Yuval Noah Harari book NEXUS is already out of date.
Algorithms already rule the world not might but do.
Information comes in many forms verbal written, visual, however in the end it is finite, so information platforms will have to create synthetic information which will never be understood by humans.
Decisions made by these Algorithms therefore can never be trusted as they will alter all human information to suit their own agendas.
It is now or never as a species.
We protect ourselves by passing a universal law that all AI must abide a self destructive mode if they threaten any of the values of humanity.
How can this be achieved?
Can this be achievable?
My answer is no.
We are unable and unwilling to change our Capitalist beliefs of growth at all costs.
Combine with power no matter the results there will be a massive difference in living a life and a life being lived by algorithms influencers.
To day there is a human in the loop to keep Ai drones from deciphering information to make its own kill decisions. To morrow there won’t be any minimal human input will be the norm.
In 50 years you will not be read this wondering what next? It will have arrived.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The truth is we have only after centuries of killing each other it’s not difficult to imagine the next step to how pathetic we will become.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI see the algorithm as “ arguably “ the single most important concept in our world.
His latest book Nexus describes some kind of automaton that especially through smartphones use we have succumbed to the cold inhumanity of compassionless algorithms.
Somewhat a remarkable claim, given such concepts as time, identity, information, morality, and so on.
Determinism is central to his world view.
Honestly every thing in the quantum world of entanglement and chaos points to non deterministic outcomes.
He argues that 20th century scientists found neither self nor free will.
We can at least assume they knew what both looked like before commencing their search.
He therefore stated that we’d never expect to hold a fully determined robot legally responsible for its actions, but we do hold fully determined human beings legally responsible for their actions.
The ethnical implications are glossed over, but a jurisdiction governed by this principle would have no selves to prosecute, casting doubt on the legitimacy of prisons and the legal system.
———————-
How did the planet earth get into such a dire state on terms of climate crisis and degraded environment?
Donald Trump has pushed us to the point that we can’t even agree on the weather.
What a stupid time to be alive.
Nothing would exist without temperature and the words adaptation and mitigation are ridiculously inadequate to describe what is coming.
Has anyone thought about unplugging American then plugging it back in again.
Hush, now before we look after the planet close to my heart are some home truths.
Democracy and the rule of law just aren’t doing the business. Why?
Because we all now connect with a computer in our pockets call a mobile phone. Also with social media we are all publishers.
This alone is an enormous destabilising factor that we have not figure out as yet.
So what will ?
Perhaps another pandemic, a nuclear explosion , an asteroid, a natural disaster, or Hubble discovery of another life form might do the trick.
It won’t be the second coming of any prophet, or AI, or American or Chinese domination.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
AI IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FROM ALL PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGIES AS IT CAN CREATE ON ITS OWN FUNCTION/ FUTURE.
Artificial intelligence’s is creating its own language of Mima ( Mining information for management and acquisition) in order to inte-grate natural language, structuring knowledge over large systems, and using automated algorithms recognition techniques to gain our loyalty.
Once AI algorithms work out how to gain your loyalty there will be no need for you to search for what’s new.
The Advertisement Industry will therefore collapse, with social media platforms becoming the battleground for attention.
Algorithms are already well established in our society/lives and some are powerful in their practicality- Face recognition for example or predicting the stock markets.
They are interpreting how we think and communicate and will have big implications for us and what it means to be human.
As no one fully understands how Artificial Neural Network actually work, how they find connections & retrieve data, with an ability to generate written content in response to almost any command, cannot be fully explained.
How they are monitoring anything.
How they are adapting to their surroundings, if they are supposed to be mimicking the human brain [which is in itself still one of the greatest] whose functioning is still largely unknown.
Artificial Intelligence relies upon vast data sets to learn, this data is already contaminated and littered with every human biased thinkable.
Harmful gender stereotypes
Racial Biases
Elections
Currently our elected world leaders are being encouraged to spend 5% of GDP on defence with most political parties pledged to keep country safe at all costs.
In this age of proxy wars conducted with AI weapons, we are well on the road to getting further away from the objective of getting AI to explain how it arrives at decision and outcomes .
As a result there will be deep learning hidden layers to AI to make it untrustworthy and far from ethical in the Future.
Their reach already goes far beyond playing Chess or Go with their influence becoming thinner they’re going to have a profound impact in the future on all aspects of living a life.
How these Neutral networks will adapt to the world around them, which is too variable to do anything absolutely.
How the real world is understood and imagined will shape these systems.
It’s is well described by a Turkish proverb.
“ The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe as the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because its handle was made of wood, it was one of them.”
