How technology could kill the art of lying
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The use of statistical learning to create targeted user experiences will only exacerbate this. It works because one generally doesn't read because they like to learn, so much as learn what they like to read.
The web is a formidable vehicle for sowing confusion and ignorance, as much as it is a place to obtain knowledge.
Sorry, how did 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers' not exist (and in even worse form) when you could lie?
Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. Even something as simple as telling a friend or coworker that that thing they do isn't that annoying counts as lying.
That's actually a pretty tough indictment of human nature, if true.
>How are you feeling. >Good.
Or my favourite: >Wow, good job!
People learn by example, and they see these lies (in their technical definition) as acceptable and even encouraged behaviour and hence follow. Then we have parents lying to their children all the time, and then later when they learn the truth they will likely carry on their tradition of lying (aka Santa, Monster Under The Bed ... God) to their kids because, hell, my parents did it.
The list goes on and on.
Or maybe I'm just a sad cynic.
Lying could almost, literally be defined as: 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers'.
The OP is claiming that eliminating lying actually increases the occurrence of distortion and disinformation (through an undisclosed mechanism).
To me, this would seem to be contradiction: eliminating the bad thing actually increase the occurrence of the bad thing.
If one can technically verify level of belief, then one can both insist upon it in coercive capacities (the NSA does not want any employee who has any doubts about its holy mission), and tune arguments for it in non-coercive capacities (The breakfast cereal marketing department's learning algorithms will be able to test jingles against a fully verifiable 100% accurate human model).
Blowing things off and consenting because you just want to move on, ceases to be an option once it's detectable. Instead, the opponent can iterate on strategies of persuasion until the job is genuinely done. This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host: It is in the interest of every memetic attack to install defenses against other memes. Will you tell your new girlfriend, that her brown hair looks nice when your preexisting bias in favor of blondes has been hyped up into a whole obsessive fandom by your last girlfriend, who jealously insisted on the mental calcification of True Belief?
Mindreading in the form of an accurate lie detector of some sort is a large portion of mind control, once you extrapolate it to routine applications throughout society.
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More specific to the article's point:
Datamining truth verification is more likely to be a problem for us due to the asymmetry: It benefits large organizations and only large organizations. It benefits the people with the best AI to search your history and only the people with the best AI to search your history. The NSA is already capable of performing a background check, utilizing the whole of its resources constructively, that would point out any doubts you have; But we are not similarly capable of deducing facts about the NSA.
On a tangent, I find this idea fascinating. What would produce an egalitarian botnet host? A Xen instance that spawns a bunch of WinXP VMs each networked such that they can only be reached by a random /16 CIDR block?
>If one can technically verify level of belief
I'll just let that one hang there for a second.
Yes, if one can do that -- and I'm not sure there is any reason to believe that it is even possible to achieve, in an absolute/practical meaning of 'technical' [I'll just add, that I believe that people may believe any number of impossibilities and attempt to act in accordance with those beliefs] --, then all manner of horrors may be possible.
To your point about the article:
Does the NSA do anything special? Anything that others could not achieve (in, the 'technical' sense)?
Perhaps there is some real cost to changing your opinion. What is that cost, and how can it be lowered? Or raised, for that matter?
Well lets take this into the extreme. Lets assume you adopt a new opinion that a life is only worth it's economical value. The amount of mental work to integrate that believe in your current set of opinions (by changing them) is huge. So you'd rather not do it.
Another example: the lie your company is on a good path. Knowing accepting it is on a bad path, means a lot of work.
And as we know humans are lazy by design.
Physiologically: Changing ingrained opinions on which many others are formed probably requires a good deal of brain re-wiring and may require solid plasticity. I'm unsure how much of a problem this is for the brain.
I guess there are a lot of other costs, but I can't come up with more.
It certainly makes you feel like you look incompetent. I wonder how much it makes others judge you as incompetent. Perhaps this issue has been researched? (I'm guessing that it might matter a great deal how one was wrong; there are different ways to be wrong, and different levels of wrongness.)
The upshot of each is that your previous understanding of the world is overthrown. It's not so much that it's the world which has ended as your worldview.
Mental models are difficult and expensive to construct. It takes an entire childhood and adolescence for humans, arguably a fair bit of adulthood as well.
Leaving those comfortable confines, even where they're wrong, is pretty distressing. We'll often work hard to re-shoebox reality into models to which it fits at best poorly instead.
Technology is not the be all, end all solution to universal connectedness, agreement, and consciousness. Technology is a means of communication, it is the stone tablet in an age of oral storytelling.
Technology could have killed lies long ago. It didn't. Why would it start now?
Technology will never stop those who have retaliatory power from lying. Janitor catches CEO lying about making a specific sales deal go through versus CEO catching janitor lying about when he clocked in. Strong intra-team asymmetries exist.
I have to wonder if an ultimate goal will end up being similar to Peter F Hamilton's Gia Field idea in his books where it essentially links people together in a way that's not easy to break and it forces you to feel everyone's emotions around you. So if you are trying to lie to someone, hurt them or steal their stuff it's going to be obvious not only to the victim but everyone around you and the perpetrator will feel his victim's emotions. Naturally this is a pretty crazy idea that's probably over 100 years away from being able to happen but still the article kinda reminded me of it.
I think one of the pressing necessities for the future is a way to categorize the "quality of science". This is seriously lacking at the moment.
"Chemtrails", global warming, evolution, historical events, etc.
How refreshing it would be if everyone was utterly sincere to each other.
It leads to dysfunctional behaviors because people don't want to earnestly told that their face is ugly when they first meet someone and every time after that.
Honesty can be brutal.
This also leads to another issue: when the data is centralized like this, those who oversee it can never be held to the level of accountability they hold others to.
This says more about society than honesty. If we collectively quit valuing physical beauty (you know -- something you're born with and can't control), that kind of statement wouldn't be an issue. Say "I'm bad at basketball" and no one cares. Say "I'm unintelligent" and everyone does.
The whole reason you gave your friends access to your fitness tracker data was so they could help motivate you. That's not a betrayal. Additionally, the Pennsylvania suspect voluntarily gave her username and password to the police, without which they would not have had access to intra-day historical data.
The case is solved by a brilliant detective combining with a precociously smart computer guy who downloads the raw data from the gps tracker and determines that while route and speed are typical, the data betrays it was someone else because of the difference in gait, recorded by the accelerometer that was built into the device for an upcoming feature not yet released by the tracking company. This is either proved in a courthouse scene where the accused has to run across the room, or by deception by secretly tagging both the accused and their unsuspecting alibi runner and comparing the data.
Or something like that, anyway.