"Trust is the scarcest commodity in the world. Nothing else comes close."
Yes, our trust in "experts" is pretty much over for now. Once I thought it was just government and then banking after 2008 but now it's everything.
Abigail Shier is the first one to drive this home to me in her book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" Too many parents have trusted experts and found their children and families busted into pieces. Too many of us sent our kids to school not knowing we would be gaslit with crazy teaching and affirmation of identities behind our backs instead of real learning. Maybe that is the end goal of cultural Marxism? It would have been nice to give Shrier a mention.
Who can "trust the science" when scientists are not free to pursue what they wish? This is why sexologist Debora Soh switched to journalism. Of course, "journalists" mostly follow a narrative with a Woke style guide. And, I suspect they write most stories in their slippers without venturing outdoors to truly investigate anything. And, since when are we supposed to "trust/believe" in science? The whole idea of science is that you are supposed to challenge ideas and see if they hold up.
Unfortunately, you are spot on with the fact that many scientists are not free to pursue what they wish. This is can be traced back to what grant funding is available at the highest level. Just take a moment to look at government grants, such as what the NIH puts out, and you will not only see a leftist bent to RFPs, but you will see some race quotas as well required for funding. This is also found at some of the biggest private foundations as well and it's very worrisome. If you're looking for trustworthy coverage of things like this, where journalists actually kick off their slippers and put on their boots and go out, check out Quillette. I have been impressed with their journalism and they cover the topic I just talked about. Keep searching for and demanding the truth, LovingMother.
I think those are the hot button issues for sure but in trying to inform myself about those I have realized it is a more widespread problem with more or less inherent flaws. Something akin to regulatory capture.
It might not be perfect but then nothing is but without it any nut can say anything and it could be palmed off as truth, like if we don't stop GW we are all doomed.
Personally, I have concerns about the trustworthiness of ChatGPT. I only recently got around to testing it out and what I saw alarmed me. For instance when I asked it for statistics on race and crime in America it flat out refused to provide them, instead spitting back platitudes about the dangers of racial generalization. It took a fair amount of prodding for it to return a few high-level numbers.
It seems to me that ChatGPT clearly embodies left-wing political values and I’m worried about what this portends. Who gets to decide what the acceptable bounds of discourse are around controversial issues related to race, gender and culture? Is it a handful of employees at OpenAI? The political orientation of ChatGPT will inevitably lead to the balkanization of our AI landscape whereby people who are upset with the biases of the mainstream platforms end up creating alternatives.
A lot of the worry over AI has been the extent to which it might replace human labor down the line, but my biggest fear isn't AI making increasingly larger swathes of humanity obsolete. My biggest fear is that our future robot overlords all end up sounding exactly like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Can you imagine an army of terminators tasked with enforcing the mandates of Kendi's Department of Anti-Racism? Can you imagine if SkyNet basically became Kendi?
It's funny how people get so worked up about the dangers of AI, when they can't see that, as with any tool, it's not the tool that's the danger, it's the people using it. In this case, the most important thing - who determines the neutrality of the training sets - is completely left out of the " safety " conversation. Any large language model (like CHatGPT) can only spit out what it has absorbed in training. Train it on books by Marx, Engels and Lenin and it will become the most devout communist! Train it on WP, NYT and the likes of them, and it would become woke! And the real danger is that it can do that wile people think it's "objective" because "is so powerful"
Most people do not realise that LLMs *do not think*, they just predict the most likely chain of words based on the words in front of them, *based only on the training material*, but people treat them as intelligent because of the high similarity to natural language. Yesterday Jordan Peterson himself was outraged that chatGPT was lying to him! (but to lie you need a conscience, which chatGPT does not have). So that the whole discussion about "dangers" and "safety" and "regulation" is misleading, nobody is discussing the most important thing: who decides the training sets and according to what criteria.
If you think about nuclear energy, it's like we keep talking about the fusion reaction and the danger of explosions and how we have to stop any research into it because accidents can happen, instead of talking about the rules and safety systems that have to be put in place so that only responsible people are in charge. It's never the tools, it's always the people using them that are the danger.
Leftists have been lying since the days of Walter Duranty covering up Stalin's crimes. Heck they've been lying since that foolish old German fart, Marx, penned the rambling doggerel and utter trash that has caused more murder, mayhem and suffering than any other document in history.
Yes. It is sad to me that the issue for me isn't even whether the AI is truthful. Even if you could make sure if was 100% truthful, it does things that show bias. Anything I have asked about Covid or vaccines always ended with Bard telling me to go get vaccinated. When I asked the same question about Biden and Trump (what good things did they do as president) it felt the need to ALSO tell me bad things about Trump but not Biden.
It tries to claim it is just reciting the data it was trained on, but that cannot be all. When I ask a question, it doesn't just answer it...if it finds it 'necessary' it adds biased commentary. I asked AI for an answer because I just wanted an answer. I can watch the news if I want punditry.
My fear is that this is purposeful. That some programmers see this as a way to sneak their propaganda into the world. They know the non-techy people will assume that a computer won't manipulate them.
ChatGPT is a fun toy but isn't useful except for things such as writing Microsoft Excel macros, which it seems to do well. For example, I thought it would be fun to have ChatGPT write an introduction for my boss, who is a big proponent of the tech, and it spit back a bunch of nonsense and lies.
I will note, though, that it's not just technology that is lying. Politicians have taken it to a whole new level. People always knew that politicians greatly stretch the truth, but people like George Santos are taking it to a whole new level.
