Even if it were true that human persuasion is of limited use in shifting opinions, the parent posted is talking about superhuman persuasion. I don't think we should just assume those are equally effective.
You can even see this geographically. The reason many in South Texas might have a negative view of immigration while those in San Francisco might have a positive view of immigration is not because of persuasion differences, but because both places are strongly impacted by immigration but in very different ways. And this experience is what people associate with immigration in general, and so it forms people's worldview.
All of the validity of the info we have is verified by heuristics we have, like groupthink, listening to 'experts' and trying to match up the info with our internal knowledge and worldview.
I feel like our current system of information allows us to develop models that are quite distant from base reality, evidenced by the multitudes of realities existing in people's heads, leading some to question if 'truth' is a thing that can be discovered.
I think as people become more and more Internet-addicted, an increasing amount of our worldviews come through that little screen, instead of real-life experiences.
The world is becoming information saturated and poorly structured by design, ever notice how these story blockers are such a big part of the propaganda machine, whereby you have to use elaborate workarounds to just read a simple news story thats pulled from another source?
Saturating culture with too much data is a great tool of breaking reality, breaking truth.
But they cant break truth for long, it always finds a way. And truth is a powerful vector, much more than propaganda without a base in truth, because human experience is powerful, unquantifiable, and can take someone from the gutter to a place of massive wealth or influence, in an instant. That is the power of human experience, the power of truth.
Doesnt make it easy though, to live in this world of so many lies, supercharged by bots. Nature outside of our technology is much simpler in its truth.
However, for smaller issues and local community issues "special access" isn't really much of a thing.
I do notice many don't seem to revisit their predictions for reflection though. Perhaps this happens more subconsciously.
I'm wrong regularly ofc.
I hope that persuaded you :)
Like here I expect there is 0% chance, even if I had a superhuman LLM writing words for me, that I could ever convince you that LLMs will not be able to convince you to hold any arbitrary position. It's because you've formed your opinion, it's not falsifiable, and so there's not a whole heck of a lot else to be done except have some fun debates like this where, if anything, we tend to work to strengthen our own opinions by finding and repairing any holes in them.
I assume you'd agree that the pursuit of what is ultimately true should be exactly the opposite of making oneself more closed minded by repairing inconvenient holes in one's opinions rather than reassessing them based on new evidence.
I wasn't referring to the ability to persuade someone to hold an arbitrary position (although that could be a fun debate as well), and putting aside the discussion about the ability to persuade fanatics, if a super intelligence had an internal model that is more aligned with what is true, it could in theory convince someone who wants to understand the truth to take a critical look at their opinions and change them if they are authentic and courageous enough to do so.
Yes, it's possible.
> The reason for this is not because I'm obstinate, but because my worldview is not formed on persuasion, but on lived experience.
Lived experience is interpreted through framing. Rhetoric can change the framing through which we interpret the world through practice. This is why CBT works. Superhuman CBT could arguably work even better.
Remember that if "superhuman X" is possible, then our intuitions formed from "human X" are not necessarily valid. For sure any X still has a limit, but our intuitions about where that limit is may not be correct.