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>Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that W

>Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? Why stop at "human-created offline content"? Seeing how a lot of peer-reviewed science is based on improper methodology, bad analysis, false data and buggy code, maybe it would be better to question everything. Obviously I don't have a full solution here, but a possible approach might be something like a fuzzy "epistemic status" you can attach to each item, and have that somehow flow across a network of trust, that everyone could personally customize. In other words, seeing how we're all already living in some echo chamber or another, maybe we could at least codify this.

majormajor 4y ago
Yeah, in my heads, human creation or curation is a "necessary, but not sufficient" thing. A ton of junk is already out there pre-computer-generated-content. So being human created isn't enough to let us know it's high quality - but not being human created is enough for the immediate future to let us know that it can't be trusted for domains where you aren't expert enough to tell the difference between "plausible" and "correct." And then in the anonymous public internet, you simply won't be able to tell "human created" from "computer created" so you'll have to just treat it all as low-value spam. Another interesting question here: let's say someone created a future AI that could actually be relied on to give "correct" or at least "properly caveated and nuanced" answers to questions - how is the layman possibly to know if that engine is actually being used behind the scenes of any online text? E.g. does the bullshit ML-generated content poison the well for "better" AI too, not just for anonymous people?
skissane 4y ago
> Seeing how a lot of peer-reviewed science is based on improper methodology, bad analysis, false data and buggy code, maybe it would be better to question everything. Peer-review isn't perfect, but it is still a more reliable source of information than (e.g) Reddit At least retraction is a thing – it doesn't happen as often as it should, but sometimes bad papers do get retracted, and there is a process people can use to challenge work they think should not have been published. Also, many journal databases have a "Cited by" feature, and so you can always read papers/letters-to-the-editor/etc responding to it - often, if research is particularly bad, sooner or later someone else will publish a criticism of it

majormajor 4y ago

Yeah, in my heads, human creation or curation is a "necessary, but not sufficient" thing. A ton of junk is already out there pre-computer-generated-content. So being human created isn't enough to let us know it's high quality - but not being human created is enough for the immediate future to let us know that it can't be trusted for domains where you aren't expert enough to tell the difference between "plausible" and "correct." And then in the anonymous public internet, you simply won't be able to tell "human created" from "computer created" so you'll have to just treat it all as low-value spam. Another interesting question here: let's say someone created a future AI that could actually be relied on to give "correct" or at least "properly caveated and nuanced" answers to questions - how is the layman possibly to know if that engine is actually being used behind the scenes of any online text? E.g. does the bullshit ML-generated content poison the well for "better" AI too, not just for anonymous people?

skissane 4y ago

> Seeing how a lot of peer-reviewed science is based on improper methodology, bad analysis, false data and buggy code, maybe it would be better to question everything. Peer-review isn't perfect, but it is still a more reliable source of information than (e.g) Reddit At least retraction is a thing – it doesn't happen as often as it should, but sometimes bad papers do get retracted, and there is a process people can use to challenge work they think should not have been published. Also, many journal databases have a "Cited by" feature, and so you can always read papers/letters-to-the-editor/etc responding to it - often, if research is particularly bad, sooner or later someone else will publish a criticism of it