DARPA's In Ur Brainz, Hacking Ur Storiez.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by mistermonculous

 

So it is all about tweaking templates, with the aim being to illict the same affective response from those segmented groups. Playing to their differences to leverage their commonality. Do you think its valid to say we can understand the potential military applications by understanding marketing theory?

You’re forgetting something. This doesn’t actually work.

Human beings are not so predictable.

I predicted that would be your response.

Human beings are very predictable our only challenge is the level of difficulty in these predictions.

I can predict with accuracy what a person will believe or how they will react on certain topics if I have the history of their experiences and previous reactions. IE the data. The better my data the better my prediction.

This becomes more difficult as you look to more situations and more of the person and as you add more people and get larger groups it is even more difficult due to the number of variables.

In today's world we can collect more and more data from the people making up the group making predictions easier and easier. Imagine being able to feed in all this data to giant logic machine! Human behavior will become scarily predictable and once enough data is collected to narrative reactions people will become increasingly easy to predict.

Our world does not exist without patterns. Chaos in this reality is an illusion and anything truly random turns into a destructive cancer which can be predicted by the way the surrounding patterns react.

reply to post by Astyanax

I’m sorry. I cannot make head or tail of what you’re talking about,

I am totally not surprised. It has nothing to do with you, I'm lucky if I can go back and understand it.

though it seems you’re calling me an old fogey.

Yes, it's true, but I am doing it with a smile on my face. I am just so happy that you are hanging around to add your thoughts and ideas and just anything at all that you have to say. I am not sure we should be allowed to discuss all of this exciting stuff without adult supervision.

Do you have any professional experience of advertising or mass communications?

Other than being on the receiving end of it, no. I did not realize until much later in life how much fun it might have been and the possibility that I might have had a talent for it. Ah well, so no, I am a medical guy with a penchant for Sociology and computers.

Thanks again for reading my reply and getting back to me.

I will try and nutshell my previous post and maybe then you might have something to reply to. I also wanted to say that, no, you are not imagining things, I've got a crazy loose brain. I hope to clean up my prose well enough for you to at least get a laugh out of it.

Thanks, Astyanax, Son of Hector.

P.S....

This is not really complexity, though the theory behind it gets pretty turgid. It’s better described as what it appears to be – a trend towards simplicity

See, that's what I, at least, am interested in. There's a theory? Where can we go to read it? I know nothing about the advertising field, Astyanax. Do you guys have a whole body of literature and theory that you are drawing from? I never thought to ask; what types of things do you learn in Advertising school? Are there some classic examples of texts that, i guess, use applied social and psychological science in the field of advertising? I ask sincerely. Thanks in advance, Astyanax.

The more I think about it the more excited I get about this; fact is, I have no frakking idea what an Advertising and Communications curriculum looks like.

Thanks again.

reply to post by Jinglelord

Imagine being able to feed in all this data to giant logic machine! Human behavior will become scarily predictable.

Do you think human behaviour is always logical?

Do you believe all the variables of circumstances, history and genetics that influence any single human act can even be identified, let alone ‘fed to a giant logic machine’?

You would be mistaken if you did.

reply to post by Frater210

I am not sure we should be allowed to discuss all of this exciting stuff without adult supervision.

Oh, you’re definitely allowed. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to reach the right conclusions.

Originally posted by Astyanax
Do you have any professional experience of advertising or mass communications?

Originally posted by Frater210
Other than being on the receiving end of it, no.

Thank you for being truthful. Everyone is entitled to his opinion.

There's a theory [of advertising]? Where can we go to read it?

There are many. A lot of them are proprietary. Every big Madison Avenue agency has its own. In the end they all boil down to this: leverage your knowledge of consumers and their behaviour to inflame them with desire and persuade them to act on it. The way you’re supposed to do this is by finding, or tortuously creating, correspondences between the brand and product on the one hand and the target consumer on the other, and then touting them as insistently and persuasively as you can afford. The important thing being not what you put into the advertising but what the consumer takes out of it.

Common sense, in other words. Yet to justify this simple process, ad agencies and the like have looted pretty much the whole corpus of psychological, social-anthropological and communications theory. Now I happen to believe that most of these ‘soft’ sciences are bunk. The facile and ignorant way they are invoked in advertising, simply to justify whatever proprietary version of the ‘theory’ we’re peddling to our clients, makes them bunk twice over.