George Santos' lying is utterly inconsequential to America. However, such a pathological fabricator of the right is quite useful to the media. They use him to distract everyone from the consequential lies of the party in charge.
I imagine the end result of AI is multiple AI "personalities". Like, one AI will be liberal, but there will also be conservative AIs, libertarian AIs, etc. Then people will only interact with AIs that share their political views.
Yes, a tool is only as good as those who wield it. Software is just a sophisticated tool and ChatGPT is in the hands of the cultural radical left - like our institutions.
Humanity has misplaced its trust since the beginning of time. C’mon, Eve, just one bite. What could go wrong? What’s so amazing is how amazed we are when we’re betrayed. We seem hardwired to trust. But most of us also possess that internal safety valve called nagging doubt. We need to heed it more frequently than we do.
There’s only one government built on distrust — ours. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 51. “If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary.”
Madison and his band of brothers constructed a constitution of checks and balances to corral the worst excesses of the heart. Post-modernism may loathe these men, but they sure understood human nature in a way we do not.
Very astute! But how unfortunate that the Constitution written by Madison and friends has been largely upended through judicial misinterpretation over the last century.
As soon as I heard about deepfakes a few years ago, I realized that we are in serious trouble. When you can no longer trust your eyes, everything is in doubt.
But when it comes to the erosion of trust in our formerly most trusted institutions, those institutions have no one to blame but themselves.
There have always been some dishonest people who put money ahead of *everything*, but with the abandonment of religious values, that trait is now spreading unrestrained. And when companies are headed up by people whose performance is judged only by quarterly profits--people who will have moved on to the next "better" position at another company in a couple of years--it is inevitable that companies will put short-term profit ahead of everything.
There have always been some people who tell lies in the name of their ideology. But with the growth of more and more virulent ideologies, those lies are now embraced instead of denounced. When there is profit to be made from those ideologies, the motive to lie and to embrace lies increases ten-fold. But even more terrifying are those who are so devoted to their ideologies that money is not even a consideration in the decision to lie.
The point is that untrustworthy people are now being rewarded by our institutions instead of rooted out of them. That inevitably makes those institutions untrustworthy.
"As soon as I heard about deepfakes a few years ago, I realized that we are in serious trouble. When you can no longer trust your eyes, everything is in doubt."
Yes - but this has been true at least since the invention of photography. There were all sorts of mythical creatures and "missing link" fakes that people fell for...
"But when it comes to the erosion of trust in our formerly most trusted institutions, those institutions have no one to blame but themselves."
This is the key thing. We used to be a high trust society but are no longer. It doesn't work for elites to whine about how we ought to trust our now untrustworthy institutions - just because. The trust must be won back.
Lies are indeed embraced rather than denounced. Except for with DeSantis:
"Ron DeSantis: "If you take a man and they dress up as a woman and you tell me I have to accept that they’re a woman, then you're asking me to be complicit in a lie."
'Seeing was believing—but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays.'
So, in lieu of everyone signing up for The Honest Broker - consider it time to horde, buy on eBay, scroll through used book stores, look in your scruffy attic, and add every hard cover book published before the year 2000 that you've always wanted to your already considerable collection of tomes in your bookshelf. They're old, worn, read, and for the most part, true. They can't be rewritten, changed, altered or disguised. They can't be canceled. They can't be whitened out. They can't be deleted.
Books can be trusted for their authenticity. You don't have to agree with what is written within them. But that doesn't matter, for you can understand what you see. And trust yourself to decide.
The future is upon us and I do not like what I see..
To this I would add estate sales for books. I have an acquaintance who started buying old books as a hobby. He now has several storage units full and an online side gig.
I recently went looking in my attic for a hard copy of Webster's Dictionary because I suspected the online version has been changing the definitions of certain words. Sadly, I remembered selling it at a yard sale a few years ago.
I know he focuses on big tech and business here, but I immediately drew the comparison to schools. We no longer trust our schools because they refuse to be transparent with parents. They closed our schools for a year, masked our kids for another full year, all without evidence. When we tried to show them data and told them our kids were struggling, they ignored us. Now, we emerge from that nightmare only to learn that they have decided teaching political ideology (CRT and gender ideology) are their two highest priorities. But, we didn't learn this because the district was honest with us. We learned it by submitting FOIA requests and teachers secretly telling us. It's a never-ending cycle of distrust.
I can name that tune with five words: No truth means no trust. We live in a society where truth is twisted or devalued ( his, hers zers, but not THE). Trust is earned and it comes from the top down, starting with leaders in business, politics, education, science etc. When you breach trust and speak untruths or allow untruths to spread, you have shown you should not be TRUSTED
I think truth became meaningless when the phrase “my truth” became so widely used (thank you, Oprah). That phrase actually means what someone values or believes, whereas using the word “truth” has created a less important meaning for what we’ve always known truth to mean.
In the personal development space, there is a distinction made between 'big T truth' and 'little t truth'. Big T truth refers to objective/universal truths like 2+2=4, and is THE truth. Little t truths refer to subjective/individual truths like beliefs and values, and is MY truth.
This is why freedom of speech is so essential and important for a free society to work. The FP just published a great excerpt from Tim Urban's book, "What's our Problem?" and it is about the importance of free speech. (I highly recommend you read through it.)
