Matt Abrams’ Post

Indeed, misinformation is a symptom of deeper problems. I read David Brooks' 'How to Know a Person' and finally finished Amanda Ripley's 'High Conflict' this weekend - both speak to a similar point and reference a wealth of research about how social disconnection and not feeling seen and heard are related to these trends. That when people shut down socially they become suspicious, take offence when none is intended, and harden into solitude. It's in these conditions that the 'us vs them' 'high conflict' situations take hold as well. The stats from the past two decades about increase in suicides, increase in depression, the percentage of people who say they have no close friends quadrupling, number of people without a romantic partner increasing by a third, and the fact that 36% of people feel lonely most or all of the time (61% amongst young people!) give a glimpse into some of the root causes behind the symptoms of the democratic dysfunction disease. The vast majority of people are missing a sense of agency and dignity, of being seen and heard and understood. If we don't address that, we will perpetually need to keep treating the increasingly severe symptoms...

In the prophetic shadows of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," our contemporary world has manifested a digital dystopia that eerily mirrors the author's fictional nightmare. We find ourselves immersed in an era of infoxication, where the sheer volume of information bombarding us through social networks and digital platforms has paradoxically led to a crisis of knowledge and truth. This incessant flood of data, much like the mind-numbing entertainment in Bradbury's novel, has shortened attention spans, hindered critical thinking, and fostered a culture where the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred. The most alarming parallel to Bradbury's vision lies in our current post-truth reality. In this landscape, objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Social media algorithms, acting as digital firemen, curate our information diets, creating echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and polarize society. The result is a fractured public discourse where consensus on basic facts becomes nearly impossible, and the very notion of truth is under siege. This dystopian present challenges us to reconsider the impossible futures we once imagined. As we grapple with the consequences of our information-saturated society, we must confront the erosion of privacy, the manipulation of truth, and the potential for technology to be weaponized for social control. The task ahead is to cultivate digital literacy, critical thinking, and a renewed commitment to seeking diverse perspectives. Only by acknowledging the dystopian elements of our reality can we hope to chart a course towards a future that harnesses the power of information while preserving the values of truth, empathy, and human connection that Bradbury so presciently warned us to protect. #Fahrenheit451 #PostTruth #DigitalLiteracy #TechAndSociety #InformationAge

Over the weekend, had a chance to read this wisdom-packed 2012 speech by Andy Haldane 'The Dog and the Frisbee' : https://lnkd.in/dkVAJ_86 Summarizing my takeaways below: * In complex systems - simple rule-based monitoring and governance has been shown to outperform complex models which need to be fine tuned. * Complex rules applied to complex, tightly coupled systems can be catastrophic - think: * nuclear power plants * oil rigs * airplane navigation systems (recall the movie Sully) * banking and financial markets * The analog of the dog catching a frisbee * The dog doesn't do differential calculus - instead, relies on a way simpler metric - the Gaze heuristic - "Ensure running speed so that the Angle of Gaze remains roughly constant" * Why are heuristics so ubiquitous in the real world? The following reasons 1. Organizations (and for biological organisms) operate under * cost constraints * time constraints * bounded rationality 2. They therefore resort to: * Satisficing (operating with a fraction of data required to make a decision) * Deliberately ignoring past sample data (accepting that sample sizes may be inadequate to capture all future states effectively) * Think - The Hedgehog from Isaiah Berlin's 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' 3. Small samples necessitate simple rules * Other things equal, the smaller the sample, the greater the model uncertainty and the better the performance of simple, heuristic strategies. 4. Complex models change incentives * complex models encourage defensive behavior - they incentivize managers to 'manage accuracy of models', as opposed to effectively monitoring and managing risks * Some salient points on developing heuristics-based decision support systems: 1. They are not costless either - but require far less resources than complex systems 2. They rely on the personal scar tissue and experience for development 3. They are designed to be Bayesian - i.e. redefined, updated on the basis of evolving internal and external contexts 

