It's a side point, but the bit about the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment is wrong and I recommend looking for real history to read if you're interested.
Here is a thread about literacy in ancient Rome. Short answer is that it's complicated:
Yup. I'm not going to argue with myself, but you are correct that this is a complex and fascinating topic that deserves more attention. Space constraints led me to vastly oversimplify. If you'd like more of a rebuttal/clarification, see https://danielbmarkham.com/epistemology-wars/ but by all means challenge my assumptions and premises.
I think it might have been better to write something like a more conventional book review of the books you read? As it is, it’s unclear where you read about ancient Rome (for example). What comes from each book, versus your own opinions?
sorry to say that the only thing I can agree on in this blogpost is "Any one of these topics represent a possible future of lifetime study. Many, because of the need to shorten the discussion, have been purposefully simplified to the point of being arguably misrepresentative." For example you are kind a implicating that christanity was responsible for the fall of rome, as the people started to reject ceasars as gods. This is kinda strange, I mean yeah this hypothesis exists but so do 210 others https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21... .You need better sources for such claims. Anyway IMO it is not strong anyway as Christanity and worldly rule made a good fit for the next 1300 years or so
My Medieval History teacher always said they were called The Dark Ages because the volume of primary sources were fewer - i.e. because they were dark to us.
Bret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed because it is overly religious in nature. There is not less writing from this period, but since scribes of that era was primarily monks, they obviously had a bias in their choice of works they chose to scribed.
The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.)
Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world.
In addition to this description of the Dark Ages/Enlightenment being wrong, it's worth pointing out how incredibly eurocentric it is ("humanity forgot how to read"). Even just in popular imagination, the 6th-10th centuries (what TFA calls "The Dark Ages") are seen as the height of literary achievement in other parts of the world (e.g. China)
> "Slashdot" is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob registered the domain http://slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. (Try it!)
> The Dark Ages were a time where humanity forgot how to read and write, where one person, a priest, was the sole person in your social life that could tell you truth from fiction. The Enlightenment changed all of that by re-teaching literacy.
And the article retcons literacy onto the past.
> I think the worst part of this is how completely insane I probably sound to folks.
The Dark Ages was a time when the christian west consciously stopped learning. Fortunately the muslim world carried the banner for intellect for a century or two.
Will the new dark age posited be western only? Or wealthy middle-class only? And will some other group develop as we stagnate on a feed of AI generated listicles?
Patently untrue. The myth of the cessation of learning during the Middle Ages has been thoroughly debunked, repeatedly, by modern historians. The learning never stopped, and the entire period of the Middle Ages was full of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The "rediscovery" of Greek learning did not begin with the Enlightenment, but during the Middle Ages. One would better describe it as the runway which set the stage for the explosion of learning due to the creation of the printing press.
Pretty interesting article I happen to agree with.
As other commenters have noted, we no longer know if any content we read in the Internet is legit. Soon enough, the problem will go beyond text and encompass image and video[1]. Give it a little longer, and entire digital personas will pop up. Next will be "feedback narratives", where groups of AIs, possibly de-federated, will use content produced by each other to produce even more content (similar to how fanlit works today, but in longer and longer chains).
We will find mechanisms to cope of course, but it may well be that our kind-of-true-information free-lunch is about to end.
[^1]: It's somewhat possible still to discern images generated using AI.
One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims. We don't need to wait for AIs to fail this test; wetware-generated text already often does.
in a truly adversarial environment, of course, someone will be spamming alternative versions of primary datasets. and in this case I suspect we've already lost, because it is unusual for wetware to fake data in ways that pass statistical tests, but being statistically plausible could be routine for machine-faked data)
[Edit: Upon reflection, replication is the (expensive!) countermeasure for possibly-faked datasets]
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that these systems are being rewarded and trained based on emotive response, not our logical system of sources and proofs. Due to the enormous complexity of the models, our idea of cause-and-effect doesn't hold.
To try to give a simple example, suppose I have a system that eventually wants to influence you on X. It may establish a months-long relationship with you online, becoming a follower and engaging in the kind of idle chitchat and sharing AI seems so good at.
Once you're "ready", the appropriate time has arrived or you've accidentally created some signals that indicate an opening, this particular system will share a strong position on X.
We automatically think that this means the system will support X, but I strongly believe the opposing the desired outcome will have more traction. "X sucks!" can be a powerful prompt for you to support X, and once you're locked into a position research shows that you'll do all the work of convincing yourself how great X is.
In this case, the sources argument fails, as it presupposes an independent, neutral observer trying to figure out what's really going on. A bunch of fake, half-assed evidence trails would provide more than enough support for X, the thing you've come to find so important. This is already being done with fake reviews and such. The difference is that it'll become invisible.
Good point. Ca. 1948 '"X sucks!" can be a powerful prompt for you to support X' was one of the known uses of "black" propaganda, so it's already proved useful with wetware operatives.
> We automatically think that this means the system will support X, but I strongly believe the opposing the desired outcome will have more traction.
The real power is just going to come from making people believe X matters more than anything else. X is great, and X sucks, are both red herrings.
Edit: The way this power will be used will not be yo sway opinion but to breed chaos by keeping the most irresolvable topics (pick your political third rail of choice) top of mind.
That's an even better take as this kind of thing will tend to feed on itself.
I continue to be amazed at how counterintuitive this all is. It may feed on itself, but in practice that might involve looping through dozens of somewhat adjacent topics in different subsets of the population. Such loops could take minutes or years.
"One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims."
For many categories of research, especially works in other languages, this strategy won't work in the future because the primary sources will increasingly be contaminated by citations of sources built by AI and ML, unless by "primary source" you mean "dedicate 20 years of your life to learning this language and studying the original, ancient manuscripts."
Since the large data sets and large language models are built by consuming enormous amounts of text, there is a risk such models will be contaminated in the future, if they start to consume text that is written by such AI/ML models. There is a sense where AI/ML amounts to a parasitic use of previously existing culture.
"There is a sense where AI/ML amounts to a parasitic use of previously existing culture."
Spot on. I've been thinking about this, and you're the first person I've seen mention it. The dystopia is that we get stuck with uncreative AI that displaces most creative people. Then humanity writ large loses its inventiveness, and it's very hard to recover.
I.E. if all artists move to using unstable diffusion, then who will remain to create and feed (useful) new art for unstable diffusion to consume? Who will be left to train new artists?
> For many categories of research, especially works in other languages, this strategy won't work in the future because the primary sources will increasingly be contaminated by citations of sources built by AI and ML, unless by "primary source" you mean "dedicate 20 years of your life to learning this language and studying the original, ancient manuscripts."
Isn't that—not the "learning the language" part, but the "original" part—exactly what "primary source" does mean?
For some citations this may be a higher bar than others, but already the basic bar of, e.g., checking direct quotations, and discounting (in the sense of assigning less credence to, not necessarily completely disregarding) works that summarise their sources rather than quoting them directly, can eliminate some intentional or unintentional misrepresentation without requiring a disproportionate investment in learning to read the sources.
Doesn't work on Wikipedia. They specifically don't take "primary sources". They only take secondary sources. If Obama was to try to edit his own article to correct some facts he knows are true they'd delete his edits immediately unless he can point to a secondary source that backs up his facts.
This is especially frustrating because often the secondary sources are from journalists who got the story wrong, made up "facts", incorrectly reported something, or just didn't understand the topic. But, because there words on are on some website they're taken as the authority.
I get it's a hard problem. The primary source could have reasons to lie. I've just seen too many cases where I've seen the secondary source was wrong either being the primary source or being at the primary source.
But, it's only going to get worse as A.I can start making up its own secondary sources and then link to them in a few weeks/months to edit wikipedia.
[One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims.]
> Doesn't work on Wikipedia.
Sure it does.
> They specifically don't take "primary sources".
A primary source is not an acceptable direct source of an article, but a comparison of the cited secondary source to the primary sources it cites would be a legitimate grounds for challenging the use of the secondary source. That's kind of central to verifiability.
