Not using a priori information for Russian propaganda

post by EniScien · 2023-04-24T01:14:22.781Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

Contents

4 comments

(The first version was written extremely poorly and received a lot of bad marks, so I hesitated to publish it for a long time, now this is the second version)

I live in Russia, so I regularly encounter samples of Putin's propaganda, and apparently, due to the effect of familiarity, I overestimate it credibility.

One of the characteristic features is that she does not seek to convince you that she is telling the truth, she seeks to convince you that no one is telling the truth, because such a thing simply does not exist, there are only views that are beneficial to various sides of propaganda.

The propaganda of your Motherland and the propaganda of the Anglo-Saxons, who throughout the history of our country have been trying to destroy it, because they are jealous.

And from this follows the tactics of attempts to persuade in specific situations. For example, if a house was destroyed in Ukraine, then you will be told that it is the Ukrainians who are bombing themselves in order to put the noble Russian soldiers in a bad light, and themselves as victims.

And there is often no evidence in either direction, and therefore it can very easily begin to seem that, in general, both versions are equally likely, and now you are simply supporting the enemies of the motherland for no reason.

However, this is a mistake, it does not take into account a priori information, which says that the probability of regularly bombing yourself after the troops of another country invaded you is extremely small, but the probability of bombing by the invading countries is extremely high, both in terms of statistics and with point of view of assessing the complexity of the hypothesis.

4 comments

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comment by EniScien · 2022-03-08T07:26:59.607Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Can I know a certain cause why that was so downvoted?

Replies from: maxwell-peterson
↑ comment by Maxwell Peterson (maxwell-peterson) · 2022-03-08T13:53:22.321Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I didn’t downvote, but I don’t understand the post. It’s vague - probably to avoid overly political details, but it’s still just… very very vague! What are the hypotheses you were considering? Why do you think one is simpler than the other? Without these details, I don’t get anything from the post. If you can’t provide the details because they’d be overly political, I appreciate the restraint, but that might mean the post just can’t be written.

When you write this part - “I became much more confident that I really followed the methods of rationality in this matter, and not just tried to refer to them when trying to convince everyone of my political views. And I no longer worry that I am unfair to alternative versions of what is happening. Here it is, rationality in action, in everyday situations.” - It sounds like the everyday, rationality-in-action usage you’re talking about is using rationality to convince yourself that you’re right about a political question. That gives me a sort of yucky feeling.

It also is a “wall of text” - text of this length should be broken into paragraphs.

Replies from: EniScien
↑ comment by EniScien · 2022-03-08T14:20:53.219Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks. Before that, my only idea was that I was talking about it as political, but talking about bits of evidence. About the nasty feeling... It's hard for me to articulate, but the fact is that I had it just before, when my intuition rejected one of the points of view, because it comes from an "anti-rational (and anti-scientific)" source, but could not come up with concrete refutations of what was wrong with this very complex alternative hypothesis. Is this still a bad use of rationality? I'm just not sure that you can't call "self-righteousness" any use of rationality in relation to politics that does not refute your previous views. Although I probably should have at least clarified this in the post itself. I am probably a victim of the illusion of transparency, since it does not look clear to an outside observer. I'll send it to drafts to fix it, and also split it into paragraphs.

comment by ChristianKl · 2023-04-24T02:22:39.493Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

However, this is a mistake, it does not take into account a priori information, which says that the probability of regularly bombing yourself after the troops of another country invaded you is extremely small, but the probability of bombing by the invading countries is extremely high, both in terms of statistics and with point of view of assessing the complexity of the hypothesis.

Historically, that's wrong. Bombing your own assets to prevent them from falling into enemy hands happened often in history. Especially bridges are often destroyed to prevent attackers from advancing and supplying their troops.

If an attacker wants to take over a city, it's more valuable if the city is standing than when all the houses are destroyed.

Generally, you wouldn't expect a country to want to use cluster ammunitions inside its own borders because as CNN describes:

Cluster munitions are imprecise by design, and scatter “bomblets” across large areas that can fail to explode on impact and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines.