3 ms·

Way back, like waaaaay back, you can imagine strangers meet out in the wilderness, each wary of the other. To determine threats or potential friends they would

Way back, like waaaaay back, you can imagine strangers meet out in the wilderness, each wary of the other. To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. Where you are from, who you know, do we know the same people, do you lie, etc. "Ah, you know the Baker and are traveling through here to trade with them." Early webs of trust were on personal knowledge of others. I think a similar web of trust needs to reemerge. Vouching and relationships and when the vouchee messes up it affects the voucher. Imagine if your relationship graph could crumble when you let someone into the circle of trust who ends up a wolf. If you could cut out whole circles of trust when they are compromised, we could maybe get more authentic web back. See shit ads or blog spam, penalize the circle that houses it by no longer seeing its content. Many smaller circles join to other circles, where irl know people in the first circle. Like a new take on web rings. If your only portal to the internet was through your rings and related rings, we may get echo chambers but we may also gain the ability to remove bad actors from our immediate rings. Fake news propaganda? Penalized the ring and all members until that wolf is removed. #MorningThoughts.

makeitdouble 2y ago
> To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. They'd just wear nice clothes and be well groomed enough, bonus point if they're in uniform, and everybody would trust them. Knowing who to trust has never been our forte.
carlosjobim 2y ago
We've lived in mass societies for more than a century. Individuals do not exist anymore, since all people are mainly formed by mass media and mass indoctrination in schools. The few individuals that exist can weild oversized influence, for example as super sharers.
xyst 2y ago
Reminds me of the “Social Credit System” in China
- pennomi 2y ago
  Social credit isn’t inherently flawed, everyone naturally develops a working model in their brain where we judge other people based off of a variety of factors. It’s just hugely scary when a government is the one operating a social credit system. If there were some theoretical framework that would assist users in judging strangers on the internet, according to their own personal settings, that could be effective. For example, one thing you see on Reddit is when somebody starts posting disagreeable comments in a community, a concerned member might look at the offending user’s entire post history and discover“oh, the only thing this guy does is make pro-[topic] statements”. The member then shares this information with the rest of the community, hoping to discredit all statements by the offender. I almost think there could be a personal LLM that does this for you, and preemptively“tags” trolls and spreaders of misinformation in a way that allows you to automatically filter or dismiss their comments.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    oh man, like an llm generated heuristic pop up over other users that you can't help but see before engaging. `pennomi tends to make reasonable arguments seeking balance from both sides. Few of their comments are downvoted and there seems to be an interest in spacex`. That's very interesting.
somenameforme 2y ago
From my perspective, the web analogy fails immediately. I might trust somebody on one topic, but eyeroll at them on another. And that trust is also subject to change, and often does. Sometimes it's because the person changes, and sometimes because I change. So, for me at least, it's one node with a zillion flickering 1-depth connections. And I think most people are also of a similar mindset, even if they might not necessarily realize it. It's how you get things like a democracy where everybody ostensibly votes for the candidate they want to win, and then we get a congressional approval rating that's trending to the single digits. [1] That's only possible because are extremely dissatisfied even when their guy and his party are both in control, otherwise it'd at least hover around 50%. [1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
Anotheroneagain 2y ago
You shouldn't base your opinions on trust.
- dahart 2y ago
  That’s a nice platitude, but completely impractical. Try to really count the number of things you know first-hand, like really truly know because you were there and you’ve also controlled for alternative explanations. Be honest. Also think hard about the number of things you believe to be true but haven’t verified yourself. My list of truths I know first-hand isn’t very big, I don’t know first-hand how an airplane or computer works (even though I design software and hardware), I don’t know first-hand that people landed on the moon, and I don’t know first hand anything about national politics. Pretty much everything we do is based on belief and things other people tell us (which includes stories we read or watch on video). I don’t know it for a fact, but I believe that most people have about the same level of first-hand knowledge as me, that most people know very few truths, and the majority of how we function day-to-day is based on beliefs that we haven’t and won’t take the time to prove. This is perhaps a generalization of Brandolini’s Law. [1] I briefly looked for whether there’s a broader and less negative version of this that applies to all information and not just misinformation, and didn’t find it yet. But if you think about it, it’s true that the amount of energy needed to know something is true first-hand is far, far higher (way more than an order of magnitude) than the amount of energy needed to use that information effectively. We basically don’t have the option to spend all of our time verifying the truthfulness of every opinion we have, or nothing at all would get done. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

