So “caveat emptor”? I get that’s always part of reality but we shouldn’t exactly steer into that skid IMO. It just shifts the burden to the rest of us and does nothing to address the root cause

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tsimionescu 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It is, and always has been, the only possibility. It's up to every individual to check for themselves what is true and what is not, and to decide who to trust for things that they can't check.

The real lesson is this: trust in the source is the most important thing for 99.99% of what you read. You will sometimes read about facts that you can actually verify, but those are mostly useless in the grand scheme - except as a sanity check on the source. For everything else, you have to ultimately trust the source.

Now sure, sometimes you can get lucky and detect certain internal inconsistencies that prove that something can't be true. And to some extent, reading the same information from multiple sources you don't normally trust too much can be a slight signal that it might be true. But these are generally in the minority.

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Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent [-]

So you test every sip of water you drink? Inspect every road before you drive down it? Check every bathroom product for harmful additives?

Again I am not ignoring reality. But for society to work and for us to live our daily lives with any semblance of sanity, we can't be expected to be fully informed on everything we see, touch, consume, etc. We have to be able to make reasonable assumptions about safety and accuracy or we can't function. And the time it takes to vet stuff is often a privilege (or you can brute force pay your way to safety).

I do not rigorously audit everything I read on wikipedia. I assume a certain baseline of accuracy up to a point, with of course exceptions. Do you pull up 3-4 high quality sources for everything you read or claim? Are you that academic about it?

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rcxdude 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the point is that for those you are trusting the regulators. For stuff you read online you are either trusting the source of the information or not. You should choose what information sources you trust carefully.

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Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn’t really change the calculus for me. We can regulate whatever we want.

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scruple 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of people are throwing their hands in the air and suggesting that this is all just some sort of unavoidable consequence of physics, rather than something that is being pushed on us without any ability to confront it.

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tsimionescu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Regulating information, while it's fairly common at some levels (e.g. school manuals, one of the largest sources of legal information control, and one often abused for nationalistic lies in every country's history), is a very dangerous thing for governments to get into. Do you think the Trump government would be more likely to correct the NYT or Alex Jones if they had the ability to regulate news stories?

	▲	Forgeties79 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There are many ways to tackle regulation that don’t involve giving the keys to fickle administrations.

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tsimionescu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My whole point is that you have to trust people, that this is the only thing you can rely on for almost every important thing you care about. For food, for example, I don't eat from sketchy restaurants, unless I get some personal recommendations from friends about it. That is, I only eat from places where I think I have some reason to trust that the food is sanitary.

Also, I didn't say you need to access high quality sources for everything, I again kind of said the opposite: you choose who to trust for what, and that's that. There is nothing more, and has never been anything more, that you can do. Sometimes people and sources you trust will still lie to you, or be wrong, and you'll know wrong information - this is also unavoidable.

Of course, the more important some information is to you, the more effort you should actually spend trying to verify with multiple trusted sources. Some weird fact about cats you saw in a TikTok? Fine to just believe it. Trying to figure out who to vote for, or if the elections were stolen? Probably worth checking a few more sources. Read some definition for a word on Wikipedia, or some old historical event? Probably fine. Reading about an even slightly controversial topic? Check the actual sources, don't trust the snapshot you happen to see*.

Of course, the way LLMs work is antithetical to this, as information provided directly by the LLM is not coming from any human source you can decide if you should trust or not. So you shouldn't trust it for anything important, unless you can verify. But for information or disinformation on the web, nothing has changed, except maybe the quantities.

*for a silly example: the exact definition of the word "electrocution" is a slightly controversial topic - whether electrocution refers to any (significant) injury caused by electricity, or only death. Pedants soemwaht regularly edit the article on Wikipedia to remove the "or serious injury" part of the definition, despite it carrying a link to the OED that includes this mention.

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scruple 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Once this provenance trail, that humans use to trace claims back to an accountable source, is dead and buried under automated sludge, "just pick people to trust" stops working as a viable strategy. How do you even tell who is actually talking?

	▲	Forgeties79 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Seriously we’ve got Reddit now straight up translating foreign language comments with AI and without stating they did it. That is a massive decision to make, and I feel like no one cares.