Are we living in the age of info-determinism?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/are-we-living-in-the-age-of-info-determinism

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

64 100 2 years ago

newyorker.com

pseudolus• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/tYpml

setopt• 2 years ago

Betteridge would say no.

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

How can a society function when the rejection of knowledge becomes a political act?

It cannot.

Living in a "post-truth" society is just a sanitized way of saying living in a society without truth. Such a society must inevitably collapse.

blueflow2• 2 years ago

Such a society must inevitably collapse.

No evidence for that.

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

I think that there is, but in true post-truth form, that's not relevant to my statement. I was stating an opinion.

evgwugegwhwgeg3• 2 years ago

Rejection of beliefs not knowledge. There is a significant difference between the two.

ben_w3• 2 years ago

20 years ago, I studied philosphy.

Can you define "knowledge"?

We had the tripartite definition, a "justified true belief", and the argument against it exemplified by a person looking at a fluffy white creature in a field and justifiably saying that they know there is a sheep in this field, but unbeknownst to them what they're looking at is a komondor and though there is a sheep elsewhere in the field it is not visible from where they are.

I think there is only belief, that we can have degrees of certainty about our beliefs but there is no way to transition to P(1) or P(0), and no specific probability other than 0 and 1 where we can reliably say that we "know" something to be true or false.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Most societies collapse eventually.

Societies built on lies can go on for quite a while, there are tests, a war for example, that can finish them off. But even then, they might stumble along.

silverquiet5• 2 years ago

I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning. The truth is we're just apes living on a planet that we're unable to stop ourselves from destroying; a tiny, ultimately meaningless rock that will be gone one day in a universe that won't even notice, let alone care. That truth is very hard to accept (I never really have) and so we create other stories to give us meaning, but these stories are too arbitrary and subjective for us to collectively agree upon.

hoorayimhelping• 2 years ago

I don't think there is such a thing as truth

This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.

dgfitz3• 2 years ago

I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning.

1+1 = 2, the earth is ~80% water, water freezes at 0degC.

What to you mean there aren't truths?

Do you mean people form opinions that are wrong? Sure. After sitting back at looking at it, it seems like the big problem is: there are small circles of power that make decisions for the rest of their population under the guise of "best interest of the people" when in reality we all know this isn't true.

So these small groups make the little people distracted with things that are very hot-button topics that affect a very small majority of people, by making appeals to emotion on both sides.

The small folks eat this up, rip a huge divide, and the small circle people sit back and laugh.

apantel2• 2 years ago

Nothing you said is truth. Those are just your own blind beliefs. How do you know the universe is meaningless? Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome. You’re just spouting YOUR truth, which is not truth at all.

eltoxo• 2 years ago

The truth is that we are very limited apes that are highly prone to self delusion and believing nonsense, trying to understand an impossibly complex world.

At the aggregate we seem to be making progress while at the individual level humanity always seems doomed. It seems a constant that the individual wants to pretend they live in the end times because at least then your time on this rock was a little bit special.

sgu999• 2 years ago

Such a society must inevitably collapse.

What are the examples of that? It's closer to a phase transition than an actual collapse at the kind of scale we're talking about here.

I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, though.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Well, a technological society that loses the idea of truth as it relates to science and technology must inevitably collapse in its level of technology. You can't maintain functioning tech on a "nothing is true" basis, because you cannot tell what will work from what won't.

complianceowl• 2 years ago

"truth doesn't exist" -- except for that truth statement you just made? If no truth can exist, then why are you making a truth statement?

Truth does exist. And the ultimate truth is Christ. Yes, those words ring as ignorance to most, but just like we are forced to reckon with gravity and the laws of physics, we all will one day reckon with the ultimate truth.

But it is not my job to compel anyone to believe this. I just find it fascinating that non-believers will believe in magic, ghosts, simulations, aliens, evolution, but that a Creator that exists outside of time, space, and matter created this universe? Nah, that's ignorant religious thinking.

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

"truth doesn't exist" -- except for that truth statement you just made?

I never said that truth doesn't exist.

bloopernova• 2 years ago

I think "post-truth" is a symptom of unequal power. The rich and/or powerful can push their version of truth with little or no consequences for them. Unfortunately for them, there's a tendency for those in power to start believing the yes-men:

For example, in World War 2, the Japanese authoritarian regime took over newspapers and newsreels. Any time they would lose a battle, or have to withdraw, that would be stated as a victory. By the end of 1942, they had stated that the Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk "11 aircraft carriers, 11 battleships, 46 cruisers, 48 destroyers, and 93 submarines" (December 8th, 1942)

The Japenese people could look at maps, and see that the "glorious victories" were somehow occurring further and further west, closer to home each time. But they had no power, no way to challenge the newspapers and announcements from Navy and Army HQs. And the constant propaganda had warped the perspectives of everyone, including progressives and liberals, so they fell in line too.

