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Comment by peter_l_downs | Hacker News Reader

Linked site won't load so here's a vaguely-related book recommendation: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I don't want to spoil it, but it involves a group of writers who try to come up with a single, maximally compelling, conspiracy theory. Reading it sets up a super interesting tension -- the book is clearly fiction, and yet the conspiracy theory it presents is as compelling as any (and in fact incorporates many) of those you'll read "in the wild".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum

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I read Foucault's Pendulum and finished it, but it was heavy going. I then read "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" [0] which I enjoyed much more, because it was more intentionally cranky and funny. It is to conspiracy novels as "Airplane!" was to disaster movies, and then some.

[Edit] Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

Everything you say is true, but the Illuminatus! Trilogy also presents some serious philosophy sandwiched between the raunchiness and silliness. For example the SNAFU principle is a reasonable explanation for a lot of what we see in large organizations. Also, expanding Hegelian dialectic by adding Parenthesis and Synthesis to fit the Law of Fives is tongue in cheek, but in a haha only serious kind of way.

Indeed. I also like how it demands attention from the reader, for example by sometimes changing the character PoV on a sentence-by-sentence basis, between characters who are sometimes themselves unreliable narrators.

Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of stuff that Dan Brown writes, though. He's sincerely trying to make thrillers; Wilson and Shea were (partly) making fun of authors like him.

> Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of stuff that Dan Brown writes

To be clear (for the benefit of others), not specifically of Dan Brown. DB was only aged 11 when Illuminatus! was first published in 1975.

> Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.

It's mostly because Browns work is just a cheap simulacrum of the original conspiracy theorists who came up with the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr...

I can only agree with the recommendation. One fun fact I wanted to add is that in one of his writings Eco told the story of a letter he received because of said book.

In the book there is the description of a fire in Paris on a specific date. The reader wrote to Eco, that he must have gotten the date wrong, as he was at that place that night and that there was no fire.

Eco uses this as an example, that some readers do not understand the signifiers of fictionality and that authors sometimes have to deal with readers taking their fictional work literally.

This BBC article says that the Illuminati conspiracy theory was the result of an elaborate literary prank https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-i...

Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum Audiobook Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyALEomuk9k

Second the recommendation, great book.

If that's the plot, then I think Scott Alexander did it better with Sort By Controversial, a short story about a team who uses machine learning to generate maximally-controversial claims/articles, then find themselves ensnared by that very same inflammatoriness.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190508

A state of art network like GPT-3 fails to appeal to human emotions and sounds artificial, so as a wedge-issue(the actual term for thing like 'Shiri Scissors') generator it wouldn't produce anything on the scale of human trolls(who actually understand psychology), besides the reputation of new user posting auto-generated trolling content will not be taken as seriously. A real troll would construct a narrative that is believable and appealing to a wide audience, without any controversial content: the controversy would comes from implications and analysis of statements in detail, i.e. the 'obviously controversial' parts are bad trolling that would detract from the position advanced: An AI trained to produce controversial content wouldn't understand such subtlety and produce directly inflammatory content.

That would just mean that “controversial” isn’t the best term for “whatever that thing is they’re optimizing”, not that that thing is fundamentally machine-unlearnable.

The thing is, the learned data comes from humans who treat offensive/controversial/trolling/infflamatory content as 'controversial' and will argue against obvious bait topics for hours.

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