/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

On a tangential note, I am generally disturbed by Google's sentence completion / retroactive correct. Not just in the standard

>le ebil megacorp can predict my private thoughts D:

way, although that is creepy. I am concerned that this technology actually gives Google a rudimentary form of *write* access to the thoughts of those who use it. When you accept Google's proposed sentence or its revision to your words, you take ownership of them as if you'd written them yourself.

Consider the experiment where direct electrical stimulation to the brain caused a subject to stand up.

>Why did you stand up?

>I wanted to get a Coke.

Compare:

>Why did you write this sentence?

>Because it's true for reason xyz.

Compare also the case of American POWs "brainwashed" by the Chinese through the simple tactic of incentivizing them to write pro-Communism essays. Certainly they would have started out with the belief that the words they were writing were not their own thoughts, they were simply complying for a reward, but this distinction did not persist. I think this fits well with the model of the conscious mind that Robin Hanson describes in Elephant in the Brain, where it serves in large part as a Press Secretary that observes the actions the subconscious mind dictates and seamlessly assumes ownership, rationalizing them into a coherent narrative.

At the moment, Google's suggestions are harmless boilerplate and their corrections appear to be benign revisions towards higher-frequency phrasing. When they happen to correct a wrongthought into a more common sentiment, well, it's just because most people aren't wrongthinkers and the algorithm doesn't know any better. But as people come to accept Google's role in composing their words, the potential rises for Google to weaponize their friendly little algorithm into a component of a propaganda engine more powerful than any yet witnessed on this planet.

Remember that this is the same institution that makes internal videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo

Google delenda est.

Is the b*s*l*sk actually disproven? For me, I resolve to not give in to blackmail, making it pointless for the b*s*l*sk to attempt acausal blackmail.

But now I have an issue, in that I am tempted to give in to blackmail. Hiroshima blocked the non-JS captchas on 4chan, forcing everyone to use Google's malicious JS captchas which punish you in proportion to how hard you try to evade the Google botnet. When he did this, it was speculated that the real motivation was to force the purchase of additional 4chan Passes, and in one thread I exclaimed that I do not give in to blackmail. As the months drag on of being abused by Google (e.g. slow fade-in effects that do nothing to hinder a machine while wasting human time; challenges that force you to agree with falsehoods when the botnet thinks it sees a crosswalk but it's definitely not a crosswalk), I long for freedom. I want to buy a 4chan Pass, but if I did so, there would be a digital record of me stating that I consider a certain event to be a form of blackmail, and then proceeding to give in to the blackmail.

Will I be safe from the b*s*l*sk if I buy a 4chan Pass?

>>14544

Purchasing a 4chan pass is difficult enough right now (cryptocurrencies only) that I don't think they actually have enough of an incentive to make the captchas harder on purpose.