A large part of Japan's defeat was because they fought an opponent capable of out-producing and out-training them. They had started to believe their own bullshit about being a superior race, about being simply better than the Americans, and as you said, collapse was inevitable. Before the atomic bombs convinced Hirohito to accept unconditional surrender, Japan was close to famine. If the war had lasted into 1946, millions of Japanese people would have died of starvation.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

Absolutely, we are. The greeks recognize the phenomenon early through their concept of logos, and how it comes about is teche fromw here we get the word "technology".

Currently, we have built our systems so strongly that we practically develop technologically deterministically. Can we help but develop new computer security technology? No. Can we decide NOT to make computers faster, even if making new technology constantly requires the unsustainable extraction of raw materials and is polluting the entire planet? No, because SOMEONE will make their computer faster, so we call have to do so to keep up.

Our modern society is so intertwined, that we cannot make decisions at ALL on which technologies to develop and which technologies not too. The Amish do it, because they have some foresight into it social impact, and because they've structured their society to place their way of life ABOVE that of technology. But the outside world IS technology now, and we are but cells in the new amalgamation of humanity and machine and we can no longer do anything about it...

...that is, until someone starts a revolution and destroys it.

39896880• 2 years ago

This piece mentions Harari’s new work. Has anyone read it? I find his style appealing but I have also read comments here that are eyerolls similar to how Malcolm Gladwell is received, so I am wondering if I should even bother.

klabb3• 2 years ago

My understanding is that he wraps Twitter hot takes in an aura of credibility through narrative and authority without necessarily providing any proof. So in that way I’m skeptical. And it’s also ironic that an article about post-truth lifts up those kinds of ideas.

On the other hand, you could argue that at a certain philosophical high level, you can’t use current generation paradigms to meaningfully explore next generation paradigms anyway – so how else are we gonna intuit the world we’re transitioning into? I suspect that to explain emerging social phenomena we’re going to have to adopt some strange ideas, whether it’s neo-religious, postmodernism or Harari-style scientism. Pick your flavor I guess..

hungie• 2 years ago

Is the article worth finishing? It opens with a CIA agent complaining it's harder to be an authority when people self organize into communities and don't just listen to newspapers and political figures.

Which, yeah. Of course it is, and that's a great thing. Sure, we get some fringe communities but on the whole we get so many more communities of people who want to help each other.

dfxm122• 2 years ago

For more and more people, a random YouTuber seemed preferable to a credentialled expert

People are too used to "having a platform" being a credential in and of itself. They wouldn't let just anyone be a TV News anchor or have a drive time talk radio show or write a book, right? There have always been snake oil salesmen, but what's unique about today is that it's very easy to make yourself look like Dan Rather or Barbara Walters or even Hunter S. Thompson. Some people fall into this false authority trap.

Anecdotally, I find that older generations are more willing to accept what they see online just because it is "published" online. Hopefully this is something that works itself out as more and more people grow up with these platforms.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

Speaking of Dan Rather, remember he tried to pass off a forged memo as real and was called out on it by a bunch of bloggers.

And recently Hollywood released a movie that tried to whitewash this.

A lot of the hand-wringing about how no one cares for the truth is mainly the elite crying over the loss of power to define truth for everyone.

dfxm122• 2 years ago

It's important to add that CBS also retracted this story.

d_watt• 2 years ago

I would think a key difference is once this was found out, Dan Rather was fired.

There will always be failures of integrity. Our expectation can't be infallible people, but rather the rigor of an organization to care about the failures.

spratzt• 2 years ago

I’ve always liked Foucault’s inversion of the old cliche: ‘Power is knowledge’

mountainb• 2 years ago

Part of the issue is the aborted attempt to turn journalism into a profession. Professionals, by and large, carry personal liability for errors, negligence, and deliberate bad behavior that harms their clients. Journalists are supposed to serve the public interest, but they generally only have narrow personal liability for torts like defamation. Recent precedent further limits that personal liability.

Despite this, journalists in the later part of the 20th century successfully created an aura of professionalism borrowed. Cronkite, Rather, the 60 Minutes crew, etc. projected a sense of seriousness and professional care. In some instances, the newspapers really did and to some extent still do engage in fact checking and other professional activities to increase reliability. However, because all of these measures are self-enforcing, they became over time even more corrupted than they were before.