So many of the "mainstream" views that we are encountering in the media and that is shaping AI that Gioia reports on here, seems to be the result of dissenters not speaking up and a desire for conformity of thought, rather than diversity of thought, in what used to be the bastions of truth. Our sources of truth are no longer reliable, that is true - but how many individuals working for Facebook, or the New York Times, or on The Hill are suppressing their own speech for the sake of keeping with the mainstream? If you censor speech that questions a favored narrative by a loud and extreme side, you are not allowing such narrative to be questioned and thus, argued out in the marketplace of ideas. You wind up with a society that muzzles itself. If you cannot change or influence the larger society, all you can do is speak truth yourself and seek out the sources you trust and amplify them. I guess that is why we are all here, reading and commenting on an FP article that disturbs as much as it resonates with us.
I agree with you, but "diversity of thought" means a range of reasonable opinions should be given attention. "I think government should be more involved in helping people" vs. "I think government should be minimized" are both reasonable opinions, even though people disagree with one or the other.
"Jews are using space lasers to install 5G in our brains" is not. 30 years ago that would get you put in a mental hospital, now it gets you into Congress.
Fifty years ago people spouting the equivalent of 5g nonsense were on street corners in every big city, not in mental hospitals. We knew it was nonsense.
This week Greg Gutfeld made a great point about how the left changes the actual meaning of what words mean so that they always have a comeback. His examples proved to be so true.
Trust is not the scarcest commodity, the scarcest commodity is critical thinking. The more time spent on platforms that pander to the human ego, the less time there is to exercise our higher ability to critically think. With each post, video, reel, and photo consumed, our emotions are fed, while our critical minds are left to starve. Our republic was founded on the very premise that an all- knowing, all- powerful government was not to be trusted and freedom of speech was paramount to preventing government excess. Most importantly, embedded within the right of free speech is the individual’s duty to educate oneself and exercise critical thinking.
"If you want answers, you go to Google—but it’s now crammed to the brim with paid placement ads."
That's not the worst of it. At least you know those are paid. The lefties at GOOG have twisted the algo so right-leaning sources on controversial topics (transgenderism, wokeness, school choice, etc.) simply don't show up any more, or get pushed to the 3rd of 4th page of results. Also, ChatGPT is so completely injected with "woke" as to be unusable. Bottom line: The people who built, own and operate the information systems have an agenda - and it SHOWS! No wonder trust is lost.
Trust is lost but not hope. Despite big tech’s best efforts (not to mention mainstream media) here we are, discussing our problems with the trans insanity and other points of view they deem “problematic” at best.
Critical thinking and skepticism and common sense can save us.
The American Business Community has only itself to blame for the collapse of trust. They produce shoddy products, lie about them and their origin, provide laughably abysmal levels of "customer service" and treat their employees deplorably while enriching half-witted, preening CEOs. Worse are politicians. Democrats screeching about Trump's shortcomings while offering as his replacement a senile, incompetent fabulist geezer? Don't even get me started. Curated "news" is not news. Political medicine is not medicine. Grow up and start telling the truth. Or you won't believe the backlash and the ferocity of it.
"Trust" is a question of "truth" and "identity" - we trust someone we know who usually tells the truth. The real difficulty that technology creates is double: we can't tell the truth from a fabricated lie, and we can't remotely verify identities in a reliable way. To solve these challenges, we must first understand what truth is, beyond its logical/mathematical definitions (almost all philosophy today gives us on this subject). How can one hope to rebuild trust if there is no real understanding of what truth is?
There is a complex argument behind this, but what we call "truth" in our daily lives is linked to what we call "reality" - so there is a strong reason why "trust" and "truth" are most under attack in the era of synthetic, fabricated realities. "Reality" turns out to be a cultural construct, but not one that can be synthesized by anyone (through lies, manipulation, etc.), but rather a collective cultural construct resulting from a set of "truth-validating institutions". Such institutions were well established and strongly linked to identity, for example the institution of personal reputation for people, or collective reputation for newspapers, or the peer review mechanism for science. Even the school as a whole is really just a " truth-validating institution", but dictionaries are also another type of this kind of institution. In fact, all of our culture and knowledge would be unthinkable without these ubiquitous, but almost never seen as such, insititutions, since no one can verify everything they learn for themselves, and they have to *trust* that someone else has done so.
What is really happening is that all these good, reliable, old truth-validating institutions are being dismantled by technology but also by an aggresive pollitical campaign targeted at them (take the list above and you'll see that woke movement is heavily targeting them, mostly school, press, dictionaries); they simply don't do their job anymore under the new conditions. And yes, it is true that free speech is fundamental to the rebuilding of some new truth-validating institutions and there is a precise reason for this:
The problem is that too many people turn to institutions to define reality.
They said there was a super deadly, fast spreading virus coming ,so you can’t leave your house. Despite the fact that the virus had been detected two months earlier in this country (officially), and there was still no crisis to speak of, most people didn’t question the narrative. They stayed home and yelled at anyone who simply asked: is it that dangerous? Is this necessary?
All one had to do to answer those questions was to look around, talk to friends. All they had to do was see how things really were IRL. But instead they believed what the media told them about their own lives!
That blew my mind. I may not know what’s going on in Russia but I sure as hell know what’s up in my neighborhood and through conversations with friends all over the US I can figure out what’s going on in the rest of the country.
Trust in oneself and one’s own perceptions is key to the truth. Outsourcing truth to institutions will always deliver a warped version of reality and it has always been so. This is nothing new at all.
I have to say that I use "institution" in its most general sense. "Reputation" is an institution, but so is "gossip", close to what you describe as "talking to friends etc". In fact, for all its negative aspects, gossip is an essential informal broker of truth within communities, because it generates informal shared opinions that are mostly correct.
