anselm

Your idea only works for tiny networks and doesn’t scale.

Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.

It’s too bad there’s no way at all to know if any media whatsoever is plausibly real, say such as by a cryptographic web of trust. Even though similar mechanisms are used to secure services such as domain name resolution clearly nothing similar can be applied here. I guess we’re just doomed to be fed a diet of adulterated content.

What is the concern?

Looking at the law (in Oregon) “Total calories must be posted in a conspicuous place in a font size no smaller than the price, or the least prominent font size of the description of the item. A statement listing the daily nutrient intake amounts of calories, saturated fat, and sodium.”

Seems like any legal requirements imply signage in the physical venue ?

I used to really love getting each new floppy when they were released and it was a big deal at our amiga club. My own contribution made it onto disk 14 for a 4d to 2d tesseract renderer but a second submission was pulled for violating a copyright for Tetris.

We see one of these essays a day at this point. I do think authors need to at least critique why they think technical solutions can’t help.

We did migrate from http to https for example. And we do use a (top down) cryptographic scheme for DNS. We also do use similar schemes for crypto currency. So we do use technology as needed when needed. I’d argue the time is coming when we need to use it in some way to secure human conversation on the net. If I am confident here it is because I see this as typical of the same transitions that forced us to use crypto elsewhere.

True PGP is a failure but I can see room for a scheme where people bother to indicate that a person is real. Nobody is going to bother indicating that a post is real or not (nobody cares).

Is the problem you’re seeing about fake content or fake people? Or both?

Does it have low value for to you to know that I myself am say 3 friend hops away from you and have say a “likelihood of being human score” of 7/10?

And it wouldn’t help you to be able to know that say many random sms messages you get or random phone calls you get or random posts or articles you have trust score of say 0/10 because nobody in your extended network of trust can attest they exist?

True fake content is hard to solve. At an intimate scale nothing can solve deception. If you’re my friend and you decide to manipulate or deceive me then there’s not much I can do. I extended trust to you and you violated it. This isn’t a new phenomena.

But the article isn’t specifically about fake content. It is also about sock puppets. It’s about an extended field of spam. Crypto can play a role at lest asserting that a post is uttered by a friend of a friend or somebody who has greater than zero trust.

Again the author doesn’t consider crypto solutions like pgp, keybase or any kind of signed social trust graph. Why do people keep writing this sky-is-falling thesis over and over without at least arguing for or against cryptography?

Yes the improving strength of GPT is magnifying the problem but is unrelated to the solution. The solution space steps outside of examining the content of the message for truth. The solution is to sign the messages using a social trust graph; and scoring posts based on the social trust distance.

It's not a very compelling argument for me that a (very short) 20 year history of failing to solve this problem means that it cannot be solved.

I'm willing to bet you $1000.00 that this will be completely solved in 10 years. In 10 years we will know if content we consume is "fake" or "real". It may still be offensive, and harmful to gullible people - but it will all be scored as to how real it is. Real will be defined as the likelihood that the content comes from a real human being type person, as agreed upon by other persons in-between you and that person. Content one hop away from you, from a friend, will have a score of 100% real, and content many hops away will have lower score. You will probably start your day by sorting the content you consume by the likelihood that it is real.

I did actually work on PGP - and I'm willing to concede it didn't succeed. But DNS works and bitcoin works (technically). So we do use various flavors of cryptographic trust to make sure that actions in a network are "real" versus "forged".

And yes - it's true that bots can creep into a social trust graph... so yeah, it make take effort to keep pruning the weeds in the garden in a sense.

Note in some ways I'm not really trying to argue FOR crypto per se - I'm just saying that the OP should at least critique crypto if they want to make the thesis they are making. And I'm arguing that it is a big omission to gloss over the utility of crypto and the argument will be hard to make that crypto is not a significantly powerful modifier to the original thesis of the OP.

There are going to be a few cases where keys are lost or stolen. It may be possible to build multi-sig wallets that allow for you to migrate an identity to a new key. What we're looking for is some kind of statistical means of trying to reduce bad actors. Even if there was no recourse for you and you were totally screwed I'm not sure it totally invalidates the concept of having a key or a mechanism for trying to remove bad actors from social discourse. You could trip and die because you wore shoes. You could get locked out of your house... bad stuff does happen - it doesn't mean we shouldn't wear shoes or have keys.

This comment is bound to spark a lot of response - it hits sensitive issues that we 'the masses' may have some worries about. It speaks to a populist conspiracy fear - that there is a "them" that wants to get rid of "us". That conspiracy is not actually proven.

Like; it an 'emotional' argument but doesn't actually propose solutions. I'd like to hear more about solutions or actual push back rather than simply push the emotion button over a conspiracy fear.

True it is The Economist, which can be suspect in that it tends to reflect something of an agenda of a minority population with a lot of power. I am in fact willing to believe that there is a small group of people who would prefer there to be less people period. But it still doesn't feel unreasonable to examine our morals. I'd prefer to build coherent arguments to oppose the concepts if these are bad concepts. Not just push the emotion button a lot.

