Comment by alexpotato
2 days ago
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens fame [0], has a great quote (paraphrasing):
Interviewer: How will humans deal with the avalanche of fake information that AI could bring?
YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw.
In democracies, this is often either the government (e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) or newspapers (e.g. the New York Times) or even individuals (e.g. Walter Cronkite).
In other forms of government, it becomes trust networks built on familial ties e.g. "Uncle/Aunt is the source for any good info on what's happening in the company" etc
The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.
Trust is much more nuanced than N% wrong. You have to consider circumstantial factors as well. ie who runs The NY Times, who gives them money, what was the reason they were wrong, even if they’re not wrong what information are they leaving out. The list goes on. No single metric can capture this effectively.
Moreover, the more political a topic the more likely the author is trying to influence your thoughts (but not me I promise!). I forgot who, but a historian was asked why they wouldn’t cover civil war history, and responded with something to the affect of “there’s no way to do serious work there because it’s too political right now”.
It’s also why things like calling your opponents dumb, etc is so harmful. Nobody can fully evaluate the truthfulness of your claims (due to time, intellect, etc) but if you signal “I don’t like you” they’re rightfully going to ignore you because you’re signaling you’re unlikely to be trustworthy.
Trust is hard earned and easily lost.
> You have to consider circumstantial factors as well
This, too, goes into the probability of something being right or wrong. But the problem I'm pointing out is an inconsistent epistemology. The same kind of test should be applied to any claim, and then they have to be compared. When people trust a random TikToker over the NYT, they're not applying the same test to both sides.
> It’s also why things like calling your opponents dumb, etc is so harmful.
People who don't try to have any remotely consistent mechanism for weighing the likelihood of one claim against a contradicting one are, by my definition, stupid. Whether it's helpful or harmful to call them stupid is a whole other question.
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5% wrong is an extremely charitable take on the NYT.
I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No expertise in disaster response. No discussion of facts. “Area man says Bush sucks!” would have been just as intellectually rigorous. I put the paper back on the shelf and have never looked at one since.
Don’t get emotionally attached to content farms.
That sounds like something from the opinion page rather than the news. That is ok, as long as it's clearly labeled. It doesn't sound particularly high quality; perhaps they were a local giving their view from the community.
Regardless, clearly labeled opinions are standard practice in journalism. They're just not on the front page. If you saw that on the front page, then I'd need more context, because that is not common practice at NYT.
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So since incorporating in 1851, let's say they put out 60,000 issues. 1 issue would represent about 0.002% of their output. How do you get to over 5% wrong?
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were defending bushs katrina response now?
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Once a problem demands second order thinking you immediately lose a significant portion of the population.
It’s simply reality, or else propaganda wouldn’t work so well.
This is easily one of the most valuable comments I've ever seen on HN.
... and since we now know the world is more complex than what we used to think, say, 1000 years ago, this kind of "second-order thinking" is required more and more.
COVID ended my trust in media. I went from healthy skepticism to assuming everything is wrong/a lie. There was no accountability for this so this will never change for me. I am like the people who lived through the Great Depression not trusting banks 60 years later and keeping their money under the mattress.
I've seen this take a few times recently, including from a relatively famous person who seemed to be on my wavelength generally but I don't quite understand what is meant by it.
Could you quickly summarize how and why you felt let down by the media in regards to COVID?
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So the position of a sceptic is epistemologically valid: you distrust any claim that is under, say, 95% certainty. But this bar should be applied consistently, and sometimes you have to bet. For example, in the question of getting a vaccine or not, you must choose, and you should choose whatever claim is more likely to get a better result than the other.
The key is that distrusting one side or source does not logically entail trusting another source more. If you think that the media or medical establishment is wrong, say, 45% of the time, you still have to find a source of information that is only wrong 40% of the time to prefer it.
The problem isn't "The NYT is wrong 5% of the time". It's that institutions are systematically wrong in predictable ways that happen to benefit their point of view. It's not random. It's planned.
But that source X is wrong - intentionally or not, in a biased way or not - does not entail that you should trust source Y. That just doesn't follow. To prefer an alternative source you must find one that is more trustworthy.
The problem is that often we have to choose because decisions are binary: either we get a vaccine or not. For example, to decide not to get a vaccine, the belief that the medical establishment are lying liars is just not enough. We must also believe that the anti-vaxxers are more knowledgeable and trustworthy than the medical establishment. Doctors could be lying 60% of the time and still be more likely to be right than, say, RFK. It's not enough to only look at one side; we have to compare two claims against each other. For the best outcome, you have to believe someone who's wrong 80% of the time over someone who's wrong 90% of the time. Even if you believe in a systemic, non-random bias, that doesn't help you unless you have a more reliable source of information.
