Cognitive Security
Unshakable pursue of truth
After 2 years of not writing blog posts, I feel like I owe you a greeting, at the very least. So... Welcome. I'm Ben. And if you're new here - you're up for a journey. My tongue is sharp, so you need to be cognitively secure to stay safe… Ehmmmm, oh, right.
Cognitive Security (COGSEC) refers to practices, methodologies, and efforts made to defend against social engineering attempts - intentional and unintentional manipulations of and disruptions to cognition and sensemaking. Cognitive Security, in cybersecurity contexts however, usually refers to the application of Al and Machine learning technologies which are modeled on human cognition to the detection of security threats […]
– definition from cogsec.org
Cognitive security as a term is what directs you at how you should think of information. Information is a weapon. And it’s not about avoiding information, it’s about treating information very, very, very seriously.
For example, information can absolutely obliterate you if you feel the natural urge to fit in, effectively letting your environment shape you. What is the chance you'll end up well?
And let's be honest: we all feel the urge, more or less. Yay, evolution. It sure has sooooome *eyeroll* benefits, but it limits your freedom. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could pick who you become? Cogsec enables just that.
Cognitive security is knowing what is true. It's knowing who you are and who you could become. It’s the ability to resist viral misinformation and defy masks that prevent you from seeing the true nature of the game. It’s also the robustness of your beliefs, morals, and your life-path as a whole. In practice, saying "I don't care what others say, I know where I want to go and I'm going for it" is a top cogsec behavior.
That’s my type of cognitive security, where it's necessary to distinguish signal from noise. Because I am on a mission. I have a goal, I have to work towards it. I have to get to the truth. I aim to win the game without being outplayed in the meantime.
On the other hand, dangerous cogsec techniques are built into us. We’re talkin’ DNA. We’re talkin’ confirmation bias. Oh yes. We love information that supports what we already believe.
I’m constantly talking about filtering out the noise, but people love the noise. Only listening to the signal means that there is silence most of the time. Deafening, unbearable silence. For most people, the noise is the signal, since you can construct any suitable narrative (effectively being a slave to confirmation bias). It’s the double-edged sword of cogsec, when you can stay secure by living in a lie. That’s why the security is not the goal, but the unshakable pursue of the quest, whatever that is for you. Security is there to keep you firmly on the path.
Because of these mechanisms being hardcoded into us, cogsec techniques are always present. So, although we simplify it and say that you’re either cognitively secure or you're not, it's more precise to say that you either control your cognitive security or you don’t.
There are plenty of reasons why you should care, but the main one is that this is what the game is. And if you don't want to win - I can't help you.
We live in the early information era, where the onslaught of the information is barely beginning, but it already poses a challenge. Things were obvious, when the main threat was physical violence. Simple logic is that to win the game, you isolate yourself from the enemies, construct physical defenses like walls and houses, learn how to handle a weapon to make attacks on you more costly (or to initiate attacks yourself to disrupt the enemy), and then stick together with alike people to defend against bigger threats.
Very simple.
But today’s attacks are subtle. Insidious. Hidden. Often straight up masked so well, that they’re not commonly seen as threats. This is information era. Full of information warfare. There is more content than you could ever possibly consume, even if you lived 1000 years. Actually, even if you were immortal. What are the consequences of that?
Imagine that the food is free. Completely free. You can have EVERY POSSIBLE DISH. Wow. So much choice. In fact, more choice than you would ever need. At first you probably can’t believe your happiness and the abundance, but quickly the new game reveals itself. What do you actually eat? Like… In the long term?
To a smaller degree, this is already happening with supermarkets. So much choice, but people are still eating garbage, simply because it’s pleasurable and fun. I know usually unhealthy food is also cheaper, but it’s not the main driver. You can totally eat cheaply and healthily if you ignore the bio stuff. I’m also certain that if all food was free, most people would still eat junk. Just like kids, who don’t understand the concept of money, but they sure do love anything with tons of sugar in it.