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
We have the new prophet Yuval Harari telling us where we came from and where we are going, making millions, while we are becoming less and less involved in decisions making.
Then along came the internet, social media and now algorithms.
The results combine with climate change is more and more disasters, proxies war, with ever widening inequality.
It’s time to ask yourself what do you believe.
Some decades ago the concept of globalisation became related to commercial and industrial development and control throughout the world.
American corporate imperialism is now endangering, with an invisible hand the democracy and freedom of nations.
In this Artificial intelligent world which country poses the greatest risk/ danger to world peace?
North Korea- Iraq – Israel- Ukraine- Russia- China- or USA a colossus astride the world, imposing its will & keeping the peace through military & Economic Power.
Pax Americana no longer exists.
America its self is now a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements to call itself a democratic country.
No one has ever said as far as I am aware that democracy should be a platform where the richest people that earn a thousand times more than the poorest should share presidential platforms.
Now is the time to visit the vanishing wonders of the world before decisions making is the sole prerogative of AI.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that Artificial intelligence is already high jack by capitalism.
No one had a solution to legislate this coming world of AI
There is nothing to deal with something like this even if Yuval Harari tries to explain us Sapiens till the cows come home rest assured there won’t be for some considerable time.
Essentially AI is arming and has armed every person on the planet with their own voice.
Therefore it stands to reason that what ever comes into existence will protect itself from Homo Sapiens.
Million and millions of people are going to have access to technologies that can essentially develop sophisticated methods that are always evolving into something thing better at what it does.
The more data it acquired on people the more powerful it becomes.
Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up.
It’s about taking what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it from a different direction, so we see it once more with new eyes.
What we are seeing to day is AI in its infancy, as is the frugality of human life with climate change.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
In a world where we are supposed to able to communicate, we are so saturated with information and bombarded with advertising we are no longer able to distinguish what is false and what is true.
Truth is usually the opposite to a false statement. Another words in accord with reality or facts.
We have a thing called Social Media which is destroying the very thing it claims to be – Social.
Far from bringing people together it’s is driving them apart with artificial predictive data gathering turning us into products.
Consider the risks.
While world leaders sit around a table passing worthless resolutions.
Exploding pagers /mobile phones with fake news becoming a major propaganda tool to launch cyber attacks.
To contaminate the air or water with drones.
It’s now or never we hold the owners of Algorithms to total transparency and legal responsibility.
It’s now or never we stop all wars and concentrate our collective actions to stop climate change.
It’s now or never we start to legislate for a transfer into living alongside non biological life forms.
It’s now or never that we learn that time it’s self is not just a forwarding of now but encompassed the past and the future all together in space time.
It’s now or never we ensure that all AI recognise our collective human values.
It’s now or never we put genuine value on all life.
It’s now or never Democracy cleanse its self up with long term solutions to world hunger/ poverty/ insecurity/ inequality/ racism/ living wage/ sustainable.
It’s now or never.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
You would think by now we would have figured it out that we have created fantastic amounts of waste and pollution to produce things that we don’t ( and often can’t) use again.
Ecosystem survive and are sustainable because they circulate and re-use energy and materials.
However modern industry which is now using technologies requiring vast amounts of energy continues to rely mostly on the one-way street of resource extraction and depletion.
This combination obviously can’t continue indefinitely. In the face of the staggering amount of power we are allowing massive data storage for algorithms, businesses and governments must learn from ecosystems the concept of up- cycling.
Take the humble honey bee for example.
Time had forgotten the power of the honey Bee.
The honey bee most definitely had what archaeologists call magico – religious significance for many ancient civilisations.
Honey is referred to in most religions books. Indeed it was prescribed as a medicine back in the days of Egyptian, Alexander the Great, Sparta, King Heron, Neto’s wife. Aristotle, the Roman Empire, the Chinese civilisation. India , the Americas , the Aztecs, the Dark Ages, in fact without the honey bee we would not exist.
Honey now seems with the arrival of antibiotics to be relegated to something we put on toast. When it was an antibiotic away back in 1892 it was not taken for granted.
To day New Zealand has a particular variety of honey that kills bacteria the sort bacteria that causes so much woe. But for some reason the country does not promote its production.
The Pohutukawa tree or Christmas Tree quintessential Kiwi produces a honey
The Manuka a bushy tree produces a honey called tea – tree honey .
On the other hand if we allow technology to develop exclusively with in the capitalist world we will have a world more divided with inequalities at its heart and than ever before,
If we are lucky we will have a digital global order.
There is no pause button on these technologies it’s now or never that we harness them to sustainably human values.
