Hacker News Reader

Comment by fernandopj | Hacker News Reader

I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction.

What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipulated digitally, and you'll have to fact-check by yourself, that doesn't scale at all.

View on HN

The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes.

The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers today, is probably a good thing too. I'm not 100% sure that there are more of them today than before, or if they're just more noticeable. But in either case, we should be very careful to draw too many conclusions when we look around today because we're living in a time of great transition. We're basically in our teenage years of this technology.

Just as you shouldn't judge an adult by who he was at 14, I don't think we should assume we know what the adult internet will look like because we see some acne on it today.

> we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us

Even this is too simple. Many people have lived under propaganda regimes, yes, many have bought into them, and many people have seen through them.

Each new wave of information technology provides new ways to “pull the wool” over peoples’ eyes.

And though a propaganda machine has power... like all things it creates and equal an opposite power that eventually destroys it. The question for individuals is only: where am I in the cycle, how long will this cycle last, and what is my role to play?

I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess.

Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest suggests that some institutions/relations (like markets) depend on trust to produce value and may be undermined or degraded if enough participants take an individualist caveat emptor approach.

It is hard to know, in a complex adaptive system, what new equilibria will emerge downstream from a big disruption. We certainly could emerge through the other side with better epistemologies. But I don't see it as a given. Thinking is hard. Proving anything is harder. Skepticism can be good (and I suspect we need more--though I don't think it's terribly well distributed or applied at the moment...), but it's also easy; it requires no trust, knowledge, thinking, rigor, logic, or proof.

So, I'm troubled by the possibility we'll dig ourselves into a deep world-shrinking skepticism (a callous) of anything we didn't/can't personally experience. It can be well-founded on real abuses of trust. It may even be the sum of individual rational choices.

Neither would necessarily keep it from unmooring things we mistook for solid ground. And, when someone finally notices one drifting, there may not be enough trust left to agree on fundamentals like: is it adrift? is that a problem? was it ever tied down? is there anything we can do? should we wait for a bit to see if it drifts closer first? should we act?

I agree with everything you said, and I don't have any special insight about how things are going to play out.

But i'm terrified of the current loud support toward censorship and authoritarian suppression of incorrect ideas. We have a lot of historical evidence of just how bloody that always turns out. So I choose to believe in the power of openness and competition of ideas.

As others have posted above, we will never have a time where it's possible or desirable for each of us to validate the truth of every claim, so that means we will have to find trustworthy arbiters of truth. I think that this should happen by people showing they are trustworthy and earning respect, rather than using authoritarian control to shut down those with differing ideas.

Much of the media today has lost such respect, and deservedly so. You can not fix this by suppression of free-speech, but only by creating honest organizations that aren't afraid to respectfully show the ideas of those who see things differently -- even if it's just refute them. Organizations that _trust_ the viewer to decide between fairly articulated positions.

The contempt for our fellow man when we say that bad ideas must never see the light of day or enjoy the same platform as government-approved ideas is a deeply paternalistic and ultimately anti democratic idea. It's elitism at its worst.

Aha. And so here we are, watching something we thought was steadfast float slowly out to sea. The ability to let people say shitty things without trying to shut them up is one more thing we need trust for.

(For example, we need to be able to trust that they have a sincere opinion and aren't paid shills for a corporate lobby on a PR mission to waste our time, emotional energy, column-inches, and attention.)

If you feel a growing sense of dread as it retreats, it's a good time to consider whether you know others who have expressed a similar sense of dread that other things in our world have come unmoored, and whether they could use some help keeping them tied down.

Trust has a problem of root. You cannot exactly trust even your parents these days. They are more often wrong than not. Grandparents, even more so.

Even society is shown to be untrustworthy, and the social processes of science.

Thus some reactionaries want to replace trust with authority. Or markets, which is another name for social proof, but with much less transparency.

Ultimately the other parts of trust are verification and reputation, which are both not unassailable. (Sybil style attacks, bribery, institutional and social biases.)

But, our saving grace might be simpler: cooperation without trust is possible and might be as efficient if things get bad enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com