[narrator]

Surprise Plot Twist: Maybe we're already living in a post-truth society and you are still sure you know what the truth is. How would you even know that what you were ferociously defending as the truth wasn't a lie? What makes you think you're not smart enough to not fall for lies?

Largely, I think most people's means of finding the truth is just to take a vote of the information sources they find credible and go with whatever they say. I was talking with some friends about the California propositions a while back. Some of them were not clear cut which way we should vote on them. Instead of discussing the actual issue, people just wanted to know what various authority figures thought. These were not dumb people I was talking to, and I used to remember an era in the 90s maybe where you could actually have a reasoned debate and come to the truth that way. It seems that's obsolete these days since nobody seems to agree on the basic facts about anything.

[cwkoss]

Disinformation is very common in traditional news media. This technology just democratizes this tool and allows anyone to engage in it.

There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.

[corrral]

> There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.

Russia seems to be farther along this path than we are and every account I've read of their experience of disinfo isn't that they got better at seeking the truth, but instead just assume everything's a lie & nothing's trustworthy, and disappear into apathy.

[narrator]

Implementing dropout to avoid overfitting on bad data.