this very badly mismatches my firsthand experiences and observations of social movements in a way that makes me suspect a mismatch between what we even mean by the word “brainwashing” or something. Perhaps it is because I did not need the update this intends to convey, which is that brainwashing does not allow forcibly replacing your opinions, but rather works by creating social pressure to agree habitually with a group?
I think that Habryka was referring to the tendency for people to worry about mind control and manipulation, not comparing human manipulation via gradient descent to human manipulation via brainwashing.
Personally, I think that worrying about advances in human manipulation is always something to be concerned about, since the human brain is a kludge of spaghetti code, so surely someone would find something eventually (I argued here that social media dramatically facilitated the process of people finding things), and it naturally follows that big discoveries there could be transformative, even if there were false alarms in the past (with 20th century technology). But the fact that the false alarms happened at all is also worth consideration.
this very badly mismatches my firsthand experiences and observations of social movements in a way that makes me suspect a mismatch between what we even mean by the word “brainwashing” or something. Perhaps it is because I did not need the update this intends to convey, which is that brainwashing does not allow forcibly replacing your opinions, but rather works by creating social pressure to agree habitually with a group?
I think that Habryka was referring to the tendency for people to worry about mind control and manipulation, not comparing human manipulation via gradient descent to human manipulation via brainwashing.
Personally, I think that worrying about advances in human manipulation is always something to be concerned about, since the human brain is a kludge of spaghetti code, so surely someone would find something eventually (I argued here that social media dramatically facilitated the process of people finding things), and it naturally follows that big discoveries there could be transformative, even if there were false alarms in the past (with 20th century technology). But the fact that the false alarms happened at all is also worth consideration.