Cyber Show on the Fallacy of Salary/Ego as a Function of Wisdom in the Era of Pyramid Schemes (Cheating People Using Buzzwords and Complicit Media)
The Cyber Show has this new article about "the remuneration fallacy and the role of reluctance as a negative feedback force."
It's by Andy.
He bemoans debt-saddled GAFAM as perceived technical authority everywhere in the world, based on the false assumption that only clever people become rich or that rich people must be clever. To quote:
A new level of rational scepticism is required to defeat a growing bias in the world. It is "looking-up" to well paid industry voices because they are well paid. Of course this is basically an Authority Bias but it's exacerbated by equating wealth and credibility. It seems especially fertile under conditions of fascism, now evident globally.Our culture has one glaring Achilles' Heel, one utterly broken metric, that we value people according to what they are paid.
Even as it's abundantly clear that billions of dollars are spent on a deluge of daily lies and shameless propaganda to confuse the public about "AI" and cybersecurity, we still hear things like "Well that knowledge is above my pay grade", or "I'm just a minimum wage engineer". We thus are supposed to lend credibility to the monied liars and doubt the accounts of the 'mere' scientists and engineers.
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It once made sense that we judged expert prestige by high position, impressive titles and above all pay grades. Even in academia, once supposed immune and impartial, it now indicates opinions that are bought and paid for. Truth and salary have become inversely proportional. Or rather perhaps, a high salary is alone a good enough reason for extreme suspicion. The tech industry so comprehensively lost integrity at so many levels as to leave an inverted meritocracy of well paid, intellectually conflicted and often unwilling propagandists who feel trapped (and tricked).
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I also think this is a distinct phenomenon from populist iconoclasm and the erosion of genuine expert opinion. There are clearly good reasons to suspect well paid affiliates as being incapable of honesty, of rational scientific free-thinking under conditions of financial duress which comes with the threat of wage withdrawal.
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By contrast, official spokesmen, seven figure salaried corporate titles like "Chief Ethicist" or "Head of AI", may occasionally read out carefully vetted press releases, but they signal clear reasons to discount everything they say. Whereas we once joked there are lies, damned lies and government statements, the total death of the credible official narrative has indeed arrived. Furthermore, that only plays into the hands of those who benefit from radical disbelief.
When every clear, simple and earnestly held popular semtiment (for example opposition to data-centres) is a "conspiracy of Chinese disinformation" or a "Russian plot", there is no ground beneath our feet. The crazed conspiracy-theorist who spreads alternative facts is to be believed equally, simply because he is so labelled.
Without irony, all of this is straight from the old Kremlin/KGB playbook.
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The obvious option for moral beings trapped in a high-salary propagandist position is a principled quit. Many Big Tech executives and chief scientists have taken that path. I was never well paid, but close enough to retirement to quit academic work in cybersecurity because it was a sham that no longer met the least of my ethical standards.
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A chilling allegory my grandfather told me comes to mind. As a Royal Navy gunner he sailed the North Atlantic protecting supply convoys in sub-zero seas where one in three were torpedoed and sunk by U-boats. He said that being able to swim was a tragic disadvantage. It only prolonged your suffering and gave false hope.
Many people in business are planning on swimming. The only way out is not to be on that boat when it goes down.
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To think otherwise is to concede "If someone offers me money I must take it" - which is the same logic as "If we can build it we should build it" - which is what got us into this mess we're in now.
The article mostly deals with rejection of slop and "Scam Altman says" (or similar) 'articles' in Bill Epsteingate-bribed publishers such as BBC. Our politicians and media get bribed to participate in this massive sham/scam; they try to shame and sometimes openly humiliate everyone into accepting cheating, plagiarism, shoddy 'code' (licence violations, obfuscated or missing attributions), and environmental destruction for the sake of maintaining an immeasurable bubble intact for a little while longer (giving the people at the top of the pyramid more time to "pump" and "exit" like Sheela Zemlin did). █
Image source: War Games