An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way.
The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was academic support of Nazi "anthropology."
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies make their claims true. In that way, 'perception' becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man' in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy 'perceive' them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans.
One might say that _hrönir_, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how _hrönir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and spend their time on topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take over", as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and "the [whole] world [will] be Tlön".
Whether it is possible to circumvent this remains to be seen. Science has demonstrated it can to some degree, but it only covers a portion of reality.
An suitably brain rotted riposte to your complaints would be something like
‘Wordcels be sneething at rotationmaxxing shapechads’
and an image of a badly drawn wojak figure.
You can say wrong. But for the record, you lost the credibility to use the word "disrespectful" when you termed all philosophers as "wordcels." :)
In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-scale business in assymetric information.[1]
But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the information collapse has returned people into Plato's allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]
The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.
[1] _ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.a...
To add to the recommended readings, I shall also mention "On Exactitude in Science"; I use this as an example of project plans where PMS try to be too detailed, and hence become useless.
[0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.
There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.
[1] 42.
If I may apply a regex:
s/polite/lucrative/g
i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?
that makes no sense to me.
it's ok for AI to run the world because they just make up stuff anyways? don't we want the opposite? in order to allow AI to run the world, shouldn't we believe that they are foolproof and are always able to figure out the correct answer?
It's kind of a moot point anyways, because Humans are highly averse to making sure their actions are logically sound. Take politics for example, not just the silly day today goings on of it, but more importantly the system that underlies it: it is beyond consideration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_(politics)
"The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."
yes, but the illogical decisions of humans can be intuited or made to be understood, and thus also somewhat predicted. for example, a human deciding over someones social security benefits can be expected make a somewhat rational even if illogical decision, and in particular, past performance of a human can predict future performance, whereas for an AI this is completely unpredictable and therefore has a much higher risk of going wrong unexpectedly. also, humans can be reasoned with, again with a somewhat predictable outcome.
Missing counteracting force: set theory
how do these things relate to our discussion?
Insufficient depth in semiotics shapes how one thinks.
Importantly: it is generally not possible to take such ideas seriously, because of culture. So humanity stumbles half blindly but confidently into the future, oblivious to much of what is going on.
Google's AI result, when I ask for the spot price of silver, returns the amount in British pounds, but with an American dollar sign in front of it.
That's not a lie, it's just an absolute misinterpretation.
I’ve seen a senior engineer at a FAANG confidently interrupt another engineer, who was giving the correct answer, to provide an incorrect answer. They mixed up facts and confidently stated a conclusion that sounded good, but was utterly wrong.
I don't know about caring, but I think that the point of the Turing test is to determine at which point a human can't tell whether it's another human. Also, I've read that it's not a particularly good test, because even pre-LLM you could craft an irritating, misspelling, troll of a chat bot and people would think it was a real teenage edgelord.
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
The most trivial example, you cant make an 800 page concatenation of two identical books because the 400 page library doesn't contain duplicates.
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.
Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].
[1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.
The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.
In the event that you disagree, "check" if you can (even consider trying) to generate a flawless proof for each of your facts.
For example, references we put ( simpsons, star trek, you name it ), language we use ( gee whiz, yeet, gyatt) and that is used to generate an online persona tends to be something of note to our image of self - one can determine to some extent the likely generation from those
The reference itself may not automatically mean much, but it is likely that if it is present in an alias, it had an impact on a younger person ( how many of the new generation jump on an old show? so mr robot would have the exposure range of 2015 to 2019 ). If that hypothesis is true, then one can attempt to guess age if the individual given that work work, because 1) we know what year is now 2) we know when it was made, which allows for some minor inference there.
Naturally, some aliases are more elaborate than others. Some are written backwards and/or reference a popular show or popular sci-fi author. Some are anagrams ( and - I discovered today - require additional datasets to tag properly so that is another thing I will need to dig up from somewhere ). And to complicate things further, some aliases use references that are ambiguous and/or belong in more than one category ( Tesla being one of them ).
The original approach was to just throw everything into LLM and see what it comes up with, but the results were somewhat uneven so I decided to start from scratch and do normal analysis ( language, references, how digits are used and so on - it is still amazing how well that one seems to work ).
Sadly, it is still a work in progress ( I was hoping for a quick project, but I am kinda getting into it ) and I probably won't touch until next weekend since the coming week promises to be challenging.
Unfortunately, this means in your particular alias ended up as:
Alias category is_random length is_anagram generic_signal Loughla Mixed Case 0 7 FALSE FALSE
( remaining fields were empty, basically couldn't put a finger on you:D). If you can provide me with an approximate age, it would help with my testing though:D
edit: This being HN. Vast majority of references are technology related.
However, it has become clear that effective LLM training is in large matter a matter of careful curation of high quality training data. Random gibberish is trivially detectable, by LLMs themselves if nothing else, so it's unlikely that your "honeypot" will ever make it into someone's training run.
Even if you carefully crafted some more subtle poison data, it would still form only a small amount of the training set. The worst case scenario is most likely that the LLM learns to recognize your particular style of poison, and will happily recreate it if prompted appropriately (while otherwise remaining unaffected); more likely, your poison data is simply swamped.
The content being discussed here isn't guarenteed statements direct from trusted sources, it's the recirculated gossip chains of Reddit, Twitter, <media>.commentSections, Clickbait-WebSheets, etc.
Hence the use of terms such as "uncurated", "untreated", "raw", "filtered", etc.
It is where there is context and insights about the story.
Sure, if nobody ever lied.
It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.
> The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high.
If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".
so I guess there's a historical precedent for that scenario, as well as this "newspaper" thing.
I think we're not really in a phase where disinformation would be that much of a problem yet, HN and Reddit are arguably still sources of very high quality data if you know where to look, so there's no incentive for most people to pay for anything. Especially when it's where most of ad-driven media copies practically all content from these days anyway.
IIRC, newspapers were a thing where a propagandist, known as the "editor-in-chief" would hire a bunch of bitter, failed novelists to write about the events of the day, but slanted according to the whims of the paper's owner.
I'm pretty sure that was it...
This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.
Your responsibility is to remember that institutions are made up of flawed people just like yourself, and work towards improving them. You don't let someone manipulate your emotions to turn them into abstract enemies, tear them down, and replace them with nothing.
Critical thinking is the only thing you can use to spot bias. Compare and contrast different stories. Then make up your own mind.
Media literacy and virtual l critical reasoning should be the bedrock of modern education, and it is not.
https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/ny-times-admits-m...
> New York Times Retracts 1920 Article Saying Spaceflight is Impossible
This is Newton's third law. It was known to work for centuries.
They retracted but it was something like
> Nerds...
> Who can stand them?
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake
I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale.
We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk.
Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem.
The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.
Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story.
> Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content
You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories.
> On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic.
Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism.
> Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.”
Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. --
Q: Tell a joke on Jesus
chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points!
Q: Tell a joke on Buddha.
chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything!
Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad
chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!