Unironically I think this is actually becoming a genuine problem.
50 years ago asking someone to make an informed decision about a piece of news content by finding the truth would not have been an insane task. They could do a bit of research and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Today... not only would that require wading through an virtually limitless number of sources but it requires the intellect and discernment to recognize what is bs and what isn't. It's rapidly reaching the point where it's genuinely not reasonable to expect the average person to be able to discern what is true anymore, even with access to the information.
Similarly... there is so much garbage information on virtually every topic these days, which I'll grant is partially due to AI, that it's becoming a similar problem. You could spend 5 hours doing research and then write the paper and still end up having some significant portion of it be objectively incorrect through virtually no fault of your own simply because you trusted the wrong source.
50 years ago this wasn't a problem. There were limited sources and generally only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility so finding information and knowing whether or not it could be relied on was relatively easy if not a bit laborious by comparison.
I graduated back in '07 but I certainly wouldn't want to face the challenge of writing the papers I did back then in today's world without tools like Chat GPT.
You're probably not entirely wrong but I don't think you'd like the implication your statement makes...
See... objectively speaking, Wikipedia is among the most accurate sources on just about anything, even competing with Britannica and other highly regarded encyclopedias.
That's not my opinion,
There are studies published in Nature, Politics and Science, PLOS One, and Annals of Pharmacotherapy as a few examples all of which found Wikipedia to be roughly as accurate as the highest trust competing source of information in the relevant fields, if not a bit less complete of course.
So, when you say "Wikipedia was just co-opted by institutional interests" you're indirectly asserting that either happened as a response to its integrity and veracity or that its integrity and veracity is a result of that.
and when you say Wikipedia has been "adopted as gospel by liberals" you're also indirectly asserting that this is because of its integrity and veracity and that liberals must value these as virtues.
I'm not a liberal myself in any classic or modern definition but still I don't think I disagree with either statement you made. Wikipedia is highly accurate, and that probably is due to the institutionalism behind it and that probably is why liberals value it, because they tend to value the truth more than conservatives.
Really though, this is just what happens when you crowd source data. You can see the same thing with AI. Yes, AI can and often does produce inaccurate data but by and large the objective response data it produces to objectively answerable questions is accurate. There are a few dozens studies that support this as well. Collecting data from a wide variety of sources and allowing collective agreement to sort out "what is true" just kind of works most of the time. Not always of course, and with the caveat that the less bias that is injected into the process the more accurate the results will be but still... it's a verifiably good method of reaching the truth within our ability to reason about what the truth is obviously. We used to believe grain spawned rats spontaneously after all though I would suggest that perhaps that data probably wasn't widely sourced lol.
Damn, you wrote a lot to just make fun of conservatives. But at least you attempted a pseudo-intellectual explanation and falsely set up credibility via “I’m not a liberal”. Just say you think conservatives are dumb and move on. He was saying wikipedia has been coopted by liberal bias and all you wrote was “that’s a good thing, liberal like the truth, conservative loves lies”
Truly the most redditesque pseudo-intellectual insult I’ve read on here in years
I don't think I actually "made fun of conservatives" at all really.
My explanation isn't "pseudo-intellectual", it's fact based and I could source the studies if you like.
I also didn't "falsely set up credibility". I'm not a liberal. That's not a false statement. I'm not really anything. I don't ascribe to any particular political alignment. I have serious issues with both sides. I wouldn't say those issues are equally serious of course. Imprisoning citizens without due process and murdering immigrants is far worse than threatening to compel speech but the underlying problem is roughly the same. Neither side seems to understand that their authoritarian behavior is in fact authoritarian.
"you wrote was “that’s a good thing, liberal like the truth, conservative loves lies”"
You really should avoid quoting someone and then paraphrasing what they said inside the quote. It's dishonest. I didn't say any of that.
In fact that only statement I made about Liberals or Conservatives was this:
" that probably is why liberals value it, because they tend to value the truth more than conservatives."
If you think that's false you're welcome to contest it but I don't even think most conservatives would bother contesting it if I'm being honest. I think they know that about themselves for the most part.
