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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

That's a good list but there are other issues. The current problem is there's a well-funded weaponised disinfo industry actively minimising Covid, climate change, and other views that challenge neoliberal privilege, while promoting extreme anti-rational cult views like Q and nationalist exceptionalisms.

Dropping AI into that is like throwing grenades into into an oil field.

At this point I'm not convinced it's possible to have a meaningful discussion about anything. The public space is so poisoned and deliberately flooded with shit (to quote Steve Bannon, one of the architects of this delightful situation) that we'd have to go back quite a way to bring back the possibility of good-faith debate. At all.

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What is Q? (is it related to Star Trek?)

I think the parent is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

Thanks. It looks like something intentionally created by CIA to cleanup past/future scandals (to associate s.child abuse investigations with lunatics).

I think there is a maybe subtle but important misinterpretation in terming those things "disinformation".

Humans try to force their views, particularly counterfactual ones, upon other humans not only to "protect their interests".

It is a power-play, signalling dominance. If successful, it attracts followers who believe to fare better under the presented narrative.

The important distinction to "disinfo" being, it isn't about facts at all.

This really messes with my head, and not in a bad way. So, you argue that followers are essentially looking for a Strong Man (psychologically) to have reality filtered through, truth be damned? Someone who "gets it," or "tells it like it is?" Essentially, this person is filling some sort of void?

Not the person you're replying to, but if that's what he meant, then I think it's accurate.

I think that interpretation is a little too narrow. Most importantly, they don't want "reality filtered", they want it bent to their desires.

Evil is just stupidity endowed with power.

In your example, the counterfactual part is being ignored out of disregard for other people's interests. A short-sighted and egoistic approach.

But of course, generally, subjective interests do not translate to common good in aggregate.

This is one of the few places where blockchain is actually useful? It is not possible nor worthwhile to have anonymous discussion that we do right now anymore given how good these LLMs are. And i am not sure if specific lingo or “lurk more” technique is going to work anymore. Given enough datasets, every human discussion will seem trivially copyable. Human discussion at a scale is very repetitive.

What does this offer over a place like twitter where the exact same conversation is playing out in public right now?

You can use the distributed proof to say that these accounts belong to you. So if you are doubtful about the integrity of a post, you can look up their blockchain ID and find out what have they been doing elsewhere publicly. Additionally, any post that does not attach a blockchain tag or something will simply get filtered out or ignored. This puts every "anonymous" post on the web a weight which it does not have in the age of LLM.

How are you guaranteeing that this ID corresponds to a real human bean? Blockchain seems terrible for this on the basis of complete reliance on an external central authority.

It doesn't but you can always augment your ID by attaching a government ID or some sort. On the internet tho? If you _only_ have texts, there is no feasible way to distinguish a person and a bot.

And how would blockchain mitigate this?

Isn't blockchain a kind of distributed proof? You can now say that this user in reddit is related to this post in hackernews via blockchain. Of course, there's no way to prevent a bot to create multiple accounts in multiple websites but I am to understand that there's a cost to this.

OK... I'm not understanding what that would solve, though. That addresses people posing as other people (and you don't need blockchain to do that), but doesn't address identifying AI commenters.

You can always augment your account with your government ID or some sort if you are famous.

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