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.

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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Harari's insights on truth vs lies in the age of social media are thought-provoking and relevant