I heard something about how the word "gossip" evolved from "God sib". It was the information you received about what was going on from your godparents and the like - long before anything like our modern means of information travel. Everyone has a need to connect and chit chat to hear what is going on and sort out what they think about it. I don't know when "gossip" developed a negative connotation. But, the actual thing just got a new word, like "What's the skinny?" or "What's the tea?" "Do spill."
Now, we are moving towards a society where it is not ok to shame/point the finger at anything and say it's bad. Like, gee, Minor Attracted People cannot help themselves so let's protect them from any negative language. Oh, except for non-believers in the Latest Thing. Like, you are a phobe and should be screamed at if you "misgender" and think biology is a thing.
The fact that our trust in institutions was higher than deserved and is now coming in line, though still too high, is a good thing. The fact that the institutions are not trustworthy is a bad thing. But these are two different things, to be clear.
I'm not trying to wind you up, David, but could answer this as directly as you can...
When/how did you learn to trust institutions, and when/why did you begin to distrust them?
For me, it was in the early-mid 1960s when the US commands in Viet Nam kept coming back with daily body counts that, when added together, said that we were killing regiments (1000 soldiers) with regularity. The reported enemy casualties never seemed to comport with the anecdotes that we were getting from returning veterans. (Of course, that whole Army narrative got blown up with the Tet Offensive, but who is blaming four-star generals for that....)
That's a good question. I can't point to a particular event or time when I lost confidence in U.S. institutions. It seems to me that it's a constant and recurring theme that our "betters" are usually spinning if not outright lying to us.
This is probably because the masses (of US population) demand that they be lied to. Does an honest politician make it past the primaries? No, obviously not. Lying is the coin of the realm.
Since the Tet offensive, we've had many similar revelations including the Afghanistan papers and most recently the Twitter files expose'. The difference now is that the mainstream media is now on the side of the govt. and against the whistle blowers. See Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger's congressional testimony. Strange times these are.
Many of us are here on The Free Press, and sustaining the site with our hard-earned, ever more worthless money, in the hopes that what they publish is the result of honest research and reflection.
Many of us can excuse the biases of some...or is that all...of the contributors as long as that bias is freely admitted and properly defined.
Articles such as this may not change the way people think or act. My continued financial support is contingent on the authors and editors doing their part. If they do, I will continue to do mine.
That’s it! I often think we need a re-education in news versus editorial. I hear unfounded complaints about the editorials being biased but then see the biased “news” being taken at face value. I’m not sure they’re teaching the difference anymore.
Newspapers have every right to take on the political outlooks of their publishers. That is what having a free market requires. Editors have every right to allow their writers to make explicit the biases that those writers bring to the table. I applaud writers who admit to what they are trying to do. It's called being honest.
I draw the line, however, when stories are imagined and with events choreographed to substantiate the narrative. I draw the line when key elements of a narrative are left out because they refute what is being alleged. I draw the line when writers, editors, publishers, columnists, and contributors collude to make a narrative more compelling than it natively deserves.
More directly, I reserve my revulsion, anger, and determined opposition when it is my government that is the one that is guilty of gaslighting and/or taking unethical or illegal activity in the furtherance of their deception and tyranny.
I urge people to re-read the Declaration of Independence and measure the governance of today with that yardstick. I urge people to re-read our Constitution for what it says, not for what one thinks it says.
I urge people to stand up to forces that are trying to subvert that meaningful goal articulated by Lincoln of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and work to return to our hands those powers that our limited federal government has presumed to be within its brief.
Our children and grandchildren need our help. The sooner we begin helping them, the better off their futures will be.
That 60 percent of people don't trust journalists or 76 percent of people don't trust politicians is actually a sign of progress -- people are beginning to be aware of the BS they have been fed. But what could the remaining 40 percent or 34 percent possibly be thinking? The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.
"Trust is the scarcest commodity in the world. Nothing else comes close."
Yes, our trust in "experts" is pretty much over for now. Once I thought it was just government and then banking after 2008 but now it's everything.
Abigail Shier is the first one to drive this home to me in her book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" Too many parents have trusted experts and found their children and families busted into pieces. Too many of us sent our kids to school not knowing we would be gaslit with crazy teaching and affirmation of identities behind our backs instead of real learning. Maybe that is the end goal of cultural Marxism? It would have been nice to give Shrier a mention.
Who can "trust the science" when scientists are not free to pursue what they wish? This is why sexologist Debora Soh switched to journalism. Of course, "journalists" mostly follow a narrative with a Woke style guide. And, I suspect they write most stories in their slippers without venturing outdoors to truly investigate anything. And, since when are we supposed to "trust/believe" in science? The whole idea of science is that you are supposed to challenge ideas and see if they hold up.
Unfortunately, you are spot on with the fact that many scientists are not free to pursue what they wish. This is can be traced back to what grant funding is available at the highest level. Just take a moment to look at government grants, such as what the NIH puts out, and you will not only see a leftist bent to RFPs, but you will see some race quotas as well required for funding. This is also found at some of the biggest private foundations as well and it's very worrisome. If you're looking for trustworthy coverage of things like this, where journalists actually kick off their slippers and put on their boots and go out, check out Quillette. I have been impressed with their journalism and they cover the topic I just talked about. Keep searching for and demanding the truth, LovingMother.
And "peer review" is similarly compromised.
When it comes to GW and the covid vaccine, the left shuts down peer review.
