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Comment by nostrebored | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty excited. The factuality of important events has been distorted for most of history. Moving to a low information trust society is something that I think will be positive.

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I don’t see it leading anywhere but a flat earth. When no one can be trusted whoever can tell you want to hear will be who people listen to and snake oil salesmen will reign supreme. Even if he was CIA, Cronkite’s world was closer to the truth than Alex Jones’.

Gr 3d 7

Curious about this take, how do you mean?

I understand the point of distorted facts, but what I’m not sure how things are improved by basically having no trust in any facts?

I’m not the original poster, but I think they are saying if we are more skeptical about what we read, we are less likely to absorb propaganda as fact.

This is kinda cute because it glosses over the lack of critical thinking skills, lack of research skills, and willingness to believe magic bullets, which would make most of us believe nothing of substance and yet fall for anyone with a silver tongue. Heck, we’re already dangerously close to that without LLMs.

One of my professors at Uni a year ago was arguing that due to genAI we would have a shift of trust into established institutions/people, so government (I'm not American so I don't know if this is possible after many recent scandals for example), Universities, people with authority/knowledge, close family members that are trust worthy, knowledgeable and/or work in before mentioned institutions. So basically we would revert to pre-web times where we had to trust some entities whenever we liked it or not.

I personally worry that what that would mean is we are left with little to no institutions to trust, besides Universities and family members, I don't think I would be able to trust governments and corporations, but I guess before internet people also weren't blindly trusting those.

I doubt the new trust bearers will be anything like governments and universities because trust in them has been severely eroded. Sadly, they will be select Youtubers and Internet influencers.

I've lived in a low information trust society and this was not the outcome at all. People trusted their local cliques much more, and there were local minima (e.g. a mainstreamish political party with leaders that are actively and dangerously anti semitic), but in general people were way more willing to engage with ideas.

One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions.

You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality.

It was strictly better in my opinion.

Low trust societies are poorer because everyone has to spend much more effort on verifying everything. People give up business opportunities because they can't trust their partners. It becomes more nepotistic because people trust family over strangers.

Low information trust societies get destroyed by pandemics of both physical viruses (due to anti-vax and medical distrust; we can see this happening again with Ebola) and destructive memetic lies (see 20th century fascism).

I've lived in low information trust societies, and they were much intellectually healthier than high trust societies, at least in the white collar communities I was in.

Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.

Ignore the naysayers, they are just jealous. You got it totally tight, not everyone get's it like we do. We are facing alot of backlash for our beliefs these days.

Listen, I'm hosting this Telegram channel for people like us, where we can exchange free information without media bias, share the real facts and plan coordinated activities against these poisoning mainstream scumbags.

I also have a 20% coupon code for Wamp® Wolf-Testosteron for you, Wamp® really helped me stay awake and alert in these dire times.

It's true: Wamp, it really whips the Llama's ass!

But this is exactly my point -- in a low information trust society things like this our noise. They work in high information trust societies because who would sell medical products that don't work? A doctor is leading Wamp®, surely a doctor would never lie to us for money?

In low information trust society everything is noise except what passes a smoke-test or who you believe, which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.

A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).

A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".

I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.

“which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.”

This is completely and observably wrong. It reads like it would make sense, but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

> I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.

I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.

In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.

Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".

This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.

Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)

> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.

A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.

You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.

In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.

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