makeitdouble 2y ago

> To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. They'd just wear nice clothes and be well groomed enough, bonus point if they're in uniform, and everybody would trust them. Knowing who to trust has never been our forte.

carlosjobim 2y ago

We've lived in mass societies for more than a century. Individuals do not exist anymore, since all people are mainly formed by mass media and mass indoctrination in schools. The few individuals that exist can weild oversized influence, for example as super sharers.

xyst 2y ago

Reminds me of the “Social Credit System” in China

pennomi 2y ago
Social credit isn’t inherently flawed, everyone naturally develops a working model in their brain where we judge other people based off of a variety of factors. It’s just hugely scary when a government is the one operating a social credit system. If there were some theoretical framework that would assist users in judging strangers on the internet, according to their own personal settings, that could be effective. For example, one thing you see on Reddit is when somebody starts posting disagreeable comments in a community, a concerned member might look at the offending user’s entire post history and discover“oh, the only thing this guy does is make pro-[topic] statements”. The member then shares this information with the rest of the community, hoping to discredit all statements by the offender. I almost think there could be a personal LLM that does this for you, and preemptively“tags” trolls and spreaders of misinformation in a way that allows you to automatically filter or dismiss their comments.
- sethammons 2y ago
  oh man, like an llm generated heuristic pop up over other users that you can't help but see before engaging. `pennomi tends to make reasonable arguments seeking balance from both sides. Few of their comments are downvoted and there seems to be an interest in spacex`. That's very interesting.

somenameforme 2y ago

From my perspective, the web analogy fails immediately. I might trust somebody on one topic, but eyeroll at them on another. And that trust is also subject to change, and often does. Sometimes it's because the person changes, and sometimes because I change. So, for me at least, it's one node with a zillion flickering 1-depth connections. And I think most people are also of a similar mindset, even if they might not necessarily realize it. It's how you get things like a democracy where everybody ostensibly votes for the candidate they want to win, and then we get a congressional approval rating that's trending to the single digits. [1] That's only possible because are extremely dissatisfied even when their guy and his party are both in control, otherwise it'd at least hover around 50%. [1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx

Anotheroneagain 2y ago

You shouldn't base your opinions on trust.

dahart 2y ago
That’s a nice platitude, but completely impractical. Try to really count the number of things you know first-hand, like really truly know because you were there and you’ve also controlled for alternative explanations. Be honest. Also think hard about the number of things you believe to be true but haven’t verified yourself. My list of truths I know first-hand isn’t very big, I don’t know first-hand how an airplane or computer works (even though I design software and hardware), I don’t know first-hand that people landed on the moon, and I don’t know first hand anything about national politics. Pretty much everything we do is based on belief and things other people tell us (which includes stories we read or watch on video). I don’t know it for a fact, but I believe that most people have about the same level of first-hand knowledge as me, that most people know very few truths, and the majority of how we function day-to-day is based on beliefs that we haven’t and won’t take the time to prove. This is perhaps a generalization of Brandolini’s Law. [1] I briefly looked for whether there’s a broader and less negative version of this that applies to all information and not just misinformation, and didn’t find it yet. But if you think about it, it’s true that the amount of energy needed to know something is true first-hand is far, far higher (way more than an order of magnitude) than the amount of energy needed to use that information effectively. We basically don’t have the option to spend all of our time verifying the truthfulness of every opinion we have, or nothing at all would get done. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law