I think those are the hot button issues for sure but in trying to inform myself about those I have realized it is a more widespread problem with more or less inherent flaws. Something akin to regulatory capture.
Peer Review in Science: the pains and problems https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/peer-review-in-science-the-pains-and-problems/
Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals - PMC - NCBI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/
I am not saying it cannot be a valid method but neither should it be considered infallible.
It might not be perfect but then nothing is but without it any nut can say anything and it could be palmed off as truth, like if we don't stop GW we are all doomed.
Some may well be doomed
But I will be fine.
If you don’t believe in it, it has no power over you
There was a great piece on The FP a while back on research for Alzheimer's disease and how it is compromised, elaborating on your points.
I read that one too! It’s wild how ideas or questions can be ignored or one idea, no matter how bad and unfounded, can crush other ideas and inquiry.
The story of Dr. John Money, which is the story of the gender identity theory, is an example of this and it is wild and heartbreaking.
I totally agree with you about grant funding now and also Quillette. And, thanks. I will!
Abigail Shier is telling the truth.
And she goes out there are does real journalism.
Personally, I have concerns about the trustworthiness of ChatGPT. I only recently got around to testing it out and what I saw alarmed me. For instance when I asked it for statistics on race and crime in America it flat out refused to provide them, instead spitting back platitudes about the dangers of racial generalization. It took a fair amount of prodding for it to return a few high-level numbers.
It seems to me that ChatGPT clearly embodies left-wing political values and I’m worried about what this portends. Who gets to decide what the acceptable bounds of discourse are around controversial issues related to race, gender and culture? Is it a handful of employees at OpenAI? The political orientation of ChatGPT will inevitably lead to the balkanization of our AI landscape whereby people who are upset with the biases of the mainstream platforms end up creating alternatives.
A lot of the worry over AI has been the extent to which it might replace human labor down the line, but my biggest fear isn't AI making increasingly larger swathes of humanity obsolete. My biggest fear is that our future robot overlords all end up sounding exactly like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Can you imagine an army of terminators tasked with enforcing the mandates of Kendi's Department of Anti-Racism? Can you imagine if SkyNet basically became Kendi?
You're right, is left biased, but why?
It's funny how people get so worked up about the dangers of AI, when they can't see that, as with any tool, it's not the tool that's the danger, it's the people using it. In this case, the most important thing - who determines the neutrality of the training sets - is completely left out of the " safety " conversation. Any large language model (like CHatGPT) can only spit out what it has absorbed in training. Train it on books by Marx, Engels and Lenin and it will become the most devout communist! Train it on WP, NYT and the likes of them, and it would become woke! And the real danger is that it can do that wile people think it's "objective" because "is so powerful"
Most people do not realise that LLMs *do not think*, they just predict the most likely chain of words based on the words in front of them, *based only on the training material*, but people treat them as intelligent because of the high similarity to natural language. Yesterday Jordan Peterson himself was outraged that chatGPT was lying to him! (but to lie you need a conscience, which chatGPT does not have). So that the whole discussion about "dangers" and "safety" and "regulation" is misleading, nobody is discussing the most important thing: who decides the training sets and according to what criteria.
If you think about nuclear energy, it's like we keep talking about the fusion reaction and the danger of explosions and how we have to stop any research into it because accidents can happen, instead of talking about the rules and safety systems that have to be put in place so that only responsible people are in charge. It's never the tools, it's always the people using them that are the danger.
Leftists have been lying since the days of Walter Duranty covering up Stalin's crimes. Heck they've been lying since that foolish old German fart, Marx, penned the rambling doggerel and utter trash that has caused more murder, mayhem and suffering than any other document in history.
Yes. It is sad to me that the issue for me isn't even whether the AI is truthful. Even if you could make sure if was 100% truthful, it does things that show bias. Anything I have asked about Covid or vaccines always ended with Bard telling me to go get vaccinated. When I asked the same question about Biden and Trump (what good things did they do as president) it felt the need to ALSO tell me bad things about Trump but not Biden.
It tries to claim it is just reciting the data it was trained on, but that cannot be all. When I ask a question, it doesn't just answer it...if it finds it 'necessary' it adds biased commentary. I asked AI for an answer because I just wanted an answer. I can watch the news if I want punditry.
My fear is that this is purposeful. That some programmers see this as a way to sneak their propaganda into the world. They know the non-techy people will assume that a computer won't manipulate them.
"I can watch the news if I want punditry"
Remember when the news was just the facts, not accompanied by commentry.
ChatGPT is a fun toy but isn't useful except for things such as writing Microsoft Excel macros, which it seems to do well. For example, I thought it would be fun to have ChatGPT write an introduction for my boss, who is a big proponent of the tech, and it spit back a bunch of nonsense and lies.
I will note, though, that it's not just technology that is lying. Politicians have taken it to a whole new level. People always knew that politicians greatly stretch the truth, but people like George Santos are taking it to a whole new level.
George Santos' lying is utterly inconsequential to America. However, such a pathological fabricator of the right is quite useful to the media. They use him to distract everyone from the consequential lies of the party in charge.
I imagine the end result of AI is multiple AI "personalities". Like, one AI will be liberal, but there will also be conservative AIs, libertarian AIs, etc. Then people will only interact with AIs that share their political views.
I never thought of that, but it's an image that has now been burned into my brain: Kendi becomes SkyNet.
Yes, a tool is only as good as those who wield it. Software is just a sophisticated tool and ChatGPT is in the hands of the cultural radical left - like our institutions.
