Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

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The facile answer is, "have an educated public who can make those decisions themselves". But it seems clear to me that the "educated public" approach has failed. The spread of memetic hazards has risen to the level where a significant segment of the public have been robbed of their ability to think critically, and the post-Enlightenment consensus that objective reality exists is under attack.

Beyond fighting a Fabian struggle in favor of critical thinking and quality information flows (which are lacking all across our society, even if that lack is particularly obvious with a certain political group) I'm by no means certain what a good, useful, and just response ought to be.

I am confident that the danger is real and needs to be acknowledged. We need to find paths forward if we're to have any hope of keeping our civilization. And that means talking (and doing something) about the "propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies". Sticking our heads in the sand and screaming "Free Speech!" while the tidal wave informational sewage rolls over us isn't going to be sufficient.

> "And that means talking (and doing something) about the 'propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies'"

The problem with your viewpoint is that, unless you plan to remove the ability of large swaths of the population who have been "robbed of their ability to think critically" to vote, ending democracy as we know it, whichever authority you construct to define what is "true" may not remain under the control of you and people who think as you do and then it will become Orwell's Ministry of Truth in all but name. Game over; civilization loses.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" as they say. Forgive us old-school liberals if we choose not to follow you down that road.

I reject the presumptions that the only possible response is a unitary authority and that we shouldn't do anything in response because any such response is automatically going to be bad. Come, on, this is Hacker News!

Why do we have to have a single central authority? We ought to at least be willing to speculate about AI-mediated Blockchains of Truth that reward factually accurate reporting. Or about ways to smoothly tell users how accurate the source they're reading has been in the past, or how to implement smart filtering of information streams to protect our own minds so that we can avoid wasting time on cognitive hazards.

The point is that we have options beyond just sitting back and giving up. The problem is real, as are the risks to responding poorly. But that doesn't justify not responding at all.

The options you described just leave us with a less direct version of what we have now. Someone owns and runs media companies because it is a source of influence and income. Someone will run the AI-mediated Blockchains of Truth, etc for the same reasons. All you will accomplish is shifting the power around momentarily, perhaps even to worse actors than we have now. But even if your ideas are very vague they are at least approaching concrete which is good because we can compare with existing solutions. But looking at those ideas, I don't see anything promising there.

Which is fine. It's a tough problem, and I have no expectation that a random poster (myself included) is going to suddenly come up with a perfect solution. As we search for solutions, there are at least two fallacious lines of reasoning that need to be rejected:

Something must be done. This is something. This must be done!

And,

This won't work. Therefore, nothing will work. We should do nothing!

I understand and agree with those who reject the first. But turning from the first only to embrace the second is also a mistake.

Did someone here embrace "This won't work. Therefore, nothing will work. We should do nothing!"? I don't see that in this thread, but feel free to point it out if I missed it.

I simply started with a seemingly easy question: who decides what is and is not fake news? Trying to answer that question yourself hopefully helps illustrate just how challenging it is to find a solution that isn't worse than the problem. But hopefully with enough pondering on that question, one does start to lean in the direction that any solution must include individuals ultimately deciding for themselves what is and isn't fake news.

Does that imply nothing will work? For sure it does not. But it might imply we are already there: the best cure for fake news might be working harder to make real news more persuasive. It could be a boring matter of will and effort - a lot of grunt work. By talking to the journalists engaged in that work, you would uncover the actual challenges and perhaps ideas around the technologies that could better empower that change. Or not. The internet itself was supposed to help us become better informed. Clicks + adverts + automatic measurement, rinse, and repeat; proved that ideal wrong. At least for now.

Yes, this is Hacker News and that means we understand systems thinking.

Either the people collectively get a say in what is "factually accurate", an ill-defined concept in the first place, or they don't (authoritarianism); the mechanics do not matter. And if we accept your premise that large swaths of the population have been "robbed of their ability to think critically", then whatever the system decides is "factually accurate" will be corrupted if the people have a say in it. Or, in other words, "garbage in, garbage out".

If there are other options, please articulate them.

I am not confident the danger is an existential threat. I think it's an interesting problem that markets are doing a poor job of solving. But since I don't want any government in charge of deciding what is fake news and you haven't sugeested a concrete solution so we can compare the cure to the illness, then what we have now will have to be sufficient.

I disagree to an extent, but it is a compelling argument. Can you elaborate on Fabian struggle? I never heard the expression used.

The expression is derived from 'Fabian strategy'[1], but the 'strategy' part didn't seem quite appropriate, since this isn't a military campaign. I've heard it before, but a quick round of googling shows that the 'Fabian struggle' construction is considerably rarer than I expected.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy

Education != ability to think critically. It is a problem of biology - we are hardwired to believe things in a certain way based on all kinds of cognitive biases, etc. I don't see a way around regulation, and I don't see a path towards effective regulation given the current system benefits those who would design the regulations.

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