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Comment by mungoman2 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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