"Now that we see what AI’s are capable of, I could make a case for reviving the FITs project."
Actually, it's just the opposite.
Now that we've seen what the AI's are capable of, you could make a much stronger case that we have already tumbled into the irreversible pitfall of a beyond-Black-Mirror world that makes anything like a FIT's project utterly hopeless.
The Gaza Hospital Incident is indeed a tragedy. But in the scheme of things, it is a minor tragedy, one of countless other such tragedies that swirl as mere specks in the ember-glowed smoking vortices of violence and warfare and death and destruction that is the destiny and fate forever for all who dwell in such lands until the very end of days.
But the PROBLEM of the Gaza Hospital Incident, of trying to figure out the true story, of who and what to believe, is THE REAL TRAGEDY and one of -monumental significance- that dwarfs all other concerns or any of the actual details of our squabbles, even though we may flatter ourselves into promoting the value of a few hundred or thousand human lives, as if they weigh -anything- in comparison to what is really at stake for us all.
They say that, "In war, truth is the first casualty." That's always been true, since the dawn of us.
But this time is different! Now, the casualty is not just some little truth, but "THE TRUTH"! Not just some facts or claims in dispute, but the very conceit that we have some reliable way of discerning the real state affairs from ... merely well-crafted illusions! Because the truth we now know is that we can't know the truth!
That is because no intellectual can now judge from a distance who or what can be trusted -as even real-.
Consider, "Photoshopping is rampant and misleading videos are everywhere."
Photoshopping?! There are AI-generated videos that look more real than any real video - already. Today. Millions of them. They can look so much better than real, that we start to doubt that something real could look that good, so they actually have to introduce the perfect amount of perfectly applied imperfections to perfectly fool us into thinking it's just imperfect enough to be 'real'.
Plato's cave, but the cave wall seems more realistic than reality, even to those looking in from outside the cave. "Damn, the progress in your cave displays has taken us out here in reality by surprise. I mean, that looks, like, more real than it actually is out here, even though, I'm like, looking at reality with my own eyes and stuff, but, compared to what's on your wall, hey, we're coming in, ok? Scoot over, make room, this is amazing!"
What makes conspiracy theories implausible is that the costs are implausible, that is, the costs of fabrication, coordination, etc. are implausibly high. But those costs just fell to the floor, and -everybody knows they are on the floor- so now what? Convincing fakes is not something for states or big companies or even experts, but something your cousin can do, and in fact does do, all the time.
What's the "health of intellectual discourse" value when you solve for the new equilibrium?
Reality is both material, and the information about those materials, so empirical evidence about facts involves the famously economically distinct atoms and bits. But if your atoms were not in close proximity to the atoms in a 'current event', everything between them and the intellectual's conception is just bits, and those bits are now -all- plausibly perfectly-realistic and incredibly-convincing lies.
To give you an idea of the trouble we're in, consider that there is no difference in principle between "socially-constructed" and "artificially generated". Content that has ideological or multimedial verisimilitude close enough to real to be trusted, will be able to convey just enough untruth as is calculated to effectively mislead.
Or in the alternative, to the extent a 'denier' of certain obviously true things was once a well-deserved epithet, it is now the case that literally everyone can plausibly deny the reality of any fact they find uncomfortable or inconvenient, simply because everyone knows it is now so easy, cheap, and fast to create realistic fabrications of any non-physical, bits-world, immaterial 'evidence' of anything.
Which is to say, "Evidence Is Over". And if evidence is over, there is no intellectualism possible beyond the pure airs of the peaks of considerations of mathematical and logical abstractions of greater and greater beauty, depth, elegance, subtlety, and sophistication.
Which is nice and all - I happen to enjoy what little I can grasp of it - but it's not "trying to discover the truth about the state of the real world of human affairs", which now seems to be in the process of flying beyond all our grasps. Instead of trying hard to keep firm hold of a few trustworthy tethers and anchors, we rushed to set them all aloft in the winds as lost feathers or worse, "Ashes to the Flames We Ourselves Lit!"
We are not ready for a world in which existentially radical skepticism about everything one is being shown and told goes from being something associated with the mentally ill to being -completely reasonable- as the most rational course of action in a world capable of making fabrications with infinite speed, costlessly, perfectly. What's a "whistleblower" in that world? Anything? What's Brin's "Transparency" in that world, a transparent lens to a kaleidoscope of illusions?