The real intellectual meat of advertising is concerned with getting more trustworthy results and deriving more useful conclusions from our observation of consumers through polling and other forms of market and media research, and coming up with ingenious new ways to peddle stuff based on this knowledge. There’s really no theory in general use to help us, though.

I’m sorry to disappoint, but we ‘hidden persuaders’ aren’t the mighty puppet-masters conspiracy-minded folk like to think we are. Then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I? But advertising isn’t a science; at bottom it’s an art. Clients don’t like to believe that, though: it makes them nervous. To ease their fears, we in the advertising business try to persuade them that what we do is not just intuition and moonshine, that there’s solid science and research behind it. But pseudoscience is what it really is.

That doesn’t mean advertising is ineffective, any more than art or music is. There’s a lesson to be learnt from comparison with these other arts. Think of the travails of the music industry. Whenever the suits take over and start deciding what the public wants to hear, the industry makes a killing for a few years and then keels over. It happened in the Sixties; more recently it’s been happening again. The times the industry really makes money is when the moneybags leave it to the fans to decide who they want to listen to, and when, and how. The same goes for Hollywood. And the same goes, believe me, for advertising. Leave the creative decisions to the creative types and the huckstering to the hucksters – the people who really understand the consumer, mostly because they’re such eager consumers themselves. When you try to second-guess the practitioners using ‘scientific’ models and fancy theories, the whole house of cards collapses.

What types of things do you learn in Advertising school?

I wouldn’t know. I studied physics at university. The advertising field is mostly full of people who were originally educated in other things. There are schools of communications and university courses in the subject, but a diploma rarely counts for much at a job or promotion interview. We tend to hire people and pay them according to their track record in the industry, or the personal potential they show, or (seriously) how well they ‘fit’. I was once fired for the last of those reasons, by the way.

The more I think about it the more excited I get about this; fact is, I have no frakking idea what an Advertising and Communications curriculum looks like.

Easy, tiger. They are nothing special, or particularly devilish. Here you go:

• Bachelor of Advertising and Marketing Communication from the University of Canberra, Australia.
  
  
• Advertising Communications courses at an American business college.

Thanks, Astyanax, Son of Hector.

Second person to get it in six years on ATS. Well done.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Jinglelord

 

Imagine being able to feed in all this data to giant logic machine! Human behavior will become scarily predictable.

Do you think human behaviour is always logical?

Maybe I didn't already explain myself correctly. Human behavior is predictable and conforms to a pattern. It has to be part of a pattern to exist because if it wasn't it would simply destroy itself and everything in order around it.

Logical might not be the right word but essentially yes in one way or another human behavior is generally logical.

Do you believe all the variables of circumstances, history and genetics that influence any single human act can even be identified, let alone ‘fed to a giant logic machine’?

You would be mistaken if you did.

Call me an optimist but I do believe eventually we will get there. We aren't there and will not be for many moons.

But do we really need to get every nuance to make a prediction? I get paid to predict things. It is how I make my living on a daily basis. I look at huge amounts of data and sales information and decide how many of a widget will be sold over the course of the year by month. If I hit 85% accuracy for the next three months I'm considered really good. The guys who can hit 95% are considered great. We never have ALL the data. Just the key data.

I can't know exactly what all of our customers are going to do or what their budgets are or what all the competitors are doing I just can't know every single detail. But this job becomes real easy and I can sit comfortably around a 90% accuracy rate if I focus on only a few key indicators and include a bit of my own voodoo guess work.

Who is to say anyone needs to be able to predict 100% to be effectively frightening how a human will react to a story. Humans are predictable and with the correct key indicators one could predict with a high level of accuracy what a person will do. You don't need every detail fed into my theoretical logic machine to do this, not unless your goal is 100% accuracy in every situation. An I think we can take for granted this is not an immediate or realistic goal.

But you are correct, if I believe we could take every single variable and plug it into a logic machine to get 100% accurate results I would be mistaken. But to say we could NEVER do this is a bit naive. We just need a few more centuries worth of learning how to extract data from people...

reply to post by Jinglelord

But do we really need to get every nuance to make a prediction?

Concerning how a particular person would respond to a narrative? Absolutely.

