On truth and trust

...and the question of credibility

… and the question of credibility

This is Tristan Harris. He looks trustworthy, doesn’t he?
Since I used to have a Blaze subscription, I still receive promotional stuff from them. Like access to this special: Why Experts Are Suddenly Freaking OUT About AI | Tristan Harris | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 185

I kinda like Glenn, but with some reservations. He is just too chatty for my patience. In this case, I started watching the interview but stopped after a few minutes to look up who Tristan Harris is.
I found him in the The social dilemma (watched it) …and this talk:
I'm not afraid. You're afraid | Tristan Harris | Nobel Prize Summit 2023  
I watched it and another one he recommended in the first:
The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023

The social dilemma led me to Coded Bias, another documentary. Since I am having a hard time walking away from the subject, I watched them all. I even grabbed the book that was recommended in Coded bias: Weapons of Math Destruction.

Why did I do all this? Because Tristan pissed me off six minutes into the “I am not afraid” video with this example: (I clipped the video here)

Transcript of the clip:

 “This is a thing that says: Social media summarized elegantly in two tweets.

The top tweet says - and I'll just zoom in really quickly - the much-vaunted Pandora papers revealed that the Patriotic Zelensky was storing payments from his top funder Israel Ihor Kolomoysky in offshore accounts and this person was also a funder of the Neo-Nazi Battalion
…and notice that that first tweet got 8000 retweets, the top one.
Now underneath it says:
I was the editor and co-reporter of that story you can look it up you've completely twisted it.
There's no link between this money and anything to do with Azov.
…. and that got 58 tweets.
Really, we could all just go home because that kind of summarizes what the entire information environment looks like and if that's the asymmetry of  power that we have granted to every actor in the information ecosystem, right, we have been living in this fun house mirror and so we got to a world that looks like this, the climate change of culture and we have another talk out there that I highly recommend folks you know I have a short amount of time today but you should check out this talk we recently gave called the AI dilemma that talks about the second contact which unfortunately I won't have time to talk about today.”

Did you catch it? Can you see the problem? I will get to it in a sec.

This is where I stopped watching to look up Aubrey Belford. She was indeed one of the contributors to the article:
Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle - OCCRP which clearly describes how corrupt the whole systems is. (Yes, I read it.)

So, did you see the slight of hand?
The lowkey tweet does not say that the two are connected. He says that the Pandora Papers show the corruption (they do), then he mentions that the person we are talking about, Kolomoisky, the one who financed Zelensky’s presidential campaign is the same guy who also finances the Azov battalion. There is no suggestion that the two are connected. The only connection is the person. His support for actual fascists is only mentioned to show that he is not a good guy.

Aubrey used the strawman logical fallacy in her argument. She says that the tweet is untrue, because it says what it actually doesn’t. The tweet does not say or suggest that there is a link.
But there is another twist: the article was published on the third of October 2021, several months before that stinking corrupt sock puppet became the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. At the time of the publishing, Zelensky was still just another corrupt third world president. At that time, for the political left, it was still OK to be critical of Zelensky, but it became absolutely verboten after the start of the war.

This is a typical tactic of the fact-check industry. Misrepresent, assume, insinuate and judge. There is no need to show how the story was ‘twisted’, only to state that it was.
The point is no to disprove, but to discredit. It is all built on the assumption that the faithful does not require proof, only a verdict that what they see is heresy. Saying that you don’t like something is a clear proof that it is wrong.

So why did it get only 58 retweets? Why would an obviously manipulative lie deserve more? Could it be that people do not like fact checkers? Could it be that they do not like to be manipulated? That they saw through the lie? That maybe, they even ‘fact checked’ it like I did?

All of which leads to the biggest lie, Tristan using this as an example to build his argument on.
Not only the foundation, but even the argument is wrong. 1% is a perfectly typical reply-retweet ratio. Unless the reply is posted by a major celebrity, people retweet tweets, not the replies to them. CHECK IT OUT! Go to twitter and see for yourself what is a typical ratio between tweets and the replies to them. Making this look as a sign of a fundamental flaw in the system is just deeply, fundamentally dishonest. The system may have many flaws, but this is not the example to show them.