They increasingly relied on anonymous sourcing for important matters, which is inherently open to abuse (it's why the Constitution requires that a defendant be able to confront their accusers and witnesses against them). They could no longer maintain this false aura because they were repeatedly confronted by bloggers and other small creators with evidence of their unreliability.

The standard proposed solution to the problems created by powerful universal publishing technology tends to be a licensing regime of some kind as a preventative measure, or otherwise that publishing technology providers submit to close supervision by the state (as they did during the cough cough era).

I think the better way that comports better with the Constitution is to just to enforce the criminal laws and facilitate civil suits against individuals retroactively for the harms that they cause through illegal speech. There are lots of kinds of illegal speech, e.g. you cannot engage in the unauthorized practice of law, you cannot provide medical advice without a license, you cannot defame people, you cannot incite riots, you cannot procure criminal acts, you cannot defraud, you cannot infringe on copyright, and so on and so forth. More lawsuits and prosecutions for illegal speech -- a reactive way of addressing the issues -- is less harmful and better comports with the Constitution than proactive means such as requiring that every social media user have a license that can be revoked or that the platforms submit to close management by the Article II government.

pessimizer4• 2 years ago

There are lots of kinds of illegal speech, e.g. you cannot engage in the unauthorized practice of law, you cannot provide medical advice without a license, you cannot defame people, you cannot incite riots, you cannot procure criminal acts, you cannot defraud, you cannot infringe on copyright, and so on and so forth.

Is this sentence unauthorized practice of law?

edit: It's a rhetorical question. If I had power over policing and the justice system, and I disagreed with you, and it were actually illegal to give legal or medical advice to people without a license (which it is not), it would absolutely be unauthorized practice of law and the spreading of misinformation. I might also claim that you're doing it to help Russia weaken a potential future law that would force journalists to be licensed. I will claim this with no evidence, but I will claim it everywhere, through dozens of different, soon-to-be-licensed, mouths. The rumor will be used as grounds to investigate you.

pjc503• 2 years ago

you cannot incite riots

We've just been through a week of Americans on Twitter getting shocked at Brits on Twitter because there's some, very minimal, legal action being taken against people who incited riots through false statements on social media. I think you need to be much clearer about what this actually means. Especially as there has been very little prosecution of Jan 6 "inciters" (as opposed to people who were physically there committing crimes while being filmed)

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Part of the issue is the aborted attempt to turn journalism into a profession.

The term "unfunded mandate" come to mind. Journalists should aspire to a higher standard (just as software developers should), but nobody's incentivizing it. Get the scoop, get the clicks, publish first and make it an exclusive. Traditional media is getting squeezed from all angles, who's got time to fact check, who's got the budget for deep research? It's hard to blame the poor journalist, who's just trying to survive in a landscape where anyone with a social media account is given the same consideration as an authority.

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

Or maybe instead, distrust of credentialed experts is a natural consequence of it becoming easier to catch people out when they lie?

If say Fauci declares that there was no gain-of-function research, and some random blogger does a FOIA that turns up a paper trail proving otherwise? That's much easier to find out about these days than if I was limited to what a TV channel or two and maybe a couple newspapers decided to cover.

LocalH• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, I find that older generations are more willing to accept what they see online just because it is "published" online. Hopefully this is something that works itself out as more and more people grow up with these platforms.

That only applies when the content is something they philosophically agree with. Those same people, when presented with information they disagree with, will say "they'll let anyone put anything on the internet", with a completely straight face. The cognitive dissonance is strong.

svieira3• 2 years ago

Earthweb (https://www.baen.com/earthweb.html) is a story of a version of the internet where Gurri's "acerbic internet" was a more PH-neutral environment.

bsuvc• 2 years ago

I realized that I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources

This happens because the so-called "authoritative sources" have lost their trustworthiness, creating a vacuum that is filled by new sources, some good and some bad.

The problem is, people are bad at thinking for themselves, and basically outsource their beliefs to third parties. Are we worse at this than we used to be, or has it always been like this?

We need more primary sources of information, and less filters trying to persuade us, who often have unseen agendas and different motivations.

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

Gathering and evaluating information is hard work and can be a significant time sink. Most people have other things going on in their lives that they'd like to have time for.

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

Throw in AI crap that can be insanely convincing into the fold posted by trolls and people seeking ad eyeballs.

fuzzfactor2• 2 years ago

I realized that I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources

This was in the early 2000's when the CIA analyst said this, but with familiarity of a time when the majority of online sources had been trustworthy (if not completely authoritative), it was easier to navigate the pitfalls at the time.

