Comment by alwa
13 hours ago
Same as always: Develop a healthy sense of skepticism, cultivate a stable and diverse network of sources whose credibility you understand, don’t trust what you read, and certainly don’t trust synthesis unless you know how it’s made?
Of course, and I'm really not trying to move the goal posts here, but I agree that that's what (most) humans are going to do. But we're rapidly moving in a direction of agent-to-agent flow and "they" seem to lack the degree of discernment the average human does. They certainly don't have the same incentive structure we do to detect fraud. They happily regurgitate and build off of lies because, to them, the lies are not lies, and they can't be. They're just a pile of geometrically close labels from the perspective of the model.
> "they" seem to lack the degree of discernment the average human does
I don't think the average human has a particularly great sense of discernment either
And what’s more, the average human’s counterparties are exquisitely tuned to exploit the gaps in that natural endowment. But the tools to improve discernment are the same as they’ve always been, just as pushups and crunches lead to physical fitness.
I’m not sure how exactly that generalizes to LLM behavior, but to you as a human cultivating discernment, I imagine it implies that anything Internet-mediated (and unvetted by you) is less reliable than it used to be.
Obviously, we don't move in a direction of agent-to-agent flow because it's fundamentally flawed and worse than the status quo
Seems like the next push, then, will be to get agents and LLMs to start doing that discernment?
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So “caveat emptor”? I get that’s always part of reality but we shouldn’t exactly steer into that skid IMO. It just shifts the burden to the rest of us and does nothing to address the root cause
It is, and always has been, the only possibility. It's up to every individual to check for themselves what is true and what is not, and to decide who to trust for things that they can't check.
The real lesson is this: trust in the source is the most important thing for 99.99% of what you read. You will sometimes read about facts that you can actually verify, but those are mostly useless in the grand scheme - except as a sanity check on the source. For everything else, you have to ultimately trust the source.
Now sure, sometimes you can get lucky and detect certain internal inconsistencies that prove that something can't be true. And to some extent, reading the same information from multiple sources you don't normally trust too much can be a slight signal that it might be true. But these are generally in the minority.
So you test every sip of water you drink? Inspect every road before you drive down it? Check every bathroom product for harmful additives?
Again I am not ignoring reality. But for society to work and for us to live our daily lives with any semblance of sanity, we can't be expected to be fully informed on everything we see, touch, consume, etc. We have to be able to make reasonable assumptions about safety and accuracy or we can't function. And the time it takes to vet stuff is often a privilege (or you can brute force pay your way to safety).
I do not rigorously audit everything I read on wikipedia. I assume a certain baseline of accuracy up to a point, with of course exceptions. Do you pull up 3-4 high quality sources for everything you read or claim? Are you that academic about it?
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