Very astute Yan Shen. Now couple that with robocops.
Humanity has misplaced its trust since the beginning of time. C’mon, Eve, just one bite. What could go wrong? What’s so amazing is how amazed we are when we’re betrayed. We seem hardwired to trust. But most of us also possess that internal safety valve called nagging doubt. We need to heed it more frequently than we do.
There’s only one government built on distrust — ours. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 51. “If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary.”
Madison and his band of brothers constructed a constitution of checks and balances to corral the worst excesses of the heart. Post-modernism may loathe these men, but they sure understood human nature in a way we do not.
What a brilliant comment.
Made my day.
Government is not your friend. It is, at best, a necessary evil. Viewing it through any other lens is madness.
Thanks, Bruce!
Very astute! But how unfortunate that the Constitution written by Madison and friends has been largely upended through judicial misinterpretation over the last century.
As soon as I heard about deepfakes a few years ago, I realized that we are in serious trouble. When you can no longer trust your eyes, everything is in doubt.
But when it comes to the erosion of trust in our formerly most trusted institutions, those institutions have no one to blame but themselves.
There have always been some dishonest people who put money ahead of *everything*, but with the abandonment of religious values, that trait is now spreading unrestrained. And when companies are headed up by people whose performance is judged only by quarterly profits--people who will have moved on to the next "better" position at another company in a couple of years--it is inevitable that companies will put short-term profit ahead of everything.
There have always been some people who tell lies in the name of their ideology. But with the growth of more and more virulent ideologies, those lies are now embraced instead of denounced. When there is profit to be made from those ideologies, the motive to lie and to embrace lies increases ten-fold. But even more terrifying are those who are so devoted to their ideologies that money is not even a consideration in the decision to lie.
The point is that untrustworthy people are now being rewarded by our institutions instead of rooted out of them. That inevitably makes those institutions untrustworthy.
I agree, Celia.
"As soon as I heard about deepfakes a few years ago, I realized that we are in serious trouble. When you can no longer trust your eyes, everything is in doubt."
Yes - but this has been true at least since the invention of photography. There were all sorts of mythical creatures and "missing link" fakes that people fell for...
"But when it comes to the erosion of trust in our formerly most trusted institutions, those institutions have no one to blame but themselves."
This is the key thing. We used to be a high trust society but are no longer. It doesn't work for elites to whine about how we ought to trust our now untrustworthy institutions - just because. The trust must be won back.
Lies are indeed embraced rather than denounced. Except for with DeSantis:
"Ron DeSantis: "If you take a man and they dress up as a woman and you tell me I have to accept that they’re a woman, then you're asking me to be complicit in a lie."
https://notthebee.com/article/ron-desantis-if-you-take-a-man-and-they-dress-up-as-a-woman-and-you-tell-me-i-have-to-accept-that-theyre-a-woman-then-youre-asking-me-to-be-complicit-in-a-lie
'Seeing was believing—but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays.'
So, in lieu of everyone signing up for The Honest Broker - consider it time to horde, buy on eBay, scroll through used book stores, look in your scruffy attic, and add every hard cover book published before the year 2000 that you've always wanted to your already considerable collection of tomes in your bookshelf. They're old, worn, read, and for the most part, true. They can't be rewritten, changed, altered or disguised. They can't be canceled. They can't be whitened out. They can't be deleted.
Books can be trusted for their authenticity. You don't have to agree with what is written within them. But that doesn't matter, for you can understand what you see. And trust yourself to decide.
The future is upon us and I do not like what I see..
Just don't buy any recently republished editions. They are being rewritten to correct the author's "unenlightened" language.
To this I would add estate sales for books. I have an acquaintance who started buying old books as a hobby. He now has several storage units full and an online side gig.
I recently went looking in my attic for a hard copy of Webster's Dictionary because I suspected the online version has been changing the definitions of certain words. Sadly, I remembered selling it at a yard sale a few years ago.
I know he focuses on big tech and business here, but I immediately drew the comparison to schools. We no longer trust our schools because they refuse to be transparent with parents. They closed our schools for a year, masked our kids for another full year, all without evidence. When we tried to show them data and told them our kids were struggling, they ignored us. Now, we emerge from that nightmare only to learn that they have decided teaching political ideology (CRT and gender ideology) are their two highest priorities. But, we didn't learn this because the district was honest with us. We learned it by submitting FOIA requests and teachers secretly telling us. It's a never-ending cycle of distrust.
Yes, exactly!
I can name that tune with five words: No truth means no trust. We live in a society where truth is twisted or devalued ( his, hers zers, but not THE). Trust is earned and it comes from the top down, starting with leaders in business, politics, education, science etc. When you breach trust and speak untruths or allow untruths to spread, you have shown you should not be TRUSTED
Apologies for leaving out today's #1source of mistrust:the media
I think truth became meaningless when the phrase “my truth” became so widely used (thank you, Oprah). That phrase actually means what someone values or believes, whereas using the word “truth” has created a less important meaning for what we’ve always known truth to mean.
When the meaning of the word "truth" has been changed, society has dug itself an enormous hole.
It was already a fairly well known idea when it was used to support a lie of silence in a movie called “Hondo” about 1950
And that is THE TRUTH
In the personal development space, there is a distinction made between 'big T truth' and 'little t truth'. Big T truth refers to objective/universal truths like 2+2=4, and is THE truth. Little t truths refer to subjective/individual truths like beliefs and values, and is MY truth.