It was still possible to judiciously exploit the new sources for deep research to a worthwhile degree for another reason because there was lots more info (but noisier by far) coming from all directions, but I wouldn't say they were exactly near-infinite.

Not compared to today.

Now I would say it's near-infinite.

Although AI may not have yet had the full effect that it could be capable of.

So I could be underestimating . . .

dageshi2• 2 years ago

Who really has the time or energy to actually do all that?

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

Exactly. I was in a discussion thread where someone mentioned a book that was accusing some group of becoming apostate (in terms of the context of this particular community). Now most people in that community don't think the author of said book is an unbiased source of information - in fact the bias seems quite blatant. But people in the thread were saying "Have you read the book?!" and most people said "No, I've got better things to do" to which the reply was "Well, then you don't want the truth!"... and on and on. Who's got time to check out every crackpot source and determine it's veracity?

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

What is funny about all this is treating Harari as some kind of expert.

His training is in medieval military history. He is not an anthropologist. Yet he is always make grand pronouncements about human behavior.

Most of his fame is not due to his academic achievements but because he can write very engaging popular works. Harari has a lot more in common with a popular YouTube “expert” than he would care to admit.

pessimizer4• 2 years ago

Since he's using the New Yorker's journalism license here, he becomes an authority on whatever subject he wants. Disagreeing with him here is some sort of "-information" with prefix, and may get you deleted on facebook.

carlmr• 2 years ago

His training is in medieval military history. He is not an anthropologist. Yet he is always make grand pronouncements about human behavior.

Some of the best software engineers studied something else. Only because his training is in something else doesn't mean he didn't read up on it or is not knowledgeable about human behavior.

Also history kind of chronicles aggregate human behavior, so it's at least a related discipline.

I'm not saying he is knowledgeable, mind you, I just think you shouldn't pigeonhole people based on doing exactly what they studied. Because many people don't do exactly what they studied and are experts in it.

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

I have too often lately been in a situation where I cannot find any authoritative sources for a topic where there should be one. The first time this happened it was deeply unsettling - I couldn't recall going back a decade a single time I couldn't find a random piece of information - it was sometime mid-2022. Now it's so commonplace I just resign myself that I may just not get an answer to whatever question I have.

The most ironic thing would be if this "post truth" situation we seem to be in drives people back to brick and mortar libraries.

keiferski4• 2 years ago

I am curious about the problem from the perspective of a startup idea / nonprofit website. What would you look for in an authoritative source that doesn't exist now? And which topics were you looking into?

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

It's not really that they don't exist, but it's silly stupid to find them now.

For instance - ddg, google, doesn't really matter the search engine - typing in something like "ohtani batting average with runners in scoring position with 2 outs" used to be so easy it'd practically pop up in the quick answers with the exact link to the ESPN table or dudewhoneverleavesbasement.com that has tracked every baseball stat for the last 150 years.

Now you just get basically the same results for "ohtani batting average" or "ohtani news." It's impossibly frustrating. It's like that with everything now.

I guess that's more of a problem with search than anything else, but honestly, search is the main way people navigate the web. If I want anything authoritative, honestly, I'm probably going to wikipedia to see a source list and then checking out authors in the local library. Anything dated post 2022 I consider inherently unreliable.

pjc503• 2 years ago

The authoritative source has to be .. authoritative. And it also has to be timely, i.e. updated in real time. This is hard. Being an authoritative source for certain sub-types of information is definitely a viable business, but only if your information is being used by other people to make business decisions. See, for example, the Bloomberg terminal.

But "authoritative" is a social construct.

apantel2• 2 years ago

The person writing about the thing has to be knowledgeable, correct, and telling the truth.

fuzzfactor2• 2 years ago

Take post-truth and cross it with higher noise than ever and you get bullshit squared.

And that's before introducing exponent AI ;)

throwawayk7h• 2 years ago

Can you describe an occurence or two like this?

haunter• 2 years ago

authoritative sources

The opposite is a problem too when authoritative sources on X topic start to talk about Y topic as if they still have the same knowledge and expertise and we should trust them. I see this more and more everywhere, here on HN too.

soared• 2 years ago

I wonder if this is partially caused by the internet spreading accurate knowledge for the first decade or so of its existence, which went against people’s existing sets of beliefs. After which they’re primed that the beliefs they held for decades (pre-internet) could easily be wrong.

