The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.
We each have echo chambers, to which we endow trust and allow the source material to be filtered and pre-judged for us. The internet didn't start that. It's embedded in our tribal natures. But it sure does act as an effective crowd-fueled amplifier.
1. Look up H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippman, among others. Both were newspapermen and had tremendous insights, though they came from very different backgrounds.
2. I.F. Stone as well. His 1974 interview on "Day at Night" is on YouTube, and a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so. There's also a website devoted to his writings, highly recommended.
3. Changes in media and communications have profound influences on society, and always have. Look up Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). Her "Preliminary Report" (1968) is much shorter and gives the general spirit of the argument: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/240164 (Full text available via http://sci-hub.cc)
Regulating news, and carrying penalties for intentional disinformation, seems one approach.
Also, how do we continue to trust whomever holds that power, given that such power will be abused eventually if not immediately? There is a common phrase about how power has a corrupting impact.
That's partially due to laziness, but in a large part due to a sort of Pavlovian conditioning that has happened due to how bloated and ad-infested the internet at large is. Even with ublock origin/adaway on, I rarely click on links unless it's a domain that I positively associate with or something that really piques my curiosity. For all its flaws, I think Google's AMP is doing a good job, at least for me, since I click on things more often that I would without it. That is creating a different sort of bias too, but at least Google is creating some incentives for making simpler, more readable websites.
Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a
fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had
found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to
pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.
The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]:
Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was
sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to
criminal or civil authorities.
Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up?
Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency?
Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ...
Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn...
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey
[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...
One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?
Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.
I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.
There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.
I challenge you to find anything similar to Pizzagate, or Obama is a gay Kenyan, or denial of anthropogenic global warming, or similar that is widely believed and publicly supported by Democrats elected to national office. I'll admit some wackos on the left are vaccine truthers, but again: they do not hold national elective office. It's really all conservatives, and there aren't Democrats in national office speaking in glossolalia.
[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/trump-budget-priorities-speech-cong...
They are "conservative" but they assumed that Trump's continuous barrage of easily-debunked lies and blatant disrespect for the intelligence of his audience would prevent his victory.
Still, I will concede your point that the "conservative" population in the USA seems to be more greatly affected by this kind of "reality rejection syndrome". I don't think Trump really has any coherent political ideology; I think he just chose to pwn the Republican party because they had the most rubes susceptible to his brand of snake oil.
(I feel like that might just be because a big segment of that population is angrier than most people, but who knows.)
At some point you need to start including Pence, Preibus, Chaffetz, Mcconnnell, etc. While I fully agree that the Venn diagram doesn't include all conservatives in the reality-rejecting circle, there is a too large of an overlap to ignore.
I'm not including Miller and Bannon in conservatives, because they're clearly motivated by something else/worse.
But it's like Christians in America, or radical Muslims. Terrible things are neither inherently Christian nor Muslim, but it's not too difficult for atheists to lump those traits to bad actors.
TL;DR: I agree, to a point.
Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.
The Vietnam War proved that our government cannot be trusted, and that happened before I was born. It hasn't gotten any better since then. What gives you the idea that this government is trustworthy and has moral goals?
It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear.
We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma.
I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her.
Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business.
I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
In the short term, only by comparing an article under review to "trusted" sources. But if there were any such sources available to tell us the ground truth, we wouldn't need the AI.
The more difficult question, I think, is: why should an average Joe trust the (presumably government or corporate) AI over their favourite worldview-confirming sources?
Truth is not an inherent reality of the universe. There is matter and energy in various juxtapositions, but no 'truth', except if by truth we mean correctly describing a physical order of things. But that's hardly the interesting part or what we usually want to know when we speak of truth.
At best, truth in things like politics and such requires a definition first, and so the problem of what's true is just moved to "according to whose definition?". Is "wealthfare harmful", for example, is not about knowing or not knowing its cost, but more about whether you think the costs are justified. One can legitimately believe that poor people should be left to rot if they can't afford healthcare, for example.
Second, why would an "advanced AI" stick to the truth any more than a human would? Especially if distorting it brings large benefits for it?
When I ask someone if "welfare is harmful", I ask for their opinion on the relative impact it has on various issues we want to optimize for, which mostly boil down to short and long-term happiness of people. It's a difficult question, but still a factual one. The list of things we want to optimize for is finite, there is some ordering to it, and the impact of various actions on those things is, in principle, calculable.
