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> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in

by tux1968 7y ago

> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it. At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us in a new and better direction.

fernandopj 7y ago
I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction. What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipulated digitally, and you'll have to fact-check by yourself, that doesn't scale at all.
- tux1968 7y ago
  The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes. The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers today, is probably a good thing too. I'm not 100% sure that there are more of them today than before, or if they're just more noticeable. But in either case, we should be very careful to draw too many conclusions when we look around today because we're living in a time of great transition. We're basically in our teenage years of this technology. Just as you shouldn't judge an adult by who he was at 14, I don't think we should assume we know what the adult internet will look like because we see some acne on it today.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    > we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us Even this is too simple. Many people have lived under propaganda regimes, yes, many have bought into them, and many people have seen through them. Each new wave of information technology provides new ways to “pull the wool” over peoples’ eyes. And though a propaganda machine has power... like all things it creates and equal an opposite power that eventually destroys it. The question for individuals is only: where am I in the cycle, how long will this cycle last, and what is my role to play?
  - abathur 7y ago
    I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess. Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest suggests that some institutions/relations (like markets) depend on trust to produce value and may be undermined or degraded if enough participants take an individualist caveat emptor approach. It is hard to know, in a complex adaptive system, what new equilibria will emerge downstream from a big disruption. We certainly could emerge through the other side with better epistemologies. But I don't see it as a given. Thinking is hard. Proving anything is harder. Skepticism can be good (and I suspect we need more--though I don't think it's terribly well distributed or applied at the moment...), but it's also easy; it requires no trust, knowledge, thinking, rigor, logic, or proof. So, I'm troubled by the possibility we'll dig ourselves into a deep world-shrinking skepticism (a callous) of anything we didn't/can't personally experience. It can be well-founded on real abuses of trust. It may even be the sum of individual rational choices. Neither would necessarily keep it from unmooring things we mistook for solid ground. And, when someone finally notices one drifting, there may not be enough trust left to agree on fundamentals like: is it adrift? is that a problem? was it ever tied down? is there anything we can do? should we wait for a bit to see if it drifts closer first? should we act?
    - tux1968 7y ago
afpx 7y ago
The next step in authenticity will probably be devices that cryptographically sign media with the device id, author, time and place.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Do you mean as stenographic watermarks, so that these signatures are hard to remove yet do not degrade the perceptual information? The thing is, people do not check information that matches their viewpoint for validity. Because being wrong feels bad.

fernandopj 7y ago

I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction. What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipulated digitally, and you'll have to fact-check by yourself, that doesn't scale at all.

tux1968 7y ago
The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes. The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers today, is probably a good thing too. I'm not 100% sure that there are more of them today than before, or if they're just more noticeable. But in either case, we should be very careful to draw too many conclusions when we look around today because we're living in a time of great transition. We're basically in our teenage years of this technology. Just as you shouldn't judge an adult by who he was at 14, I don't think we should assume we know what the adult internet will look like because we see some acne on it today.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us Even this is too simple. Many people have lived under propaganda regimes, yes, many have bought into them, and many people have seen through them. Each new wave of information technology provides new ways to “pull the wool” over peoples’ eyes. And though a propaganda machine has power... like all things it creates and equal an opposite power that eventually destroys it. The question for individuals is only: where am I in the cycle, how long will this cycle last, and what is my role to play?
- abathur 7y ago
  I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess. Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest suggests that some institutions/relations (like markets) depend on trust to produce value and may be undermined or degraded if enough participants take an individualist caveat emptor approach. It is hard to know, in a complex adaptive system, what new equilibria will emerge downstream from a big disruption. We certainly could emerge through the other side with better epistemologies. But I don't see it as a given. Thinking is hard. Proving anything is harder. Skepticism can be good (and I suspect we need more--though I don't think it's terribly well distributed or applied at the moment...), but it's also easy; it requires no trust, knowledge, thinking, rigor, logic, or proof. So, I'm troubled by the possibility we'll dig ourselves into a deep world-shrinking skepticism (a callous) of anything we didn't/can't personally experience. It can be well-founded on real abuses of trust. It may even be the sum of individual rational choices. Neither would necessarily keep it from unmooring things we mistook for solid ground. And, when someone finally notices one drifting, there may not be enough trust left to agree on fundamentals like: is it adrift? is that a problem? was it ever tied down? is there anything we can do? should we wait for a bit to see if it drifts closer first? should we act?
  - tux1968 7y ago

afpx 7y ago

The next step in authenticity will probably be devices that cryptographically sign media with the device id, author, time and place.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Do you mean as stenographic watermarks, so that these signatures are hard to remove yet do not degrade the perceptual information? The thing is, people do not check information that matches their viewpoint for validity. Because being wrong feels bad.