[AmericanChopper]

The way I see it LLMs are just making it more obvious to see all the flaws with the existing levels of trust. Humans have never had access to universal truths, or universal ways of validating anything. Any claim anybody makes could be intentionally or unintentionally deceitful or untrue. The idea that there are sources you can trust to do your thinking for you is the more dangerous illusion in my opinion, and I’m not convinced that society will be harmed by poking some holes through it.

[tsimionescu]

> The idea that there are sources you can trust to do your thinking for you is the more dangerous illusion in my opinion, and I’m not convinced that society will be harmed by poking some holes through it

There is no alternative to this idea. It is completely impossible for an individual to possess all of the knowledge of everything that affects their lives. The only option for getting some of this information is going to trusted sources that compile it and present some conclusions.

This applies just as much to scientific knowledge as it does to medicine or to politics.

If you want to avoid trusting any authority, it's hard to even confirm that North Korea exists. Confirming that it is ruled by an authoritarian regime and that it possesses nuclear weapons is impossible. And yet it's a trivial bit of info that everyone agrees on - imagine what avoiding trusted authorities would do to knowledge about other more subtle or more controversial topics.

[AmericanChopper]

> There is no alternative to this idea.

I said do your thinking for you, not do your information gathering for you.

I would suggest that you do not trust any single source to only ever tell you things that are true. If there’s a topic you want to know something about it’s a much better course of action to look at multiple different sources, and do your own thinking to come to your own conclusions.

There are no authorities who can reliably take on this role for you, and LLMs don’t change this. The same is true with science. Even prior to LLMs, the replication crisis should have shown that a single paper on any topic can’t be relied on to contain any truth (the same would be true even in the absence of a replication crisis for that matter).

[tsimionescu]

Oh, then I misunderstood. I thought you were against the notion of trusting a source for information, at all.

I very much agree with your actual point - that no source should be trusted absolutely, and that the only way to get a decent-to-solid idea on a topic is to consume multiple sources on that topic.

However, the problem is that even then people have relatively little time. It's important to have sources that one can rely on to be relatively accurate with a high probability, to get some vague idea about a topic you're not deeply invested in, but do care about somewhat. And I think this is where LLMs can hurt the most.

[consteval]

> The idea that there are sources you can trust to do your thinking for you is the more dangerous illusion in my opinion

The difference between economically successful countries like the US and the peripheral countries is we are a high-trust society.

I don't spend 100 hours chemically testing my food because I have faith it is safe to eat. I don't waste money on scam after scam because I have faith most businesses are legitimate. If I'm a business, I can order stuff and more stuff and I trust the spec.

Our outsourcing of that trust to other people is what makes us economically successful.

Other countries which don't have this trust focus on basic tasks. Gathering food, water, shelter, and basic infrastructure. Because ultimately every man is out for himself. They aren't building software and airplanes and whatnot. Because as complexity increases, the more people are involved and therefore the most trust is required. Trust is required because of the fundamental limitations of human meat space - we have limited time and survival needs.