Last night I was thinking about why reputation destruction attempts are so rampant online, and why all political sides try to discredit the opponent instead of his arguments, and on the other hand some people act as if all arguments are on the order of “Rome is in Italy” where the person making the statement doesn’t matter. Of course the person making the statement matters; if you’re reading investment advice, Warren Buffet’s opinion is going to carry much more weight than the opinion of some random person on Reddit. That’s why it would be a problem if we had to read all opinions completely unsigned, divorced from the “brand” of the author, and then I thought – the weight we give to the information we read is a product of the weight of the argument itself, and the perceived weight of the person/entity making the argument.
You are going to take something much more seriously if it comes from a reputable source. Also, if a formerly reputable source abuses the trust invested in them by all the previously sound information they have been giving, and starts spreading propaganda, their “brand weight” is going to degrade and people aren’t going to put much trust in their opinions anymore. We saw that already with the news networks, which have degraded to the point where they are the least trustworthy sources out there, but also with corporations like Boeing, and, unfortunately, science – which has been corrupted so terribly by financial influences, policies that favor publishing questionable work often over publishing solid work infrequently, political influences and so on. Basically, I went from a position of treating scientific articles and publications as mostly rock solid in 1980s and 1990s, to a position where I now see them as obfuscated garbage until proven otherwise. This is unfortunate, because I already treated everything the governments are saying as deception until proven otherwise, I treated “news” as propaganda, lies and deception until proven otherwise, and I can also add science as something that’s manufactured on demand by industry and politics, and has no scientific value until proven otherwise. Essentially, my weighing of various “brands” has changed from positive to zero or negative, which leaves me with a very realistic conundrum: whom are we to believe, and are we actually better off with all those sources of (dis)information around, than we would be if it all stopped bombarding us with worthless, deceptive bullshit altogether? Basically, if Internet went down permanently, would that really be a bad thing? At least the liars would have their mouths shut finally, and deluded people would have to depart from their insane echo chambers, if not voluntarily, then because their Borg interconnection hardware stopped working, and Big Brother TV stopped broadcasting.
The painful thought that follows this is, whether people who got liberated from the brainwashing machine would actually bother to turn their brains on, or is it really their aversion to independent thought that created the addiction to the brainwashing machine in the first place? It’s not that people believe that Earth is flat in the 21st century due to lack of evidence; they believe in lies because truth doesn’t make them feel special and important enough. They believe in lies because they prefer it that way.