And this is exactly the inconsistent epistemology that we see all around us: People reject one source of information by some metric they devise for themselves and then accept another source that fails on that metric even more.
> by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information
Except those institutions have long lost all credibility themselves.
Yes, the existing ones were captured, and so we have to build new ones.
This was done intentionally, over decades, to try to push ‘trust’ closer to where it can be controlled. Religion, family ties (through propaganda), etc.
For sure. He then goes on to mention "in democracies", but a lot of democracies are now failing, in part because the institutions like the free press are being directed by their billionaire owners, or suppressed. And the family ties are being impacted heavily by mass misinformation and propaganda campaigns online, where their publishers are actively pushing it themselves (major worldwide social networks are now state influenced and / or their top brass has subjugated themselves to the reigning parties and / or any countermeasures have been removed).
How very inconvenient it is, then, that at the same time intentional efforts to spread uncertainty and to erode trust in traditional institutions are at an all-time high! Must be a coincidence.
It's a feedback loop; you need things like freedom of speech and press to get a functional and free democracy, but you need a functional and free democracy to have freedom of speech / press. Infringe on one and you take down the other. But you need to strip down the legal branch of a free democracy first, because the democracy and freedom of speech/press is protected by a constitution in most cases.
The odd thing is that in the US we we deliberately do not differentiate free speech from other things such as dollars, lies, propaganda and outright manipulation. This is a relatively new thing, forced upon us in the last few decades, and it is causing a spectacular crash in trust towards all our institutions.
But billionaires are making and keeping ever more money than before, so it isn't a problem.
Our familial ties have been corrupted, supposing they were ever anything a sane person should've relied upon. And if humans can build institutions they trust, what happens when AI can build fake, simulated institutions that hit all the right buttons for humans to trust just as if they were of the human-created variety? Do those AIs lock in those pseudo-institution followers forever? Walter Crondeepfake can't not be trusted, just listen to his gravitas!
Trusting institutions is fine but you have to trust people or institutions for the right things, blind trust is harmful.
I'll trust my doctor to give me sound medical advice and my lawyer for better insights into law. I won't trust my doctor's inputs on the matters of law or at least be skeptical and verify thoroughly if they are interested in giving that advice.
Newspapers are a special case. They like to act as the authoritative source on all matters under the sun but they aren't. Their advice is only as good as their sources they choose and those sources tend to vary wildly for many reasons ranging from incompetence all the way to malice on both the sides.
I trust BBC to be accurate on reporting news related to UK, and NYT on news about US. I wouldn't place much trust on BBC's opinion about matters related to the US or happenings in Africa or any other international subjects.
Transferring or extending trust earned in one area to another unrelated area is a dangerous but common mistake.
The thing is, building such institutions and maintaining trust is expensive. Exploiting trust is lucrative (fraud, etc.) It's also expensive to not trust - all sorts of opportunities don't happen in that scenario if, say, you can't get a friend or relative in the right place.
There are many equilibrium points possible as a result. Some have more trust than others. The "west" has benefited hugely from being a high trust society. The sort of place where, in the Prisoner's Dilemma matrix, both parties can get the "cooperate" payoff. It's just that right now that is changing as people exploit that trust to win by playing "defect", over and over again without consequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...
> YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw.
Funny that he doesn’t say that the institutions have to provide accurate information, but just that we have to trust them to provide accurate information.
The New York Times.
Wall Street, financier centric and biased in general. Very pro oligarchy.
The worst was their cheerleading for the Iraq war, and swallowing obvious misinformation from Colin Powell at face value.
Unfortunately that's not what happens. BBC, Al-Jazeera, RT, CBC are all propaganda sources and are not sources of information. The other family members will get the information from those sources so family will not be trusted as well. And the sources I consider as trustfull, my opinion of them most likely skewed by my bias and others will consider it propaganda as well.
CBC and BBC aren't perfect, but I trust them leagues over any billionaire owned media like anything from Post Media the Murdochs, or Bezos. Really any for profit news isn't to be trusted.
That's not how they did it though. Trusted institutions are only really needed in a trustless society and reliance on them as a source of truth is a really new trend. Society used to be trustful.