074 - Mind Hack

Humans reliably become terrible decision-makers when any one or more of the following are true:

• When emotions are running high

• When emotional centers of the brain are damaged or chemically inhibited

• When faced with "Choice Overload" (too many options, usually more than ~5)

• When the complexity of a problem exceeds human cognitive bandwidth

• When arousal is running high

• When faced with trauma-associated stimuli

• When they defer to sources of disinformation to ground their decision-making

• When heavily targeted by bad actors and adversarial systems

Bad actors and adversarial systems engaged in social engineering operate at a global scale and under many of the world's highest-value "brands". Though a handful of statistical outliers will virtually always escape capture by these "powerful optimizers", for everyone else, sooner or later they will break.

A scene from the original Matrix movie comes to mind, where Morpheus has been captured, and his mind is being "hacked". More than 20 years later, this same activity doesn't require electrodes being placed on your scalp, as your data is already in the hands of those seeking your manipulation.

So long as they have the economic incentive to manipulate you, adversarial systems of their creation will eventually succeed, it is only a question of time. Humans aren't built to reliably counter adversarial powerful optimizers that operate at internet scale.

Technology has been developed and demonstrated over the past 10 years capable of countering this growing threat while adding new and immeasurable value along the way. The next step will be locating an investor who chooses viable technology over the umpteenth trashbot of 2023. After that, the bad actors and disinformation brokers may have a short road to bankruptcy and prison.

Until then, I wish everyone luck in resisting the metaphorical mind hack.