That saps your will to be political, to morally judge actions and support efforts to punish wrongdoers.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/propaganda-political-apa...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/insi...
For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US, but Golf of Mexico everywhere else. What is the "correct" truth? Well, there is none, both of truthful, but from different perspectives.
I get the general point, but I disagree that you have to choose between one of the possibilities instead of explaining what the current state of belief is. This won't eliminate grey areas but it'll sure get us closer than picking a side at random.
Are markets a driver of wealth and innovation or of exploitation and misery?
Is abortion an important human right or murder?
Etc etc
You have to look at the details before you find the grey areas. Consider the case of abortion, and further consider the question of the existence of the human soul. There's no scientific evidence for souls, but the decision to look only at scientific evidence is itself a bias towards a certain way of understanding the world.
This is still much better than just deciding to pick one or the other side and ignoring the dispute.
But that also isn't the truth everywhere, it's only a controversy in the US, everyone else is accepting "Gulf of Mexico" as the name.
The exact word "controversy" might have been the wrong choice by me, but whatever, I'm not a Wikipedia editor and I don't run Google Maps. The world has standards for dealing with government disputes and with i8n.
I guess that's the fundamental disagreement, I wouldn't call that a "dispute" more than I would call the name "America" a dispute, it's just that different people understand it different. For some, it means a group of continents (that's how most people around me would take that for example), for others it means a country in North America (which I'm guessing is the common meaning if you live in North America already). Just because different people has different meanings doesn't make it into a dispute.
Russia doesn't care what you call that sea, they're interested in actual falsehoods. Like redefining who started the Ukraine war, making the US president antagonize Europe to weaken the West, helping far right parties accross the West since they are all subordinated to Russia...
We're pretty much okay with different countries and languages having different names for the same thing. None of that really reflects "truth" though. For what it's worth, I'd guess that "the Gulf of America" is and will be about as successful as "Freedom fries" was.
The US, like other countries, doesn't get redefined with every change of government, and Trump has not yet cowed the public into knuckling under to his every dictat.
Parent is arguing one thing, show up with some bullshit argument and watch dozen comments arguing about Gulf of Mexico instead of discussing original point.
The system that would score best tested against a list of known-truths and known-lies, isn't the perceptive one that excels at critical thinking: it's the ideological sycophant. It's the one that begins its research by doing a from:elonmusk search, or whomever it's supposed to agree with—whatever "obvious truths" it's "expected to understand".
This is an excellent point
But it's very easy to detect whether something is enemy propaganda without looking at the content: if it comes from an enemy source, it's enemy propaganda. If it also comes from a friendly source, at least the enemy isn't lying, though.
A company that doesn't wish to pick a side can still sidestep the issue of one source publishing a completely made-up story by filtering for information covered by a wide spectrum of sources at least one of which most of their users trust. That wouldn't completely eliminate falsehoods, but make deliberate manipulation more difficult. It might be playing the game, but better than letting the game play you.
Of course such a process would in practice be a bit more involved to implement than just feeding the top search results into an LLM and having it generate a summary.
Exactly. Redistributing information out of context is such a basic technique that children routinely reinvent it when they play one parent off of the other to get what they want.
This is a reflection of how social dynamics often work. People tend to follow the leader and social norms without questioning them, so why not apply the same attitude to LLMs. BTW, the phenomenon isn't new, I think one of the first moments when we realized that people are stupid and just do whatever the computer tells them to do was the wave of people crashing their cars because the GPS system lied to them.
We can not play the game.
Not everything needs to result in a single perfect answer to be useful. Aiming for ~90%, even 70% of a right answer still gets you something very reasonable in a lot of open ended tasks.
People used to live in bubbles, sure, but when that bubble was the entire local community, required human interaction, and radio had yet to be invented the implications were vastly different.
I'm optimistic that carefully crafted algorithms could send things back in the other direction but that isn't how you make money so seemingly no one is making a serious effort.
Im not arguing one way or another, I'm just pointing out a potential fatigue. It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.
> Every new form was said to be a herald of the end times,
The two world wars and surrounding economic upheaval arguably came close to that in many ways. "We somehow managed to survive previous technological advances" is hardly a convincing argument that we need not worry about the implications of a new technology.
> and yet here we are, in many ways stronger than ever.
The implication doesn't follow. You haven't explained how you would differentiate a system that had plenty of safety margin left from one that was on the brink of collapse. Without that distinction the statement is no more than hand waving.
> Im not arguing one way or another
You certainly seem to be taking a stance of "nothing to see here, this is business as usual, these recent developments pose no cause for concern".
> It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.
It's difficult for you to see how computers being able to speak natural language on par with an undergrad is more transformative than long distance communication? You can't be serious. Prior to this you could only converse with another human.
I don't disagree with your rebuttal, but if the idea that "we survived so we don't have to worry" is invalid, than the idea "if we don't do something we don't survive" is equally invalid. I don't pretend to have the answer either way.
> The implication doesn't follow. You haven't explained how you would differentiate a system that had plenty of safety margin left from one that was on the brink of collapse. Without that distinction the statement is no more than hand waving.
My point is to those experiencing the revolution in real-time they had no ability to estimate the impact or understand there were any margins, and we very well may be in that position too.
> You certainly seem to be taking a stance of "nothing to see here, this is business as usual, these recent developments pose no cause for concern".
Respectfully, I am absolutely not taking any such position. I don't appreciate the straw man, and won't bother to address it.
> It's difficult for you to see how computers being able to speak natural language on par with an undergrad is more transformative than long distance communication? You can't be serious. Prior to this you could only converse with another human.
The first principles are the same: they're all "radical" technologies which were as of a decade or two prior, utterly unfathomable. I could generalize your last statement to "Prior to <revolutionary technology> you could only <do a fraction of what's possible with the technology>."
My point is making value judgements about which is _more_ impactful is difficult to see from the ground floor. It's too early to tell; At the time it's occurring, each innovation may as well have been magic, and magic is impossible to understand, and scary.
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We've entirely diverged from the original issue I was trying to make, which was that people have actively put themselves in bubbles that confirm their own bias since the dawn of time. I'm not looking to change your mind on AI, so I can call this exchange complete from my end. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
How many of "us" believe that the desired behavior is lies??
Consider markets - a capitalist's "objective truth" might be that they are the most efficient mechanism of allocating resources, a marxists "objective truth" might be that they are a mechanism for exploiting the working class and making the capitalist class even richer.
Here's Zizek, famous ideology expert, describing this mechanism via film analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k
Remember when worrying about COVID was sinophobia? Or when the lab leak was a far-right conspiracy theory? When masks were deemed unnecessary except for healthcare professionals, but then mandated for everyone?
In other countries we went from “that looks bad in China” to “shit, it spread to Italy now, we really need to worry”
And with masks we went from “we don’t think they’re necessary, handwashing seems more important” to “Ok shit it is airborne, mask up”. Public messaging adapted as more was known.
But the US seems to have to turn everything into a partisan fight, and we could watch, sadly, in real time as people picked matters of public health and scientific knowledge to get behind or to hate. God forbid anyone change their advice as they become better informed over time.
Seeing everything through this partisan, pugnacious prism seems to be a sickness US society is suffering from, and one it is trying (with some success) to spread.
As it should when new evidence comes to light to justify it. Ideally, the tools we use would keep up along with those changes while transparently preserving the history and causes of them.
I think people are more willing to adjust their views as new evidence suggests as long as they never dug their heels in in the first place.