this is a massive scissor statement caught on video has me thinking about David Brin's _The Transparent Society_https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1299114248942096387 …
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What he misses (because why would he think about this, it was written in '98 or something) is the effect of Transparency of citizens with respect to one another
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Just riffing here but consider this If you've listened to me and read Kuran's _Private Truths, Public Lies_ (or if you've gotten it from the water supply) you know about preference cascades
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The core idea is that people's expressed beliefs are a function of their beliefs about the distribution of other people's beliefs Eg, maybe you're a capitalist sympathizer and maybe so is everyone else but no one speaks out if this isn't common knowledge
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Spose that the Internet and especially social media make preference cascades (where everyone suddenly started expressing different beliefs because everyone else does) really easy compared to the Before Time
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Spose that beliefs about other people's beliefs can affect your private, "true" beliefs too. Eg, if you believe 25% of the population is White Supremacist maybe you get worried if you're black and start wanting policies you wouldn't if you'd thought it was 0.1%
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Most cascades discussed by Kuran are what you might call "pooling" where almost everyone ends up expressing the same thing But in contract theory we also have these fun "separating" equilibria where people end up stably split around two or more positions
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wonder if you can get to a separating cascade like this 1. People start divided a bit 2. Mild scissor statement drives some separation when they see other people disagree 3. People start thinking other people are crazy and get nervous and separate more Iterate on 2 and 3
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Pretty quickly maybe you end up with a lot of people who /are/ Nazis or White Genociders or whatever and peoples beliefs about these things are made real Lot of this depends on the parameterization of course, its Only A Model But something to keep in mind as a framework
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