Now, ok, I get it, there is so much crazy """AI""" hype out there, that strikes as similar to all the other pipedream vaporware bubbles, that it is easy to adopt a kind of world-weary eye-rolling snarky attitude about it all, like it's really not even 1% of the big deal that it's made out to be.
Wrong. If anything, if you can even believe it, the hype-meisters are -under- selling it. They are probably not even trying to under-sell it, it's just getting better so fast that their attempts to over-sell are too slow for the reality to surpass their puffery!
Things aren't really as bad as you are making out. Once everyone realizes how easy it is to fake photos, videos, audio recordings, etc., these will no longer be considered (on their own) as evidence of anything. But that doesn't mean that we're in a post-truth world, or anything like that. We're just in the world of 200 years ago, before the invention of photography, audio recording, etc. People back then didn't think that judging what is the truth was a hopeless endeavor...
No. We are absolutely NOT going back in the world of 200 years ago!
That whole social-cultural-legal-commercial equilibrium was built on the assumption that in most cases of dispute there -wouldn't exist- any kinds of evidence that weren't of the nature of records of text or the sworn testimony of witnesses.
Having full knowledge for thousands of years of how reliance on such sources of evidence could go awry in a huge variety of ways, the cultures of our predecessors adapted with a number of institutional approaches to increase the chances that the information upon which they depended for all awareness of the world outside their narrow domain, information that was indeed often a matter of life and death, was reliable, credible, and trustworthy.
But those institutions were the accumulated work of millennia of civilizations effort and refinement. Rome had them, but as the saying goes, they didn't build them in a day!
And what you are proposing is that we'll just rebuild Rome all again in a day! We can't, not even close. Not even the actual Romans could, and we're nothing compared to them.
We got rid of most of those institutions when we got all the modern kinds of scientific, material, forensic, and digital evidence. I don't need to take your word for what happened because I have a video from the camera that was pointed at the action.
And we have build up a modern way of receiving and intermediating information about our world that has taken the accuracy and verifiability of those mediums and forms of evidence completely for granted, and that places no emphasis whatsoever on making sure that actual human testimony and reports are accurate portrayals of reality.
And now ALL those mediums, ALL that evidence, is completely, plausibly fake, because cheap, easy, and fast for anyone to fake. The world of 200 years ago could at least trust what the people they trusted said to them. But people don't speak to each other face to face - the screens are everything. The glowing pixels are more the window into reality than our actual reality. Now you do not even know if you are having conversations with actual real people, or indeed if I am a real person or some Handle-pattern-perfectly-imitating comment-bot.
There is no point whatsoever in trying to console oneself by hand-waiving away the abysmally deep trouble we've gotten ourselves into.
Once again Handle articulates many of my thoughts better than I would have. Any who want to believe in a non true alternate reality of other’s injustice will soon be making deep fakes as real as any factual digital recordings.
Since Kling and most FIT folk deny that deep state censorship of the truth means the rigged election was stolen, there remains even a definitional problem, as well as Lenin’s always relevant Q: What Is To Be Done?
I doubt that Kling nor most FIT folk will support Trump 2024, no matter how terrible Biden & the Dems are, in reality.
Whatever twitter's faults, WSJ, NYT and everyone else ran with the unlikely, if not false, story that "Israel did it." (They haven't really corrected anything either . . . they're now just saying that the US agrees with Israel that it was the Palestinian's fault, but the framing is largely unchanged.) That twitter contains false and unverified information is a strawman. So does the MSM. Twitter is self-correcting, however, if you're a reasonably capable "truth-seeker." The MSM is not. If anything, it's twitter that keeps the MSM in line.
Another scenario appears it might be closer to the truth- it was a Hamas rocket failure and the claims it hit the hospital are false along with the reported casualty numbers. The surveillance and photographic evidence suggest the rocket came down in a parking lot without the amounts of damage required to produce even 100 casualties unless someone was holding a meeting in the parking lot.
I mean, if Scott Alexander were doing one of those prediction things he finds so fascinating and I find so boring - “will there be within the next few days a story about Israel bombing a hospital?” - I assume we’d all be at 100%.
I have read the same account. If true, it suggests that the conflagration in the hospital was due to its possible dual purpose as a weapons storage facility. I put a significant probability on that interpretation since it would further motivate Hamas to lie about the cause to avoid blame.