If a single family has to make decisions about having more babies or not based on budget, then why can't a planet full of people decide how many people should exist period? Why is that "bad" to even think about?

And why not 'scan' an unborn child for diseases and terminate in some cases? I don't think it implicitly is 'defacto bad' as the sentence implies. This second comment attempts to tie larger issues of population to more narrow fear based issues around abortion. It's creating a gordian knot. It's not a great argument.

Is there a way to make an argument that isn't mashing the emotion button over and over? And that isn't trying to conflate far and near issues together into an unresolvable emotional morass?

I do favor a pro-choice stance, but I want to avoid strictly falling down into a pro-choice versus pro-life stance since that is hugely loaded politically with people on the left hugely inflamed at the restriction in women's freedoms, and people on the right ostensibly outraged that every single life is not seen as sacred. As a left leaning person I do think the people on the right are not charitable, and I do think they don't actually care about lives, but rather they are using babies as emotional tools to try manipulate emotions and hold onto power. So I tend to think pro-lifers are manipulative - basically I see them as trying to manipulate me with their rhetoric. But I am willing to acknowledge that it is worth trying to think about this more; a charitable read has to include room for some pro-life arguments that human life is indeed sacred. The problem with the scanning statement however is that it leads us only to an emotional argument - and those are not solvable today. It might be nice to propose an idea or solution, not just (again) hit the emotion button.

If we have a mental model of a potential child as having the best possible outcomes, having the most joyous life, contributing the most - then of course it is an utter tragedy to deprive that child of a possible life. But I think our mental model of life should be more like what we actually see in nature; a garden that is riotous and constantly and eagerly grows, and we weed and prune that garden constantly. I'd argue that we are 'helpess gardeners' - we cannot avoid gardening, we cannot avoid stepping in the garden, we can only choose where to step. The solution space I see here that bridges left and right values is to decide who the decision maker is around if a child lives or dies. I'd argue the best decision maker is the person most closely involved and most entangled with that life - basically the mother. I'd pour dollars funding and energy into the people with utereses - rather than into judges and police. Any structural imperialism that deprives the mother of agency and turns them into a baby factory feels cruel to me but also is clearly not valuing the mommas life itself. If people on the left or the right want to fund that mother, educate that mother, argue with that mother - then they should empower the uterus owner as much as they wish - pay for schooling, education, rhetoric - whatever they want to expose them to - but delegate the power of the decision to the uterus owner. People on the right then get a chance to bombard that poor uterus owner with their campaign - but so be it - at least the energy, money and attention are placed in the right spot. This is more diverse, close to the ground, grass roots and reflects more the nature of the world - that decisions should be distributed and local - more ecological. In any world where uterus owners were male this would instantly be the case - we only consider denying women agency because we come from a patriarchy.

Probably in fact - if we want to solve far field issues like planetary population concerns, then education is probably the best way in general. The system as a whole can load balance births with locally available resources if it is allowed to do so I believe.

It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems.

These moral scales philosophers employ do seem to rest on unquestioned axioms about the value of human time spent alive. I constantly wonder why if they are philosophers that they don't examine the axioms themselves more? Often it feels like they try to weigh say the potential of a younger person to live longer versus the weight of an older person with less time to live. I don't know that this kind of calculus really makes sense - it feels like it quickly leads to logical conundrums because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another.

If I had to decide between two lives (or say if the Earth was going to be struck by an asteroid) it feels like a better scheme is to weight 'diversity' - to focus less on the happiness or joy or quality of life and more on trying to select for many different kinds of minds. So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship, or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes. I'd probably bias mostly towards humans simply because I don't know of anything else that can cogitate, but I'd also try to include larger systems of living organisms. Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.

It is gonna happen for sure. People will leverage powerful tools and claim it is their own voice. Me shrugs.

I more want to at least have that individual emitter be accountable for what they post; to establish continuity. I want to know that that emitter is say 3 hops from me, and is trusted by 12 friends in between, and has a general trust score of say 7/10 overall as an overall rating by my extended trust graph.

It is less that I want people to say good things, or be truthful or whatnot - I just want to know that they are real, that there is a human behind it, that that human has an opinion of some kind. The thing is that there are a ton of sock puppets that are not real - it's more about reducing the noise / spam rather than a perfect solution.

Even with some defects or imperfections anything is better than what we have now - which is basically nothing.

I think the way I'd think about this is to imagine say a small community, such as a town of say 5000 people or so. While you cannot know each person individually, you can know of people by reputation. People do earn rep over time, and they can burn rep. It is true that some people will be unfairly downscored, or unfairly upscored - but I'm not really trying to argue for those fine grained situations. What I'm trying to argue for is simply distinguishing the very bad actors acting out of pure malice from injecting fake news, media and 'yellow journalism' into human conversations.