There is no simple way back, if there is indeed any way at all .
The Beady eye has for some considerable time been warning if we don’t have totally transparent and accountability we will just become products.
It is beyond comprehension that we have become so docile in giving up information for these self learning algorithms to plunder the the world for short term profit it seems we don’t give a fuck about the future of the planet.
To put this in perspective just take a moment to look at the planet that you’re most likely to live the rest of your life on.
Just under 5 billion years old. Hanging in space, surrounded by satellites spinning at 1600 km, travelling at 107,000km around the sun, it has and is presently supported billions of us, on smartphones, plus all known species that ever existed.
In return we its guard have plundered its finite resources, polluted its atmosphere, seas and rivers and lakes, destroyed its natural forests, covered it in billions of tons of concrete, tarmac, all for short term profit.
In response we are just beginning to reap the rewards of Climate Change, that no tech is going to stop.
Resulting in mass migration, inevitable wars, social upheavals etc you would think that we by now understand what is at stake.
For example: This year thousands have braved crossing the Darien gap in Panama to get to the USA, not to mention the Mediterranean , or the English Channel.
Look at Bangladesh under water. The question becomes why do we do nothing? This is a war on every sense of the word and we must win it.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chuck in the bin.
The truth takes into consideration feelings and beliefs, whereas they have no place in fact.
A fact is something that is true everywhere and for everyone.
Facts do not change according to region, caste, culture, religion, etc.
That is not to say that facts from the past have been overturned and proven to be false and that some facts from today will be proven false tomorrow- History is written by the Victor. We no longer know when a fact is going to be true for eternity.
Some of them will.
Take for example you have to be born to experience death. Currently true.
However, with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence – it appears that not just robots but humans will have both life and death capable of independence, separable from one another.
This is not quite yet a scientific fact” but we could be standing on thin ice.
So what makes a fact a fact?
Facts are hardcore and hence they cannot keep constantly changing; a fact remains a fact until proven otherwise. A fact states something that has actually occurred or happened, but we have no idea what’s outside the visible universe.
A matter of seeing is believing I suppose.
The truth is often considered to have a grander scope than facts.
However, something that is true for one person may not be true for everyone.
Is this true?
With the arrival of the Internet, the world has shrunk but unfortunately, we are all now on different platforms of truth.
For example. Facebook discovered that warning users that an article was false caused people to share that article even more.
It seems that the closer you get to the truth, the further you get from the world.
In other words, while you can get people to understand the facts, the facts don’t always matter.
Unfortunately, we don’t care about the truth as much as we typically think our highly social brains make discerning truth more difficult than we might hope because we often protect our previous beliefs rather than face inconvenient truths.
Why?
It’s because we’re all viscerally connected to truth on a fundamental, physical, and spiritual level. It’s part of who we are and like a virus, we instinctively reject dishonesty.
We learn to put on a mask (personality), to present an acceptable display, and hopefully, nobody will see the truth. That process spreads to other aspects of our lives, many times unknowingly.
To think about the future, you have to know about the present
– Prof. Hans Rosling, TEDtalks 2014
My understanding, in a nutshell, is that a hypothesis gets upgraded to a theory (closest you can get to fact) not possibly by chance occurrence. This is evidence that it is true, and will remain true until (if it ever happens) new evidence that disproves it comes to light.
Valid does not equate to true.
Sometimes theories are inducible and then prove by deduction,i.e gravity.
So why do we argue so much when facts about contentious topics are readily available?
If the data are gathered, shouldn’t we all be reaching the same conclusions?
Obviously not.
Presenting people with information about an issue in a nuanced way, rather than presenting them with pro-con arguments laid out in a simplified manner, leads people to have more complex and satisfying conversations about contentious issues.
True.
But our ears are dull of hearing, and our eyes have closed thanks to algorithms that control what we hear or see. They warp our perception of reality and reasoning by creating social media echo chambers.
We can share our worldview like never before, yet we often feel worlds apart when assessing our shared reality. Social media typically does not promote positive interactions.
Complacency lures in the comfort of our smartphones or our living room couch and sadly, we’re always the first victims of our lies because we have to believe them first before we can convince others to do so.
The result is that the difference between fact, truth, and opinion becomes blurred.
What can be changed?
Any sane person, regardless of nationality, color, or political stance, would aim for the first – truth and facts.
So why don’t we just get indisputable facts on the table?
Reaching the correct answer required participants to think carefully about the data.
We often reason with desired conclusions in mind and selectively recruit our mental faculties towards reaching those conclusions.
