Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nighthawk648 2394 days ago
Added to the top: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Kranzberg

Kranzberg six laws of technology should ease your mind.

You don’t need MRI’s to manipulate people. Knowing basic psychology and allowing yourself some time to learn about them will allow the same effect. I understand you are saying mass produced, with data science applying these learning models to groups of people is easy enough.

You know why political campaigning on social media is effective? It’s because they take a best fit approach. You find clustered of people, and identify the one most easily manipulated. It won’t be long till they start to push the agenda fed through IV to their peers. Maybe 2/10 are dissenters and won’t listen. Maybe another 2/10 are as stubborn as the opposite agenda and won’t listen. So you are left with 6/10 people who are more likely to be convinced from someone they know rather than political advertisements. Especially if the IV being fed to best fit manipulator has disarm tactics for the opposites agenda, regardless of how true the disarm tactic is.

There was a time where you had to go to town hall, listen to the radio, and read the news paper. Even then, you were probably likely to find the same tactics maybe less pruned to actual manipulation and closer to the parties real ideologies.

Every technology has a cost benefit analysis. Do not let this stop progress. Stopping technological progress is the worst thing we can do because humans are evolving and growing and the technology is needed to keep up with the numbers.

Some of the argument may have fallen apart in the middle I’m more than willing to discuss further to clear up any anomalies...

1 comments

Isn't it funny how most governments become less brutal as the technology and knowledge to influence and manipulate people becomes available to said governments. Not to sound too bleak, the flipside to this is that technology also enables people to coordinate and inform eachother of the actions of governments.
Exactly. Egypt is a great case study. I’m not too privy on recent events but the protests that spun from Facebook proves exactly that. There was some change at least for a little while...

HK is another example of how technology has helped shed light which led to protests.