How many times have you believed and old wives tale, but then found out it’s not true at all? Now apply that less to specific beliefs but more generally, and scale it across all your beliefs.

netsharc• 2 years ago

After which they’re primed that the beliefs they held for decades (pre-internet) could easily be wrong.

I wish the majority of dwellers of the Internet is able to do this (I feel I'm quite reflective), but it seems like a lot of the noise online is people insisting that they've been right the whole time...

adolph• 2 years ago

The author would have done well to read "The Beginning of Infinity" by Deutsch which has well rounded discussion of different methods of epistemology espoused over time. The development past authority need not result in anarchy. Deutsch's view, embracing fallibility can achieve an advancement of human creativity and knowledge.

isaacremuant• 2 years ago

Meh. Most comments here seem to be playing this pretense game that having to be critical about what you read is something that happened post 2016 and pretending the internet somehow changed things for the worse when media, biases, political influence and propaganda hasn't been a think since the Inception of the written word.

If you think we're suddenly "worse" then you're probably too used to your alleged set of beliefs being spread and shared by the major narrative setters and you were too comfortable in that echo chamber.

But hey, it's easier to call anyone who thinks differently some name (Today it's customary to rail against the evil right, in "the west" but your mileage may vary) and write "insightful articles" about post truth eras and the like.

akira2501• 2 years ago

You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.” Back then, info-determinism was exciting. Today, it feels like a challenge which we must surmount, or else. ♦

You can learn more about the deranged minds of CIA officers and "public intellectuals" from the backgrounds of their arguments than you can from taking them at face value.

These people are _completely afraid_ of living in a world which does not require their permission or ideology in order to function. This article is written entirely from the "state" point of view and completely lacks any "humanity" whatsoever.

And yet, “the public opposes, but does not propose.” Demolishing ideas is easy in a subreddit; crafting new ones there is mostly beside the point.

Give me a break. Tons of new ideas and new systems and new projects have been created on the internet using precisely this mechanism and with zero government authority involved. This is a completely ridiculous assertion by the article.

How can a society function when the rejection of knowledge becomes a political act?

Is it the rejection of knowledge or simply the rejection of authority? Perhaps people expect those in authority to actually explain themselves, to act in a transparent manner, and to not use their power to unfairly benefit one group over another.

But democracy on a mass scale depends on mass institutions—mass media, mass education, mass culture—that seem likely to fracture or mutate with the arrival of A.I. The forms of government that flourished in one info-epoch may not thrive in the next.

I'm sorry, but what a total crock of shit, this idea that "mass anything" is somehow _required_ for "mass democracy" to function, or even that "mass democracy" is something experienced in any of our governments.

It really sounds like these people want to diminish humanity at all costs, in favor of AI, so they can regain control of our information space, and have the ability to manipulate the entire world en masse and without any oversight or responsibility for it.

I'm completely grossed out by this article and the people within it.

ElevenLathe• 2 years ago

Thank you for articulating these criticisms. IMO people like the author are pining for high modernism when we've been in a postmodern media (and cultural) landscape for at least a couple decades now. It's the same impulse that has extremely online right wingers pining for "trad" values while posting waifus. They seem to wish we could live in the Eisenhower administration forever. Unfortunately for these people, that's just not possible.

Edit: also want to add this quote:

...disillusioned voters might adopt more realistic expectations about how much leaders can improve their lives.

This article positions itself against "nihilism" but this is the most nihilistic thing I've seen in a piece of political writing. This is no more than a way to say that elites should tell voters: "Peons, stop expecting your lives to get better. That's not our relationship. This is not a democracy, and your role in society is to suffer silently while also praising us."

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

This article is written entirely from the "state" point of view and completely lacks any "humanity" whatsoever.

Well of course it's pro-statist: it's from The New Yorker. There aren't many more leftist publication than that one and leftists love the state: it's their religion.

To these people every single problem is due to "not enough state" and the solution is always "more state", which can be seen here:

But democracy on a mass scale depends on mass institutions—mass media, mass education, mass culture ...

Yeah. Mass state. Mass mind control. More left.

I honestly don't understand how anyone who thinks for himself cannot see through this pile of horseshit.

kkfx• 2 years ago

IMVHO and perception we live in an era of very informed ignorance, NOT in the Socrates sense of course... I can speculate about various cohort of informed ignorant (me included), like those who demand "numbers" but not care how they was generated, so for them a "good looking" page of data CERTAINLY it's true or those who read only a specific news source and so on.

The signal/noise ratio it's not a new thing of course, but the real problem is mean (absence of) culture not information per se.

Are we living in the age of info-determinism?

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