> DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

> I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments

Corporations and governments are made of actual people.

> Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state.

"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. I've met people who work for the state at various levels and the policies they support that might lead towards that end result are usually not intentionally doing so.

"Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"

Bang on.

> It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint.

Not an accidental 'viewpoint'. A deliberate framing to exactly exclude what you pointed out from the discourse. Sure therer are dummies who actually believe it, but they are not serious humans.

If the supposedly evil russians or their bots are the enemy then people pay much less attention to the real problems at home.

My hn comments are a better (and probably not particularly good) view into my personality than any data the government could conceivably have collected.

If what you say is true, why should we fear their bizarre mind control fantasy?

No it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation.

And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening

The rant from 12 monkeys was quite prescient. On the bright side, if the data still exists whenever agi finally happens, we are all sort of immortal. They can spin up a copy of any of us any time... Nevermind, that isn't a bright side.

> Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state.

I'm sorry, I think you dropped your tinfoil hat. Here it is.

> presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments

Off-topic and not an American, but I never see how this would work. Corporations and governments are made of people too, you know? So it's not logical that you can presume the "best of actual people" at the same time you presume the "worst of our corporations and governments". You're putting too much trust on individual people, that's IMO as bad as putting too much trust on corp/gov.

The Americans vote their president as individual people, they even got to vote in a small booth all by themselves. And yet, they voted Mr. Trump, twice. That should already tell you something about people and their nature.

And if that's not enough, then I recommend you to watch some police integration videos (many are available on YouTube), and see the lies and acts people put out just to cover their asses. All and all, people are untrustworthy.

Only punching up is never enough. The people on the top never cared if they got punched, as long as they can still find enough money, they'll just corrode their way down again and again. And the people on the down will just keep take in the shit.

So how about, we say, punch wrong?

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Famous quote.

Now I give you “Bzilion’s Conspiracy Razor”:

“Never attribute to malicious conspiracies that which is adequately explained by emergent dysfunction.”

Or the dramatized version:

“Never attribute to Them that which is adequately explained by Moloch.” [0]

——

Certainly selfish elites, as individuals and groups of aligned individuals, push for their own respective interests over others. But, despite often getting their way, the net outcome is (often) as perversely bad for them as anyone else. Nor do disasters result in better outcomes the next time.

Precisely because they are not coordinated, they never align enough to produce consistent coherent changes, or learn from previous misalignments.

(Example: oil industry protections extended, and support for new entrants withdrawn, from the same “friendly” elected official who disrupts trade enough to decrease oil demand and profits.)

Note that elite alignment would create the same problem for the elites, that the elites create for others. It would create an even smaller set of super elites, tilting things toward themselves and away from lesser elites.

So the elites will fight back against “unification” of there interests. They want to respectively increase their power, not hand it “up”.

This strong natural resistance against unification at the top, is why dictators don’t just viciously repress the proletariat, but also publically and harshly school the elites.

To bring elites into unity, authoritarian individuals or committees must expend the majority of their power capital to openly legitimize it and crush resistance, I.e. manufacture universal awe and fear, even from the elites. Not something hidden puppet masters can do. Both are inherently crowd control techniques optimized by maximum visibility.

It is a fact of reality, that every policy that helps some elites, harms others. And the only real manufacturable universal “alignment” is a common desire not to be thrown into a gulag or off a balcony.

But Moloch? Moloch is very real. Invisible, yet we feel his reach and impact everywhere.

——

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

just to be clear – this is a conspiracy theory (negative connotation not intended).

every four years (at the federal level), we vote to increase the scope and power of gov't, and then crash into power abuse situations on the next cycle.

> I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear.

seems like a good starting point.

You got it not quite right. Putin is a billionaire just like the tech lords or oil barons in the US. They all belong to the same social club and they all think alike now. The dice haven fallen. It's them against us all. Washington, Moscow, it makes less and less of a difference.

Are you aware you are saying that on HN of YC, the home of such wonderful projects as Flock?

The state? Palantir isn't the state.

This is so vague and conspiratorial, I'm not sure how it's the top comment. How does this exactly work? Give a concrete example. Show the steps. How is Palantir going to make me, someone who does not use its products, a "slave of the state?" How is AI going to intimidate me, someone who does not use AI? Connect the dots rather than making very broad and vague pronouncements.

Manipulate isn't the right word in regards to Twitter. So they wanted a social media with less bias. Why is that so wrong? Not saying Twitter now lacks bias. I am saying it's not manipulation to want sites that don't enforce groupthink.