
Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder - kaisix
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misinformation-has-created-a-new-world-disorder/
======
Mikeb85
It's not as though the mainstream press are blameless. Maybe they wouldn't
have lost their position if they weren't blatantly peddling propaganda. In
places like the UK and Canada, the top news agencies are literally government
owned. CNN is hilariously biased. Western news outlets have been caught time
and time again misleading people.

Alternative news sources are far from perfect as well, but in an age where
everyone is trying to mislead, it forces people who want to be informed to
actually take in events from multiple outlets and try to discern where truth
lies for themselves. Maybe it's my Slavic upbringing, but I was taught to be
sceptical of everyone and everything.

Also, information can't be weaponized cheaply. If one side has access to it,
so does the other. They counteract each other. In the end, people still have
to discern news for themselves.

Finally, it's quite hilarious to hear news outlets trying to convince us that
today we're misinformed, and if only we do a few things to 'fix' the system,
we can get to a point where they're our only source of news again.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Do you have any solutions? It’s clearly evident that most of the public wants
and pays for sensationalism and bias rather than facts, hence as a business,
it’s not viable to provide objective truths.

It’s easy to blame “the media”. It’s harder to look at ourselves, relatives,
friends, neighbors, and community and say we haven’t really done anything to
incentivize good sources of information to exist.

We pay nothing for quality journalism and expect everything. I’m actually
impressed with what we do have at least for now.

~~~
Mikeb85
I'm not sure there is a 'solution' per se. I'm not even 100% convinced any of
this is a problem. If we allow a single outlet to become our filter for what's
true and false, then they wield too much power over us and history shows at
some point in time they will exploit it.

If someone wants to be informed, I'd say go out into the world, talk to people
and experience things, but even that has its limits (one person can only see
so much). You can take in many different sources and try to filter out the
noise, but that takes a lot of time. I try to be informed on topics that
matter to me but I'll gladly admit that some topics simply don't matter to me
so I don't put in the effort.

In the end, maybe this _is_ the inevitable result of our system. It's far from
perfect but I still think it's better than some alternatives.

~~~
magicsmoke
It seems like the issue is that it takes a lot of time and effort to be
informed enough on any topic to make a good decision on it, and people are
limited on how many topics they can be reasonably informed about. However, we
have an expectation that people should take a stance on any particular event
happening in the world when asked for their opinion. The default answer to
such a question shouldn't be yes or know, but I don't know, and there
shouldn't be any shame attached to not knowing because no one can know
everything.

Also, another part of the problem might be how news media implies that by
consuming their publications in a few minutes you can be just as informed as
the expert who has been studying a topic for years, and how they overinflate
people's confidence in what little they know.

~~~
xtiansimon
> ‘...you can be just as informed as the expert who has been studying a topic
> for years...’

Reminded me of the BREXIT vote.

~~~
scruple
Reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

------
mirimir
Back in the early 90s, I was very optimistic about the potential for Internet-
mediated "citizen journalism" to counter misinformation delivered by the mass
media.

I was such a bloody idealist. The distinction between democratic populism and
mob violence is iffy in practice.

------
growlist
Not a single example of leftist/liberal misinformation in the piece. Either
the left are as pure and innocent as a newborn kitten, or this article is
itself misinformation.

~~~
kuzehanka
I'll tell you something interesting.

Yesterday a replicated version of GPT2 was published to the wild[1]. I've been
playing with the model quite a bit since then and found something unexpected.

If you give it a right-wing US politics prompt, it performs so well that most
of the output could pass for a coherent human without any editing. An example
prompt would be

> The only way to save America is to vote for Donald trump. The democrats have
> failed us

If you give it an inverse left-wing variant of the same prompt, it mostly
returns incoherent output and sometimes actually flips back to the right-wing
narrative. An example would be

> The only way to save America is to impeach Trump. The republicans have
> failed us

How well this model performs depends on how much training data it had access
to. And this model was mostly trained on Reddit comments. So even this early
on, OpenGPT is clearly highlighting biases in Reddit comments. Reddit is
traditionally known as the bastion of the left, so the fact that OpenGPT is
much more effective at generating right-wing propaganda is indicative of
something. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess what.

[1] [https://medium.com/@vanya_cohen/opengpt-2-we-replicated-
gpt-...](https://medium.com/@vanya_cohen/opengpt-2-we-replicated-
gpt-2-because-you-can-too-45e34e6d36dc)

~~~
deogeo
It could simply be a consequence of the poor inversion - I don't recall seeing
many left-wing news that start with "How to save America". You're effectively
giving it conflicting input.

~~~
kuzehanka
You're welcome to propose a better _inversion_ and I'll check the output and
report back.

It does need to be an inversion though, not a complete change of prompt.

It's a general theme with this model though. When you try to get it to do
left-wing propaganda, it has a tendency to flip back to right-wing because of
the bias in the training data.