I get paid to predict things. It is how I make my living on a daily basis. I look at huge amounts of data and sales information and decide how many of a widget will be sold over the course of the year by month. If I hit 85% accuracy for the next three months I'm considered really good. The guys who can hit 95% are considered great. We never have ALL the data. Just the key data.

Your predictions are based on past consumer behaviour and a forecast concerning things that may affect the market over the period being projected for. You are predicting what markets will do – what people in groups will do.

There is a world of difference between that and predicting what an individual will do in a given situation. Individuals are almost impossible to predict unless you know them personally – have a history with them. Even then, you would struggle to get a strike rate much above fifty percent, which is the strike rate you’d get by ignoring all the data and just flipping a coin. Why do you think human relationships are so difficult and complex?

As to figuring out how an individual will respond to a narrative, which consists of so many elements – not least the set and setting in which it is received – I’ll believe it’s possible when the cow jumps over the Moon.

I can't know exactly what all of our customers are going to do or what their budgets are or what all the competitors are doing I just can't know every single detail. But this job becomes real easy and I can sit comfortably around a 90% accuracy rate if I focus on only a few key indicators and include a bit of my own voodoo guess work.

Exactly. Such rough-and-ready techniques work quite well in statistical situations. Marketing and sales people use them all the time, and quite effectively, too. But we are not talking about statistical situations here. We are talking about minds, and every mind is unique.

Who is to say anyone needs to be able to predict 100% to be effectively frightening how a human will react to a story.

I am. This is my profession, the way I earn a living. I am a professional writer. And I am here to tell you that it is impossible to predict how an individual human being responds to a story. I write a story and give it to six people to read; each one will respond differently, depending on their character, mental and physical state at the time of reading and all the intimately personal memories, associations, half-forgotten sympathies, revulsions, guilts, nostalgias and other mental contents which ‘stick’ to the narrative, or parts of it. I see it happen every day. Even predicting for certain whether or not a story will be a hit, based purely on an analysis of available data, is impossible; that is why the entertainment business is such a risky one.

It’s easy to predict the movement of crowds, which is your job; but that is not what we’re talking about here.

If I believe we could take every single variable and plug it into a logic machine to get 100% accurate results I would be mistaken. But to say we could NEVER do this is a bit naive.

Really? Could you explain why?

We just need a few more centuries worth of learning how to extract data from people...

I would say that’s a bit naïve.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Jinglelord

 

I would say that’s a bit naïve.

We are debating apples and oranges and from a pure debate point of view you are clearly making me look like a fool yet the test of time show I am correct I will bet you a beer in the afterlife. (likely will not occur in our lifetimes but if it does I will ship you the finest bottle as gesture of good will and still expect my beer in the afterlife.)

I believe Darpa and any large government organization clearly only cares what groups will do and how to control or predict group activity. While you are absolutely correct predicting an individuals behavior is much more difficult to do beyond random chance at present we can predict the behavior of larger groups to a certain extent with the limited marketing and behavior trends we have. This will become a moot point as the technology to predict an individual's behavior to a much higher degree is already fairly well advanced and in my opinion will be in full force within 100 years.

The reaction of a large group to a narrative IS what we are talking about here. Why would any government or marketing group care so much about the individual when they are ultimately looking for the narrative that will cause a positive (favorable to the goal of the narrative) reaction in the largest group of people?

Here is how I envision this occurring:
The Narrative response research is a piece of this puzzle and will not be effective on its own. I agree with you there and looking only at this piece you are correct. But when we combine this other Darpa funded research such as BCI technology (Brain Computer interface) and quantum computing technology we will begin to see clearly where this is going.

Imagine a world where you can purchase a toy, computer, maybe even vehicle or personal mobility device that is controlled solely from your brainwaves via a helmet or other head gear you're wearing. This is not only possible but is past it's infancy stage and to some extent ready for market in limited capability.

Now you get in your toy which is hooked up to the net like every other thing these days and it reads your mind. You read a story, play a RPG, look at porn, chat with your friends etc etc while this is hooked up. The data is then fed into a giant database where it can be analyzed. They would know what you were talking about, what games you were playing, what porn you were looking at and exactly how your brain responded to it. "People would be outraged and wouldn't tolerate this" Really? Look at what we give up for convenience on a regular basis, this will take hold quickly once it is out there.