Even the question of "can welfare be justified" is an objective one. There is some model for "justified" that you have, and the data either lets you justify welfare or does not (and tells you the degree to which it is so, if your thinking process is worth anything).
It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".
--
Either way, I only said that a sufficiently smart AI could know the truth (or at least a good approximation of it). I didn't say it will necessarily tell it to people who ask. But an AI that can't correctly from data would be a pretty shitty AI. It's enough that human brains have this problem.
I think you might be surprised at the diversity of answers you get for this, particularly if you actually get people's unfiltered opinions and not what they think you want to hear. Try it, sometime - ask 20 random people (not connected to yourself) what their biggest problem is and what they most care about in their life. You'll get some commonalities (earning a living is a big one, as is social acceptance & validation), but as soon as you start digging into how do you wish to earn a living and what do you consider an ideal world, it very rapidly diverges.
"It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult"."
That's called "being human". What would you rather they do, defer to your agenda?
I don't think it's calculable, even in principle. Except in trivial issues, people can (and do) disagree on very fundamental ideas about what we want to optimize for and which direction we should optimize them.
>It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".
Why wouldn't the people put their "personal interests in focus"?
Whose interests they should put to focus? And says who?
Your mistake is assuming the data is objective in the first place, and doesn't, a) contain the societal bias at the time it was written, b) contain the bias of the authors that made the study, and c) contain any inherent bias in the metrics used.
All the AI knows is the training set. This is given a necessary bias by the researchers in the process of creating the AI. The best an AI can do is exaggerate the biases that it learned from the training set (Which is, after all, the main point of using AIs -- to exaggerate favorable biases to produce data that the researches believe is valid).
[1]: www.badscience.net/2009/10/and-now-nerd-news/ [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/Negative-Data-in-Science [3]: http://www.nature.com/news/half-of-us-clinical-trials-go-unp...
The rise of far-right politicians in Europe indicates that America is not alone here.
External reality might. Reality of what people want, what we think is best, etc, doesn't.
And even the external reality part is close to impossible to access and convey to others whether it "adds to a coherent whole" in all situations or not.
I think we're talking about different things: the current state of AI vs (what's currently) science fiction.
Half of my response still applies though. The thing with trust is that you can always call it into question. Give people a powerful AI-powered fact-finding engine, and there will still be those questioning whether you could trust the tool.
This isn't a greenfield.
There's been some research on this. I think I even saw at least one article about it here on HN, though I can't find a link any more.
What I remember seeing is a kind of world (?) map of the Internet with a set of different-colored interconnecting webs of sites.
There is one set that deals mostly in verifiable facts, usually based on genuine, usually academic research. Universities are major nodes in this net, but you get some overlap with "mainstream" news sources, Wikipedia and so on.
There's another major set that includes InfoWars, Collective Evolution, Natural News, Deepak Chopra, Mercola and other Anti-Vaxxers, various AGW deniers, and other well-known sources of bullshit.
Both of those networks have many more connections within themselves than to the other clouds, and have their own frequent-viewer audiences who will frequent the one set more than the other.
There were, as I remember, other sets that were less significant.
Purely on probability, a story will be dramatically more likely to be true if originated and/or propagated in the first of those clouds than the second.
Mapping these webs is a pretty mundane mechanical task, yet it can provide an excellent filter for some classes of information.
Other stuff is "squishier" because it's more opinion than fact. Politics and policies will be found here, and you're likely to see (I don't remember if the article I have in mind showed this) "conservative" vs. "liberal" networks rather than "fact" vs. "bullshit". On the other hand, there are experts on many aspects of politics, and if you're looking for ideas on policy that are informed by history and research, you're more likely to get them from professors of history, economics and law than from Fox News or televangelist channels.
I suspect there are a lot more inferences that can be drawn, via probability or Bayes, from the Internet sources of information, its propagation behavior, and the shape of the networks it travels.
Similarly, there's a wealth of information to be gained from analyzing the language of an individual page. Emotional words vs. dispassionate ones; weasel words like "probably" or "it was said" as opposed to "according to" or links to other sources. Bullshit is often simplified for consumption by simple people, while academics often carelessly lapse into "high-bred" or technical language.
Some of those features could be gamed, simulated, faked, and certainly will be. Many bullshit articles in the health, field, for instance, now link to "outlier" or discredited papers in PubMed to enhance their credibility. But like our grandparent poster, I think AI, working patiently and dispassionately, will be able to continue to find hints to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.