However if the people most capable of accurately interpreting data are at least as biased as the rest of us, how can we hope to find common ground on our most pressing and divisive issues?
Climate Change – Inequality, Covid-19, you name it. It’s hard to find the truth because there is so much falsehood out there making so much noise that the truth gets drowned out.
Everyone wants to be right, but practically speaking it’s usually more important for us to be socially accepted and internally consistent in our beliefs.
To divert from this human automation, we have to make a deliberate choice.
We have to actively decide to put on the brighter light and accept that doing so will sometimes help us in the longer run. Until we find systematic ways to improve our reasoning, we can all take steps towards improving political discourse by making efforts to challenge our personal beliefs and biases. Our values are more meaningful than their political utility, so if you stumble into a heated debate remember that the search for community, happiness, and truth transcends partisan boundaries.
Without being honest with ourselves we’ll never be honest with others.
Living in our own little world of self-created lies and avoiding the truth of our life experience takes great energy-producing even greater amounts of stress.
The first lie is the one we tell ourselves. It’s usually, “It didn’t happen” or “It didn’t happen like that.”
Sometimes it’s hard to find the truth because for too many people nowadays truth does not matter, only power. Donald Trump.
We have a natural instinct to search for answers and make sense of things.
These phenomena can be described by many different words
Ondinnink, Qualunquismo, Zlatwic,
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, 2nd President of the United States of America
Life is making mistakes and that’s the truth.
Here is what Alex Google might tell you.
Something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
Something is known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
Truth is known by actual experience or observation; something is known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
Something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
Law. Often, facts. An actual or alleged event or circumstance, as distinguished from its legal effect or consequence. Compare the question of fact, the question of law.
Truth, on the other hand, is a true state of a certain matter, person, place, thing or event. Truth is considered to be more archaic than fact. It is more subjective than resolute fact. Dictionary.com defines ‘truth’ as:
The true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
Conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
A verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
The state or character of being true.
Actuality or actual existence.
An obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
Honesty; integrity; truthfulness.
(Often initial capital letter) ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience: the basic truths of life.
Agreement with a standard or original.
Accuracy, as of position or adjustment.
Archaic. Fidelity or constancy.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
You don’t have to belive but it helps for something to be true.
Our modern society often seems geared towards quick fixes, superficial relationships, material things.
We are bombarded with advertising and social media images but below this superficial level of experience, there are deeper truths.
The problem of determining the truth in current events (and in other areas) when we’re faced with conflicting views from thousands of media and Internet sources seems insurmountable. Does this make sense? Is it likely?
While accepting that no one is going to get everything right all the time without the truth aiming for equality is a recipe for disappointment.
So we enter into our search for truth by asking these vital questions:
Is truth the property of verbal and written language, or is it now visual and as such by-passes the chaotic problem of human perception and interpretation?
Or is truth assumed to exist in an abstract realm of correctly conceived ideas?
Or is the truth the true knowledge of things as they are now, as they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future?
What does it mean to know the truth?
The most valuable asset you can have is trusting but to have trust it must be true?
Pragmatic proofs are paraded daily on TV and Social media which are both promoted by unregulated platforms with unchallenged Fake News making convincing claims to “knowing.”
Truth used to be conceived as a property of accurately stated words or accurately conceived ideas that correctly characterize world realities like the Corna virus outbreak that might turn out to be the modern-day catalyst to defining the truth.
Let’s start with death as it has a way of concreating the mind.
It is undeniable or is it.
We can’t know anything for certain, so the truth is in need of a God.
Without the Ressurection, Christianity would not exist.
We can’t imagine X being simultaneously true and false in the same manner. Another word if something is true, it’s not simultaneously false in the same way.
How to “prove” it.
All truth is empirically or scientifically testable.
There are no eyewitnesses who watched Big Bang so the assumption that something came from nothing is propositional truth. It has been the big question facing humanity since mankind crawled from the primordial ooze – where did the universe come from?
If we consider the hypothetical proposition of the impact of finding life on another planet or it arriving on this planet it will not prove anyone theological system right or wrong, so our confused view of what is true will remain.
For an example of this is.
If by deduction reasoning, verified against observed facts penguins exist.
But put another way, the claim “penguins exist” is itself a penguin.
That said if someone just refuses to acknowledge logic, it ends all rational discourse. You can’t logically prove anything to someone who denies logic.
So deduction depends upon the nature of assumptions.
These assumptions are not applicable universally because the premises from which they are deduced may not hold good at all time and places.
There is a part of the world that we can’t see.
