I wouldn't even say normies are good manipulators even by instinct. As you said, they're often too dumb to notice the contradictions present in their own narrative. No amount of zeal can make up for that when the one being manipulated is cognizant thereof.
Think they are not as bad as it might seem. The goal is not to win in the intellectual arena. If the mob, the majority of the other people around them, the other normies, take their side, they have succeeded.
Go on reddit right now, argue a massively unpopular perspective you feel confident you are correct on. The discussion won't even get through the logical chain to the end point. Autists might optimise more for being right, normies more for being percieved as
right by other normies. They take the side that is favored shamelessly and that alone makes them orders of magnitued more effective at finding allies and reaching their victory condition while requiring minimal brain work. They all copy the same few lines and arguments from each other and again, that is an advantage.
If you expose on of them, you would expose all the others who haved used the same argument, so you will find a large group of people uniting against you, trying any cheap manipulative attack possible, shaming, guilting, any logical fallacy under the sun, etc. And their large number and cooperation as a group will allow them, more often than not, to crown themselfs the victor if you accept it or not and without even needing to reason much.
When something like this plays out, who is more pathetic? We, refusing to just go along with the popular dogma, refusing to swim with the tide or the normies, who have invested far less effort into their argument but become the judge and jury of what's accepted as fact just by their sheer number and conformity?
Being mindless works in their favor, it's low cost to just repeat whatever the dominant group is saying and it gives huge returns.
In a sense, their manipulation succeeds because the target, the other normies, want to be manipulated. They also want the side they have chosen, the most popular one, to win. They don't want to be proven wrong and look bad. They probably get some advantage from what is the accepted narritive. So they will happily allow character assassination or give favor to arguments in support of their side.
Probably yes. It reminds me of what Nietzsche called the "consensus sapientium" -- i.e., the agreement of the wise. I believe Nietzsche used this term to refer to the apparent fact that most philosophers considered great in his time (e.g., Plato and Schopenhauer) denied life as opposed to affirming it. It almost seems as tho sufficient intellect forces one to see so many flaws that life just seems irredeemable.
Yeah, I'm leaning anti-natalist personally as well. That being said, with the technological progress I expect to come through AI within the next 5-50 years, I don't think it's very relevant anymore.
If Ai works out (and is as powerful as I'm assuming) we enter a post-scarcity society and how the world looks afterwards won't have much to do with how it does now. If it doesn't, we're all dead anyways so anti-natalist get what they want without lifting a finger. Only S-risk is really a scary prospect for the future and I intent to keep a method of suicide at hand to maximize my chance of not being a part of that type of world.
