Meta is ushering in a 'world without facts', says Nobel peace prize winner | Hacker News Reader

Meta is ushering in a 'world without facts', says Nobel peace prize winner

theguardian.com

16 pointszfg15 comments

There is a semantic issue here that's bothering me: the word "Fact" is a contronym.

I was taught in elementary school that facts don't need to be true to be a "fact". Nearly 3 decades ago, I was told that "facts" are either true or false, as opposed to "opinions" which are neither.

Then, as time moved on, I encountered what appeared to be a bifurcation in the English language, where half the people I encountered defined "fact" as a true statement, and the other half defined "fact" as any statement about the external world that did not rely on somebody's internal state of mind to make sense.

I challenge all of you to perform a quick experiment with Google. Step 1: Google "Fact vs Opinion". Skim the results. Step 2: Google "Fact definition" or "Fact meaning". Skim the results. Step 3: Compare and contrast.

Time was (that is up to about 10 years ago) that people put phrases like "I think..." and "It seems to me ..." to prefix things which they are not presenting as facts. It seems that is seen as weakness now. It results in a worse world.

We should be educating people to think for themselves instead of advocating for centralized authorities who think for you.

People don't have the time to become familiar enough with every subject to form well reasoned opinions. It's the same reason we don't build everything we own for ourselves. Specialization and deferring to experts has been a natural human behavior forever

While I don't disagree that people could be better prepared by our education system, they also have to want to be capable of thinking for themselves.

By all means, feel free to fact check our textbooks, news broadcasts, and statements from official sources.

But when I log on to social media to rant about how UFOs are time-traveling humans, I don't want a teal-colored, official-looking div element to alert the world that the online version of my personal expression is objectively wrong.

The problem is that someone can say "they are eating the cats, they are eating the dogs" and that turns into hate and violence in the real world. They are not separate spaces, both the physical and the digital are part of the same world

So where does the line get drawn? Many believe that American style free speech goes too far and enables the malicious freedom to manipulate

Also, online platforms are currently anti-competitive, so when you don't agree with the provider, there are significant costs to choosing another. That's why efforts like ATProto & ActivityPub are important to the next generation of social media applications.

Well, I do agree but to an even further extent. Not only can we not become familiar with all the information, but experts also cannot do this. There is way too much information, and it updates way too quickly.

There are of course exceptions when the domain is specific and focused enough, but in general, even experts will make mistakes and cannot process so much information. For me it's about keeping an open mind, and being conscious of getting exposed to a variety of opinions and perspectives.

The problem from both the general public and the experts tends to be lack of epistemic humility, i.e. getting too entrenched in your own beliefs and refusing to consider alternatives.

I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow.

One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.

I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”

The people who put the thumbs on the scales are subject to the same bias and relative positioning of their beliefs. Whatever the issue is with the average person sorting through information will also affect the authorities and experts. Maybe not as much, however when it does happen because they have more control it tends to be more impactful.

So in the end it amounts to the same difference, average people will believe wrong things often with little impact, experts will believe wrong things rarely with lots of impact. Additionally, it's not like experts or authorities cannot contribute, they would just be on a more equal footing and would need to do more work than in a situation where there is censorship or control of information.

What is the meaning of facts anyway? How relevant are the facts for post-industrial society? We, as a society, are separated from "hard" reality by too many degrees of separation for facts to be of any considerable importance. That is the price to pay for the superabundance and sky-high productivity.

And i understand where it's coming from. People want social networks to be balanced that is, reflect views of the general society/mass of users: balance between left and right. Any thoroughly fact-checked content is a content with left bias too evident to miss. It naturally makes people unhappy: they feel that they are being "pushed woke shit". Because biologically, people are, and ought to have, a significant right bias (insert famous squirrel vs tiger example).

If you have no facts, you have no history.

If you have no history, you can have no future.

If you have no future, then you are stuck in an eternal present. This is the ideal state for authoritarianism and autocracy.

There are facts and history of course, just not on social networks. For people who call the shots - the elite and the intellectuals - things are just fine, but they don't spend days arguing with each other on Facebook.

I think a big question is what outcomes do you want. Let’s say a vaccine is dangerous. How many people are you willing to sacrifice on the misinformation. What if it leads to social upheaval? You could ask similar questions about say, class consciousness, immigration etc. true or not, beliefs have consequences.

But in any cases, it is not the facts, but narratives and manipulators who drive people's behaviour. There is competition between left and right propaganda machines, it happens among intellectuals working for the elite, not between the left vs right masses, masses are just that: masses, they have no conscious and no behaviour of their own, they are a product of manipulation.

I've never, in trying to figure out whether something is factually correct or not, worried much about what Facebook/Meta thinks. Facts will go on. Also Facebook is bringing in a community notes type system instead.

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