On Informed Complacency and the Potential Decline of Curiosity | Hacker News Reader

On Informed Complacency and the Potential Decline of Curiosity

thesocietypages.org

50 pointsfern1210 comments

I've always been fascinated with the appeal to authority. I suppose the ultimate authority is a repeatable experiment that demonstrates a fact to an acceptable level of certainty.

Such experiments are often not possible when considering the fuzzy structures that have concrete effects on our daily lives. How do we come to conclusions on sociological or economic theories for example?

When the going gets tough, we all tend to appeal to authority.

"Look I don't know why it's true per se, but this book right here says it's true, and it was written by this guy that everyone agrees is really smart!"

At some point, we all must appeal to another authority in some way. We can't know everything, so we must rely on and trust in others. How can we possibly do that now in the age of Google and Facebook? What about when images and even live video can be convincingly faked?

I have this sense of dread that we may reach a point where we all stand around and go "huh... I don't know what the truth is. I guess we'll never know. Oh well." And from then on we will live in our own simulations divorced completely from reality. I mean, it feels like we're already there in some cases.

Instead of a sense of dread, how about learning to be comfortable with uncertainty? There's a lot going on in the world where we rely on others for information, and probably can't know for sure without doing a lot more research. Admitting you don't know something is a good thing, particularly when there's no need to know.

I see a lot of the opposite: people pretending to be instant experts about whatever issue is in the news, when they knew nothing about it yesterday. It makes it harder to tell what's going on.

Yes, learning how to deal with uncertainty is necessary. I think the analogy though is something like this: Your mind was running on hardware, now its running inside a container inside a container. Do you have a reasonable chance of figuring out how things work, also will it even be relevant? Inside the filter bubble / matrix everything seems consistent.

C.S. Peirce, in "The Fixation of Belief", argued that people progress through a series of "methods" of deciding what to believe.

First was the "method of tenacity", which simply consisted of someone believing whatever they had always believed. But this has difficulty as soon as someone runs into a person who believes something different. Who is right?

Next came the "method of authority", deferring to some trusted third party. But again a problem: what happens when that person's social group encounters a different group who follow a different authority?

Next is the "method of a priori", or "method of philosophy", which attempts to deduce the truth from self-evidently true first principles. But of course people may disagree even there.

Finally comes the "method of science", which constantly criticizes and tests itself, knowing and accepting that it is fallible and in need of continuous effort to avoid falling into false conclusions.

Peirce expressed confidence that there is objective truth, but skepticism that any method of human investigation can ever definitively arrive at it. Yet he used this as a definition; truth, he said, is "the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate".

Regarding doctored images, I had a sense of dread (way back when the internet was new) that the world would soon advance to being able to doctor videos. I thought ingenuity and advancement were limitless, the rest is just writing bytes to file. But it feels like it still hasn't happened yet.

It's happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttGUiwfTYvg

Another one involving training a system on Obama speeches and lip movements.

Then being able to go from audio to synthesizing realistic mouth movements in a model and overlaying it on a video, to give a video of Obama "speaking" from cut-together audio, an impressionist, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yq67CjDqvw

At a certain point the cycle repeats. Remember, most people believed some form of religion had all the answers at some point. Most of their answers were "accurate enough", in the same sense that anything you read within 30 seconds of searching is "accurate enough". For a lot of people, those answers are still and will continue to be "accurate enough".

Think about the following with "Church" or "Search Engine" as [institution].

"I had a question.

I visited the [institution] and found conflicting or unclear answers.

I decided to explore the question on my own, because the [institution] was just confusing me further"

One is part of human history on a grand scale. I hope the other will be as well.

We'll certainly never know. We never knew, we never will.

You are living out a simulation right now, as is everyone else - the human experience simulation they call it. That's your reality, mine is my human experience reality.

The dread you feel is a more mature version of suspecting the Santa Clause is not real. It feels nice to believe in someone who brings presents for no reason, once a year, but the reality is much nicer - your parents care about you enough to bring you that wonderful experience :)

So it is with 'truth' - outgrowing the simplistic notion of truth can be very gratifying indeed, but the process can feel dreadful at times.

Ha. With my friends, if we have one of these "we don't know" scenarios, and my friend tries to take out their phone to look it up, I tell them to put that goddamned thing away. Knowing is not fun. Reasoning is fun, asking around is fun, guessing is fun, bullshitting is fun. If you don't need to know, don't look it up!

Would you rather get to know someone through many conversations and shared experiences, or by reading a (hypothetical, futuristic) brain scan? And so with the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com