I'm not author of parent.

My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.

If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.

I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).

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01100011 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high.

I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.

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CalChris 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.

I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.

	▲	FloorEgg 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth. AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions. Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model capabilities. Something like 99% of positive model capabilities comes from 10% of the training data (forget exactly). I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the owners and creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better.