adrienne on Warpcast

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Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) was on @bankless a few months ago, talking about why truth is so hard to find these days. I tend to agree that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but Harari makes a few points I keep thinking about: (Paraphrasing from memory) - we think about the time after printing press as a time of enlightenment but scams and lies spread much faster and for a long time (did he say 200 years?) - truth is expensive, hard to get to, and can be messy, inconvenient and not entertaining. Truth can hurt - lies are cheap, are entertaining, make us feel good. So of course lies will spread faster and take over social media Eventually, maybe tens or hundreds of years, I believe AI and social media will be a huge benefit to society. But today, well, we live in messy time. https://www.bankless.com/will-ai-kill-democracy-yuval-noah-harari

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𒂠_𒍣𒅀_𒊑 pfp

𒂠_𒍣𒅀_𒊑

imho yuval is a charlatan. luckily we have varying models of trust assumption from 1/1 to 1/n wrt signed fact. and we're not going to be trapped in structureless dark forests forever. even now, people are leveraging AI to the contrary of this scenario, compressing cheap content into more digestible/qualifiable forms. we even have freakin @askgina.eth to doublecheck all the facts and offer counters. tbqh, doomerism is lindy because it's easy to sell, but I don't find his conclusion to be that credible.

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I know he gets a lot of criticism. He didn’t sound doomer on the podcast. Imo his points were very logical. Lies are cheap, truths are hard. Therefore when information becomes easier to spread (printing press, internet, social media) the lies will front run the truth. We can still get to the truth, it will just take effort.

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Mac Budkowski ᵏ

Agree, on the other hand, we have Community Notes, and I think we're going to see more solutions like that

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𒂠_𒍣𒅀_𒊑 pfp

𒂠_𒍣𒅀_𒊑

bottom line for me is that he's advocating the Hobbesian leviathan for what is clearly a Lockean technological arc. same trend as corrupt/incompetent politicians vs impudent mass media. the margin & lag between truth and lies is exceedingly tiny. nobody is a credible arbiter, but sunlight is the best disinfectant. Locke is right; there is no moat. the mandate for the public is to attest/concede to the "gray truth" as much as we update our prior filters.

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