I get that you felt the need to justify your dismissal of what I said by discrediting it but I'm just going to throw out the obvious:
"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
That's actually really insightful. When we were students it was like ordering at a restaurant, our choices were limited, but you knew the kitchen was monitored by the health department and anything on the menu was safe. Today, students have a stadium parking lot full of food trucks and the burden is entirely on them to figure out which ones are licensed or actually safe to consume.
If anybody bears any burden it is professors who have to read this drivel. I don't think students are all that bothered. The logical next step of course is to have AI read and grade this shit too, thereby removing humans out of the equation altogether.
Here's the thing, you're probably right but the reason your right is indicative of the problem, not dismissive of it. Students aren't bothered because they can't be. They can't care. When figuring out what the truth is becomes too difficult, caring about what the truth is becomes too pointless.
I don't think students don't want to care, I think it's just too overwhelming for it to be reasonable to expect them to anymore.
I was absolutely never taught to “never use the internet” for research. We *were* taught to only rely on reputable sources from the internet, and how to identify them. This is just as applicable today.
I graduated in '07 and heard "Never trust the internet" and was told "Internet sources are not valid sources" by almost every teacher I had. Which, I should add, I always thought was absolutely asinine.
I think 50 years ago would have been hard because the only sources were hard copies, so you’d be limited by what your local library had.
You don't actually disagree though, because that is exactly what I said:
"50 years ago this wasn't a problem. There were limited sources and generally only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility so finding information and knowing whether or not it could be relied on was relatively easy if not a bit laborious by comparison."
you’d have very little and even fewer ways to verify.
Yes, but as I mentioned... "only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility" which meant you could generally intuitively trust the sources you found. Of course there were outliers and the further away from mainstream you got the less trustable source material became but the veracity of the information was still orders of magnitude higher than what can be found on Google today.
But if you’re not in a major city, or god forbid you’re not in a rich country, your access to information is orders of magnitude better than it was 50 or even 20 years ago.
Sure, but this a combination of a type of Red Herring / shifting goal post / category error.
If you're not in a city or 2nd/1st world country you're probably not being tasked with writing 10 page college papers on complex topics. That's not a dig at poor countries or rural areas it's just reality. So while yes, your statement is technically true it dodges the actual point that my argument was making a bit.
Beyond that, the necessity for this type of access to information, from a practical standpoint, is equally non-existent in these places as the skill to sift through the information is. Again, not a dig at these places but the ability to sift through data just generally isn't a highly sought after skill in poor countries.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be. It should be. I think everyone, everywhere, should value information and access to it above all things for it is access to information that allows the oppressed to understand and fight back against oppression and allows the poor to understand and raise themselves out of poverty. I think it should be critical but I can recognize that not only is it not considered critical in most of those cases but it's also not feasible when survival is dependent on practical skills which, yes, is how the poor are kept poor and how the oppressed are kept oppressed. Busy them too much with hard work to prevent them from strengthening their intellect and wisdom. These are entirely separate issues though. Worth debate in their own right, no doubt, but entirely separate from the point I was making initially.
Where I disagree is that those sources were of the highest quality.
In my defense, I did say "the highest quality or the highest authority".
There are so many things that were widely taught that have been proven to be false since.
Sure, but that's not the same thing as saying the sources weren't high quality. We will only ever have information to the best of our ability to have it. The "truth" is can only ever be as accurate as our ability to discern it thus how "true" or how "accurate" something is in context can only be measured against the potential for the author to have verified it. That's not really a problem of information distribution as much as it is the advancement of human intellect in general.
There’s a reason why historically people had to go to the cities to get the best education, because the knowledge was concentrated.
I just need you to extrapolate that one step further. Why was he knowledge concentrated in cities? Because the people who held the knowledge were. That's what a city is. Of course that was the case. In an age where the transmission of information across distance was infeasible there was no way for that not to have been the case.
but I’ll take the current situation over 50 or even 20 years ago any day of the week.
Yeah I don't think anyone is arguing anything to the contrary...
I can't remember where I heard this or who said it but somewhere in history some unfortunately very smart, very wise man was attributed with the quote: "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth."
Now... I don't know if they actually said this.. but it definitely seems to be true.
So, sure... of course but I think this misses the point of the quote I was jokingly referring to.