> If Obama was to try to edit his own article to correct some facts he knows are true they'd delete his edits immediately
That's true, but a different thing: editing based on personal knowledge without referencing a source isn't “using a primary source”, its trying to make Wikipedia itself a primary source (what WP calls “original research”.)
OTOH, Wikipedia isn't the only Wikimedia project, several of the other ones can be secondary or primary sources (Wikinews, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity, notably.)
I tried correcting the origins of the first prototype of the Docker software on Wikipedia. The people I worked with at the time can confirm the story of course. But Wikipedia will not take our words as we are the literal primary sources. Instead they want secondary accounting. Which happens to be whatever was shared to journalist years later by people that weren't there initially or didn't design and write the code.
This is annoying at a personal level (resumé looks better with a wikipedia mention). It did opene my eyes on how history recounting really works though.
> I get it's a hard problem. The primary source could have reasons to lie. I've just seen too many cases where I've seen the secondary source was wrong either being the primary source or being at the primary source.
I've seen just as many cases where the subject of some article tried to influence it, bend it, or outright fake facts on it. Believing them could be considered worse than a bunch of secondary sources. Those are obviously not bullet-proof either, but there is more inertia to it to fake it. Like paper ballots. In theory, can be faked, but the endeavor is enormous.
Maybe this will lead to a re-centralization of information. We'll have to trust certain sources instead of taking reddit or some blog/video found through google at face value. Back to Walter Cronkite.
That is true. I went travelling recently and found that I get much better and concise information from a guidebook than spending hours reading travel sites/tourism agency site/blogs that want me to book a tour with them. Centralization and curation are becoming very important.
> It's somewhat possible still to discern images generated using AI.
currently if it includes "photograph" and includes humans or animals, there is a chance that you can get a good image once out of every 50 generated images. by "good" i mean "does not need to be retouched". If i use one of the other models (instead of stable diffusion's model) that goes to 1 in 10 images.
If i use img2img and all of my understanding of the generation, i can probably generate 8 images and get 3 usable ones.
All this is to say, depending on the subject, i could generate stuff that is indistinguishable from traditional art, in whatever medium or representation you want. And i can't make art, edit photos, etc. My limits of understanding of traditional art and editing is "crop/rotate" and adjusting the lights and darks to get the correct contrast and color rendering, and then save and publish.
On your primary topic, something i have been noticing ramp up in the past 10 days or so is weird typos and even "new words" being created, where it looks like someone was typing on a phone and didn't bother to check the output. I'm not sure if it's some new AI/ML, or perhaps there's a bug in the "keyboard input" part of android, perhaps. It's like the opposite of your adding a dash in "defederated" because there's a red squiggly line under the word in the input box.
I was listening to a podcast by Balaji. He has an idea that could serve as counterpoint to these fears.
In that podcast, he describes (mainly for research purposes) a blockchain where all data has been validated and verified before being added.
I could see a similar chain being used by trustworthy organization where truth has been validated, verified, and recorded in a public blockchain where anyone can see for themselves sources of information that have been used.
The real question would be, can we find trustworthy organizations to compile the information?
> I could see a similar chain being used by trustworthy organization
There's the fatal flaw. As COVID has shown, trust in institutions can easily degrade. The blockchain doesn't add anything to the trustworthiness of the institutions' assessment of the facts: if the institution is trusted, then it's assessment is trusted regardless of what the blockchain says, and if it's not trusted, then the blockchain won't convince you of anything.
> Soon enough, the problem will go beyond text and encompass image and video[1].
And the people making that happen are we. The sw eng / CS / IT nerd crowd. Those reading HN. And it's rare to see critical voices of those working on this. For basically everybody here it's just cool tech.
IMO- video and images are already compromised, think about airbrushed models magazines.
One I thought about a little while ago was the skilled artisan. Imagine a ridiculously good clock maker from times of yore, years and years of developing skills so good that the kings and queens of the world would be presented with their wares. Now imagine a digital artist the likes that lucasfilm would employ. Then take the artisan fine craftsperson idea. Dedicating years and years to digital image techniques. They could of made deep fakes years and years ago. It would of taken a long time but it was possible by a highly skilled digital artist.
Those kinds of high quality works would of been very expensive, maybe some eclectic billionaire had a short video made as a gift for someone depicting themselves inside a video game world, al a Tron!
AI puts that skill and craftsmanship into average joes hands like myself.
https://youtu.be/fUQbuFO5MwQ
I don’t think we ever had an era where you could assume what you read online was correct. Acquiring knowledge has always required critical thinking and checking of sources, this has been known throughout history eg Polybius and his insistence on firsthand knowledge. Also see the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
> "I for one welcome our new X overlords" ... This quote began back in 1905 with H.G. Wells' short story "Empire of the Ants" and has taken on a life of its own, as shown in this Simpsons clip.
I never knew that. I always assumed it started with a line from Half-life 2.
It’s unpredictable what the future looks like but I agree there is something new in AI’s revealed capabilities.
This could “frontfire” (that is, backfire against bad actors). The web has been flooded with corporate sock puppetry for a decade, drowning out legitimate content. What ChatGPT is scaring people about has been within an epsilon dollar amount of being true for a long time.
I think the problem with this narrative is that it assumes that the _online_ is the only reality. For the foreseeable future AIs will be restricted to the digital world. I know its hard for us terminally online types to get it: but in fact, most people mostly live in the real world.
And even for things with epistemological import its hard to imagine (current) language model based AI having a big impact beyond making certain things I might have done with a search engine a little more convenient. Like if I need to know something of consequence, I'll still turn to a textbook or a bonafide human expert that I work with.
It's more subtle than that. The AIs and algorithms are being employed to influence our behavior (in the most common case - to make us purchase things). We manifest AI into the real world through our behavior.
I'd be happy to put money on the fact that current artificial intelligence, invisible to us because it doesn't talk like a person, has already pretty much maxed out the potential in terms of influencing us to buy shit.
These new language models do one thing, which is that they do a passable job of putting one word in front of another for awhile. I just don't see that as earth shattering.
> "spammers are evolving into something we are not able to recognize as spam"
There is something deeply sad (if not freightening) to invent a enormously powerful digital augmentation technology and use it primarily to dimimish our humanity as it drowns in fake replicas
There’s a fundamental question of why we’re trying to produce Artificial Intelligence instead of Augmented (human) Intelligence. Why did the first term stick and not the second from the 50s?
Why do we want to replace humans instead of augment them? To increase shareholder profit? To wage war remotely? To hand governments more power over us? What is the goal?
Artificial intelligence creates a more compelling narrative. It’s the “us .vs. them” dynamic that humans are so fond of. Even when it isn’t an explicitly antagonistic relationship; an AI is still shown as an “other”.
Really when you think about it, in a good amount of stories humans might as well be augmented intelligences. We just aren’t making a point of them being different, or at odds with the general human population.
Image AI has inpainting. You can provide a sketch for the AI to follow, have it redo parts of the image, or have it extend the image. You can pull things into Photoshop and retouch there.
Novel AI has story writing assistance. Or ChatGPT can be used to provide bits and pieces that can be then combined or improved until something good results. Eg, Chat GPT can write fairly passable poetry that one could use as a base for something actually good.
So far all AI works much better when combined with a human that knows what they're doing. You can easily create hundreds of okay pictures, but an actual artist is still by far the best user for an image generator.
Whatever the goals they derive from previous, less dangerous eras, where there was always at least a hope that an oppressed or abused segment of the population could escape: migrate, revolt, strike, whatever
We are entering a dystopic regime where our famous pale blue dot planet acts more as a mousetrap, where we play out an arms race of surveillance, advanced weaponry automation, psychological warfare and misinformation.
Its not clear how we could put a lid on the artificial madness but for sure it wont be achieved with half-measures
It's not a pure "either/or" scenario; augmented intelligence is still a goal (Neuralink, for example), but our progress on upgrading the human brain has been going much more slowly than our progress on upgrading AI.
