I got this idea after reading one of schrafinator's posts:
Well, no, actually the prewar intelligence was pretty good coming out of Iraq from the weapons inspectors. The Bush admin just choose to ignore the inspectors and instead chose to listen to Chalabi and believe in a single forged document.
They had long before decided to go to war in Iraq regardless of what the rest of the world said and regardless of the results of inspections.
They did know that their case was pretty weak, though, which is why they constantly invoked 9/11 and Osamma bin Laden in the same breath as Hussein and Iraq in speeches and interviews in the run up to the war.
They counted on the fear and ignorance of the American people, and they used it well.
Which is basically a good example of social engineering that is counting on a certain amount of ignorance of the public in general. I wonder if there is a study anywhere about how consistent the ignorance of the masses is. What made me think of this is a talk I heard about how the most effective computer viruses in history thus far have overwhelmingly relied on the ignorance of computer users in order to propagate themselves rather than technical exploitation.
If there is someplace somewhere a document that shows how you can predict the measure of ignorance of a population then you probably could have a good ol'e time pushing things as far as possible. Our friends in the white house seem to doing such a great job at it they might have some kind of systematic way of doing it.
In particular, it looks like there is some evidence that the media is part of the propagation of ignorance. schrafinator posted this extremely interesting link in the Iraq War thread:
http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=2937&f...
Lets not have this turn into another variation of the discussion of the Iraq War. In using examples of counting on the ignorance of the populace we should use current events but it should not be a debate about the content of those events.
For the moment we have two good examples; successful computer viruses and the spoon feeding of contradictory information to the public by the Bush administration.
In fact, most social engineering works on the basic assumption that people, as a mass, are basically ignorant. What is different about this from what I would like to discuss is that social engineering seems to work on some personal sense of viability of the engineering rather than a firm confidence based in some sort of social science.
In a nutshell, is there a science behind social engineering? Does a measure of ignorance play a part in predicting the success of particular act of social engineering? How can I use this in my plan for world domination?
Some social engineering resources:
Social engineering (political science) - WikipediaSocial engineering (security) - Wikipedia
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