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.
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