[uxcolumbo]

I have to read up on the ancient Greeks and the origins of democracy.

And yes agree - banning misinformation isn't the answer.

So what are the solutions - how do make sure propaganda doesn't bubble to the top, but facts and truthful information does - so people can make informed decisions.

How do you avoid people like Trump, i.e. narcissistic self serving people rising to power and subverting democracy.

[krapp]

You can't simply expect truth to win. History shows time and again that a lie can circle the world a hundred times before the truth even gets its shoes on. Misinformation is viral, information is not. Lies are simple, the truth is often complicated. Charismatic con men and charlatans appealing to base emotion, rumors and conspiracy theories often short circuit reason and rationality in ways that a presentation of facts to the contrary can't repair.

If your top priority is ensuring the playing field is always even between truth and lies, and that lies are always given a fair shake, then you're just rigging the game for lies. The truth only wins and holds precedence in an environment where lies can be recognized and fought against, and prevented from manifesting their own reality bubbles.

Banning misinformation alone isn't enough, and yes it can certainly be abused, but it is necessary.

[cf141q5325]

>Banning misinformation alone isn't enough, and yes it can certainly be abused, but it is necessary.

Its impossible. And its one of the most dangerous and insidious ideas out there. To put it quite bluntly, you arent competent enough to determine for other people what is true and what is fake. And neither is anyone else. Its the reason we had informed consent, because without it, idiots thinking to do "the right thing" historically time and time again inflict horrible fates upon those deemed not smart enough to make decisions for themselves.

I understand that you want it to work, or even feel it needs to work, but reality quite simply doesnt give a crap about what anyone feels "should or needs to work".

This might look like a stupid disagreement, but quite frankly, this is the line in the sand towards totalitarian dystopias. If you were competent enough to make that decision, you would be competent enough to explain why something is true or fake. Which in my view leaves either malice or delusion motivating those pushing on regardless.

Thanks to the internet i had the possibility to speak with people holding despicable views, be it nazis or thanks to /r/syriancivilwar even interviews with ISIS supporters. Please really think about the fact that i am still more worried about people with your set of believes.

This is truly dangerous, especially because people tell themselves they do it for the "right reasons". Its what makes it such a horrible trap. Its an easy narrative to fall for and once you are in you left reality in favor of the group narrative. And while other extremist groups use the same mechanisms, this one is a lot more palpable on first view. After all, who would be against no more misinformation? Overlooking the horrible and costly insight of the last 100 years and more that just as running an economy, this isnt a trivial task you can just dictate, even if you really want to. Especially since running the economy would be trivial in comparison.

For the sake of a livable future, please stop before you doom us all.

edit: sorry for the addition 30 minute in

[uxcolumbo]

Not sure you noticed - but your reply is to a new contributor to this discussion.

I agree - we shouldn't ban information, same as not cancelling people into oblivion, e.g. for jokes they made 10 years ago.

But /u/krapp made a valid point... "Misinformation is viral, information is not." ... or it seems to be that way.

There should be consequences for lying and spreading misinformation, esp if you have a large platform and your decisions will impact millions of people.

And my question prior... what do you think can be done to stop people like Trump rise to power - how can this system weed out narcissistic and self-serving people who don't care about progress or improving society. With those people in power long enough, we will eventually have a system where our freedoms will be taken away.

[cf141q5325]

> Not sure you noticed - but your reply is to a new contributor to this discussion.

Yes, i hope you didnt thought this applied to yourself, far from it. I also jumped in a few posts ago on a conversation you had with somebody else.

I also didnt want to imply that missinformation spreading viraly wasnt a problem. Its just not fixable with authoritarian measures and the problem goes far deeper then "just" liberties. The problem is that any attempt to ban the sharing of information means you need a means to accurately determine what is wrong or incomplete information (jumping over the whole problem of miss-/diss/mal-information and true information without context to keep the post short) without the ability to challenge errors. By attempting to ban information you are interfering in your reality finding process. Doing this is extremely dangerous due to the inability to judge implications of errors and such errors being extremely profitable. Its a truly horrible idea, no matter how nice solving the problem of spreading missinformation (while actually being impossible) sounds. Its the patching out of a vital safety check without which you loose your ability to error-correct. As everywhere, without a means to error correct, all the problems such an approach allows for already exist, time just hasnt caught up.

I think this is a vital point people overlook. Its not a moral argument, totalitarianism isnt just horrible, it does not work. Its a process that leads to the creation of errors in thinking, dismantles the means to error correct and breeds corruption. Its groups of idiots moving forward while ignoring the consequences, encouraged by socio/psychopaths profiting off such movements temporarily at the cost of long term problems it creates.

