And one difficulty here I believe is that those intent on social engineering think about it in more sophisticated terms than their targets, which perhaps is obvious.
And part of the process can be a kind of performative incredulity at the very suggestion that they are part of a campaign of hostile takeover, even if it's exactly accurate. I suppose you could even have unfortunate circumstances where parts of an open source community are unwitting advocates of being co-opted.
And I think you probably see a parallel in state-based information warfare, where part of the objective isn't just to spread misinformation, but to shift cultural norms so that the transmission of misinformation is inherently easier, which can involve sewing distrust in institutions or expertise, or normalizing a gish gallop argumentative style.
I'm perhaps stating the obvious here, but I suppose the upshot is that human psychology can be targeted in a programmatic way, and there might need to be something in the way of a normalized infosec-oriented doctrine relating to the stewardship of open source programs as an intentional countermeasure.
>> And I think you probably see a parallel in state-based information warfare, where part of the objective isn't just to spread misinformation, but to shift cultural norms so that the transmission of misinformation is inherently easier, which can involve sewing distrust in institutions or expertise, or normalizing a gish gallop argumentative style.
My thought immediately went to Linus Torvalds. The way he acted was tolerated in the past, but the culture was changed and it was used to force a change onto the project.
Same thing with all of those Codes of Conduct that suddenly propped up.
Are you saying codes of conduct make the transmission of misinformation is inherently easier, e.g by sewing distrust in institutions or expertise, or normalizing a gish gallop argumentative style? Are you saying Linus Torvald's behaviour prevented those problems?
It has not occurred to me before, but I don't see why the cancel culture surrounding such matters couldn't be used as an attack vector. Basically, target key maintainers who are vulnerable to this (white, male, history of questionable interactions etc) and push until you force them out one way or another. Then when project gets in trouble because of the lack of qualified manpower, pitch your own agent as replacement. For bonus points, make it someone who hits the right buttons wrt "diversity".
I think it's more that it leads to brain drain. Be it by misinformation, by discouraging anyone who doesn't fit [demographic of leadership], or by simply not giving proper code reviews in the name of politeness. All 3 ways creep up and the code base suffers from lack of care, and/or lack of talent.
We can certainly debate how effective old methods were (and yes, I have no doubt Torvald's old behavior turned off many a talent) and how we can improve on them, but in a more general viewpoint we need to remember that many open source code bases are, or started as, volunteers providing their knowledge in their free time. It doesn't take much to make them walk to the next repo. Or not contribute to OS at all.
Not going to quote the whole thing, but yes hard agree. Contrasting this factual opinion with the opinions in the “sell TikTok” hn threads is quite a delta.
The speed reading shit they do in competitive debate was in my opinion 100% caused by clandestine elements who wanted to keep the future “revolutionary” intelligentsia class obsessed with ivory tower elitism so that they don’t get too close to doing actually subversive things.
I have no other explanation for how otherwise smart people think that speed reading lacanian psychoanalysis is high school is valuable for anything.
In Europe, the most popular high school and university debate format is British Parliamentary in which spreading is not popular because you only have 15 minutes to prepare and weakly justified arguments don't require responses.
British culture certainly has plenty of ivory tower elitism, yet has passed by this. I don't think it's a special revolutionary pedagogy, just a different interpretation of how to deal with subjectivity in debate.
To play devil's advocate people seem to be quite attracted to self-sabotaging ideologies, as they offer the intoxicating justifications of "not my fault" and "no point in doing work". Hell, the typical "rebellious" things are practically hand-picked to be ineffectual at gaining any even small sort of power and demonize doing so. Just look at the dynamics of being accused of "selling out".
I agree with you that it's incredibly bizarre, but I associate it with the strange cultural norms that can only crop up in very specific academic environments that have just the right alchemy of academic strangeness, competitiveness, and idiosyncratic historical origin. I'll compare it to something I recently discovered, which is some viral video I recently saw of some sort of pig fare where kids lead pigs out on this walk to show how well the pigs are trained and I think to show off the pigs as models specimens, and the kids do this intentional intense eye contact with judges in order to get the judges to look at them. It seems so strange and abnormal, but it was explained away as just something that's part of the history of the competition and having strategic value for being effective in the competition.
I've seen videos of the college debates you're speaking of though, and I've definitely felt that they're badly in need of reforms that either impose a word count or otherwise disincentivize speed reading.
The long and short of that is just to say you can explain it without regarding it as some sort of intentional state disinformation program. I would also say I find that especially implausible just because, while I don't love the practice, I don't think it degrades our ability to follow arguments or have information literacy necessarily, and meanwhile modern social media absolutely does seem to instill habits that reinforce short-term attention spans, disjointed thinking, object permanence problems and the like, all of which would dispose people to be more receptive to bite-size arguments that don't have to fit into a comprehensive or coherent worldview.
> And I think you probably see a parallel in state-based information warfare
My own research shows it’s the opposite: they destroy trust in institutions and experts by telling the truth when those groups lie to their own citizens.
The US did this routinely during the Cold War.
More recent examples include:
- demographic facts about murder, violence, and police
- demographic facts about college enrollment, eg the racism at Harvard
- George Floyd’s autopsy report
- images of cities burning; reports of the 70+ people murdered
- facts about COVID
- facts about COVID vaccines
- facts about Ukraine’s status on the battlefield
- footage of Nazis in Ukraine
- facts about Tavistock and WPATH lacking scientific evidence for their recommendations
Because institutions and experts have normalized lying to “nudge” the public via narrative manipulation, it has become easy for adversaries to undermine the nation by showing contrary facts.
People become more radicalized by demonstrating with evidence a supposed ally has betrayed them, eg, your government lying to you. Once broke, trust in institutions and experts takes generations to repair — or a replacement of those institutions entirely.
And part of the process can be a kind of performative incredulity at the very suggestion that they are part of a campaign of hostile takeover, even if it's exactly accurate. I suppose you could even have unfortunate circumstances where parts of an open source community are unwitting advocates of being co-opted.
And I think you probably see a parallel in state-based information warfare, where part of the objective isn't just to spread misinformation, but to shift cultural norms so that the transmission of misinformation is inherently easier, which can involve sewing distrust in institutions or expertise, or normalizing a gish gallop argumentative style.
I'm perhaps stating the obvious here, but I suppose the upshot is that human psychology can be targeted in a programmatic way, and there might need to be something in the way of a normalized infosec-oriented doctrine relating to the stewardship of open source programs as an intentional countermeasure.