> You seem to have a superiority complex with a desire to win an argument...

Am I the only one who suffers from this phenomenon in this conversation? It takes two to argue, and a claim that you are acting purely in good faith and me in bad is a little rich. If I cannot disagree with you, then how dare you disagree with me.

> ...rather than engage in an honest discussion, but I'll indulge you for a moment.

Or, we could simply disagree without engaging in speculative, self-serving framing of what is going on.

>> The magnitude of these operations, and what they actually did (as opposed to what is claimed/implied/believed they did, typically without conclusive evidence, but lots of innuendo and rhetoric) is not actually known.

> First of all, a basic principle of information warfare, and warfare of any kind for that matter, is to keep your enemy and the public at large in the dark as to how it's actually performed, and the extent of its operations. So the general public will only hear about what gets to leak out, and run through the filter of their own country's media, with its own biases and agendas.

Disagree - in addition to hearing about what gets to leak out, they also hear false &/or misinformative narratives....and as a consequence, some of them proceed to spread these narratives on social media, such as HN.

> I'm speaking from the perspective of a layperson, and only know what the general public has access to. But I'm educated enough to be able to put 2 and 2 together, see the clear effects of psyops...

I notice you say "see the clear effects" with no qualifiers - do you mean that you can see some of the effects, or do you mean all of the effects?

For example: is the cultural convention to discuss and think about matters in imprecise and ambiguous language purely organic?

> ...and with the power of deduction conclude that this isn't just a single warehouse in an isolated town, but that these are operations on a global scale that are rarely reported in mainstream media.

Depending on which definition of "on a global scale" one is meaning, this could involve anywhere from (say) 10 to 100,000 personnel.

> You, on the other hand, are implying to have some insider knowledge that contradicts mine. So how about you follow your own statement, and be precise in your framing of reality?

Is it that I am implying it and "framing reality", or might it be that you are using the powers of interpretation & perception to form a belief that I am doing these things?

I think I have a half-decent way to investigate: quote the precise text I have written that you believe does what you claim, and we can discuss it.

> Which part? QAnon started on 4chan[1]. The part about conspiracy theories thriving on forums and social media comes from my own experience on the internet. So, yes, it's subjective. Do you have a different opinion about this that you would like to share?

Actually, I think I have made an error - upon reviewing the conversation: "QAnon started on an online forum, where most conspiracy theories live and grow", I believe myself to have misinterpreted you - at the time I wrote the comment, I believed you had claimed that most conspiracies lived and grew within the QAnon subset of the conspiracy world. Upon review, your text does not seem to actually make that claim - thus, I am mistaken, and thus I owe you an apology: I am sorry for misinterpreting what you said (in this instance).

>> It may also be possible that it is not possible for you to realize this.

> It very well may be. I'm not very smart.

I don't think intelligence is a substantial requirement - in fact, I genuinely believe that it can be detrimental, and maybe even that it is usually detrimental. My thinking is this: if a person is genuinely smart, they will likely finding themself to be genuinely correct far more often than not when a disagreement arises with another person. As a consequence, I believe it is possible if not likely that one might form a expectation/heuristic that when a disagreement arises, the error is [likely to be] on the other end of the wire. And this is not merely a theory, but one that emerged based on observing human discussions carefully for many years - I believe that it is well supported by evidence, although I've never bothered to look into whether there are any supporting peer-reviewed studies.

>> Reality may appear to be binary (True/False - and portions of it are), but it is actually fundamentally ternary (True/False/Other).

> What? Are you claiming that Cambridge Analytica didn't exist? Or that it existed in some other dimension? It's difficult to follow your big brain arguments.

Most simply, it is the difference between binary logic (True/False) and ternary logic (True/False/Other).

More colourfully, I like this quote from Curtis Yarvin:

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-th...

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The four-stroke regime is a two-story state. When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”

Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.”

There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.

Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft!

This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious.

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> I would like to say that I wonder that as well, but so far you haven't said anything that made me think that you do. So I think I have more knowledge.

Did you consider the significance of "me think" in the operation? And, do you tend to consider what you believe to be true, to be necessarily true? The "T" in JTB (Justified True Belief) doesn't come for free, despite how it may seem.

>> Does your intuition suggest to you that it is you?

> Yes. Please prove me wrong.

I do not expect that a genuine proof of your incorrectness would be any match for the power of your intuition, so even if I did try and succeed at doing it, it is far from guaranteed that you would adopt it as a belief.

As I see it, there is more than enough content here already for a reasonable person to determine whether it is possible that their beliefs may be less than perfect, potentially substantially less.

> I don't think I do. I never thought I would be contemplating conciousness in a thread about disinformation, but here we are.

Do you see no dependency of disinformation on consciousness?

> Can you teach some some techniques to improve my perception of reality?

My favorite technique: for every belief you hold (or at least, assert): as seriously as possible, ask yourself the question: "Is this belief necessarily [and comprehensively] true? Is it impossible* that it could be not true, taking into consideration that I am performing this calculation using consciousness, which science has well demonstrated to be unreliable for a variety of reasons?"

Generally speaking, most people I've floated this idea to find it to be ~utterly bizarre...a phenomenon which I find to be utterly bizarre and wouldn't believe had I not witnessed it myself so many times.