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There is no solution, because there is no oracle of truth that we all can and do completely trust. Thus, banning "lies" is just a backdoor way of centralizing
by jerf 2y ago
There is no solution, because there is no oracle of truth that we all can and do completely trust.
Thus, banning "lies" is just a backdoor way of centralizing political power into the entity that gets to decide what is "truth" for legal reasons.
The real problem here is the idea that a political entity can determine "truth". People on average have a huge cognitive blind spot around labels and have a hard time processing the idea that a label can be placed on something and the label can be just... wrong. It sounds great to have a political body label things as "truth" and then punish "lies"... but there is no more connection between the "truth" label they would hand out and the actual truth than exists currently. You're just asking to be told more soothing and subtle lies rather than disturbing and blatent lies, and while that may feel better that's not actually progress.
To be honest, you can see that even today in our culture. As near as I can see there's still a lot of people, even yea verily here on Hacker News, that have not deeply processed the fact that just because something is labelled "misinformation" that means nothing whatsoever as to its truth value. It's nothing more than a particularly successful way for some politicians to label what other politicians say as lies, which they've done since time immemorial, but this one still slips past people's cognitive defenses for some reason, even now. I expect we're past the halfway mark on that one being used up, though.