Comment by cmiller1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmiller1 | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a bigger issue at hand than AI here, and its how the lay person interacts with systems they don't understand.

I was listening to a podcast a while back discuss this conspiracy theory going around new age TikTok that "0010110" is some kind of secret code to transcendence... which of course is ridiculous and anyone here can see it's just a 7 digit base 2 representation of the number 22. However it made me realize that uninformed people born into the information age are going to assign meaning to all sorts of things they don't understand that are really just artifacts of a design choice some engineer made at some point.

It's like the computer equivalent of all the new agey quantum mechanics woo, people are going to discover ghosts in the machine and I wouldn't be surprised if they assign supernatural or religious significance to those ghosts.

This isn't specific to "uninformed people born into the information age", or even supernatural-believing or religiously-inclined people. People assign meaning to seeing someone who looks just like somebody who lived 150 years ago and deem him a time traveler. They see a TikTok on how the Chick-fil-a spelling is not what they thought and conclude we're living in a simulation. The list goes on, but people like to pile on the religious because it's easy.

And those people may be uninformed when it comes to tech -- which is in part understandable because why should a plumber learn to read binary, but be more humble. You're equally just as "uninformed" as they are in when you enter their world.

One mistake newer generations make is thinking that we're the first to observe something. People's tendency to 'discover ghosts' is as old as the earth.

People accidentally burn their clothes when ironing and they think its a Virgin Mary apparition. A jet flying at a very high altitude? Aliens.

Well yes, I'm uninformed about some topics, I used that word specifically to try not to insult the intelligence of someone who simply isn't well versed in the specific topic at hand.

I'm uninformed about plumbing, so in the future I will try my best not to attribute problems with my plumbing to the spiritual or supernatural.

22 is a big numberin Kabbalah, which extends to the tarot and other occult systems. Probably someone's joke that caught on.

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