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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Rationality Quotes June 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (413)
-Eric Hoffer
That may be Deep Wisdom but it's surface nonsense. Propaganda contains many untruths that people end up honestly believing in. The quote effectively says "propaganda is useless if only one is brave enough to believe what they know (how?) is really true". This is simply wrong.
It definitely isn't nonsense, because I know it is literally false.
Agreed.
I think the idea is that propaganda provides an easy answer, but doesn't really prevent anyone from doing research to find the harder answer. A more detailed example here.
Except people don't have the time to research every statement they hear.
But they also often accept statements they should doubt based on the information they already have. Motivated thinking is there, it just needs an official voice that reassures them that they will be in majority even if they are actually wrong.
As mentioned in this post, I think you're underestimating how many of our ideas come from the group.
Of course not every statement!
Assuming widespread literacy and other educational prerequisites for industrialization, two or three hours per citizen per month poking at the justifications behind the reigning political party's most central claims, including (but certainly not limited to) seeking out and asking reasonable questions of those who already disagree with such claims, would be enough to utterly shred most historical propaganda efforts by sheer weight of numbers. If even half the people who attended one of Hitler's rallies thought afterwards "Those were some pretty strong claims; I should go find some Jewish spokesperson to hear the other side of the story" and then made a reasonable effort to do so, do you think things would have gone the same way?
Upvoted for the link to that story.