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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Two issues with that:

I) There will be a "danger window" where the fact that audio-visual evidence is meaningless has not yet fully registered with too many people.

II) It's perfectly possible that audio-visual lies are just inherently more convincing to the human psyche than written or spoken lies. We know instinctively that we can not trust what others say blindly, but we do instinctively trust our own eyes and ears. Note the etymology there: Blind trust is trust without seeing. When you see you don't need trust anymore.

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For a classic example of this, our justice system tends to—in general—treat witness testimony as highly reliable. After all, the person was there. They saw it with their own eyes.

Of course we all know rationally that witness testimony is generally terrible. And yet we don’t actually seem to care about that when push comes to shove.

The "science" behind much criminal forensics is often laughably absurd. Even where there is valid theoretical foundation, in many cases the practice voids validity of much of the results.

And that's before we consider the psychology of witnesses, criminals, juries, judges, law enforcement, etc.

It's terrible, but it's reliably terrible. You always have exactly one layer of distortion between the evidence and reality: one human being. And that human being can be held accountable for willful misrepresentation.

(Hearsay, when there is more than one human in the chain, is treated differently.)

I think your right, the tricky part is always navigating these technological changes.

If you imagine life in colonies here around 1776, there was no photographs to doctor, no Zapruder film, or Nixon tapes, and yet newspapers existed and people lived in a relatively high trust society. People generally had faith in contracts, the law, and the government; but not a lot of ways, as an individual, to verify much at all.

I think eventually we’ll have to go back to that model of simply picking individuals and institutions to trust. Hopefully it’ll make people more selective.

> People generally had faith in contracts, the law, and the government; but not a lot of ways, as an individual, to verify much at all.

How do you know this was the case in 1776? Wasn’t there a revolution around that issue?

Slight non-sequester, but the DS9 episode ‘In The Pale Moonlight’ comes to mind here in this thread

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