| I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising. The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically. Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era. I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results. If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China. Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you |