[arkades]

The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts. The Enlightenment imagined rhetoric and persuasion as something like single combat: one man’s reason pitted against another. It didn’t imagine massively resources organizations throwing millions of dollars at studying quirks of human cognition so as to optimize the short-circuiting of reason itself.

I’m a proponent of Enlightenment values, but the bottom line lessons that we derive from those values were derived in a wildly different context. An Enlightenment for the modern day may very well look different than “old school” Enlightenment. It may very well one day shape up to being open-minded about what socioeconomic datasets you let your pet AI graze on, rather than being foolish enough to ingest slogans from all comers.

[QAPereo]

You’re not wrong, but it’s also true that at various times the written word and advances in its production and distribution were seen much the same way. Any new technology which represents a massive improvement in communication is going to radically change society in unpredictable ways. Needless to say, rapid and irreversible change is monstrous to live through especially if you’ve historically enjoyed the advantages of a previous system.

[alien_at_work]

>The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts.

So the solution is to fight those things (with e.g. laws and education), not bring back taboos. How many times must we re-learn the lessons of the past? Censorship is not the path forward and even if you disagree, surely you can understand that, at an absolute minimum, we can't let random noisy members of the internet, or certain specific monopolies make the descision on what ideas can't be thought or expressed.