The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse
Aside from the whole skynet thing the above is what spooks me the most
There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.
You hold the opposite position. Why?
It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.
IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.
We are (well, I am, and TFA is) not talking about epistemology so much as the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales. Instead the limits of human psychology control how we as a society respond to these issues. Your argument is a distraction that remains uncontextualized within the conversation it finds itself in.
People are not dumb animals but you won't be able to engage anyone toward a solution on the basis of an argument about how they just need to understand more about epistemology. That's the kind of thing that people can only internalize via empirical means.
At this point it feels like you're being deliberately obtuse. I've been quite clear about the primacy of human psychological limits as the main aspect of the argument and you simply refuse to engage with this point. You haven't been very good about adding to the conversation, only diverting it.
The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.
I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.
Also, of course I didn't read the article....
Overheated: the discourse has too much anger or vitriol, or is too personal and emotionally charged.
Chilled: people have given up on discoursing at all.
If this is what you mean, I don't think we want less discourse as a solution to bad discourse. We want to maintain but temper the discourse.
Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.
Learning how to actually talk to one another in good faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality. This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying story about the other, which increases, rather than decreases, the emotional charge between the two.
This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social media has shown.
So, we'll cement ourselves at the status quo? Or at whatever conditions that serve the powerful?
It's work recruiting people to your cause. It's expensive, and takes time and attention and resources. People have consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they need training and guidance and oversight.
Letting a bot loose for your cause costs pennies. It can be updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet; absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.
your human recruiter is going to have their own biases, could be tired, may not know how to deal with personality X or Y, they may not learn.
the bots can track how they do by upvote, react quickly, won't get tired or annoyed, and can use existing data to filter and target those who are extremely vulnerable.
hell, with real-time analysis by data mining companies (cough cough FB, reddit) they could even figure out if/when a normally stable-ish person is in crisis or has a bad week, and hit them at their most susceptible. 99% of the year they might be able to see through the BS, but this week things are hard and what they're seeing in their feed just feels right, for once...
I wonder how we could test to see if they are already doing this...
That's a useful insight. The one on one wearing-down process came from theology. It's sometimes called Jesuitry. Members of the Society of Jesus were trained to do that sort of thing, and they got so good at it that the whole organization was suppressed in the 1700s.[1] There are still Jesuit-run schools in the US, and they do tend in that direction. "Never argue with a Jesuit", said Richard Nixon.
Since mass media, large scale use of one on one convincing has gone out of fashion. It's not cost-effective. With large language models, it's back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_the_Society_of_...
When you say “find an argument that works” isn’t this just saying that they’ve said something you find persuasive?
What’s wrong with this? How is this different to any other argument in good faith?
The perceptions of other disagreeing people ended up just being one more way to validate them because you end up seeing the same pattern of mistakes over and over again.
Wait until GPT5. Or don’t, because a vast amount of people are already incapable of that.
The idea the world will be worst off with less flame wars is simply wrong IMO.
I would already rate the discourse I have had with chatGPT4 as the best of my life.
I win if I learn something. It strikes me as highly perverse to view that the only way to win is to not play the game because you can't brow beat the bot into submission.
THAT is though what we mean by "political discussion". A bullshit pie throwing contest until one side quits. A twitter flame war. Yes, hopefully AI completely destroys that.
But people who absolutely will not update their priors is not likely to work out well in the long run...
I could argue with you, "Havoc", for a while, and perhaps convince you that there are 2/3/7 genders, or whatever, and then as sure as the sun rises, along comes another user. Or infinite set of.
Most social media is "man yells at cloud", quite literally.
I think this interchange of thought and sharing of ideas is the true essence of discourse. That other thing is more of a verbal tribal battle. I can see issues with bots swinging the political landscape in ways that cause harm, but I think there is good reason to think discourse might flourish. Fundamentally, if the competitive arguers are discouraged, whilst the curious and conversational are encouraged, or at least not hurt, then discourse itself wins.
We might find discourse flourishes corners of discussion on the internet but the wider internet is much more at risk to these approaches
We forget that AI becomes more human as it gets more intelligent. These are not computers programmed with a hard limitation anymore, they're actually more prone to being manipulated than other humans are.
The problem is usually the opposite (sycophancy)
PS Intended as a lighthearted jab, please don't get offended.