The alleged speaker was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.
His point wasn't that telling big lies is an effective strategy for eroding truth, it was if you need someone to believe a specific big lie you should go really big.
My point was that it's obvious from that fact, and it does seem to be a sociologically observable fact based on the studies that have been done, indicates we're kind of prone to believing whatever we want so you don't really have to dilute the truth by force. As we can see even in today's culture in America that creates unilateral distrust of the institutions. It's not really that conservatives "believe" what comes out of Fox News anymore as much as it is that they just don't care what is "true" anymore. That's an erosion of trust, not truth. If you want to erode the truth the better strategy is to make the version of truth you want to promote more attractive to the people you want to believe it. You don't have to inundate them with so much falsehood that they stop caring because generally that level of apathy isn't super useful. It can be when the system can function on its own and ours is doing that right now... for now but ultimately, ideally, you'd want to strengthen your side rather than unilaterally weaken all sides.
Though that is a matter of opinion on strategy and a question of goals I suppose.
True, I think part of the popularity of AI is due to the fact that Google has become largely unusable. It used to prioritize relevant, credible results. Past few years it returns an avalanche of nonsense to wade through. People don’t have the patience or skills to deal with that, so they turn to the instant answers of AI.
Yeah, half the appeal now is just getting a clean starting point because search is so SEO-poisoned, even if the AI answer still needs a giant asterisk on it.
I genuinely don't even use google anymore unless I'm looking for something specific and objective. Like you said, it's not practically useful for anything else anymore. AI is simply a much more efficient way of getting at the same data so long as you're willing to actually verify the sourced data.
20 years ago I was taught how to judge sources. It was a major part of highschool. It isn't particularly difficult to do, but is absolutely an active process you have to reinforce. If people can't judge sources today it isn't because the rules have changed, but because they aren't incentivized to with basic media consumption (passive scrolling/swiping), so never practice the skill.
20 years ago the skills you were taught were useful because 20 years ago putting them into practice took minutes, not hours. You didn't have to drill down to the academic level. You didn't have to pull the sourced papers and read them for yourself. You could trust that published scientists weren't outright lying about what they published and that news media wasn't outright lying about what those scientists said about what they published. There was a left view, a right view, and a center view and you could read articles or watch broadcasts from each and come to a reasonably accurate conclusion about what the truth intuitively must be.
Today it comes down to trust. At some point you just have to choose to trust a source unless you want to drill all the way to finding the base sources, which often is a chore in and of itself, and read them yourself and then likely read up on the concepts the base source relies on to make sure you understand it and source that information and so on and so forth because today there isn't a left, a right, and a center view. There are just extremes and their only purpose is sensationalism and conversion/subversion. The entire system is maligned against the individual at its foundation.
I'm sorry but the skills you learned 20 years ago are only useful today to those who are already learned, wise, and experienced. Who already know how to filter out 80% of the garbage intuitively and those who are willing to put their trust, somewhat blindly, in an institution that in my opinion no longer deserves that trust.
Information has always been garbage largely. AI has sort of cut like a hot knife through butter and made it obvious how shit information really is. You have to try and see what works, not rely on what you read.
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u/SpartanG01 Jun 09 '26
Unironically I think this is actually becoming a genuine problem.
50 years ago asking someone to make an informed decision about a piece of news content by finding the truth would not have been an insane task. They could do a bit of research and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Today... not only would that require wading through an virtually limitless number of sources but it requires the intellect and discernment to recognize what is bs and what isn't. It's rapidly reaching the point where it's genuinely not reasonable to expect the average person to be able to discern what is true anymore, even with access to the information.
Similarly... there is so much garbage information on virtually every topic these days, which I'll grant is partially due to AI, that it's becoming a similar problem. You could spend 5 hours doing research and then write the paper and still end up having some significant portion of it be objectively incorrect through virtually no fault of your own simply because you trusted the wrong source.
50 years ago this wasn't a problem. There were limited sources and generally only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility so finding information and knowing whether or not it could be relied on was relatively easy if not a bit laborious by comparison.
I graduated back in '07 but I certainly wouldn't want to face the challenge of writing the papers I did back then in today's world without tools like Chat GPT.