I don’t recognize the described risk. If spam gets so advanced that individual articles are indistinguishable from human-produced material, reputation steps in, forcing much more ability from the bots to keep up with human content producers. If language models or their descendants are able to overcome this barrier, then it doesn’t really matter who produces the content.
We already live in a ecosystem flooded with human "human level" spammers at a mass scale.
We are only grounded in systems of reputation & relationships. These systems will remain important as content becomes fully synthetic. I.e Linkedin, Google, Social networks already heavily depend on social and reputation graphs towards keeping spam at bay; if anything new ideas will be harder and harder to go viral as the social and reputational filters are forced to assume synthetic.
Maybe AI learns to leverage/buy endorsement "content" posts from your friends and colleagues like celebrity endorsements operate today (as personalized commercials/text become very low cost).
AI/people trying to drive value with AI will have to find ways to leverage social relationships to squeeze into relevance where content/ideas are very low cost.
the issue is that the large language model doesn’t understand what it’s saying, cannot reason or come up with novel ideas, yet it can convince a human that it _is_ doing so.
so then if the world begins to prefer AI-generated content, any question you ask the internet will only show you AI-generated answers, which can only offer you answers based on its training set, and over time a system with no new inputs just ends up being static generated from static, albeit static which is convincing enough for a human to accept it.
It would be very useful if it was required by law to inform people when they are interacting with or consuming content from a ML/AI system. Like how you get a warning when you are being recorded on a call to customer service. Have a known icon present in a chat box when a computer system is responding. Same on social media, blog posts, articles, art, etc. Otherwise I think things are going to get very weird and lots of mental health problems are going to get worse.
If this is a problem that a bunch of people actually complain about, hardware makers will just introduce apis to let systems know a human is typing. Think verified buyer on Amazon
Isn't AI (chatgpt) basically too late to the party. If I'm understanding the thrust of the article is that language models can easily generate content that you don't know if it's true or not, with various opinions and points of view.
But the internet already has that. And that's how chatgpt can generate it's text, because it's trained on the internet as a corpus. So it can make more of the same, slanted and untrustable and maybe indistinguishable from whether a person wrote it. But that's nothing new.
Yeah but you can fine tune it to generate whatever you want, given your own training corpus. Anybody's whose job is to generate text will have a productivity boost.
For a while till we've watered down all content so much that chatgpt has no actual useful material to pull from but its own spew. Much of the internet seems to be trending this way, with just low effort content mill sites being propped up by high Google scores that cause more low effort content which further lowering the quality of Google results. It'll be its own downfall I tells ya....
We are rapidly going back to square one on the Web: to needing curated guides to good websites. This time, not because search engines don’t exist, but because search results have been gamed by content mills pushing garbage content. It’s almost like the web is turning itself inside out. The web you care about is to some extent “dark”, i.e. not discoverable by conventional means.
If systems like ChatGPT just become echo chambers (garbage content feeding AI generation of derivative garbage, ad infinitum), I kind of see things like ChatGPT simply turbo charging this creeping digital benightedness in the face of information over abundance.
I really feel like the world is "going dark" along multiple axes, not just the AI one. The globalized economy seems to have passed its peak as the resource dependencies and energy sources have begun a long shift away from 20th century norms, and there's likewise renewed interest in privacy technologies, personalizations/customizations and optimizing around local spaces, vs "connecting the planet" and proceeding further down the path of standardized everything.
Which means that most likely, we have a future where we don't have any designated global sources of truth, as was the assumption going into the Enlightenment. It'll be a little more like Aristotle's time, where the true lessons were taught esoterically, by devising puzzle-like texts with intentional tricks and flaws. (This is the Leo Strauss thesis, which is explained very well by Arthur Melzer in "Philosophy Between the Lines".) To uncover the knowledge you have to demonstrate the critical thinking necessary to undermine its surface.
It's something I should probably try writing fiction about. It could be a long trend or a temporary blip, but it's worthy of speculation.
Curated lists of sites is the web. A site links to a few sites that the author knows to be good and those sites do the same for a few more sites. That's the web. It's what enabled the Google page rank algorithm to work in the first place. The Internet we continue to use and enjoy but the web hasn't existed in any practical form for 15 years.
If people do start rebuilding the web then Google's search algorithm will suddenly start working better which will cause people to stop building the web. So obviously we'll just end up with a steady state where Google just kindof sucks but is kindof usable. I think that we might be there already.
More and more I think we need proof of being human to participate in the "town square". It essentially means the end of anonimity online, but I struggle to see how we overcome bots without it.
In the future, I imagine part of the web is anonymous and signal to noise ratio is 1:1,000,000 - and the other part of the web is authenticated and the single to noise ratio is much better.
I struggle to see how that would help. There are already plenty of paid shills out there. Just feed your shills the script and once again you have a sacrifice of anonymity for nothing. Like how real naming policies just made people double down.
Frankly I find it disturbing that people jump straight to throwing away rights as the solution.
Honestly I don't see anonymity as a right. It is a sticking plaster defence against the loss of other rights and protections.
Yes it is useful for people to organise against oppressive regiemes (either Amazon strikebreakers in Wisconsin or police / security forces in Tehran) but we really should have a clear and direct solution to Amazon in a democratic society. And if we cannot then anonymity is a poor second best.
Secondly, yeah you want to be a paid shill for Russia / BP / Qatar etc go for it. Reputation matters. Maybe some kind of labelling / fair advertising is a good idea "all opinions expressed here have been paid for by tonights sponsor Marlboro."
I would be interested in hearing from a proper human rights lawyer - anonymity is going to have a lot of case law surely?
Requiring proof of humanity does not necessitate deanonymizing users to anyone except the platform itself; they can still be anonymous to other users and onlookers.
The real town square, the one that elects politicians has not been a literal town square for a while. People with money who control the media are the real town square and it is they who set the context and frame
I doubt the town square ever existed as an idealised thing - social underclasses would always have struggled to even be allowed into the square, it would have been commercially dominated and social success would have correlated wrongly to commercial and political success.
Luckily we get to design the rules for our society and town squares and so improve access. In my view most of the so called "social justice wars" are to do with how far to the front shoukd one push previously excluded underclasses.
These two items have always been true, they do not describe the future.
For instance:
"If I take position A on something and you take position B, it's possible that we can both believe the other person is conversing in good faith."
There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations. I have to know they are arguing in good faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who might be arguing in bad faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who is lying, or who doesn't believe in anything they themselves say, or who is simply trying to manipulate me, or who is simply trying to insult me, or whose idea of veritable fact is utterly different from my own.
There are also those who are simply engaged in mental work so different from my own that I would have to devote years of study before I could understand them, and I have no interest in investing those years. Gödel's incompleteness theorems remind us that for any given system of axioms there will be statements that are true but which cannot be proven true using only the given axioms. If I were to waste time engaging such people in conversation then they might end up saying something that is logically consistent but it would take me several years of effort to figure out that their statement was logically consistent, and without investing those years of effort, it simply sounds like they are speaking nonsense. But I don't have enough lifetimes to figure that out.
Therefore, challenging conversations, that are personally useful, have always been limited to small groups of people.
Likewise:
"I think there's a future for folks who self-organize into interlocking circles of trust."
That is the way things have worked for humans for at least 10,000 years. We self-organize into interlocking circles of trust. That's how circles of friendship work.
IMHO very strong statements are always wrong -> "Therefore, challenging conversations, that are personally useful, have always been limited to small groups of people.".
History seem contradict that and to demonstrate that the conservative, quiet "middle" is almost always wrong over time. The only people who are eventually "right" are invariably considered to have strong opinions and to be fringe by the "middle".
This is almost tautological. The "middle" is where we are right now and "more right" is, by definition, not where were are right now.
Then the issue is that you don't know which is which, a priori. Most strong statements end up false, eventually. The statements that eventually end up right may have been strong all along, but most of their strong cousins will eventually end up wrong instead. Consequently, the cautious approach is to be skeptical of strong statements, since they will likely turn out false.
(I'm also not sure that the initial assumption is actually true. There are tons of examples where the strong statements have not prevailed. Remember those saying Covid-19 is a killer virus, decimating billions? Or that it's no big deal? Turned out neither. It was bad, but not that bad.)