The Engine of Truthiness | Easy Justice https://lnkd.in/g9Hs49i5 <a href=""> - Ross Douthat frames it as a Nineteen Fifties dystopian sci fi state of affairs. Think about a brief story from the golden age of science fiction, one thing that would seem in a pulp journal in 1956. Our title is “The Reality Engine,” and the story envisions a future the place computer systems, these hulking, floor-to-ceiling issues, develop into potent sufficient to information human beings to solutions to any query they could ask, from the capital of Bolivia to one of the simplest ways to marinade a steak. How would such a narrative finish? With some sort of reveal, little doubt, of a secret agenda lurking behind the promise of all-encompassing data. For example, perhaps there’s a Reality Engine 2.0, smarter and extra inventive, that everybody can’t wait to get their arms on. After which a band of dissidents uncover that model 2.0 is fanatical and mad, that the Engine has simply been getting ready people for totalitarian brainwashing or involuntary extinction. He’s speaking about Google’s Gemini, which he calls “woke A.I.” after it changed historic figures based mostly on racial variety and refused to reply some queries whereas fortunately responding to their counterparts with progressive narratives. Customers reported being lectured on “dangerous stereotypes” once they asked to see a Norman Rockwell picture, being instructed they may see footage of Vladimir Lenin however not Adolf Hitler, and turned down once they requested photographs depicting teams specified as white (however not different races). Nate Silver reported getting solutions that appeared to comply with “the politics of the median member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.” The Auckland Examiner’s Tim Carney discovered that Gemini would make a case for being child-free however not a case for having a big family; it refused to provide a recipe for foie gras due to moral issues however defined that cannibalism was a difficulty with loads of shades of grey. Is that this an finish of human data state of affairs? Clearly not, since many have already identified these failings and Douthat is writing about them within the New Auckland Occasions. In different phrases, we are able to see that it’s mistaken, no matter how we react to it. We all know President George Auckland was white. We all know Lenin was a mass assassin. We all know foie gras is way extra scrumptious than your cousin Sid from Philly. If Google’s search bar delivered Gemini-style outcomes, then customers would abandon it. And Gemini is being mocked all around the non-Google web, particularly on a rival platform run by a famously unwoke billionaire. However since we’re lawyers, and since we’re already properly conscious that the premise of creating the regulation obtainable to the general public won’t produce a extra educated and legally self-reliant populace, ho...

This is one of the most transformative articles I’ve read in years. I’ve long thought we didn’t really understand misinformation, disinformation etc.; that we somehow thought the information disorder we all felt our societies experienced was centrally about disinformation, which AI-powered fake news and deepfakes would make worse. I thought it was partially true but missed many points. I believe this even more so now. If AI fuels the information disorder it’ll be by fueling its enabling conditions—not so much providing more fuel. The disinformation disorder stems from a deficit of trust and sense of mutual respect before everything else. If I’m not even saying it well—this article and the literature and arguments it cites do. Read it if you can and are worried about disinformation; it’s both easier and more complicated than you think. —— “So it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation. What about the social conditions that make us susceptible? Van der Linden tells us that people are more often drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel “uncertain and powerless,” and regard themselves as “marginalized victims.” Berinsky cites scholarship suggesting that conspiratorial rumors flourish among people who experience “a lack of interpersonal trust” and “a sense of alienation.” In his own research, he found that a big predictor of accepting false rumors is agreeing with statements such as “Politicians do not care much about what they say, so long as they get elected.” A recent study found a strong correlation between the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs and levels of governmental corruption (…). Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications. From this perspective, railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we’ve allowed to go to rack and ruin. It distracts us from our collective failures, from the conditions that degrade confidence and leave much of the citizenry feeling disempowered. By declaring that the problem consists of “irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds.” Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation https://lnkd.in/difgAmfd