This is why freedom of speech is so essential and important for a free society to work. The FP just published a great excerpt from Tim Urban's book, "What's our Problem?" and it is about the importance of free speech. (I highly recommend you read through it.)
So many of the "mainstream" views that we are encountering in the media and that is shaping AI that Gioia reports on here, seems to be the result of dissenters not speaking up and a desire for conformity of thought, rather than diversity of thought, in what used to be the bastions of truth. Our sources of truth are no longer reliable, that is true - but how many individuals working for Facebook, or the New York Times, or on The Hill are suppressing their own speech for the sake of keeping with the mainstream? If you censor speech that questions a favored narrative by a loud and extreme side, you are not allowing such narrative to be questioned and thus, argued out in the marketplace of ideas. You wind up with a society that muzzles itself. If you cannot change or influence the larger society, all you can do is speak truth yourself and seek out the sources you trust and amplify them. I guess that is why we are all here, reading and commenting on an FP article that disturbs as much as it resonates with us.
I agree with you, but "diversity of thought" means a range of reasonable opinions should be given attention. "I think government should be more involved in helping people" vs. "I think government should be minimized" are both reasonable opinions, even though people disagree with one or the other.
"Jews are using space lasers to install 5G in our brains" is not. 30 years ago that would get you put in a mental hospital, now it gets you into Congress.
Fifty years ago people spouting the equivalent of 5g nonsense were on street corners in every big city, not in mental hospitals. We knew it was nonsense.
"Consider the case of scientists—who now struggle with a replicability crisis that casts doubt on even the most respected peer-reviewed studies."
Two words: "Gender Ideology". It has eaten all of the formerly respected medical, scientific, and academic organizations. But, what is a woman anyway?
This week Greg Gutfeld made a great point about how the left changes the actual meaning of what words mean so that they always have a comeback. His examples proved to be so true.
Trust is not the scarcest commodity, the scarcest commodity is critical thinking. The more time spent on platforms that pander to the human ego, the less time there is to exercise our higher ability to critically think. With each post, video, reel, and photo consumed, our emotions are fed, while our critical minds are left to starve. Our republic was founded on the very premise that an all- knowing, all- powerful government was not to be trusted and freedom of speech was paramount to preventing government excess. Most importantly, embedded within the right of free speech is the individual’s duty to educate oneself and exercise critical thinking.
Yes, THIS!!!!
I have seen the decline in critical thinking at work for the last 15 years. It was a steady decline but then accelerated over the last 5 years.
"If you want answers, you go to Google—but it’s now crammed to the brim with paid placement ads."
That's not the worst of it. At least you know those are paid. The lefties at GOOG have twisted the algo so right-leaning sources on controversial topics (transgenderism, wokeness, school choice, etc.) simply don't show up any more, or get pushed to the 3rd of 4th page of results. Also, ChatGPT is so completely injected with "woke" as to be unusable. Bottom line: The people who built, own and operate the information systems have an agenda - and it SHOWS! No wonder trust is lost.
Trust is lost but not hope. Despite big tech’s best efforts (not to mention mainstream media) here we are, discussing our problems with the trans insanity and other points of view they deem “problematic” at best.
Critical thinking and skepticism and common sense can save us.
:-) Let's hope - but also work hard on this. :-)
The American Business Community has only itself to blame for the collapse of trust. They produce shoddy products, lie about them and their origin, provide laughably abysmal levels of "customer service" and treat their employees deplorably while enriching half-witted, preening CEOs. Worse are politicians. Democrats screeching about Trump's shortcomings while offering as his replacement a senile, incompetent fabulist geezer? Don't even get me started. Curated "news" is not news. Political medicine is not medicine. Grow up and start telling the truth. Or you won't believe the backlash and the ferocity of it.
Bruce, you are one of my favorite commenters here. I can always count on you to touch my spirit with your eloquent low key rage.
Why, thank you.
I think.
Yang Peng told me I sounded "angry." Living in an idiocracy can do that.
The world used to make a lot more sense. Maybe I should just get in my Gran Torino with Clint and go on a road trip.
"Trust" is a question of "truth" and "identity" - we trust someone we know who usually tells the truth. The real difficulty that technology creates is double: we can't tell the truth from a fabricated lie, and we can't remotely verify identities in a reliable way. To solve these challenges, we must first understand what truth is, beyond its logical/mathematical definitions (almost all philosophy today gives us on this subject). How can one hope to rebuild trust if there is no real understanding of what truth is?
There is a complex argument behind this, but what we call "truth" in our daily lives is linked to what we call "reality" - so there is a strong reason why "trust" and "truth" are most under attack in the era of synthetic, fabricated realities. "Reality" turns out to be a cultural construct, but not one that can be synthesized by anyone (through lies, manipulation, etc.), but rather a collective cultural construct resulting from a set of "truth-validating institutions". Such institutions were well established and strongly linked to identity, for example the institution of personal reputation for people, or collective reputation for newspapers, or the peer review mechanism for science. Even the school as a whole is really just a " truth-validating institution", but dictionaries are also another type of this kind of institution. In fact, all of our culture and knowledge would be unthinkable without these ubiquitous, but almost never seen as such, insititutions, since no one can verify everything they learn for themselves, and they have to *trust* that someone else has done so.
What is really happening is that all these good, reliable, old truth-validating institutions are being dismantled by technology but also by an aggresive pollitical campaign targeted at them (take the list above and you'll see that woke movement is heavily targeting them, mostly school, press, dictionaries); they simply don't do their job anymore under the new conditions. And yes, it is true that free speech is fundamental to the rebuilding of some new truth-validating institutions and there is a precise reason for this:
https://antimaterie.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-truth
The problem is that too many people turn to institutions to define reality.