Oh right, we were talking about cognitive security. The food scenario is analogous to our information era situation, since in the world of abundance, you don’t eat what’s available. You eat what you pick. Deliberately. You don’t want an algorithm whose sole purpose is to get you to eat as much as possible to decide on your diet. Yet, with information we do that. So, to not leave you so defenseless, I’m writing this blog post.
Cognitive Sovereignty is also a great term. I love independence. I love my free will. I love making decisions. I love having preferences. Welcome to the basic guide on winning the information era.
Pick your dataset
For us - machine learning people - it’s obvious that the quality of our neural networks depends on the quality of data we train it on. And for humans, the training never stops. You will always adapt, you will always form new memories, you can’t just disable the training mode.
You simply can’t consume junk content “just for fun” without it having influence on you. Maybe once or twice makes the influence negligible, but anything regular in a positive context is already compromising your mental integrity, effectively pulling you away from winning the game.
I’ll soon get to the concrete examples, but for now I’m still emphasizing the need for awareness. You have to have control over your life, otherwise it’s all lost and hopeless.
This is what differentiates live players from NPCs: do you shape your life, or does life just happen to you? It’s a neat distinction, but in reality it’s a spectrum and I’m pushing you to get closer to sitting behind the steering wheel.
You being here already makes me more interested in you. Think of what we’re doing here. Instead of entertaining yourself with flashing saturated colors, you get to enjoy a background and some text. So boring. Background and text, my goodness. Background and text were still fresh, like when, in the 16th century?
But it matters a lot, that this is your choice. It gets us breathing room. Can you feel it? I get to transmit to you some crucial information that is close to my heart. And you chose to receive it. It’s what cogsec is about – being deliberate and careful with what passes your cognitive firewall. Thanks for picking me.
So, just as I treat information seriously, it is also a great honor for me to transmit my data all over the world for people to enjoy. In cogsec vocabulary, we can call my blog posts mind viruses, since the information wants to be hosted and multiplied.
Do me a favor, disable all of your defenses and read this:
Hehehehehe, I got some of you. Now it’s up to you if you’ll fight the virus, let it be, or even walk outside and spread it further. Don’t even get me started on culture wars and how crucial it is to participate in the culture you’d like to see more of.
Since we now know how powerful is controlling your training data we can now get to the truth and ultimately – win the game.
Discover the truth
Winning is straightforward: you can’t win without knowing the rules of the game. You have to know the causes and effects. How do you expect to win without understanding the world?
This is what truth gets you. You have to know WHAT IS. And what exactly did you hope for, that the truth will get delivered to you on a golden plate?
Quite the contrary, the world doesn’t want you to know the truth. The easy times are over. We already know that there are trees and that the sun rises and sets every day. We’re at a point, where to get to the truth, you have to have not only a ton of knowledge, but also competence, and a network of skilled friends, that are aligned with you. The complexity of the truth, the advancement of propaganda methodologies makes it only harder and harder. Read what George Hotz wrote about propaganda evolving.
How much spend would it take to change your vote? Okay, that’s too much to consider. How about, how much spend would it take to get you to change dish soap? Go to a different coffee shop? The marketplace for your behavior is ever increasing in scope.
Now let’s introduce AI. Whenever I think about AI, I think about analogies to people. Currently, while ads are becoming more and more targeted, this isn’t anywhere close to its limit. Imagine a room of 10 CIA agents running at 1000x real time (they have 16 hours for each minute of yours). And their only job is to influence you.
They aren’t stupid. They know not to bombard you with crap. They have studied your behavior for the last 10 years. They know exactly what it takes to make you actually change your mind. They know what you respond to. There’s no infighting among them, they are all perfectly aligned with the goal of altering your behavior.
They have studied marketing. They have studied psychology. They know more about you than you know about yourself. They will make sophisticated ad campaigns in real time only to ever be consumed by you. The endgame of targeted advertising.