True some real people will be downscored (I prefer to think of this as downscoring bad actors rather than 'blocking'). And true an AI can 'sound very human' - but an AI or a bad actor will struggle to build up a reputation over time. An AI can't shake hands with you, it is harder for it to prove it is human... Other bad actors will presumably burn their reputations if they spit out a series of offensive, misleading, false, inflammatory or toxic posts...

Note I am not necessarily advocating for crypto per se as a way to establish social trust graphs (a'la PGP or say Keybase) but I am arguing that there are other options that the OP did not raise. I more want to see a wider discussion around ways to filter malicious media that either "centralized systems" OR "small social clubs". I'm not necessarily saying it has to be a cryptographic solution... but I do think there are more ways to have what we want.

Authors making this argument (which we see often now) really need to sketch out why cryptographic solutions will fail.

The entire thesis rests on this erroneous sentence in the second point: “This can be done in two ways – just move to invite-only silos where you already know everybody, or big platforms where the owners do the vetting for you.”

There are more options. We employ them when we are forced to; when it becomes cheaper than not.

We can sign posts or sign that somebody is real or to sign that somebody has earned rep, or that somebody has burned their rep… and subjectively score every piece of content that crosses our phone against our social trust graph.

We can rhizomatically scale social networks, can deputize our people in our extended social network to mark content as appropriate for kids or not, or otherwise filter. There’s no specific reason why we cannot grow a kind of social nervous system that has a kind of myelin sheath against noise and spam. It doesn’t have to be specifically only people we’ve shaken hands with or our like 3 closest buddies.

This essay opens with comments about utility for the metaverse but then switches to a description of a grammar without strongly connecting back to why it is so valuable for programmers to learn a new language to better build the metaverse. It may be helpful but is it that much more helpful?

I understand this is a pet project for these folks but I think that a metaverse grammar should not fe functional but procedural - it should be extremely simple and accessible to novices. We want these tools to be accessible to everybody I think - unless we as programmers want to be responsible for building all interactions for all users.

But I mostly think a grammar today isn’t just about the literal parser - instead it is more about the parser and surrounding tooling. Rust for example is surrounded by tooling that helps - cargo/crates are a nice helpful way to make rust developers effective.

If I was going to devote significant energy to this topic I’d solve other problems. Any code that users write needs to be late binding - allow software agents to be pushed to the cloud and participate in already running simulations or models. Code should allows users to define granular security around libraries and components to prevent them from doing bad things. Code should be highly portable; able to run across many devices at speed - not something new that has low cross platform support.

I think a better way of thinking about this isn’t the grammar itself but the kind of “computational sandbox” one is offering - the grammar container or app runner.

WASM is a good example of thinking in a better way - portable, secure, performant. It’s more like a metaverse tool than the above grammar.

What’s especially curious to me is that Tim’s project Unreal is almost the anti-metaverse. It is utterly fixated on and built around an extremely heavy high fidelity renderer - that is not portable - that does not run across many devices. Unreal uses an old school compilation philosophy that requires behaviors to be precompiled - so if you want to add a single feature you have to tear down all the instances, recompile them, recompile the server too, distribute a new build to all participants and restart the sim. It’s a tool designed for a different era and a different ecosystem… in a sense AAA games are the opposite of a participatory constantly evolving online shares consensual world. So maybe he should fix that first.

The minute fakes are a serious issue we will sign utterances. Exactly the same as DNS or anything actually important. Deepfakes will not be a threat or issue.

Humans more than any other life form seem to constantly be playing with social, economic and political self-organization. How energy is distributed and what is fair. We’re a highly social almost hive-like species that is constantly trying out new hive patterns and arguing about them.

Crypto is useful because it lets people play with their own schemes and nobody can stop them. It seems like most uses of crypto are for some form of token gated community.

While token gates are a valuable concept, it is true that many communities themselves are not worth joining and are inflating their perceived value.

I do think that the recent spate of critiques are fairly poor also. Critiquing antiques like bitcoin or lolling about say early DAOs falling over due to bugs doesn’t really make a compelling argument.

There are a lot of people around the world who cannot buy and sell from each other; either they are in different regulatory regimes, or they are completely unbanked. There's also a lot of concentration of wealth to publishing houses - who aggregate the work of many artists and then simplify billing. Because money is so hard to deal with it tends to make it hard for artists to have creative sovereignty. They're always beholden to somebody else. We all suffer for this.

Effectively money is a form of communication; and when Mozilla bows to social pressure and social anti-crypto hysteria - they're continuing what they've always done - which is focus on insulating users, protecting users from risks, while also failing to foster a healthy ecosystem. Why do we have an arms race between people who want to violate privacy and people who want privacy? Why do we have so much sound bite media, with hugely emotional banner headlines and warped narratives? Why are the walled gardens so much more successful than the web (in the sense of much of the creative work and creative community moving to native apps?). We have these phenomena because there is no legitimate way for people to have direct transactional and healthy relationships on the web with respect to money. Mozilla is not "helping the web" they are hurting the web. Their fixation on the wrong things injures the ecosystem. They shouldn't waste their time begging for crypto, but what they should do is enable people to pay each other.