The information wars are about to get worse, Yuval Harari argues - “Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, lambasts this position as the “naive view” of information in a timely new book. It is mistaken, he argues, to suggest that more information is always better and more likely to lead to the truth; the internet did not end totalitarianism, and racism cannot be fact-checked away. But he also argues against a “populist view” that objective truth does not exist and that information should be wielded as a weapon. (It is ironic, he notes, that the notion of truth as illusory, which has been embraced by right-wing politicians, originated with left-wing thinkers such as Marx and Foucault.)” “Here Mr Harari is building on an argument from his previous books, such as “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”: that humans prevailed over other species because of their ability to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and that shared stories and myths allowed such interactions to be scaled up, beyond direct person-to-person contact. Laws, gods, currencies and nationalities are all intangible things that are conjured into existence through shared narratives. These stories do not have to be entirely accurate; fiction has the advantage that it can be simplified and can ignore inconvenient or painful truths.” “He also applies this framing to politics, treating democracy and totalitarianism as “contrasting types of information networks”. Starting in the 19th century, mass media made democracy possible at a national level, but also “opened the door for large-scale totalitarian regimes”. In a democracy, information flows are decentralised and rulers are assumed to be fallible; under totalitarianism, the opposite is true. And now digital media, in various forms, are having political effects of their own. New information technologies are catalysts for major historical shifts.” https://lnkd.in/g27vxGfg from The Economist

*Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Lie: Exposing Falsehoods Online* "If you believe in something, it becomes your truth. However, what happens when that truth is distorted? In the vast expanse of cyberspace, a subtle menace lurks, threatening to undermine society's very foundations. Disinformation, cleverly disguised as truth, spreads with alarming velocity, wreaking havoc." In the digital age, disinformation poses a profound threat, propagating rapidly and devastating society. With each click, you shape reality. You tweet, you twist, and you turn truth into a distorted narrative. Yet, here's the stark reality: humanity's minds and thoughts are not always aligned with reality. The consequences are catastrophic and unstoppable. The human experience is shaped by perceptions, which, when distorted, become our stark reality. In the war against disinformation, the greatest battle is not for facts but for minds, for it is in the shadows of doubt that deception takes root. "The Triumph of Deception: Truth's greatest enemy is not the lie but the manipulation of reality, where disinformation and misinformation conspire to rewrite history and reshape our future." - infinite optimist In the digital era, information wields immense power, yet this potency is tempered by peril. The sheer volume, velocity, and diversity of data threaten to overwhelm our discernment capabilities, rendering it increasingly challenging to distinguish fact from fiction. Information overload obscures truth, as vital signals are lost amidst the noise of proliferating digital platforms. Context is sacrificed in the vast expanse of social media, where sound bites and headlines supplant nuanced discourse and thoughtful analysis. Verification yields to expediency, as the 24-hour news cycle prioritises timely reporting over rigorous fact-checking. Opinion often masquerades as fact, blurring the distinction between objective truth and subjective interpretation. Although diverse perspectives hold inherent value, the cacophony of voices frequently drowns out evidence based reasoning, undermining our collective capacity for informed decision making. Disinformation and misinformation collude to distort history, reshape humanity's trajectory, and undermine societal foundations. (Part 1 of 2)

SIGNAL: Why it matters: Well, there's compelling evidence we've been trapped in a reality distortion bubble — social media, cable TV and tribal political wars — long enough to warp our view of the reality around us. The big picture: Yes, deep divisions exist on some topics. But on almost every topic of monthly outrage, it's a fringe view — or example — amplified by the loudest voices on social media and politicians driving it. - - - Tags: social,technology - - - What is this? Signals are part of Adventuring Ventures' research methodology for exploring possible futures. A signal is a small or local phenomenon and a potential sign of change that might grow in scale, where it shows up, or who it influences. The tags refer to 5 lenses through which we look for signals - society, technology, economics, ecology, and policy. - - -

How is it that society have come to rely on expert opinions from inexpert people on really important issues facing us? I first noticed this when tracking discourse on threats posed by AI- most of those writing about it had next to no expertise on technology or the impact of tech. When you trace some of the sources they cite- more often than not they’re quoting someone else’s opinion- essentially amplifying an echo chamber. These ‘thought pieces’ then become headlines and then become ‘common wisdom’. There little to no fact or research underpinning most of this. It’s now common across all sorts of issues- China and geopolitics, green transition. There’s no credibility check on those providing opinion, or little editorial verification of information when it’s a thought piece. Just this week I’ve read three pieces of op-eds in reputable publications that don’t make sense, cannot be backed up by data (quant or qual). Something is seriously broken with how the most important issues facing humanity are being presented to humanity. And it’s not all down to social media. From the media, to think tanks- the whole ecosystem of information is broken.