That’s why I had to check him out. Believe it or not, he is one of the best. At least he understands some of the problems, but just like the rest, he is just jockeying for a commissar position in the AI control nomenklatura advocated for.

Saying that he pissed me off is not exactly correct. What I felt was more bitterness than anger. The bitterness that I have to deal yet again, on this very important subject, with so much underhanded dishonesty.
How can I take an argument that is built on lies seriously? I can call them lies, because I believe that both Tristan and Aubrey are intelligent enough to know that they were lying. I must ask why? Isn’t the truth enough? After seeing this, how can I possibly trust anything they say?
Do they even care to know that some can see the lies, the manipulation and the logical fallacies?
Or do they consider it a cost of doing business in the world of the deplorables?

I don’t know the answers to the above questions. It is difficult for me to believe that people can be blinded this much by ideology, but apparently, it is possible. Tristan seems to be trapped by his ideology, politics, world-view, call it what you will. Just like any other person interviewed in The social dilemma.
I am willing to bet at multiple odds, that there was not a single republican among them. They are all trapped in their ideology. Part of that ideology is the firm (and fundamentally Leninist) belief that they should be the custodians and arbiters of the discourse. Because they KNOW what fake news is. Because they KNOW what a conspiracy theory is.

I actually like Tristan Harris and I happen to agree with 80% of his observations. It is his assumptions and conclusions that I find terrifying.

Social media, AI and LLMs are not the problem. They are the symptoms of much larger problems.
We cannot talk about them in isolation.
We cannot talk about them without reaching some agreements on the rules of the conversation.
We cannot talk about them without understanding the roots of the problems.

Somewhere close to the end of “The Social Dilemma) Tristan says:

If we don’t agree on what is true or that there is such a thing as truth, we are toast.
This is the problem beneath other problems because if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.

I most definitely agree with that, but then I have to ask: why are we wasting our time on talking about our dilemmas and ignore the questions about the nature of truth?

I have a lot more to say about roots I mentioned above, about the jockeying for control, about the documentaries and about the real problems of AI, but I would have to do that on another day. For now, watch at least the two documentaries and let me know what you think about them. Seriously. Its your homework.

Further reading (more from me)

• AI is no match for natural stupidity
  There are further links in that post, if you feel like going down the rabbit hole.

Worthwhile reading/watching (more from Others)

• The social dilemma

• Coded Bias

• Why Experts Are Suddenly Freaking OUT About AI | Tristan Harris | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 185

• I'm not afraid. You're afraid | Tristan Harris | Nobel Prize Summit 2023  

• The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023

Notes

Some Tristan Harris quotes from The social dilemma:
I bolded the most objectionable points

There is a study, an MIT study, saying that fake news on twitter spreads six times faster than true news.
What is that world gonna look like when one has a six-times advantage to the other one?
It’s a disinformation-for-profit business model. You make money the more you allow unregulated messages to reach anyone for the best price.

“Facebook has trillions of these newsfeed posts. They can’t know what is real or what is true….
Which is why this conversation is so critical right now”

[The robotic voice of conspiracy theories] “The government planned this event, created the virus, and had a simulation of how the countries would react”

[Tristan again] We’re bombarded with rumors, people are blowing up actual physical cell phone towers.
We see Russia and China spreading rumors and conspiracy theories. People have no idea what’s true, and now it’s a matter of life and death.
What we are seeing with COVID is just an extreme version of what is happening across our information ecosystem. Social media amplifies exponential gossip and exponential hearsay to the point that we don’t know what’s true, no matter what issue we care about.

“Imagine a world where no one believes anything is true. Everyone believes the government’s lying to them. Everything is conspiracy theory, “I shouldn’t trust anyone. I hate the other side.” That’s where all this is heading.

We in the tech industry have created the tools to destabilize and erode the fabric of society in every country, all at once, everywhere.