It is impossible to solve this problem because we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be. People live in different and dynamic truths. What we consider enemy propaganda today might be an official statement tomorrow. The only way to win here is to not play the game.
This is in fact the goal of Russian style propaganda. You have successfully been targeted. The idea is to spread so much confusion that you just throw up your hands and say, I'm not going to try and figure out what's going on any more.
That saps your will to be political, to morally judge actions and support efforts to punish wrongdoers.
> The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (like news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The brazenness is part of the point. From a game theory standpoint, it's interesting to watch the tactics out there (in here) in the wild.
An earlier comment mentioned how hard it is to get down to objective truth. Sometimes there are cases, like 'accelerate climate change in the belief that it'll help Siberia and hurt the West and Europe and open up the Arctic for shipping' where it's not at all hard to get down to objective truth: objective truth comes for ya like a tiger and will not be avoided.
Are you going to claim that US politicians don't do the exact same thing? This is my favorite example of it, where one literally tells you what the play is while it's getting made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I
> If there's one underlying axiom of western thought it is "question everything."
I don't believe this, even for a second.
How are those that truly do question everything treated?
Well, as either looney conspiracy theorists, or vindicated activists, depending on when the official State narrative (or classification status) changes.
Not always, or even often unjustified, but I hardly think you can call it an "underlying axiom of western thought" with the extreme negative public sentiment towards it.
Gasp! Are you referring to a lively marketplace of ideas and the intrinsic dynamics of competition within that marketplace?
Nobody said it's without cost to hold non-consensus views. The point is that those costs are incurred by the marketplace of ideas itself (people being "mean" to you, not the state beheading you) and that, in the long run, correct views become the consensus through winning such competitions over and over again.
There are alternative regimes where incorrect views can reign indefinitely because they choose to prevent people from criticizing each others' views.
It depends on your ideology. If you believe in international law, sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, as I do, you will have a different truth than if you believe in dominionism, might makes right, panslavism and historical revisionism as the majority of the Russian population does.
That's exactly my point, your truth is a reflection of your world view and your ideology.
It is silly to assume one's truth as universal and doing so kills all nuance.
What you're saying is certainly an established propaganda strategy of Russia (and others), but what parent is saying is also true, "truth" isn't always black and white, and what is the desired behavior in one country can be the opposite in another.
For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US, but Golf of Mexico everywhere else. What is the "correct" truth? Well, there is none, both of truthful, but from different perspectives.
> For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US
We're pretty much okay with different countries and languages having different names for the same thing. None of that really reflects "truth" though. For what it's worth, I'd guess that "the Gulf of America" is and will be about as successful as "Freedom fries" was.
Hah, yeah :) I originally wrote "Golfo de Mexico" but that's obviously the wrong language for HN and instead ended up with a mix between the two, inadvertently creating a new ocean golf resort.
The correct truth is to go to a higher level of abstraction and explain that there's a naming controversy.
I get the general point, but I disagree that you have to choose between one of the possibilities instead of explaining what the current state of belief is. This won't eliminate grey areas but it'll sure get us closer than picking a side at random.
In all those cases, you can explain the existing sides and show the available evidence for each. This isn't perfect, but those cases don't show the imperfections clearly enough.
You have to look at the details before you find the grey areas. Consider the case of abortion, and further consider the question of the existence of the human soul. There's no scientific evidence for souls, but the decision to look only at scientific evidence is itself a bias towards a certain way of understanding the world.
This is still much better than just deciding to pick one or the other side and ignoring the dispute.
I don't see those examples as being either-or.
They don't seem like questions about any kind of objective truth, just questions about what aspect of a thing you think is the most important to you.
If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute. I'm Australian. It is called the gulf of Mexico here. I still acknowledge that there is now a naming dispute between the US and basically everyone else.
The exact word "controversy" might have been the wrong choice by me, but whatever, I'm not a Wikipedia editor and I don't run Google Maps. The world has standards for dealing with government disputes and with i8n.
> If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute
I guess that's the fundamental disagreement, I wouldn't call that a "dispute" more than I would call the name "America" a dispute, it's just that different people understand it different. For some, it means a group of continents (that's how most people around me would take that for example), for others it means a country in North America (which I'm guessing is the common meaning if you live in North America already). Just because different people has different meanings doesn't make it into a dispute.
The US hasn't switched to calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Partisans on the right do this to show their allegiance to Trump. Partisans on the left still call it the Gulf of Mexico to show their opposition to Trump. Big companies that can be targeted by Trump call it the Gulf of America to protect themselves. And most non-partisans still call it the Gulf of Mexico because they're not paying attention and have always called it that (if they have ever spoken of it or know that it exists). I suspect a lot of people call it the Gulf, already an established custom before this idiocy about renaming it, precisely to avoid entangling themselves in the partisan fight.
The US, like other countries, doesn't get redefined with every change of government, and Trump has not yet cowed the public into knuckling under to his every dictat.