They said there was a super deadly, fast spreading virus coming ,so you can’t leave your house. Despite the fact that the virus had been detected two months earlier in this country (officially), and there was still no crisis to speak of, most people didn’t question the narrative. They stayed home and yelled at anyone who simply asked: is it that dangerous? Is this necessary?
All one had to do to answer those questions was to look around, talk to friends. All they had to do was see how things really were IRL. But instead they believed what the media told them about their own lives!
That blew my mind. I may not know what’s going on in Russia but I sure as hell know what’s up in my neighborhood and through conversations with friends all over the US I can figure out what’s going on in the rest of the country.
Trust in oneself and one’s own perceptions is key to the truth. Outsourcing truth to institutions will always deliver a warped version of reality and it has always been so. This is nothing new at all.
I have to say that I use "institution" in its most general sense. "Reputation" is an institution, but so is "gossip", close to what you describe as "talking to friends etc". In fact, for all its negative aspects, gossip is an essential informal broker of truth within communities, because it generates informal shared opinions that are mostly correct.
I heard something about how the word "gossip" evolved from "God sib". It was the information you received about what was going on from your godparents and the like - long before anything like our modern means of information travel. Everyone has a need to connect and chit chat to hear what is going on and sort out what they think about it. I don't know when "gossip" developed a negative connotation. But, the actual thing just got a new word, like "What's the skinny?" or "What's the tea?" "Do spill."
Now, we are moving towards a society where it is not ok to shame/point the finger at anything and say it's bad. Like, gee, Minor Attracted People cannot help themselves so let's protect them from any negative language. Oh, except for non-believers in the Latest Thing. Like, you are a phobe and should be screamed at if you "misgender" and think biology is a thing.
Gossip and talking to friends about their objective experiences in life are very different.
Outsourcing the truth to the FBI certainly wasn't one of our government's greatest achievements.
The fact that our trust in institutions was higher than deserved and is now coming in line, though still too high, is a good thing. The fact that the institutions are not trustworthy is a bad thing. But these are two different things, to be clear.
I'm not trying to wind you up, David, but could answer this as directly as you can...
When/how did you learn to trust institutions, and when/why did you begin to distrust them?
For me, it was in the early-mid 1960s when the US commands in Viet Nam kept coming back with daily body counts that, when added together, said that we were killing regiments (1000 soldiers) with regularity. The reported enemy casualties never seemed to comport with the anecdotes that we were getting from returning veterans. (Of course, that whole Army narrative got blown up with the Tet Offensive, but who is blaming four-star generals for that....)
That's a good question. I can't point to a particular event or time when I lost confidence in U.S. institutions. It seems to me that it's a constant and recurring theme that our "betters" are usually spinning if not outright lying to us.
This is probably because the masses (of US population) demand that they be lied to. Does an honest politician make it past the primaries? No, obviously not. Lying is the coin of the realm.
Since the Tet offensive, we've had many similar revelations including the Afghanistan papers and most recently the Twitter files expose'. The difference now is that the mainstream media is now on the side of the govt. and against the whistle blowers. See Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger's congressional testimony. Strange times these are.
Trust, once lost, is hard to restore.
Many of us are here on The Free Press, and sustaining the site with our hard-earned, ever more worthless money, in the hopes that what they publish is the result of honest research and reflection.
Many of us can excuse the biases of some...or is that all...of the contributors as long as that bias is freely admitted and properly defined.
Articles such as this may not change the way people think or act. My continued financial support is contingent on the authors and editors doing their part. If they do, I will continue to do mine.
That’s it! I often think we need a re-education in news versus editorial. I hear unfounded complaints about the editorials being biased but then see the biased “news” being taken at face value. I’m not sure they’re teaching the difference anymore.
They're not...
Newspapers have every right to take on the political outlooks of their publishers. That is what having a free market requires. Editors have every right to allow their writers to make explicit the biases that those writers bring to the table. I applaud writers who admit to what they are trying to do. It's called being honest.
I draw the line, however, when stories are imagined and with events choreographed to substantiate the narrative. I draw the line when key elements of a narrative are left out because they refute what is being alleged. I draw the line when writers, editors, publishers, columnists, and contributors collude to make a narrative more compelling than it natively deserves.
More directly, I reserve my revulsion, anger, and determined opposition when it is my government that is the one that is guilty of gaslighting and/or taking unethical or illegal activity in the furtherance of their deception and tyranny.
I urge people to re-read the Declaration of Independence and measure the governance of today with that yardstick. I urge people to re-read our Constitution for what it says, not for what one thinks it says.
I urge people to stand up to forces that are trying to subvert that meaningful goal articulated by Lincoln of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and work to return to our hands those powers that our limited federal government has presumed to be within its brief.
Our children and grandchildren need our help. The sooner we begin helping them, the better off their futures will be.
Excellently stated!
I'm not sure what they are teaching. Period.
That 60 percent of people don't trust journalists or 76 percent of people don't trust politicians is actually a sign of progress -- people are beginning to be aware of the BS they have been fed. But what could the remaining 40 percent or 34 percent possibly be thinking? The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.
Exactly
Here in canada over 30% somehow still think Trudeau is an ethical, transparent, caring, intelligent politician.
Despite years of endless evidence to the contrary.
How do I debate such people.