P.S. An Israeli spokesman says it was an Islamic Jihad rocket rather than Hamas. He also claims that about a third of Islamic Jihad rockets fail, which if true further heightens the probability that they were the source of the errant weapon.
Who benefits from the hospital explosion? Israel loses international support regardless of if they did it or not, since the calls for restraint increase in lockstep with the Gaza death count. Hamas benefits, regardless of if they did it or not, because it rallies Arab/Muslim countries to their cause and may provoke Hezbollah to attack. Jordan already cancelled Biden's visit.
The fact that Biden said "it was the other team" on camera suggests US military intel supports the IDF conclusion.
My own assessment is 95% likely misfire from Hamas/PIJ rocket.
Exactly. Hamas benefits because the hospital incident because this story dominated the news cycle for an entire day and knee jerk reactions about who bears responsibility won’t be updated in light of new evidence.
The audio intercept the IDF released in which two speakers seemingly acknowledge the explosion was Palestinian in origin is telling. Even if the speaker was incorrect, the fact that the Israelis are willing to expose their SIGINT capability (and probably the target and/or medium of collection) to refute their culpability in the explosion is a pretty drastic measure.
My start point in the search for truth, is motive. What would Israel’s motive be for bombing a hospital? A concealed rocket launcher perhaps? I have seen video of Israeli drone strike on a Hamas rocket launcher, being delayed whilst nearby buildings were evacuated. It seems unlikely they would deliberately target a hospital without warning or at all - the PR fall out would negate any benefit. It’s possible a malfunctioning Israel munition did it accidentally, but I think Israel would own up and gain credibility. I don’t think Hamas deliberately caused the explosion, but most likely a rocket misfiring. It has happened before injuring their own citizens, and they always cashed in by blaming the Israelis.
Motive's not good enough. Ask any really crazy conspiracy theorist. The stronger any argument you make for why something obviously didn't happen, is at the same time exactly the perfect kind of lie to tell for, "That's what they WANT you to believe!"
The limit of "thinking in bets" is that there's no way for the market to resolve and pay out. The hard part about prediction markets is designing useful questions.
"A wealthy foundation put on a grueling three-day conference to brainstorm ideas for improving public discourse."
Please do post that summary. I have a professional interest in the topic
I get that Hamas is known to place military activities among civilians to make it more difficult for Israel to neutralize. Even so, I'm troubled by your belief that it is 10x more likely Israel did it on purpose than unintentionally.
I'm not sure if I'm more troubled you believe that or because you might be right.
Ultimately, I've come to see this kind of utilitarianism as short-sighted and too easily gamed.
Palestine has deliberately adopted the strategy to make targets that are normally considered "off limits" in warfare to be militarily important. In effect, it creates a Trolley Problem for Israel. To kill Palestinian combatants, Israel must endanger the innocent hostages (often Palestinian civilians) they take.
But this differs from the normal Trolley problem in two important ways. First, there's the agency of the Palestinian combatants. They are shooting too, and ultimately it's their unjust act (using hostages) that is the issue. Second, it's not a single shot "game". Refusing to endanger the hostage leads to another round, where more hostages are taken and more Israelis are killed. The only way to stop hostage taking is to show the strategy is ineffective. In the long run, that will minimize the suffering and shorten the war.
That is why I think that rewarding Hamas for using human shields is a war crime. In the past, Israel has exchanged prisoners for hostages. Given how that worked out, I wonder if those exchanges should be regarded as war crimes by Israel. If you reward hostage-taking, you just get more of it.
The US government has indeed recently paid many enormous ransoms for many hostages. You don't have to be some kind of "public choice / median-voter-theory" grandmaster high strategist or whatever to realize that it's some kind of a sham.
It's the logical extension of the Warren Court's "pretext cases" jurisprudence that ginned up phony disputes between secretly-cooperating parties in order to generate holdings that """forced""" elected officials to do what they all wanted to do anyway but couldn't get the pesky voters to agree with them on! "The Justices have spoken! My hands are tied! What can I do?!"
Now we get "settlement agreements" that likewise 'force' local jurisdictions into doing what the local elites wanted to do anyway, or which give away billions to a number of well-placed class action litigants without even giving the public the merest courtesy of pointing out exactly who did the bad thing, did anything happen to those people, and why was it bad again?