Upvoted to discourage greyness. Your observation is very applicable and is heavily grounded in human nature. It's even funny! But it turned grey because no comment mentioning Trump is complete without the author stating how they FEEL about Trump. Extra greyness awarded for wrong answers. People trying to avoid entanglement in the partisan fight are the new 'enemies of America'.
Parent is arguing one thing, show up with some bullshit argument and watch dozen comments arguing about Gulf of Mexico instead of discussing original point.
It's been called the Gulf of Mexico everywhere for centuries. The president is free to attempt to rename it but that will only be successful if usage follows. Which it does not, as of today. This is a terrible example of subjectivity.
Russia doesn't care what you call that sea, they're interested in actual falsehoods. Like redefining who started the Ukraine war, making the US president antagonize Europe to weaken the West, helping far right parties accross the West since they are all subordinated to Russia...
There's a more basic problem: it's two very different questions to ask "can the machine reason about the plausibility of things/sources?", and "how does it score on an evaluation on a list of authoritative truths and proven lies?" A machine that thinks critically will perform poorly on the latter, since, if you're able to doubt a bad-actor's falsehood, you're just as capable of doubting an authoritative source (often wrongly/overeagerly; maybe sometimes not). Because you're always reasoning with incomplete information: many wrong things are plausible given limited knowledge, and many true things aren't easy to support.
The system that would score best tested against a list of known-truths and known-lies, isn't the perceptive one that excels at critical thinking: it's the ideological sycophant. It's the one that begins its research by doing a from:elonmusk search, or whomever it's supposed to agree with—whatever "obvious truths" it's "expected to understand".
> The system that would score best tested against a list of known-truths and known-lies, isn't the perceptive one that excels at critical thinking: it's the ideological sycophant
Yes, it's difficult to detect whether something is enemy propaganda if you only look at the content. During WWII, sometimes propagandists would take an official statement (e.g. the government claiming that food production was sufficient and there were no shortages) and redirect it unchanged to a different audience (e.g. soldiers on a part of the front with strained logistics). Then the official statement and enemy propaganda would be exactly the same! The propaganda effect coming from the selection of content, not its truth or falsity.
But it's very easy to detect whether something is enemy propaganda without looking at the content: if it comes from an enemy source, it's enemy propaganda. If it also comes from a friendly source, at least the enemy isn't lying, though.
A company that doesn't wish to pick a side can still sidestep the issue of one source publishing a completely made-up story by filtering for information covered by a wide spectrum of sources at least one of which most of their users trust. That wouldn't completely eliminate falsehoods, but make deliberate manipulation more difficult. It might be playing the game, but better than letting the game play you.
Of course such a process would in practice be a bit more involved to implement than just feeding the top search results into an LLM and having it generate a summary.
> Then the official statement and enemy propaganda would be exactly the same! The propaganda effect coming from the selection of content, not its truth or falsity.
Exactly. Redistributing information out of context is such a basic technique that children routinely reinvent it when they play one parent off of the other to get what they want.
The real problem is that most people just want answers, they're unwilling to follow the logical chain of thought. When I talk to LLMs I keep asking "but why are you telling me this" until I have a cohesive, logical picture in my mind. Quite often the picture fundamentally disagrees with the LLM. But most people don't want that, they just ask "tell me what to do".
This is a reflection of how social dynamics often work. People tend to follow the leader and social norms without questioning them, so why not apply the same attitude to LLMs. BTW, the phenomenon isn't new, I think one of the first moments when we realized that people are stupid and just do whatever the computer tells them to do was the wave of people crashing their cars because the GPS system lied to them.
But the social sphere is made of fictions, the most influential of which probably been the value of different currencies and commodities. I don't think there's any way for an individual to live in the modern world without such fictions.
I would actually be very interested in a system where there's nothing stored just as a "fact", but rather every piece of information is connected to its sources and the evidence provided.
I remember when people gave up on digital navigation because the traveling salesman issue makes it too expensive.
Not everything needs to result in a single perfect answer to be useful. Aiming for ~90%, even 70% of a right answer still gets you something very reasonable in a lot of open ended tasks.
In a hypothetical world where people have, train and control their own LLMs according to their own needs it might be nice, but I fear that since the most common and advanced LLMs are controlled by a small number of people they won't be willing to give that much power to individuals because it will endanger their ability to manipulate those LLMs in order to push their own agendas and increase their own profits.
Because that would only reinforce the already problematic bubbles where people only see what feeds their opinions, often to disastrous results (cf. the various epidemics and deaths due to anti-vaxxers or even worse, downright genocides).
The core underlying issue isn't due to LLMs but they greatly exacerbate it. So does the current form of social media.
People used to live in bubbles, sure, but when that bubble was the entire local community, required human interaction, and radio had yet to be invented the implications were vastly different.
I'm optimistic that carefully crafted algorithms could send things back in the other direction but that isn't how you make money so seemingly no one is making a serious effort.
My point is: the exact same was said of every form of mass communication. Every new form was said to be a herald of the end times, and yet here we are, in many ways stronger than ever.
