similar to https://x.com/JenMsft/status/1381640311357628420/photo/1 : corporations need to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend carbonated beverages to each other

when you are in the business of making money off of this, and you know how it works, it's not hard to see it.

It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.

The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.

This comment is self demonstrating.

It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.

The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.

The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.