Comment by John A (john-a) on Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century · 2024-02-19T00:26:08.401Z · LW · GW

I'd argue that the covvid cascades were a failure of manufactured consensus.

The dynamic Roko described in the intro, people acting upon the perceived acceptability of others, is very similar to the concept that when faced with some novel thing people act based on the actions of those around them. I once read somewhere that the toilet paper hoarding was an example of this. With no idea of how to respond to an epidemic, everyone started doing the first thing they saw others were doing and that happened to be stories of people hoarding tp.

Extending that kind of herding behavior to Roko's specific dynamic, one other behavior that gained acceptance as the proportion of individuals who publicly espoused the beliefs was engagement with conspiracy.

Now that I'm typing it out I could see this diverging of consensus reality as a sort of "manufactured consensus" as it established the bounds of acceptable discourse, it just doesn't seem to be a very effective one if we're looking at it from the pov of a 'conspiracy of control' from some shadow cabal.

It's this lack of effectiveness, in coalescing society to flock in some specific direction to meet a very pressing challenge, that leads me to call it a failure of manufactured consensus.