Im not arguing one way or another, I'm just pointing out a potential fatigue. It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.
Sure, every time mass communication got "stronger" various social issues were exacerbated. So naturally people complained about that. The same thing is happening here. A new technology is exacerbating some preexisting problems and people are complaining as a result.
> Every new form was said to be a herald of the end times,
The two world wars and surrounding economic upheaval arguably came close to that in many ways. "We somehow managed to survive previous technological advances" is hardly a convincing argument that we need not worry about the implications of a new technology.
> and yet here we are, in many ways stronger than ever.
The implication doesn't follow. You haven't explained how you would differentiate a system that had plenty of safety margin left from one that was on the brink of collapse. Without that distinction the statement is no more than hand waving.
> Im not arguing one way or another
You certainly seem to be taking a stance of "nothing to see here, this is business as usual, these recent developments pose no cause for concern".
> It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.
It's difficult for you to see how computers being able to speak natural language on par with an undergrad is more transformative than long distance communication? You can't be serious. Prior to this you could only converse with another human.
>The two world wars and surrounding economic upheaval arguably came close to that in many ways. "We somehow managed to survive previous technological advances" is hardly a convincing argument that we need not worry about the implications of a new technology.
I don't disagree with your rebuttal, but if the idea that "we survived so we don't have to worry" is invalid, than the idea "if we don't do something we don't survive" is equally invalid. I don't pretend to have the answer either way.
> The implication doesn't follow. You haven't explained how you would differentiate a system that had plenty of safety margin left from one that was on the brink of collapse. Without that distinction the statement is no more than hand waving.
My point is to those experiencing the revolution in real-time they had no ability to estimate the impact or understand there were any margins, and we very well may be in that position too.
> You certainly seem to be taking a stance of "nothing to see here, this is business as usual, these recent developments pose no cause for concern".
Respectfully, I am absolutely not taking any such position. I don't appreciate the straw man, and won't bother to address it.
> It's difficult for you to see how computers being able to speak natural language on par with an undergrad is more transformative than long distance communication? You can't be serious. Prior to this you could only converse with another human.
The first principles are the same: they're all "radical" technologies which were as of a decade or two prior, utterly unfathomable. I could generalize your last statement to "Prior to <revolutionary technology> you could only <do a fraction of what's possible with the technology>."
My point is making value judgements about which is _more_ impactful is difficult to see from the ground floor. It's too early to tell; At the time it's occurring, each innovation may as well have been magic, and magic is impossible to understand, and scary.
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We've entirely diverged from the original issue I was trying to make, which was that people have actively put themselves in bubbles that confirm their own bias since the dawn of time. I'm not looking to change your mind on AI, so I can call this exchange complete from my end. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
There is no objective truth because humans are inherently ideological beings and what we consider objective is just a reflection of our ideology.
Consider markets - a capitalist's "objective truth" might be that they are the most efficient mechanism of allocating resources, a marxists "objective truth" might be that they are a mechanism for exploiting the working class and making the capitalist class even richer.
> What we consider enemy propaganda today might be an official statement tomorrow.
Remember when worrying about COVID was sinophobia? Or when the lab leak was a far-right conspiracy theory? When masks were deemed unnecessary except for healthcare professionals, but then mandated for everyone?
In other countries we went from “that looks bad in China” to “shit, it spread to Italy now, we really need to worry”
And with masks we went from “we don’t think they’re necessary, handwashing seems more important” to “Ok shit it is airborne, mask up”. Public messaging adapted as more was known.
But the US seems to have to turn everything into a partisan fight, and we could watch, sadly, in real time as people picked matters of public health and scientific knowledge to get behind or to hate. God forbid anyone change their advice as they become better informed over time.
Seeing everything through this partisan, pugnacious prism seems to be a sickness US society is suffering from, and one it is trying (with some success) to spread.
I don't see why you are being downvoted. In the U.S., if you ignored the politicians and listened instead to the medical professionals it went down more or less the way you described.
> the point seems to be that the commonly accepted truth does indeed change.
As it should when new evidence comes to light to justify it. Ideally, the tools we use would keep up along with those changes while transparently preserving the history and causes of them.
Perhaps that's the tragedy though. At least in the U.S. plenty of people seem unwilling to change their "truth" when new evidence comes to light. When there are actors that seek to make everything political it also makes everything then "tribal".
I think people are more willing to adjust their views as new evidence suggests as long as they never dug their heels in in the first place.
You're projecting your views on the comment. You may even be correct, but it's still a projection: that view is not explicit in the text; combined with the specific wording, I feel down-voting rather than engaging was precisely the correct response.
This whole interaction is a classic motte-and-bailey: someone says something vague that can be interpreted several ways (and reading their comment history makes it clear what their intended emotional valence was); people respond to the subtext, and then someone jumps “woah woah, they never actually said that”.
Either way, nothing of value was lost, as the same point you say he was trying to make was made in several other comments which were not downvoted.