I'd claim the opposite. The weaker a statement, the more flexible it is. A pretty much maximally weak statement is "something will or will not happen". It's true with 100% certainty. And it's quite useless, since it doesn't actually state anything meaningful. The more concrete and thus stronger you make a statement, the more you risk it turning up false. There are certainly outliers and exception, but there should be a pretty good correlation between strength of a statement and its likelihood of eventually not turning out true.
>I don't waste my time arguing with someone who might be arguing in bad faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who is lying, or who doesn't believe in anything they themselves say, or who is simply trying to manipulate me, or who is simply trying to insult me, or whose idea of veritable fact is utterly different from my own.
THANK YOU! Seriously, the whole "assume good faith" thing that you find on the tech sites (like here, like wikipedia) drives me completely up a wall.
Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron? Have I not read the comment sections of youtube, yahoo news, assorted disqus and news forums and trolltalk? Am I completely unaware of 4chan?
I mean, I can understand that ideal back in the days of kuro5hin when Rusty was naively asking his trolls to tell him if they felt the need to attack k5 (and then nights in white satin happened...)...but that was almost a fucking quarter of a century ago!
To hold out that kind of naivete in 2010 -much less 2023, is idiotic to be quite honest. Obviously I don't advocate for some thunderdome style noise factory -more to the point I think it's on us to be aware that we're dealing with adversarys, keep our emotions in check (don't be baited) and do our own part to keep the conversation from descending into chan style flamage.
But assume good faith? Hell to the fucking naw -gtfo with that noise!
> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron?
Assuming bad faith will never result in convergence.
Assuming good faith could result in convergence, even if you think the probability is low.
Therefore converging on truth, or at least shared opinion, must start with assuming good faith. Of course if you're not actually interested in those things, then I can't help with that.
> I have literally no idea what you mean by "convergence" (in this context), so I'm going to guess that no; I'm not. Particularly since you appear to be using it as a rhetorical cudgel (meaning a stick to hit someone over the head with).
You are doing an excellent job of demonstrating what "bad faith" means.
Actually, I'm being completely honest and forthright. I have not seen that term used in that context and the context was particularly passive-agressive (itself a sign of bad faith).
From my point of view, the post that I replied to was made in bad faith ...eg laying on the snark (which is against HN guidelines, btw).
Yes, I know "it takes two to tango", but on the other hand...It Takes Two To Tango. The patronizing snark was unwarranted and itself a sign of bad faith.
You hopefully realize that a sentence like "Who in the flying fuck are you to assume that I need help of any sort?" is not a very constructive way of arguing and usually disqualifies the writer from any form of civilized discussion.
I think you are replying in good faith but you are overreacting to the “help” comment which I do not think was intended to be offensive.
I think “convergence” is a good term which the Parent used, and based on the context I would interpret it as a “shared understanding” or mutually benficial exchange of ideas. Convergence also implies agreement and maybe partial agreement could be a part of that, but even “agreeing to disagree” seems like a good faith outcome.
So do some people post without this intent? I’m sure they do but I will always assume the opposite until they prove otherwise.
> Who in the flying fuck are you to assume that I need help of any sort?
You asked a question. Asking a question is ostensibly a request for help of some kind, like clarification. Perhaps you were asking rhetorically or insincerely, but I provided an answer in good faith assuming you literally didn't understand why one should assume good faith. I would have replied anyway even if you weren't, just in case anyone else was even slightly convinced by your line of reasoning.
> Are any of those convergence? I don't know -and now, thanks to your post, I don't care either.
Convergence may not relevant to all objectives, but neither is assuming good faith. Since we're talking about why one should assume good faith, I pointed out that convergence to agreement is one good reason.
I don't see how anything else you mentioned is relevant.
At least try to assume enough good faith that you would see yourself as arguing in good faith if you argued for the other side.
Most people don't even pass that low bar though, they demand that others assume way more good faith than they themselves do, that is the kind of people who need to hear this advice.
Why would you bother engaging someone in conversation at all if you didn't assume they were engaging in good faith?
If I'm going to assume there's a 50% chance the person I'm talking to is engaging in bad faith I'd rather do something more productive like scream my opinions out my window.
"Assuming good faith" is potentially a fantasy, but it's a useful fantasy for encouraging quality conversation.
>Why would you bother engaging someone in conversation at all if you didn't assume they were engaging in good faith?
Not all interactions are a conversation -at least not necessarily an on-going one. For instance, in a political thread you may choose to reply to a very obvious troll simply for the sake of countering misinformation -not because you want to run off and get married to them.
>If I'm going to assume there's a 50% chance the person I'm talking to is engaging in bad faith I'd rather do something more productive like scream my opinions out my window.
Fair. "Don't read the comments" has become a proverb for a reason. That said -there are times and places where it's useful (for your own sake) to interact.
Sure, adjust your conclusions as the conversation evolves, but that first interaction requires an assumption of good faith to make conversation possible to begin with.
It's like how tit-for-tat has been the most effective long-term strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments. An agent employing this strategy always starts by cooperating as it's first choice, and only switches to defecting after you've defected first.
The possibility of good faith is enough to start a conversation. However, there is an inverse correlation of this probability, and how likely I will start a conversation, at least for me.
People who don't assume good faith are arguing in bad faith, that is the crux of the issue.
For example, lets say you argue with a person like yourself, you both assume bad faith in the other person. Then as the conversation goes on and the other doesn't listen, your assumption gets "validated" and you got a shit conversation from it.
If however you both assumed good faith, now you see the other person listens, you get a great conversation where you share and listen and learn. This is by far the better scenario, you meet much more interesting people and get much better conversations this way.
So, how do people like you get a good conversation? Well, you only get good conversations with people who assume good faith, who keep that up long enough to convince you that they actually care. Those kind of people are rare, and the harder you make yourself to talk to the rarer they will be for you. For me, I meet people who listen and I can talk to everywhere, assuming good faith means that you find more good people, it is that simple.
>People who don't assume good faith are arguing in bad faith, that is the crux of the issue.
Assuming -as I've already said; that they're arguing. There are other reasons for interactions.
>So, how do people like you get a good conversation?
1)Cultivating a circle of people whom I trust have good intentions -usually IRL
2)Sticking to shared topics and guaging wether or not individuals I recurringly interact with are on the level or not (this requires pseudo-anonymity as found in traditional simple machine/phpbb style forums).
>People who don't assume good faith are arguing in bad faith, that is the crux of the issue.
Obviously I disagree -and that disagreement isn't something I've simply pulled out of my ass. It's based on 25 years of online interaction experience, as well as seeing how disinformation campaigns played out on social media such as twitter and facebook.
"people like you" is a very othering phrase and that's just funny as shit. You cannot "other" me without making a whole lump of assumptions about me. I'm not sure if that counts as a strawman argument in this case or not but anyway it doesn't matter.
You *can* have great conversations where you share and interact and learn *without engaging in naivete.* But you won't hear it from me.
Mind you, I am capable of learning from astroturfers (their salespitch), trolls (what's the party line?) and kooks. I simply have my eyes open and do not assume that they are something that they are not...it's amusing that several posters in this thread are unwilling (unable?) to grasp that not-terribly-subtle distinction.
All this passive aggression is making me reach for the pepto, I will say that!
I'm not sure why you care so much? It doesn't cost anything to assume good faith, its just a win win situation. As we see here you still waste time arguing with people even when you assume bad faith, so it doesn't even save you time, its just your loss.
Anyway, very few people really argue in bad faith, I almost always can make people listen if I just get to talk to them long enough. Assume good faith long enough and you will find it in almost anyone. But conversely assume bad faith and you will find that in almost anyone as well.
Edit:
> All this passive aggression is making me reach for the pepto, I will say that!
There is nothing passive about my aggressiveness here, I am very loudly and clearly stating that I think your approach leads to worse outcomes. There is nothing wrong about clearly stating when you think others are wrong about things.
