already this has tags in the notes like “#anti ai” but… this is just real life with almost everything. this is like grifter 101 please don’t exceptionalize needing to be critical of chatgpt.
This is literally how job interviews work, by the way, and then everyone is surprised the super-duper confident guy is also an incompetent moron.
This worked on Trump voters, with the added selling point that he’s a piece of shit that gave them permission to be pieces of shit.
Talking to experts when I was young used to drive me nuts because I would say something self-evidently straightforward, and they would say, “Well, it’s not actually as simple as that…”
And then I got older and learned things on the way, and found people asking me questions that were straightforward, but the equivalent of “Why isn’t it obvious to everyone that there is only one right way of doing the thing…?” and I would reply, “Well, it’s not as simple as that…” and watch them decide that I probably didn’t know what I was talking about.
The whole Polybius thing is my favourite conspiracy theory because nearly every individual element of the story is absolutely true, but not for that reason.
Did some early arcade games cause people to suffer hallucinations, memory loss, and short-term personality changes? Yes, they did – because many folks who played them were experiencing close range exposure to bright, rapidly flashing lights for the first time in their lives, and – at the time – public awareness of photosensitive epilepsy was practically nonexistent. Most who had it were undiagnosed, and its symptoms often weren’t recognised when they arose – and if you have no idea what photosensitive epilepsy is, those symptoms might look a lot like alien mind control!
Were early video arcades frequented by serious-looking men in dark suits? Again, yes they were – because they were suspected of being money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings, and thus were routinely placed under federal surveillance. And those suspicions weren’t unfounded – it later transpired that many early video arcades were, in fact, money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings.
Did arcade cabinets with strange titles and indecipherable gameplay quietly pop up in out-of-the-way places, then vanish shortly thereafter, never to be seen again? Absolutely – because a thriving black market in off-brand bootlegs arose almost immediately. Quality control was nonexistent, so many such cabinets had operational lifespans measured in weeks, and you’d most often see them in arcades with poor locations simply because they were cheap.
It was a perfect storm of largely unrelated factors that added up to the convincing appearance of a shadowy conspiracy, even though each element by itself had a fairly boring explanation.
1980s - During the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign against racist South Africa, adversaries of the movement said that a “whites only” South Africa had a “right to exist” and that singling out South Africa was wrong when the BDS movement wasn’t also targeting the Soviet Union or “Black on Black crime.”
Jerry Falwell, the Ronald Reagan administration, and other right-wing forces accused BDS of aiding and abetting terrorism by advocating on behalf of the “convicted terrorist” Nelson Mandela.
