
On Informed Complacency and the Potential Decline of Curiosity - fern12
https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/03/13/on-informed-complacency-and-the-potential-decline-of-curiosity/
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iamcasen
I've always been fascinated with the appeal to authority. I suppose the
ultimate authority is a repeatable experiment that demonstrates a fact to an
acceptable level of certainty.

Such experiments are often not possible when considering the fuzzy structures
that have concrete effects on our daily lives. How do we come to conclusions
on sociological or economic theories for example?

When the going gets tough, we all tend to appeal to authority.

"Look I don't know why it's true per se, but this book right here says it's
true, and it was written by this guy that everyone agrees is really smart!"

At some point, we all must appeal to another authority in some way. We can't
know everything, so we must rely on and trust in others. How can we possibly
do that now in the age of Google and Facebook? What about when images and even
live video can be convincingly faked?

I have this sense of dread that we may reach a point where we all stand around
and go "huh... I don't know what the truth is. I guess we'll never know. Oh
well." And from then on we will live in our own simulations divorced
completely from reality. I mean, it feels like we're already there in some
cases.

~~~
skybrian
Instead of a sense of dread, how about learning to be comfortable with
uncertainty? There's a lot going on in the world where we rely on others for
information, and probably can't know for sure without doing a lot more
research. Admitting you don't know something is a _good thing_ , particularly
when there's no need to know.

I see a lot of the opposite: people pretending to be instant experts about
whatever issue is in the news, when they knew nothing about it yesterday. It
makes it harder to tell what's going on.

~~~
zxcb1
Yes, learning how to deal with uncertainty is necessary. I think the analogy
though is something like this: Your mind was running on hardware, now its
running inside a container inside a container. Do you have a reasonable chance
of figuring out how things work, also will it even be relevant? Inside the
filter bubble / matrix everything seems consistent.

------
discoursism
Ha. With my friends, if we have one of these "we don't know" scenarios, and my
friend tries to take out their phone to look it up, I tell them to put that
goddamned thing away. Knowing is not fun. Reasoning is fun, asking around is
fun, guessing is fun, bullshitting is fun. If you don't need to know, don't
look it up!

Would you rather get to know someone through many conversations and shared
experiences, or by reading a (hypothetical, futuristic) brain scan? And so
with the world.