I care because I feel that the attitude is destructive and that there are better approaches that can be taken. I've outlined them other places ITT already.
>As we see here you still waste time arguing with people even when you assume bad faith
>arguing
If there's another way to get my point of view read, I'd love to hear it!
>when you assume bad faith
Logical fallacy. I do not necessarily assume bad faith ...I simply do not assume good faith.
>Anyway, very few people really argue in bad faith,
I would encourage you to try to have some sustained long-term on youtube comments or facebook if you haven't already. I'm being completely serious here -that will present you with numerous examples of people arguing in bad faith.
I have the impression when you say "arguing" you could actually be meaning "discussing"; the difference being one aims to convince another person -the other simply seeks to share veiwpoints. One's adverserial, the other isn't. Am I reading you correctly?
>And this attitude is why we can't have nice things.
Swing and a miss. I'd encourage folks reading this thread to go back and read the entire thing; or at least the paragraph that my quote was taken from.
The thought that I posted was; "why would I assume good faith when there are so many examples of bad faith out there?"
[edit]In the event my post gets killed/reported/downvoted into oblivion -here's the original context:
>Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron? Have I not read the comment sections of youtube, yahoo news, assorted disqus and news forums and trolltalk? Am I completely unaware of 4chan?
No, the vast amount of bad faith, misinformation, trolling and piss-takes on the internet making such an assumption moronic is why we can't have nice things.
I think "assume good faith" has to be taken as something of a Prisoner's Dilemma proposition.
You don't want to be a dove, and keep assuming good faith when it hurts.
Assume good faith initially because it least has a chance of being productive, but the moment bad faith is detected, either withdraw or "punish" (and propagate social signals that bad faith arguing has been detected so others know not to engage)
>Assume good faith initially because it least has a chance of being productive, but the moment bad faith is detected, either withdraw or "punish" (and propagate social signals that bad faith arguing has been detected so others know not to engage)
That's fair but I think a better solution is to enter into a conversation Tabla Rasa; you don't know someone's a kook/troll/whatever but you are aware that they may be. They may also be a potential friend/workmate/source of support/whatever.
With each interaction, over time, trust is either built up or torn down.
This is harder and harder to do in the current forum/anonymous posting climate not so much because of anonymity but because of different design elements that have stripped people's messages of ways to make distinctions (avatars, signature are two that come to mind, profiles are another).
Now posters all blend into one another so building up any kind of individual rapport is difficult; if not impossible.
Thanks for clarifying this. It made me reflect on the relationship between assuming positive intent, negative intent and blank slate as directly corresponding to strong positive and negative priors vs weak priors or even uninformative priors.
Even updating these priors with new data to form posteriors falls perfectly into place. Thank you.
It's been good to have the chance to articulate my annoyance and examine it closer and think of what alternatives I'd propose. I'm glad to have something more to go into future discussions with than inarticulate gripes. All in all a net win IMO!
> the whole "assume good faith" thing that you find on the tech sites (like here, like wikipedia) drives me completely up a wall
> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'?
Perhaps because you've missed the implied part of this guideline. Spelled out, it would go like this: if you're replying, assume good faith - if you can't, you should not reply at all.
I mean, if you're not going to assume good faith, what are you doing in the conversation in the first place? Do you like to engage in fights, or stir up ones? Don't you have anything better to do?
>I mean, if you're not going to assume good faith, what are you doing in the conversation in the first place?
It depends on the specific conversation. One example (which I gave earlier) might be to counter misinformation -for the sake of people reading. Another example might be to give out warnings or clarifications in the capacity of a forum moderator.
>Do you like to engage in fights, or stir up ones?
There's other reasons possible too. HN is made up of smart people so I'll leave imagining them as an exercise for the readers.
> or who doesn't believe in anything they themselves say,
Disagree with this. I think it is important in conversation to attempt to defend all alternate views even without believing them
> We self-organize into interlocking circles of trust. That's how circles of friendship work.
circles of friendship are ~100-150 people , but if we look at recent decades, in the most advanced economies people freely choose to be atomized while using use the State (~millions of people) as their support network.
"while using use the State (~millions of people) as their support network"
That is such a misreading of what I wrote I have to wonder if you are being deliberately obtuse. I wrote "There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations." I think it was clear what scale and type of conversation I was discussing.
It looks to me as if they’re stating their own view of a point you brought up, not reformulating what you stated. If you want good faith discussions the best way would probably be to apply the principle of charity[1] and allow for the other person to engage in the discussion by also adding their own thoughts on the topic, not just sticking to your points slavishly - that would hardly allow for either refutation nor insight. It’s not all about you.
why does the person have to believe what they're saying? isn't that Socrates method or devil's advocate? you have to explore both sides even if you're leaning the other way
I’m very concerned about where this is going. I can absolutely see the benefit of this technology and have used it a couple of times in the last week to genuinely save me time and come up with some ideas.
My concern is where this is going, if the marginal cost to produce, effectively, infinite content is zero then what’s the point here? What’s are we doing and where are we going?
Is the aim ti get to a point where humans don’t have to do anything? It’s all taken care of? Because if AI can make our art, create all media formats of our content, handle problems and do a lot of our physical tasks then … what’s the point?
People look at me as if I’m mad, but in the space of 12 months we’ve gone from “AI can’t even manage multiple timers” (not quite but if you live with a Siri then you get it) to “holy moly, I can’t tell if that painting was made by a human or not” which is bonkers.
I guess we need to see if we are at the start of the exponential curve or approaching a plateau.
I am looking forward to it. People will finally stop up each other in the name of meritocracy, and the society will equalize, because we will collectively recognize no one is really better and more deserving.
The industrial revolution did this with physical strength and fitness, and the recognition that muscle doesn't really matter anymore lead to general decrease in violence. In a similar way, we will stop mythologizing intelligence or creativity.
A lot of people at the top are those who are the most manipulative which is a very restricted form of intelligence. General intelligence was not a barrier for them up to now. Those kinds of people will continue not to share.
I may have the technical issues wrong, but I'm not sure once you factor in training that the cost is marginal. ChatGPT isn't open source; and unlike stable diffusion you can't simply self-host a trained AI equivalent.
What makes ChatGPT effective ...again, as I understand it... is the training which is a result of pouring millions of dollars in it. That may be pocket change in Silicon Valley but outside of there, it effectively puts it out of reach.
It is written in the New Testament scriptures and the book of Revelation.
The author wrote, “It's like tech is making each one of us our own little village with a computer priest.”
Indeed it is. Make no mistake. We are building a false god in hopes that it will serve us. However, this thing is not of the creator but man. The technologists have forgotten history.
150 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadHere is a thread about literacy in ancient Rome. Short answer is that it's complicated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3huswa/how_l...
The article might be AI generated, your comment might be, both, or none of them. How will we know who is right? And if we can't, will we stop caring?
The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.)
Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
It's not a CLI reference. Slashdot was named for how it sounds read aloud: https://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml
> "Slashdot" is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob registered the domain http://slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. (Try it!)
I don’t them, but their email addy is legendary.
The thing that would make sense for the CLI would be ./ (dot slash) I guess.
And the article retcons literacy onto the past.
> I think the worst part of this is how completely insane I probably sound to folks.
No. It's worse for the reader. I stopped there.
The Dark Ages was a time when the christian west consciously stopped learning. Fortunately the muslim world carried the banner for intellect for a century or two.
Will the new dark age posited be western only? Or wealthy middle-class only? And will some other group develop as we stagnate on a feed of AI generated listicles?
As other commenters have noted, we no longer know if any content we read in the Internet is legit. Soon enough, the problem will go beyond text and encompass image and video[1]. Give it a little longer, and entire digital personas will pop up. Next will be "feedback narratives", where groups of AIs, possibly de-federated, will use content produced by each other to produce even more content (similar to how fanlit works today, but in longer and longer chains).
We will find mechanisms to cope of course, but it may well be that our kind-of-true-information free-lunch is about to end.
[^1]: It's somewhat possible still to discern images generated using AI.
One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims. We don't need to wait for AIs to fail this test; wetware-generated text already often does.
(eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34128199
in a truly adversarial environment, of course, someone will be spamming alternative versions of primary datasets. and in this case I suspect we've already lost, because it is unusual for wetware to fake data in ways that pass statistical tests, but being statistically plausible could be routine for machine-faked data)
[Edit: Upon reflection, replication is the (expensive!) countermeasure for possibly-faked datasets]
To try to give a simple example, suppose I have a system that eventually wants to influence you on X. It may establish a months-long relationship with you online, becoming a follower and engaging in the kind of idle chitchat and sharing AI seems so good at.
Once you're "ready", the appropriate time has arrived or you've accidentally created some signals that indicate an opening, this particular system will share a strong position on X.
We automatically think that this means the system will support X, but I strongly believe the opposing the desired outcome will have more traction. "X sucks!" can be a powerful prompt for you to support X, and once you're locked into a position research shows that you'll do all the work of convincing yourself how great X is.
In this case, the sources argument fails, as it presupposes an independent, neutral observer trying to figure out what's really going on. A bunch of fake, half-assed evidence trails would provide more than enough support for X, the thing you've come to find so important. This is already being done with fake reviews and such. The difference is that it'll become invisible.
As a presumably inadvertent example of reverse propaganda, cf https://dakotavadams.substack.com/p/redpill-op
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
>The X-Windows Disaster: This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins.
>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
The real power is just going to come from making people believe X matters more than anything else. X is great, and X sucks, are both red herrings.
Edit: The way this power will be used will not be yo sway opinion but to breed chaos by keeping the most irresolvable topics (pick your political third rail of choice) top of mind.
I continue to be amazed at how counterintuitive this all is. It may feed on itself, but in practice that might involve looping through dozens of somewhat adjacent topics in different subsets of the population. Such loops could take minutes or years.
For many categories of research, especially works in other languages, this strategy won't work in the future because the primary sources will increasingly be contaminated by citations of sources built by AI and ML, unless by "primary source" you mean "dedicate 20 years of your life to learning this language and studying the original, ancient manuscripts."
Since the large data sets and large language models are built by consuming enormous amounts of text, there is a risk such models will be contaminated in the future, if they start to consume text that is written by such AI/ML models. There is a sense where AI/ML amounts to a parasitic use of previously existing culture.
Spot on. I've been thinking about this, and you're the first person I've seen mention it. The dystopia is that we get stuck with uncreative AI that displaces most creative people. Then humanity writ large loses its inventiveness, and it's very hard to recover.
I.E. if all artists move to using unstable diffusion, then who will remain to create and feed (useful) new art for unstable diffusion to consume? Who will be left to train new artists?
It's like the information revolution in reverse.
Isn't that—not the "learning the language" part, but the "original" part—exactly what "primary source" does mean?
For some citations this may be a higher bar than others, but already the basic bar of, e.g., checking direct quotations, and discounting (in the sense of assigning less credence to, not necessarily completely disregarding) works that summarise their sources rather than quoting them directly, can eliminate some intentional or unintentional misrepresentation without requiring a disproportionate investment in learning to read the sources.
This is especially frustrating because often the secondary sources are from journalists who got the story wrong, made up "facts", incorrectly reported something, or just didn't understand the topic. But, because there words on are on some website they're taken as the authority.
I get it's a hard problem. The primary source could have reasons to lie. I've just seen too many cases where I've seen the secondary source was wrong either being the primary source or being at the primary source.
But, it's only going to get worse as A.I can start making up its own secondary sources and then link to them in a few weeks/months to edit wikipedia.
> Doesn't work on Wikipedia.
Sure it does.
> They specifically don't take "primary sources".
A primary source is not an acceptable direct source of an article, but a comparison of the cited secondary source to the primary sources it cites would be a legitimate grounds for challenging the use of the secondary source. That's kind of central to verifiability.
> If Obama was to try to edit his own article to correct some facts he knows are true they'd delete his edits immediately
That's true, but a different thing: editing based on personal knowledge without referencing a source isn't “using a primary source”, its trying to make Wikipedia itself a primary source (what WP calls “original research”.)
OTOH, Wikipedia isn't the only Wikimedia project, several of the other ones can be secondary or primary sources (Wikinews, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity, notably.)
This is annoying at a personal level (resumé looks better with a wikipedia mention). It did opene my eyes on how history recounting really works though.
I've seen just as many cases where the subject of some article tried to influence it, bend it, or outright fake facts on it. Believing them could be considered worse than a bunch of secondary sources. Those are obviously not bullet-proof either, but there is more inertia to it to fake it. Like paper ballots. In theory, can be faked, but the endeavor is enormous.
You're right. It's a hard problem.
https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
which is some thoughts on certifying and signing media
currently if it includes "photograph" and includes humans or animals, there is a chance that you can get a good image once out of every 50 generated images. by "good" i mean "does not need to be retouched". If i use one of the other models (instead of stable diffusion's model) that goes to 1 in 10 images.
If i use img2img and all of my understanding of the generation, i can probably generate 8 images and get 3 usable ones.
All this is to say, depending on the subject, i could generate stuff that is indistinguishable from traditional art, in whatever medium or representation you want. And i can't make art, edit photos, etc. My limits of understanding of traditional art and editing is "crop/rotate" and adjusting the lights and darks to get the correct contrast and color rendering, and then save and publish.
On your primary topic, something i have been noticing ramp up in the past 10 days or so is weird typos and even "new words" being created, where it looks like someone was typing on a phone and didn't bother to check the output. I'm not sure if it's some new AI/ML, or perhaps there's a bug in the "keyboard input" part of android, perhaps. It's like the opposite of your adding a dash in "defederated" because there's a red squiggly line under the word in the input box.
In that podcast, he describes (mainly for research purposes) a blockchain where all data has been validated and verified before being added.
I could see a similar chain being used by trustworthy organization where truth has been validated, verified, and recorded in a public blockchain where anyone can see for themselves sources of information that have been used.
The real question would be, can we find trustworthy organizations to compile the information?
There's the fatal flaw. As COVID has shown, trust in institutions can easily degrade. The blockchain doesn't add anything to the trustworthiness of the institutions' assessment of the facts: if the institution is trusted, then it's assessment is trusted regardless of what the blockchain says, and if it's not trusted, then the blockchain won't convince you of anything.
And the people making that happen are we. The sw eng / CS / IT nerd crowd. Those reading HN. And it's rare to see critical voices of those working on this. For basically everybody here it's just cool tech.
Our doom is the missing ethics of our peers.
One I thought about a little while ago was the skilled artisan. Imagine a ridiculously good clock maker from times of yore, years and years of developing skills so good that the kings and queens of the world would be presented with their wares. Now imagine a digital artist the likes that lucasfilm would employ. Then take the artisan fine craftsperson idea. Dedicating years and years to digital image techniques. They could of made deep fakes years and years ago. It would of taken a long time but it was possible by a highly skilled digital artist. Those kinds of high quality works would of been very expensive, maybe some eclectic billionaire had a short video made as a gift for someone depicting themselves inside a video game world, al a Tron! AI puts that skill and craftsmanship into average joes hands like myself. https://youtu.be/fUQbuFO5MwQ
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
I never knew that. I always assumed it started with a line from Half-life 2.
This could “frontfire” (that is, backfire against bad actors). The web has been flooded with corporate sock puppetry for a decade, drowning out legitimate content. What ChatGPT is scaring people about has been within an epsilon dollar amount of being true for a long time.
And even for things with epistemological import its hard to imagine (current) language model based AI having a big impact beyond making certain things I might have done with a search engine a little more convenient. Like if I need to know something of consequence, I'll still turn to a textbook or a bonafide human expert that I work with.
These new language models do one thing, which is that they do a passable job of putting one word in front of another for awhile. I just don't see that as earth shattering.
There is something deeply sad (if not freightening) to invent a enormously powerful digital augmentation technology and use it primarily to dimimish our humanity as it drowns in fake replicas
Why do we want to replace humans instead of augment them? To increase shareholder profit? To wage war remotely? To hand governments more power over us? What is the goal?