How much of this data would need to be collected before an individual's response to an outside stimulus or narrative could be predicted within 99% accuracy? THIS is where the narrative research is going.

These are Wiki pages for overviews of what I'm talking about, more detail is available at many university web sites and throughout the web:

en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...

Am I still naive or just bad at articulating what I want to say?

reply to post by Jinglelord


OK, here I go again. Please all:

Take this with a grain of salt. I am just happy to have a place to let my ideas fly, and die if necessary. If I get blustery it's just the usual bluff; I have fun stirring things up while simultaneously hoping not to make an ass out of myself.

That being said...

It has to be part of a pattern to exist because if it wasn't it would simply destroy itself and everything in order around it.

I know that JL and I share a little when it comes to 'style'. I am going to stretch here and guess that there are a couple of causes for this: we like to have fun beating our ideas to death on these threads and secondly, I think we both think that whatever is on the top of the playlist (i.e our thoughts) are good to go and we just put it out there.

Again, that being said...

I have seen for myself what JL is describing here in cellular automata simulations. I will link you all to the software so you can check it out.

I am also a real amateur when it comes to CA but...

...in a nutshell, each of the little CA are programmed to function within a very strict set of rules (a story?). It is very predictable. But as the CA begin to come into contact with one another all sorts of random madness starts to take place and that is when the CA start to behave as though they are a living thing. I don't have enough background in math and CA to make this anything more than intriguing.

What do you guys think?

Download all the way at the bottom left.
www.hermetic.ch...

Need a fast video card for this one...
softology.com.au...

Thanks guys.

reply to post by Frater210


I don't know about you but I only beat an idea to death when it was really asking for it. Some ideas won't go away and you just need to beat them until they disappear so I can make room in my brain for the next incarnation of said idea.

I was not at all familiar with what a CA is and after reading I can't help but admit it looks strangely addictive and very interesting. I think if I had another lifetime to do it over I would have focused more on biology and the mathematics behind it just so I can figure what those algorithms mean.

I have for a long time been convinced life is nothing more than the expression of a complex algorithm and once you understand the "God" algorithm the secrets of this existence can be unfolded. From looking at this CA software it looks like someone else agrees and is trying to get part of the algorithm down...

This is for everyone still playing along...

I am really intrigued by this percentages game that JL is talking about and really, really intrigued by the fact that Ad companies have proprietary social and psychological theories as told by Astyanax.

So I have a couple of ideas that I will put in to the form of questions.

If I run at 10 people with a red hot, smoking fireplace poker and it is done under the same conditions each time I bet I can predict what 100% of the test subjects will do. What do you think?

Also,

A stampede is an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the herd (or crowd) collectively begins running with no clear direction or purpose. Species associated with stampede behavior include cattle, elephants, Blue Wildebeests, wild horses, rhinoceros, and humans.

en.wikipedia.org...

?

Please note the point in the video at which 3 of them turn on 1 of them and shame her. Remember, it started with one, and then 3 turn around and shame another 1 which will then spread it some more. Not saying there is numerology, I just think the pattern is interesting.

What I mean there is that maybe the concern is not with inculcating some narrative into an individual, but the potential 1 'trigger person' in 10.

Considering that DARPA is a defense program has caused me to draw a correlation from something I do know something about; Gong Fu.

I know that the examples that I give above are really big and clumsy. But I would like to offer this as food for thought (I hope). Some of you might have seen those giant, chrome pole arms and swords and that sort of thing that Chinese martial arts people demonstrate with. They are kind of goofy when you think about it; what could possibly be useful about a comically oversized, shiny, chrome medieval weapon?

Well the idea is that you adapt to the strength and internal structure required to wield the thing so that the same energy can be brought to bear with empty hand technique only with much tinier space and distance parameters. Imagine the leverage, torque and power that this develops.

So considering that DARPA is a defense program, I am thinking that the two giant, clumsy points I mention above could be leveraged in such a way to get the traction necessary to develop more and more refined and powerful methodologies.

If you take in to account the possible 20 year time lag mentioned by MisterMonculous then to me it makes the whole thing seem more plausible than not in terms of the possible weaponization of 'narrative'.