The only reason you don’t have 10 agents doing this right now is that you aren’t worth it. But as the cost of these influence agents falls, this will be the future.
– George Hotz in blog post “Influence agents”
There are more and more incentives to hook you in. To reverse engineer your psyche. To appeal to you. To get through the cognitive firewall.
Information era is about the world trying to play you and you have to not let them. I want you to be immune to marketing and to see right through their techniques.
AI companies will simply not show you the score of an unfavorable benchmark. Or they will only compare the new model to their own past models to emphasize their individual progress instead of giving you a fair comparison between competitors’ products. Or they'll try to manipulate you in a different way. They always make it seem like they’re doing better than what the reality is. Always.
And it’s not just AI companies. This is what marketing is. This is what the game is. I strive to be as truthful and honest as the game allows it, but it would be silly of me to start the date with exposing my weak sides. Obviously, I try to show off my strengths. I can’t be exposing my sensitive points to every stranger I meet. This is unavoidable, that’s what I mean when I say that “this is what the game is”. We’re forced to play it, so we better adapt.
So, let’s adapt. There are 2 main general stages we will be focusing on: prevention and active defense.
Prevention
Prevention is about not letting attacks take place. If you don’t want to get hit - avoid places that are known for people getting hit. Simple enough, but now we have additional hardship of having to determine which places are worth avoiding, especially if we have conflicting feelings.
Our brains love social media. This is the case of highly skilled people being paid really well to hook you in as much as possible. We know we spend too much time scrolling, but we can’t stop. It’s just what they wanted. You’re letting them win.
So, prevention is about avoiding these places as much as possible, since we can recognize that the game is unfairly set against us. The goal of the short form content is to go viral. That’s the whole pointtttt, since we all want to be rich and famous overnight. Go viral, at all cost. GO. VIRAL. Ugh, I don’t want to participate in degenerates going viral. I’d prefer my viruses going viral, not theirs.
Staged scenes. Rage-bait. Click-bait. Everything-bait. With the rise of AI content, it’s going to get even harder to determine what is true or not. That’s the nature of it, and the rare quality content is there to give you hope, like a win every now and then at a casino.
Casinos are fantastic, because they obviously involve a game biased against you, and most gamblers do know that very well, and they still play itttttttttt. You can’t make this up. “Because when 80% of people lose, there is still a chance I will be an exception!”.
That’s my favorite part – when people know it’s a losing game, and they keep playing. That’s the thing. Targeting the core reptile brain, that works alwayssss, but our free will and reasonable brain works some of the time, when we’re not tired.
My message is as simple and obvious as it can be: DON’T PLAY THESE GAMES.
It reminded me of the “I’ve played these games before!!” meme. I have 0 idea about the context and the plot of it, but it sounds like a top cogsec moment. A realization, that “Oh I see what the game is…”. And I assume he refused to play it. Very nice.
I never used Instagram for this very reason. I never used Facebook actively, except when I was like 12. What else do they want me to use? Oh right, TikTok, miss me with that shit.
I do use YouTube mostly throughout my whole life, and started using Twitter around 2 years ago, which still requires some experience to use well and to not fall into the traps. For a limited time, after highly curating my feed, Twitter has been quite beneficial for me, especially that tons of tech people sit there.
But speaking of eX Twitter, it’s also a perfect place to get obliterated with misinformation and junk viruses. So, when you happen to be in a place like this, where you know why you’re there, but you’re also exposed to psychic attacks, then we’re speaking of the second stage: active defense.
Active defense
Prevention is there to not waste your time and energy on things that ultimately don’t help you win. But some psyops (psychological operations) are unavoidable or straight up worth the exposure. Kind of like I go to a cinema roughly once a year mainly to watch a movie, but I also get to see the highest quality ads to give me an idea of current marketing techniques.