Really when you think about it, in a good amount of stories humans might as well be augmented intelligences. We just aren’t making a point of them being different, or at odds with the general human population.
Image AI has inpainting. You can provide a sketch for the AI to follow, have it redo parts of the image, or have it extend the image. You can pull things into Photoshop and retouch there.
Novel AI has story writing assistance. Or ChatGPT can be used to provide bits and pieces that can be then combined or improved until something good results. Eg, Chat GPT can write fairly passable poetry that one could use as a base for something actually good.
So far all AI works much better when combined with a human that knows what they're doing. You can easily create hundreds of okay pictures, but an actual artist is still by far the best user for an image generator.
We are entering a dystopic regime where our famous pale blue dot planet acts more as a mousetrap, where we play out an arms race of surveillance, advanced weaponry automation, psychological warfare and misinformation.
Its not clear how we could put a lid on the artificial madness but for sure it wont be achieved with half-measures
We are only grounded in systems of reputation & relationships. These systems will remain important as content becomes fully synthetic. I.e Linkedin, Google, Social networks already heavily depend on social and reputation graphs towards keeping spam at bay; if anything new ideas will be harder and harder to go viral as the social and reputational filters are forced to assume synthetic.
Maybe AI learns to leverage/buy endorsement "content" posts from your friends and colleagues like celebrity endorsements operate today (as personalized commercials/text become very low cost).
AI/people trying to drive value with AI will have to find ways to leverage social relationships to squeeze into relevance where content/ideas are very low cost.
so then if the world begins to prefer AI-generated content, any question you ask the internet will only show you AI-generated answers, which can only offer you answers based on its training set, and over time a system with no new inputs just ends up being static generated from static, albeit static which is convincing enough for a human to accept it.
But the internet already has that. And that's how chatgpt can generate it's text, because it's trained on the internet as a corpus. So it can make more of the same, slanted and untrustable and maybe indistinguishable from whether a person wrote it. But that's nothing new.
If systems like ChatGPT just become echo chambers (garbage content feeding AI generation of derivative garbage, ad infinitum), I kind of see things like ChatGPT simply turbo charging this creeping digital benightedness in the face of information over abundance.
Which means that most likely, we have a future where we don't have any designated global sources of truth, as was the assumption going into the Enlightenment. It'll be a little more like Aristotle's time, where the true lessons were taught esoterically, by devising puzzle-like texts with intentional tricks and flaws. (This is the Leo Strauss thesis, which is explained very well by Arthur Melzer in "Philosophy Between the Lines".) To uncover the knowledge you have to demonstrate the critical thinking necessary to undermine its surface.
It's something I should probably try writing fiction about. It could be a long trend or a temporary blip, but it's worthy of speculation.
If people do start rebuilding the web then Google's search algorithm will suddenly start working better which will cause people to stop building the web. So obviously we'll just end up with a steady state where Google just kindof sucks but is kindof usable. I think that we might be there already.
Frankly I find it disturbing that people jump straight to throwing away rights as the solution.
Yes it is useful for people to organise against oppressive regiemes (either Amazon strikebreakers in Wisconsin or police / security forces in Tehran) but we really should have a clear and direct solution to Amazon in a democratic society. And if we cannot then anonymity is a poor second best.
Secondly, yeah you want to be a paid shill for Russia / BP / Qatar etc go for it. Reputation matters. Maybe some kind of labelling / fair advertising is a good idea "all opinions expressed here have been paid for by tonights sponsor Marlboro."
I would be interested in hearing from a proper human rights lawyer - anonymity is going to have a lot of case law surely?
Luckily we get to design the rules for our society and town squares and so improve access. In my view most of the so called "social justice wars" are to do with how far to the front shoukd one push previously excluded underclasses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner
I guess we mean "public discourse" - which mostly means books and newspapers then, and all variety of media today.
And trust me, they did not get their impact by standing on a cold pavement outside hyde park. They used other media :-)
For instance:
"If I take position A on something and you take position B, it's possible that we can both believe the other person is conversing in good faith."
There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations. I have to know they are arguing in good faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who might be arguing in bad faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who is lying, or who doesn't believe in anything they themselves say, or who is simply trying to manipulate me, or who is simply trying to insult me, or whose idea of veritable fact is utterly different from my own.
There are also those who are simply engaged in mental work so different from my own that I would have to devote years of study before I could understand them, and I have no interest in investing those years. Gödel's incompleteness theorems remind us that for any given system of axioms there will be statements that are true but which cannot be proven true using only the given axioms. If I were to waste time engaging such people in conversation then they might end up saying something that is logically consistent but it would take me several years of effort to figure out that their statement was logically consistent, and without investing those years of effort, it simply sounds like they are speaking nonsense. But I don't have enough lifetimes to figure that out.
Therefore, challenging conversations, that are personally useful, have always been limited to small groups of people.
Likewise:
"I think there's a future for folks who self-organize into interlocking circles of trust."
That is the way things have worked for humans for at least 10,000 years. We self-organize into interlocking circles of trust. That's how circles of friendship work.
History seem contradict that and to demonstrate that the conservative, quiet "middle" is almost always wrong over time. The only people who are eventually "right" are invariably considered to have strong opinions and to be fringe by the "middle".
This is almost tautological. The "middle" is where we are right now and "more right" is, by definition, not where were are right now.
Then the issue is that you don't know which is which, a priori. Most strong statements end up false, eventually. The statements that eventually end up right may have been strong all along, but most of their strong cousins will eventually end up wrong instead. Consequently, the cautious approach is to be skeptical of strong statements, since they will likely turn out false.
(I'm also not sure that the initial assumption is actually true. There are tons of examples where the strong statements have not prevailed. Remember those saying Covid-19 is a killer virus, decimating billions? Or that it's no big deal? Turned out neither. It was bad, but not that bad.)
"Weak statements" have no inherently better Bayesian prior to being more true than "strong statements".
THANK YOU! Seriously, the whole "assume good faith" thing that you find on the tech sites (like here, like wikipedia) drives me completely up a wall.
Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron? Have I not read the comment sections of youtube, yahoo news, assorted disqus and news forums and trolltalk? Am I completely unaware of 4chan?
I mean, I can understand that ideal back in the days of kuro5hin when Rusty was naively asking his trolls to tell him if they felt the need to attack k5 (and then nights in white satin happened...)...but that was almost a fucking quarter of a century ago!
To hold out that kind of naivete in 2010 -much less 2023, is idiotic to be quite honest. Obviously I don't advocate for some thunderdome style noise factory -more to the point I think it's on us to be aware that we're dealing with adversarys, keep our emotions in check (don't be baited) and do our own part to keep the conversation from descending into chan style flamage.
But assume good faith? Hell to the fucking naw -gtfo with that noise!
Assuming bad faith will never result in convergence.
Assuming good faith could result in convergence, even if you think the probability is low.
Therefore converging on truth, or at least shared opinion, must start with assuming good faith. Of course if you're not actually interested in those things, then I can't help with that.
You are doing an excellent job of demonstrating what "bad faith" means.
From my point of view, the post that I replied to was made in bad faith ...eg laying on the snark (which is against HN guidelines, btw).
Yes, I know "it takes two to tango", but on the other hand...It Takes Two To Tango. The patronizing snark was unwarranted and itself a sign of bad faith.
I think “convergence” is a good term which the Parent used, and based on the context I would interpret it as a “shared understanding” or mutually benficial exchange of ideas. Convergence also implies agreement and maybe partial agreement could be a part of that, but even “agreeing to disagree” seems like a good faith outcome.
So do some people post without this intent? I’m sure they do but I will always assume the opposite until they prove otherwise.
You asked a question. Asking a question is ostensibly a request for help of some kind, like clarification. Perhaps you were asking rhetorically or insincerely, but I provided an answer in good faith assuming you literally didn't understand why one should assume good faith. I would have replied anyway even if you weren't, just in case anyone else was even slightly convinced by your line of reasoning.
> Are any of those convergence? I don't know -and now, thanks to your post, I don't care either.
