without coordination.
Which i suppose from your perspective is just evidence that the programming IS that effective. I can't really see anyway to prove it one way or the other personally. But you're consistent on that so I'll concede the point.
Whats your faith convictions/lack thereof? Id guess that colors your perspective on this more than anything. For my part, the universe IS deterministic in the sense that there are no truly random actions. And our belief in randomness is just an illusion created by our inability to perceive all things at once in full detail. It's the perfect simulation argument I realize, but I do believe in a God that's all powerful, and every argument with an all powerful God that tries to square that with him somehow blinding himself to the outcome of Free willed beings falls flat.
Otherwise it wouldn't be free will, it'd be predictable acceptable outcome that he elected not to alter. Which still make the only choice and will that matters His.
I'm not even sure in that context what free will IS. It can't be part of the natural world, so it's either mechanically Void and therefore random or mechanically random. Neither of which work because... if you have perfect information randomness doesn't exist.
On the flip side. A secular perspective on it demands consciousness be chemical. Or at the very least, physical. In which case I come to the same question. Hormones and neuron temperature and whayever else reacting in complicated ways that we aren't even aware of producing a process we can't even quantif yet.
So ignoring all the metaphysics of it all.
Tldr. You seem to be saying that not understanding basic chemistry and linguistics is the same brainwashing that turns people into pavlovian attack dogs in politics. In which case, hey fair enough.
It needs to be said more often because your last paragraph is on the money.
Most people would fail a Turing test. They're basically ameboes. Stimulus response. Stimulus response. (Granted I don't believe in free will to begin with so I'm coming at this from a fairly dark place as far as "the human spirit" goes)
The end result is it doesnt actually matter what anybody does or doesn't do, all that matters is what's memorable and framing. That's the basic idea of "fortifying an election" the number of people who are UNABLE and I don't mean haven't learned, I mean lack the capacity, to parse connotation and denotation separately is way higher than those who can.
"Republicans pounce" indeed. The fact that pounce, point out, seize, hold accountable, raise questions, bring up, push, question, call out, and comment on are exactly the same thing is lost on 80% of people.
I think your way underselling most people, and free will. Most people are simply not as you say. Most people are not actually NPC's. They are trained to be NPC's by the media and education on specific topics. This is where the Ghelman-Amnesia effect comes into play, as well as familiarity bias.
Most people don't think much about politics, so their cognitive load is entirely based on other topics. They know what they know about, and what effects them in their daily lives. Relying on conditioning for things like politics is merely an efficient use of their time because the effects of government, particularly federal, have very little direct and immediate effect on their lives.
The conditioning which is built to offload cognitive load is not easily given up because not having to worry about cognitive load is a major benefit. No one wants to be the weirdo droning on about the mechanisms of political intrigue, especially if feedback is not explicitly apparent.
As such, the media indoctrinates people more based on those feelings because they have actually conditioned people for decades to subscribe to a narrative that has pre-built conclusions for everything, so the only thing left is emotional stimulation which is just responding to whether or not the issue is difficult or complex enough to not fit into the narrative, causing emotional distress from cognitive dissonance, and adding to cognitive load.
What you are seeing is not animal psychology. You are seeing a highly refined, highly trained, mass psychological conditioning that is designed solely to make people's cognitive load lessened; while actually betraying them in the long run. It's a deception.
If free will weren't a thing, deception and counter-deception wouldn't even be necessary.
Your argument would be valid to me if I was only talking about politics. I'm not.
I'm talking about every aspect of life. And the PAINFUL slog it is to get people to even play pretend at critical thinking.
The conclusions that people draw from information is in my experience, barely even tangitally related to what the information actually IS.
And again, if I only saw this in politics id say you have a point. But it isn't. There are programed blindspots, I'm not disagreeing with you there. And there are people who could otherwise make connections and leaps of logic that don't because of that programming. But in my experience the vast majority couldn't. Even without the programing.
Free will is a separate issue, I don't believe it exists and I've yet to hear an argument that was convincing. Most boil down to "but it'd be totally lame if it didn't exist" and I don't find that paticularlu compelling.
I still think you're not giving credit. This strategy isn't just for politics, it's a strategy that humans use for everything because cognitive loan is always a permanent issue.
I think Free Will is a larger debate, but fundamentally my argument would be that it is effectively required to exist as a mechanism of randomization, otherwise you would exist in a determinist universe, which is patently false.
If you think it's holistic than I can't fault you, I just can't bring myself to see it that way. It seems too...chaotic as a strategy.
It's why I don't buy most conspiracies as such, I don't think people acting in large groups are good enough at keeping secrets to pull most "inside jobs" off. But people who went to the same schools, believe the same things, have the same friends, and have the same ethics will as a force act in a way that furthers their agendas without coordination.
Which i suppose from your perspective is just evidence that the programming IS that effective. I can't really see anyway to prove it one way or the other personally. But you're consistent on that so I'll concede the point.
Whats your faith convictions/lack thereof? Id guess that colors your perspective on this more than anything. For my part, the universe IS deterministic in the sense that there are no truly random actions. And our belief in randomness is just an illusion created by our inability to perceive all things at once in full detail. It's the perfect simulation argument I realize, but I do believe in a God that's all powerful, and every argument with an all powerful God that tries to square that with him somehow blinding himself to the outcome of Free willed beings falls flat.
Otherwise it wouldn't be free will, it'd be predictable acceptable outcome that he elected not to alter. Which still make the only choice and will that matters His.
I'm not even sure in that context what free will IS. It can't be part of the natural world, so it's either mechanically Void and therefore random or mechanically random. Neither of which work because... if you have perfect information randomness doesn't exist.
On the flip side. A secular perspective on it demands consciousness be chemical. Or at the very least, physical. In which case I come to the same question. Hormones and neuron temperature and whayever else reacting in complicated ways that we aren't even aware of producing a process we can't even quantif yet.
So ignoring all the metaphysics of it all.
Tldr. You seem to be saying that not understanding basic chemistry and linguistics is the same brainwashing that turns people into pavlovian attack dogs in politics. In which case, hey fair enough.