esterday I saw an article on one website that was so well written I decided
to sign up to give them more money. Unfortunately it turned out I had already
done so a few months earlier and they wouldn't take it.
People have given up on TV, newspapers, and radio. The only radio I listen to these days is air traffic, and even that's annoying: the controller keeps telling people to land on the wrong runway when the pilots clearly prefer a different one. As outrages go, that's at best a two on the Richter scale, but at least it's not manufactured truth, unlike almost everything else.
Sadly, the Internet isn't much good even for basic questions like this. The dream of everyone having a chance to participate in the great debates: What is truth? What is the best runway to land on? Is arithmetic racist? may be coming to a close.
NPR agrees. They're just attacking 'twitter' of course, since it was bought by Elon Musk. But at least they have a sense of humor: the wealthiest nonprofit outside of the Wink popped up a box demanding money while I was trying to read it.
Back in 2018, some guys came up with a wisdom-of-the-crowd tool. They had software that can answer questions like “How can I stop racism?” (Hand up, waving wildly: stop creating it.) Of course in reality it was just a new, sneakier way to feed us propaganda. It sank like a rock.
MIT thought they had a better way: a new algorithm.
For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.
Supposedly they derived this result mathematically, then after testing they claimed it could reduce “errors” by 22 percent. They published it in Nature[1], thereby proving that there is no wisdom in the science literature either.
When it comes to truth, there are three general rules.
If it's important and beneficial to humanity, people don't want it, so you have to make it free. If it's useless, put it behind a paywall. They'll think it must be valuable and you'll get rich.
There is no way, even theoretically, of deciding truth. The closest we have is to test it empirically on the assumption that the world is real and consistent—and that point is fundamentally unknowable.
No software, or "AI" as it's now called for some inscrutable reason, can ever determine what is true.
Anyone who ever signed up for cable TV knows that no matter how much money you send them, sooner or later the ads will come back. People are tired of the junk, the falsehoods, the censorship, and the uncertainty in the Web. They don't want to give money to a website that's clearly headed for bankruptcy. So they're turning to Tik Tok to get their news. Naturally, the government's solution is to ban it.
The Internet was a test to see if “wisdom of the crowds” was a real phenomenon. We now have our answer. You may stop now. As for which runway is best, it was a trick question. Everybody on the Internet agrees the best runway is the one that doesn't have an ocean at the end of it.
[1] Prelec D, Seung HS, McCoy J. A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem. Nature. 2017 Jan 25;541(7638):532-535. doi: 10.1038/nature21054. PMID: 28128245. Link. paywalled.
may 07 2024, 5:27 am