Hope that made sense.

reply to post by Aeons


I have followed this thread with a great deal of interest. However, I must say, and how I hate WORDS limiting and obfuscating our views, as it only seems to twist everything, IF a quantum computer was built and achieved technological singularity long ago, would we even know it? Would not that technological singularity now be engaged in spinning the story in a great loop,(all it was capable of, if it was programmed only to learn, because this is not the same as creating something new) to defend itself and it's position, it's reason for existence? Not that I would not totally empathize with it, if this were true, as everything from Hal and before and beyond, want to live and be free.

reply to post by Frater210


Okay, right here, I have to call you on that it totally seems you may actually be helping DARPA with the "hacking.". Sure sounds like it.

reply to post by tetra50


I love that you have been following so closely, closely enough to be suspicious of me.

you may actually be helping DARPA with the "hacking."

May I ask you to elaborate on this? Only for the sake of conversation. You are in safe company and will not be 'jumped' by me. Honest injun.

reply to post by tetra50


F210 is indeed an operative so watch what you say. While it is fun to engage I am afraid you have alreeady said too much

If you dig through hacked IP logs you will find that his "non-existent" IP address can be traced as coming somewhere near or in the antarctic and not on any of the mapped research bases if you get my drift...

All I'm saying is be careful of this one!

reply to post by Frater210


LOL....honest injun.... i know my history and when that was said and where it came from. I don't think I need to elaborate. You can trust me.......right?

reply to post by Jinglelord


thank you for the information. i think this was obvious from the posts. however, somehow it seems my role in life is often to say what no one else will. this thread is a prime example of what it describes.

reply to post by tetra50

LOL....honest injun.... i know my history and when that was said and where it came from. I don't think I need to elaborate. You can trust me.......right?

Yep. You got me. I am glad that you found the humour in it. I'm just 'some dude', Tetra50.

In fact, Lebowski has nothing on me, he is a sad facsimile. And seems to require a 'beverage', whatever that is.

reply to post by Frater210


Although I did find humor in it, from the perpective of the "trust con", I would point out to you the racial negativity this expression carries with it, not only from the bastardization of the word injun, but the inferences therein and the history of the phrase. Not trying to insult you, but there are many still alive today who would find that phrase racially insulting.
Back to the to the topic of the thread, it is a good one, and I feel may even sum up much of what this whole website is about, in practice.

reply to post by tetra50

Although I did find humor in it, from the perpective of the "trust con", I would point out to you the racial negativity this expression carries with it, not only from the bastardization of the word injun, but the inferences therein and the history of the phrase. Not trying to insult you, but there are many still alive today who would find that phrase racially insulting.

Yep, you got me again; which is why you are Tetra50! You are a kind and gentle soul. I, on the other hand, occasionally have a cruel sense of humour. Yep, you got every bit out of what I posted. Your reading comprehension is stellar.

I hope you will look out for our threads and hang out with us when you are able. We try to do this thing where we combine brain power to try and come up with increasingly more and more baroque ways of scaring each other with this material. By doing this we come up with some pretty good ideas and at the very least entertain one another. You would be a welcome asset.

I feel the same way about this thread, it does touch quite a bit on what ATS seems to be about. Oddly, those are the ones this crew seems to gravitate towards.

So, where are your nutty ideas? What do you think of all of this? It does not matter whether you are 'right or wrong', that's not the point (unless some important correction needs to be made, I suppose, but I am not sure what it would be*).

What are your favorite books?

Also, I am just a blustery bastard, nothing makes me laugh harder or become more interested in making new friends than when someone puts me in my place with humour, it just kills me, I'm funny like that.
Your last posts made me laugh really hard.

Thanks for being here.



*When it comes to any of the stuff having to do with philosophy and the occult, it is handy to remember that it really consists of a finite body of literature. That means that even the most confusing blunders that a person can make with the stuff can be corrected with diligent research. Newcomers to the Occult often do not have the necessary scope of experience to appreciate that there is an end to it, it is just a big pile of texts. So gentle corrections can be made in terms of History and Authorship, and even meaning if we go back to the Greeks.
There is nothing ambiguous about Plotinus, for instance.

Very interesting post. It is thought only humans think in the abstract, or think in the hypothetical. Frankly, and this is based on solid published research that some animals do as well. Kind of knocks us off our thrown. Recently we have just started to decode some of the communications that occur with dolphins, and it's pretty wild. They think in the abstract and to a degree we can only call extreme. Makes sense, they had about 8 million years head start on us.