Comment by DaUR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaUR | Hacker News Reader

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As opposed to trusting biased, rushed, financially-motivated humans of average human intelligence to distill the world's knowledge? Or biased, rushed, career-driven sociologists, that live under publish-or-perish and don't use the scientific method? Why the hell is it acceptable to have political activists and ideologues influence public policy?

Again, that isn't the point. AI would be a step forward, and I'd gladly take journalists becoming unemployed if it causes a new AI-led era of Enlightenment.

You're missing the vision: AI, with its swathes of data, would be able to tell you precisely what percentage of blacks that have been put in prison over drug laws would never have committed violent crimes. People's perception that these laws are justified for "public safety" would recede. That's just an example.

You're arguing from a fundamentally obscurantist point of view, arguing that unless we know 100% of the facts, it's better to keep certain things quiet to prevent human bias, whereas you should be arguing that we'll never know 100% of the facts (obviously) and should just stop being so quick to judge. More facts are always better than less facts, period.

> As opposed to trusting biased, rushed, financially-motivated humans of average human intelligence to distill the world's knowledge? Or biased, rushed, career-driven sociologists, that live under publish-or-perish and don't use the scientific method? Why the hell is it acceptable to have political activists and ideologues influence public policy?

Because we can discuss what bias these people have, and there is a "marketplace of ideas" so to speak. We're not asserting that there is one potential truth based on what a machine says.

On the contrary, there is no marketplace of ideas. These people are so insular that they'll hang on to their dogma no matter what criticism is leveled against them. They're fundamentally wrong, not just misguided. Case in point, the IAT.

> We're not asserting that there is one potential truth based on what a machine says.

Strawman.

But that is what you're suggesting - that a machine is capable of deriving a singular unbiased truth of the world, and present it in a way that is proven not to further bias in any human reading it, and we should all accept that on the face of it.

> But that is what you're suggesting

No, it isn't. I've said repeatedly they'd be much more accurate than humans, and much less biased than humans.

You keep taking a black-and-white version of my arguments, arguing against that, and moving the goalposts. I'm not sure you're debating in good faith.

The alternative is that you wind up with multiple AIs with different biases, people pick the ones that match their own biases, and we're not much better off. One presents stories about how drug users are unlikely to be convicted of violent crime, the other presents stories about how drug use leads to unsafe workplaces and road accidents. Both factually correct - like almost all news today - and both playing into people's biases and not solving the question of "do we legalise weed?" at all.

You're arguing that AI will lead to much more nuanced discourse, and much more complex and detailed pros and cons rather than the ruffian binary polarization we have now, and I agree.

No, it'll be the exact same binary polarization. One side keeps arguing "weed doesn't lead to violent crime" and the other side keeps arguing "but look at all the ways it does harm people", because that's the news stories they've each chosen to see, exactly the same as any discussion I've had on the subject to date.

The issue with journalism isn't people outright lying. It's quite rarely a failure to understand the problem space either. It's framing the discussion in a certain way and picking and choosing which facts to prevent. Having multiple AIs which pick out different things to tell their readers doesn't solve that problem at all.

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