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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes, arrogance of humans is unbounded. That you, humble reader are happier to swim in a sea of misinformation on the premise that you are smarter and faster at disambiguating bullshit from reality.

Furthermore, you are content to pretend that the rest of humanity is capable of doing this on a regular basis. And not just the top 10% of those who can read, interpret and weigh biases, but a solid portion of it.

It is a completely reasonable interpretation if you are an accelerationist living in the elite classes. In fact, perhaps, they are even counting on a majority of people thinking this is a fine environment.

I don't have the answers, but a lot of this is just a continuation of a very bad trend.

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> Ah, yes, arrogance of humans is unbounded. That you, humble reader are happier to swim in a sea of misinformation on the premise that you are smarter and faster at disambiguating bullshit from reality.

I think you misunderstand me: I want people to shit in the sea until it stinks so bad that everyone gets out of the water.

Ok but I don't have a lot of faith that it will ever be turned back without violence because there are vested interests in keeping everyone swimming in it.

> Ok but I don't have a lot of faith that it will ever be turned back without violence because there are vested interests in keeping everyone swimming in it.

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing.

I think an acceptable good-but-not-perfect outcome it one where the "sea" (AI) stinks so bad that enough people get out that there's a viable life outside of it. The thing is people, individually and in aggregate, are lazy and competitive, so self-discipline isn't sufficient to sustain that life. There need to be problems that push people in that direction.

The web is foundational to AI, so that's a place where it's vulnerable.

Just to be clear, you're proposing that we poison the internet with misinformation - which is just as misleading to humans using traditional information retrieval tools as to AIs - until it's completely unusable, and this will be good because it's bad for AI, and everyone who is misled in the meantime is acceptable collateral damage?

Here I'm quoting from the website:

> It should go without saying that you should never publish fake content. While my experiment relied on tens of thousands of unverified stats, I ran it in order to share the results with the public, and the website, while still live, now carries a disclaimer.

"now carries a disclaimer" sure suggests it didn't, so "you should never publish fake content" really doesn't seem like a standard the author actually held themself to.

Parent doesn't actually need to propose anything, this will happen regardless because the incentive structure demands it and the same technology makes it cheaper than ever before to perform the poisoning.

It may happen anyway but you can say the exact same thing for AI development. In neither case does it seem like a good excuse for bad behavior.

https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...

> In neither case does it seem like a good excuse for bad behavior.

Good behavior that facilitates bad behavior is not, in fact, good behavior. For instance: it's not "good behavior" to hold the door open for gunman hell-bent on destruction.

The AI labs aren't building AI to help humanity, they're building AI to win at capitalism. Which a big reason why the AI is coming for the intellectual, creative labor that people often enjoy, before it comes from the dirty, unenjoyable labor.

We invented the democratic process precisely to mitigate such violence. Get enough people pissed off and no amount of “vested interests” will impede severe regulation.

The problem with this analogy is that we already literally shit in the actual sea so much people get sick and die sometimes and yet people are still getting in the sea.

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