Convergence may not relevant to all objectives, but neither is assuming good faith. Since we're talking about why one should assume good faith, I pointed out that convergence to agreement is one good reason.
I don't see how anything else you mentioned is relevant.
Most people don't even pass that low bar though, they demand that others assume way more good faith than they themselves do, that is the kind of people who need to hear this advice.
If I'm going to assume there's a 50% chance the person I'm talking to is engaging in bad faith I'd rather do something more productive like scream my opinions out my window.
"Assuming good faith" is potentially a fantasy, but it's a useful fantasy for encouraging quality conversation.
Not all interactions are a conversation -at least not necessarily an on-going one. For instance, in a political thread you may choose to reply to a very obvious troll simply for the sake of countering misinformation -not because you want to run off and get married to them.
>If I'm going to assume there's a 50% chance the person I'm talking to is engaging in bad faith I'd rather do something more productive like scream my opinions out my window.
Fair. "Don't read the comments" has become a proverb for a reason. That said -there are times and places where it's useful (for your own sake) to interact.
It's like how tit-for-tat has been the most effective long-term strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments. An agent employing this strategy always starts by cooperating as it's first choice, and only switches to defecting after you've defected first.
For example, lets say you argue with a person like yourself, you both assume bad faith in the other person. Then as the conversation goes on and the other doesn't listen, your assumption gets "validated" and you got a shit conversation from it.
If however you both assumed good faith, now you see the other person listens, you get a great conversation where you share and listen and learn. This is by far the better scenario, you meet much more interesting people and get much better conversations this way.
So, how do people like you get a good conversation? Well, you only get good conversations with people who assume good faith, who keep that up long enough to convince you that they actually care. Those kind of people are rare, and the harder you make yourself to talk to the rarer they will be for you. For me, I meet people who listen and I can talk to everywhere, assuming good faith means that you find more good people, it is that simple.
Assuming -as I've already said; that they're arguing. There are other reasons for interactions.
>So, how do people like you get a good conversation?
1)Cultivating a circle of people whom I trust have good intentions -usually IRL
2)Sticking to shared topics and guaging wether or not individuals I recurringly interact with are on the level or not (this requires pseudo-anonymity as found in traditional simple machine/phpbb style forums).
>People who don't assume good faith are arguing in bad faith, that is the crux of the issue.
Obviously I disagree -and that disagreement isn't something I've simply pulled out of my ass. It's based on 25 years of online interaction experience, as well as seeing how disinformation campaigns played out on social media such as twitter and facebook.
"people like you" is a very othering phrase and that's just funny as shit. You cannot "other" me without making a whole lump of assumptions about me. I'm not sure if that counts as a strawman argument in this case or not but anyway it doesn't matter.
You *can* have great conversations where you share and interact and learn *without engaging in naivete.* But you won't hear it from me.
Mind you, I am capable of learning from astroturfers (their salespitch), trolls (what's the party line?) and kooks. I simply have my eyes open and do not assume that they are something that they are not...it's amusing that several posters in this thread are unwilling (unable?) to grasp that not-terribly-subtle distinction.
All this passive aggression is making me reach for the pepto, I will say that!
Anyway, very few people really argue in bad faith, I almost always can make people listen if I just get to talk to them long enough. Assume good faith long enough and you will find it in almost anyone. But conversely assume bad faith and you will find that in almost anyone as well.
Edit:
> All this passive aggression is making me reach for the pepto, I will say that!
There is nothing passive about my aggressiveness here, I am very loudly and clearly stating that I think your approach leads to worse outcomes. There is nothing wrong about clearly stating when you think others are wrong about things.
>As we see here you still waste time arguing with people even when you assume bad faith
>arguing
If there's another way to get my point of view read, I'd love to hear it!
>when you assume bad faith
Logical fallacy. I do not necessarily assume bad faith ...I simply do not assume good faith.
>Anyway, very few people really argue in bad faith,
I would encourage you to try to have some sustained long-term on youtube comments or facebook if you haven't already. I'm being completely serious here -that will present you with numerous examples of people arguing in bad faith.
I have the impression when you say "arguing" you could actually be meaning "discussing"; the difference being one aims to convince another person -the other simply seeks to share veiwpoints. One's adverserial, the other isn't. Am I reading you correctly?
And this attitude is why we can't have nice things.
Swing and a miss. I'd encourage folks reading this thread to go back and read the entire thing; or at least the paragraph that my quote was taken from.
The thought that I posted was; "why would I assume good faith when there are so many examples of bad faith out there?"
[edit]In the event my post gets killed/reported/downvoted into oblivion -here's the original context:
>Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron? Have I not read the comment sections of youtube, yahoo news, assorted disqus and news forums and trolltalk? Am I completely unaware of 4chan?
You don't want to be a dove, and keep assuming good faith when it hurts.
Assume good faith initially because it least has a chance of being productive, but the moment bad faith is detected, either withdraw or "punish" (and propagate social signals that bad faith arguing has been detected so others know not to engage)
That's fair but I think a better solution is to enter into a conversation Tabla Rasa; you don't know someone's a kook/troll/whatever but you are aware that they may be. They may also be a potential friend/workmate/source of support/whatever.
With each interaction, over time, trust is either built up or torn down.
This is harder and harder to do in the current forum/anonymous posting climate not so much because of anonymity but because of different design elements that have stripped people's messages of ways to make distinctions (avatars, signature are two that come to mind, profiles are another).
Now posters all blend into one another so building up any kind of individual rapport is difficult; if not impossible.
Even updating these priors with new data to form posteriors falls perfectly into place. Thank you.
> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'?
Perhaps because you've missed the implied part of this guideline. Spelled out, it would go like this: if you're replying, assume good faith - if you can't, you should not reply at all.
I mean, if you're not going to assume good faith, what are you doing in the conversation in the first place? Do you like to engage in fights, or stir up ones? Don't you have anything better to do?
It depends on the specific conversation. One example (which I gave earlier) might be to counter misinformation -for the sake of people reading. Another example might be to give out warnings or clarifications in the capacity of a forum moderator.
>Do you like to engage in fights, or stir up ones?
There's other reasons possible too. HN is made up of smart people so I'll leave imagining them as an exercise for the readers.
Anything else is a flame war and might be fun but isn't helpful or valuable.
Disagree with this. I think it is important in conversation to attempt to defend all alternate views even without believing them
> We self-organize into interlocking circles of trust. That's how circles of friendship work.
circles of friendship are ~100-150 people , but if we look at recent decades, in the most advanced economies people freely choose to be atomized while using use the State (~millions of people) as their support network.
That is such a misreading of what I wrote I have to wonder if you are being deliberately obtuse. I wrote "There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations." I think it was clear what scale and type of conversation I was discussing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
My concern is where this is going, if the marginal cost to produce, effectively, infinite content is zero then what’s the point here? What’s are we doing and where are we going?
Is the aim ti get to a point where humans don’t have to do anything? It’s all taken care of? Because if AI can make our art, create all media formats of our content, handle problems and do a lot of our physical tasks then … what’s the point?
People look at me as if I’m mad, but in the space of 12 months we’ve gone from “AI can’t even manage multiple timers” (not quite but if you live with a Siri then you get it) to “holy moly, I can’t tell if that painting was made by a human or not” which is bonkers.
I guess we need to see if we are at the start of the exponential curve or approaching a plateau.
The industrial revolution did this with physical strength and fitness, and the recognition that muscle doesn't really matter anymore lead to general decrease in violence. In a similar way, we will stop mythologizing intelligence or creativity.
People are great at rationalizing why some people deserve more than others. Your perfectly equal society will probably never happen.
What makes ChatGPT effective ...again, as I understand it... is the training which is a result of pouring millions of dollars in it. That may be pocket change in Silicon Valley but outside of there, it effectively puts it out of reach.
The author wrote, “It's like tech is making each one of us our own little village with a computer priest.”
Indeed it is. Make no mistake. We are building a false god in hopes that it will serve us. However, this thing is not of the creator but man. The technologists have forgotten history.