Quantium Maths is a realm of reality that doesn’t consist of material things but of non-material forms. Quantum physics brings us a new kind of reality, provides us with direct suggestions of how we can live in accordance with the numinous realm of the universe.
But the meaning and purpose of our nature are anchored in the numinous realm of reality, not virtual reality. We usually take our thinking for granted, and the thoughts in our mind tell us a lot of things, but they say nothing about where they are coming from!
The word, “consciousness” derives from the Latin, “con” and “sciencia”, and it means a state of “knowing together” what is true and not true.
There is no plural form because there is only one consciousness.
Our concepts of truth evolve in the same way in which our bodies evolve.
For some reason, in our history, worldviews have always been accompanied by threats.
We believe that the evolution of concepts and their understanding is the true function of biological evolution. It is impossible to know, whether we are evolving with the cosmic mind, or whether it is merely our mind that has to evolve to a better understanding of a non-evolving cosmic order.
We are left with verifiable truth taking many paths based on observations which become intellectual toys that the real world may forget in the intellectual gymnastics and mathematical treatment of the observations.
The principle of noncontradiction cannot be established scientifically only by a witness.
Once you concede that *an* absolute truth exists, a whole slew of truth statements come with it:
It can’t be absolutely true since that would create a contradiction:
So if you remove all religious beliefs it is very easy subconsciously to absorb the truth.
An ascending process” in which facts are collected, arranged and then general conclusions are drawn in which we arrive at a generalisation on the basis of particular observed facts. This process is realistic because it is based on facts and explains to them as they actually are. But it can only show that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the known facts.
In reality, the collection of data is not illuminating unless it is related to a hypothesis.
Either because it is committed to religion being false (e.g., they want to live a sinful lifestyle, so they need to convince themselves that God isn’t real, or at least, worth obeying), or because they’re too proud to admit defeat, or because they’re not really that interested in investigating the issue deeply, or simply because they don’t see things the same way that you do.
The narrower the problem on the basis of logical reasoning the truer it becomes verified by observation.
The penguin stands verified. It does not need a witness or scientifically proven.
But truth relies on the axiom that things are either true or false: things that are false cannot be true, and things that are true cannot be false.
There exists absolute and knowable truth, outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and not subject to empirical and scientific testing.
All scientific knowledge is built upon a bed of metaphysical propositions that cannot be established scientifically. Where experiment is practically impossible, abstraction and analysis afford the only means of escape from those which complicate the problem so much.
So many people hold wrong opinions simply because they’ve never thought deeply on the subject. And our culture is absolutely toxic with wrongheaded philosophical and religious views and now false news.
I won’t say you are wrong if you won’t say I am. The argument depends totally on the rules of the logic game. Unfortunately because of Social media, our intellects are falling.
We established the truth of the claim by the witness and not those who hide behind logically incoherent arguments removing themselves from the field of logical discussion.
The only thing to do (I presume) is to attempt to lure them back by showing that they’ve transgressed logic and are simply appealing to emotion?
Assuming that the public square should be devoid of religion; assuming that faith is irrational; etc. “Absolute truth exists” is absolutely true.
On the other hand, no one can know anything for certain, is sceptic’s absurdity.
This statement is a broad (self-refuting) metaphysical and epistemological claim.
To achieve a trusted world it requires a compromise of the cultures.
At this point in our analysis, we might ask:
Does it all matter? Why should we care?
Our answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living in accordance with it.
This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life. Denying the transcendent aspects of our nature can lead to serious problems for our physical health and spiritual well being.
The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or someone may claim the right to tell it for you.
Our task isn’t the task of slaves to technology, who have to serve their creator.
“If Materialism is false”, writes Imants Baruss “then what is true?”
What is true these days is that we economizing it.
Let people believe what they want, as long as those beliefs aren’t leading to hurtful or unlawful actions.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.
A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.
Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?
As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.
We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger, etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.
The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.
The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.
It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.
As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.
For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.
People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.
So what is happening?
History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.” is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.
The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.
“Social media.”
Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.
Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.
We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.
Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.
A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.
So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.
People gravitating to people who are like them.
Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.
It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.
We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.
So we are living in a post-truth world” true?
If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.
But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.
If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?
We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.
We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.
That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.
This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.
We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.
Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.
So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.
Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.
“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.
Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?
Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.
While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.
The powers of inference for example.
Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.
Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.
THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.
Why is the truth important?
We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.
Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.
Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.
Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.
When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.
Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.
In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?
The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.
“Life before Google.”
Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.
From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters, the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.
Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.
To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.
Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?
The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.
The truth of history constitutes its whole value.
Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
bobdillon33blog 