[roenxi]

I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all - they care about being part of a group and that is where it ends. It shows up in things like critical thinking being a difficult skill acquired slowly vs social proof which humans just do by reflex. Makes a lot of sense, if there are 10 of us and 1 of you it doesn't matter how smartypants you may be when the mob forms.

AI does indeed threaten people's ability to identify whether they are reading work by a high status human and what the group consensus is - and that is a real problem for most people. But it has no bearing on how correct information was in the past vs will be in the future. Groups are smart but they get a lot of stuff wrong in strategic ways (it is almost a truism that no group ever identifies itself or its pursuit of its own interests as the problem).

[Jensson]

> I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all

Plenty of people care about the truth in order to get advantages over the ignorant. Beliefs aren't just about fitting in a group, they are about getting advantages and making your life better, if you know the truth you can make much better decisions than those who are ignorant.

Similarly plenty of people try to hide the truth in order to keep people ignorant so they can be exploited.

[rendall]

> if you know the truth you can make much better decisions than those who are ignorant

There are some fallacious hidden assumptions there. One is that "knowing the truth" equates to better life outcomes. I'd argue that history shows more often than not that what one knows to be true best align with prevailing consensus if comfort, prosperity and peace is one's goal, even if that consensus is flat out wrong. The list is long of lone geniuses who challenged the consensus and suffered. Galileo, Turing, Einstein, Mendel, van Gogh, Darwin, Lovelace, Boltzmann, Gödel, Faraday, Kant, Poe, Thoreau, Bohr, Tesla, Kepler, Copernicus, et. al. all suffered isolation and marginalization of some degree during their lifetimes, some unrecognized until after their death, many living in poverty, many actively tormented. I can't see how Turing, for instance, had a better life than the ignorant who persecuted him despite his excellent grasp of truth.

[Jensson]

You are thinking too big, most of the time the truth is whether a piece of food is spoiled or not etc, and that greatly affects your quality of life. Companies would love to keep you ignorant here so they can sell you literal shit, so there are powerful forces wanting to keep you ignorant, and today those powerful forces has way stronger tools than ever before working to keep you ignorant.

[roenxi]

Socrates is also a big name. Never forget.

[danmaz74]

You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.

When dealing with almost everything you do day by day, you have to rely on the credibility of the source of the information you have. Otherwise how could you know that the can of tuna you're going to eat is actually tuna and not some venomous fish? How do you know that you should do what your doctor told you? Etc. etc.

[svieira]

> You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.

But isn't your third sentence True?

[danmaz74]

I don't know it to be True, but I know it to be useful :)

[svieira]

I am not sure I am following - you don't know if there is anything that is really true, but you presume there isn't and that model of "the only truth is the absence of truth" is useful to you because it allows you to ... what exactly?