~~~
deogeo
But the difference between left and right-wing stories _is_ a complete change
of prompt. By requiring an inversion, you're basically requiring a malformed
prompt. Which is moot anyway because:

> Reddit is traditionally known as the bastion of the left, so the fact that
> OpenGPT is much more effective at generating right-wing propaganda is
> indicative of something. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess
> what.

There are _so_ many ways to interpret this: 1) Reddit may not be such a
bastion of the left as you think (several posters claimed so here) 2) Just
because a story is right-wing doesn't make it propaganda. 3) Reddit _could_ be
a left-wing bastion, and _therefore_ share right-wing propaganda to mock it or
hate on it. Just like right-wing sites like to highlight all those "Dear White
People: Please Stop" stories by Salon et. al.

~~~
kuzehanka
I'm sorry you said the inversion is poor so I assumed you had a better one in
mind.

Please, give me a pair of left/right wing variants of the same general concept
that you think are not 'poor' and lets have a look at what that yields.

Otherwise stop saying the inversion is poor or malformed.

~~~
pjc50
The questions in
[http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors?surveyid=175...](http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors?surveyid=1753513807)
might make a good start, with the addition/removal of "not". Although I'm not
convinced that word-handling AI handles "not" correctly.

------
carapace
Fidelity to reality.

I think that Wendell Berry's "Standing by Words" is relevant

> In his keynote essay, Berry argues that “we have seen, for perhaps a hundred
> and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless
> or destructive of meaning.” Furthermore, he continues, “this increasing
> unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the
> same period, of persons and communities.”

~[https://www.enotes.com/topics/standing-by-
words](https://www.enotes.com/topics/standing-by-words)

Mom talks about how TVs weren't even a thing when she was a girl. She
remembers seeing the first one in the store. Back then they only broadcast for
a few hours in the evenings.

Now you can't ride a bus without someone watching TV on their phone.

Nothing on those screens is real. Not even HD surround sound Nature shows are
actually real. We are living in a hyper-mediated world.

Align yourself with reality, it's _nice_ out here.

~~~
xtiansimon
Hmm. In the world you envision I see lower employment because there’s just
less work.

Hard to infinity divide and recombine labor in the ‘real world’ of butchers,
bakers, construction, grocery stores, mechanics, retail, bus drivers.

Whereas movies, television, streaming, toys, video game tie-ins need a lot of
busy people.

I see much more work in software and hardware and security and seo and
e-commerce and recommendation engines and social media.

Not to mention JavaScript, Go, Rust, Python, agile-long live agile; down with
agile.

Haha. You had me going for a minute.

------
chris5745
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own
government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice,
they may be relied on to set them to rights.” -Thomas Jefferson

Everyone seems to talk a lot about governments, but at some point we may need
to explore whether being informed about non-government entities may be just as
important in this context.

I would argue that being informed about government is important for preserving
a democracy, and being informed about industry is important for preserving a
free market. Information inequality threatens the integrity of any system that
relies on a group to make decisions, whether it’s a town hall meeting or a
shareholder event. By the vote or by the dollar. It creates inefficiencies
that are exploited by the information-wealthy.

As regrettable as it is to think this way, I am not sure there is a
technological solution to the problem of misinformation. In the very near
future we may only want to connect to the internet for entertainment,
irrespective of truth. Critical thinking will still be alive, but anyone who
engages in it truthfully will probably limit their thoughts to people, things,
and events in their immediate surroundings.

Later, when we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll have another chance to be
honest with each other.

------
hos234
This is a good list of different type of issues being produced.

I think there is a need of tracking it the same way we track software bugs. I
thought Tristan Harris's Ledger of Harm's was a good attempt. Looks like this
author is doing a similar thing. Should all be merged into some kind master
list that software architects can stay aware of.

The idea of a "9/11" Test, getting software devs to think about how their
tools and features will be used during a 9/11 type event is a good suggestion.

I had a boss once who would ask the team, 'how would the most shadiest
character you personally know, use this proposed feature?'.

~~~
Theizestooke
> I had a boss once who would ask the team, 'how would the most shadiest
> character you personally know, use this proposed feature?'.

I mean society is based on trust and faith, with that kind of reasoning you'll
only come up with the most paranoical and authoritarian design schemes.

~~~
pfisch
Human's always game every system we ever develop. It is reasonable to
recognize this when you design systems.

I have a f2p game and it is unbelievable how clever some of the free players
are at figuring out ways to get everything for free.

~~~
deogeo
> unbelievable how clever some of the free players are

You have my curiosity.