>And my question prior... what do you think can be done to stop people like Trump rise to power

I mentioned it at the end of my first post, i think the solution is as old as time and as with everything technology makes them more solveable. You cant fix stupidity centrally, its a decentralized problem for which a centralized solution would require totalitarian perfection due to loosing the ability to error-correct.

So its down to everyone to have a honest conversation about how stupid they are on individual questions and whether they are emotionally mature enough to have that conversation without becoming cynical. So figuring out where your views are wrong, or incomplete, where you are acting ideologically or are just reacting to a frame. Instead of attempting to get rid of miss-information you focus on figuring out where you can say with a high degree of certainty, and strict requirements for falsifiability what is likely true. So what is non-missinfornation, approximating base-reality from which we then can have meaningful conversations. Since we make the effort to communicate, we clearly decided on cooperation instead of conflict. So lets work on making that more productive, after all there is a core question here. Are you actually interested in being right or do you just take pleasure from feeling right? If its the later, know that reality is a bitch that will win every time over your feelings. Clinging on regardless is how being stupid looks from the perspective of a stupid person. Which we all are sometimes. Which cognitive biases trick us into ignoring or brushing aside.

I think this is a task where tooling can help and where we can give a hand to other people in the process. Talk to people meaningfully, think steelmening instead of strawmaning. You might be missing a perspective somebody else overcorrected for. Almost none of the issues are one dimensional, its all spectrums you cant overcorrect on without being just as wrong as before. Understand how people came to a conclusion and show up errors instead of regurgitating your own views. As this is obviously difficult (take this from the experience of a seasoned idiot) its clear why we havent "solved" it yet. But i believe it is something technology can help us with. And cooperative decentralized solutions are still a lot more solvable then the insane idea of trying to dictate reality.

It would also help with the old star trek question of where technology will move towards. Will we manage to create a world in which technologies are useful tools or are we headed for becoming clogs in a malfunctioning machine we dont understand and cant control?

This problem is hard to fix because everyone believes they themselves are not an idiot, everyone else is. Thats an error caused by cognitive biases. But one were we can help each other and develop tooling to achieve better results all around. I suspect there will be massive payoffs once we just agree on trying to be less stupid and meaning well, even just for the benefit of a less shit future for yourself.

[uxcolumbo]

> Are you actually interested in being right or do you just take pleasure from feeling right?

Yes great point. I have experienced this myself in the past and it takes effort not to do this.

> Since we make the effort to communicate, we clearly decided on cooperation instead of conflict.

Yes - I think our first exchange seemed to veer slightly towards conflict (for me anyway), but then it took a turn to a more shared understanding.

> So it's down to everyone to have a honest conversation about how stupid they are on individual questions

Yes agree. Stupidity is dangerous [0] and we need to be better equipped to detect our own stupidity and then self-correct.

That's why I think 2 key things for avoiding spiraling into tyrannical systems are a) fight poverty b) better education systems that teaches more about critical thinking and to recognise the tactics self-serving people use to gain power. Easier said than done of course.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, which were insightful for my ongoing journey to study this topic. Two resources next on my list are:

1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_...

2) https://www.greecepodcast.com/plato-republic-civil-war/

[0] https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/

[cf141q5325]

Thanks for the resources, especially the Bonhoeffer theory and the nice feedback. I do appreciate it. I can also only return the favor, being able to come to an agreement on such points is really good news and i found this quite beneficial as well. The difficulty of it (conflict in speech is just so much more easy and fun) is why i have so high hopes for technology. Because you wont just help with understanding but being more easy to understand. Which means getting more control about how you frame stuff without just trying to influence your conversation partner. I am not so optimistic about education beyond a base level though, getting a grip of framing stuff, and not just reacting immediately, is just very difficult no matter how much you meditate, at least for idiots like myself. Schmachtenberger [0] is proposing that same approach with the stuff around "rule omega", but as you can take from the close to 10 hours of videos and not making much visible progress since, you are kind of trying to build a new non-stupid human. (Not tryint to downplay that approach would be great if it worked and its a really nice idea. I might be overly cynical here).

When it comes to possible solutions, cooperative minimum is key imho. Which likely means the solution cant be aimed at gaining political influence or monetary benefits. Because people react to such attempts of influence as well. And as with every tool, there will be attempts of weaponization. Which gets us to conflict again, which makes the experience everywhere more shit. So keeping Goethe Zauberlehrling in mind is rather important.

In case anyone is wondering about the poverty point, its so people get the option to not have to react under dire pressure for once. Because thinking about stuff like this is quite simply a luxury if you have to worry about where the next meal for you and your family is going to come from. Less anxious people are more willing to cooperate.

[0] Sensemaking and its problems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