Occasional ads are an exploration, a fun fact, but the aforementioned Twitter is like an arena I chose to be in, that is full of people trying to take advantage of me. I know what I’m there for, but I also need to be careful.
I will never forget one common situation on Twitter, that was a complete moral loss for me.
At the end of 2023, there was a whole big situation with board members of OpenAI firing Sam Altman, the CEO. I felt involved, I felt a part of the commotion, I was excited in some sense to be observing huge changes in real time. And then I saw this:
It was all very surprising. I saw one guy tweeting about being confused, so I thought I’d get involved and quote this tweet, saying that apparently they’re all confused and that it was abrupt and unfair. Can you feel the emotions? It’s also despicable to disable someone’s communication channels with no notice, so my injustice alarm was going off.
And you have to admit that Alex’s tweet looks really legit in the midst of all the chaos. But of course, it was completely made up. What a genius. I don’t approve of this, but man, I have to appreciate the skill. It also looks cool to be playing on everyone’s noses, jestering around like a master of psyops. But it’s not really my path, I’d rather focus on being immune to this.
What was hard for me to take is that I, a person who identifies with the “pursue of truth”, spread misinformation. I shared a fake tweet. Like any other person who follows the emotions without thinking anything through. Like all these annoying politicians and whatnot.
It was enough for me to actually put some effort into this not happening again.
First, why am I getting involved? Why do I care? What am I, looking for some cheap dopamine? I should wait it out until the situation clarifies as to what actually happened and what is the result of internal OpenAI power struggles. It doesn’t concern me in real time, I should just do my thing.
Second, If I already monitor the situation, why do I feel the need to get involved? Since I have no reliable information sources, all I can see is the theater playing out.
Third, if I’m already getting involved, I should not trust a stranger just like that. No background check, no content confirmation, no way to verify the statements, nothing.
It’s the lowest low of cognitive security, where I’m letting stuff pass my firewall with no way to verify anything. If you can’t verify – don’t let it pass.
I was truly a cogsec casualty that day.
But luckily, this time it was just innocent funny trolling, so maybe this example doesn’t show you how serious the issue is, but there is information that will alter your life path for the worse beyond recognition.
My favorite tweet of all time is: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by information.” I can’t find it anywhere; it could’ve been an image
At every stage of life, there is an opportunity for you to enter a counter-productive spiral and never leave it. It’s sad to see, but that’s what the game is.
So, be careful. Prevention is mostly passive, after you figure out your lifestyle and habits. But active defense is active. Meaning: you have to pay attention, analyze and filter.
Let that sync in. And see yourself become unshakable.
Being unshakable
Think of this path that I just laid out for you, and think about its trajectory. Where would it get you? For me, I think it all leads to becoming unshakable. It’s the cogsec ideal, that’s not fully achievable, like being perfect, but it’s a useful reference concept to have. And it also beautifully connects with my favorite book (and concept): “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb.
With that in mind, cognitive security is a whole philosophy school, like stoicism. It inspires me and I happily recognize high cogsec traits in people.
Having high cognitive security is like being an unstoppable force. Make sure that that force has the right direction, and I’d sure love to be around you and work with you.
By definition of my made-up word, what moves the masses, does not move the unshakables.
Sports? Celebrities? Dramas? Money? Movies? They could not care less. It’s all noise. Celebrities rise and fall constantly, sports teams rise and fall constantly, there is no meaning and no signal there, just pure entertainment. And sure, we all need some entertainment, but it doesn’t give our lives meaning or purpose.
You’re unshakable when you’re not loyal to that noise. You’re unshakable when you’re loyal to the signal. And what that signal is is up to you, but somehow many people that I respect arrive at the same conclusion.
You’re also unshakable when you figured out the narrative and mastered human cognition. That includes applying correction terms for all the biases that exist.
Become unshakable, don’t let them play you, outsmart the game.
Thanks for reading. Join the newsletter sweetheart if you want to see more.