And now we have international "deals" which are more of the same choreographed fakery.
For one thing, notice that the public is not only not clamoring for the release of these hostages, they literally do not even know they exist, and, even after their release is splashed all across the front pages as part of some """deal""", can anybody remember their names, what they were imprisoned for, for how long, in which country, " ... um ... uh .... Are these like "our boys" we were trying to bring home like POW's, or .. no .. but ... uh ...??"
That's a pretty weird thing for a democratic country to go ALL OUT to do, right? Spare No Expense measured in capital-B Billions for those eight whoever-they-ares! "Ok press corps people, now put your cameras right here for the photo op for the heart-warming family reunion of ... what were their names again? ... or, whatever, who cares, not important ... anyway ... "
It's especially weird since EVERYBODY knows AND HAS ALWAYS KNOWN that it's common knowledge that you don't do this and can't do this. And, of course, we don't actually do this. It is not like Israel, which - though it tries as hard and as fast as it can to squander it! - still has so many orders of magnitude more social cohesion and solidary than we do such as to make them feel practically alien to us in their feelings as if every captured soldier was a beloved member of their own family. For them, huge ransoms of redemption still make ZERO strategic sense, but at least they make emotional sense, you can understand WHY, compelled by such intense but inevitably self-destructive emotions, they are being foolish enough to make these obviously terrible mistakes.
But none of that holds for USG, which has no such pressure from Americans which have no such feelings. The USG never actually does this, except when it WANTS to do it, for other reasons.
As for which side could find evidence, the Israelis and the U.S. would be in the best positions to know with a good degree of certainty what the truth actually is given their air surveillance capabilities.
The American government will trust what American officers report. The Israeli government will trust what Israeli officers report. They would be fools to trust each other, but at the same time, they also both know that they can't make claims to the other government even in secret that are even slightly likely to contradict those internal reports.
So, in the absence of public dispute between the Americans and Israelis on such a claim, one ends up with only two scenarios: that the Americans and Israelis are on the same side of the actual truth, or that they are on the same side of a shared lie.
It's easy for people trying to learn and say the truth, to be on the 'same side' by means of the transitive property of equality. On the other hand, Franklin's Law weighs against anything that requires lots of people to stay secret a long time about a big lie, which is incredibly difficult and unlikely.
And, even if ever attempted, they wouldn't blow all that effort and cost on something like this! Not that any of this matters to those who are determined to believe otherwise.
The Ukraine war is the first I've been able to observe in real time as an adult with modern internet access. What you describe happened an awful lot in that war. Conflicting stories of what happened or is happening that can't all be true. Some of this intentional and some not.
There was the Ghost of Kiev, which was a story now acknowledged as having been made completely up by Ukranian propaganda on purpose.
Then there was the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline which was universally blamed on Russia by all right thinking media until later Seymour Hersh blew the story open and now everyone admits it was done by the US and lied about it.
Then there is the Dnieper dam that blew up. Which like Nordsteam everyone blames on Russia but I doubt for the same reason I doubt Nordsteam (it was not in the Russians best interest to blow the dam).
Then there was the counteroffensive where I was reading headline after headline about how the Ukranian blitzkrieg was going to be in Crimea any day while I was simultaneously watching twitter threads about stacks of destroyed Ukranian vehicles piled up at the front.
I'm sure that Russian State TV probably has equivalents of all these, but as I'm not exposed to that I notice what the NYtimes and CNN do.
And getting out of war just think about something like the "Steve Sailer Hate Hoax News Cycle".
1) There is some Hate Hoax/Campus Rape
2) Steve Sailer published a blog or tweet about how ridiculous the idea is.
3) Ross Douthat or some other "Steve Sailer Idea Launderer" publishes the same basic idea.
4) The NYTimes issues a retraction on page 26.
In such a world how do you trust what's real?
Usually asking "Cui Bono" gets you most of the way there, but even that can be misleading.
At the beginning of the pandemic I saw the way the Chinese were reacting to COVID and assumed that it must mean COVID is a big deal. Why would China act that way if it wasn't a big threat? For the first couple of months of the pandemic that was my leading thought, I didn't really get over it until the summer rolled around.
Anyway, I'm pretty low confidence as far as figuring out "who is responsible for an explosion in an urban war zone." I wouldn't put too high a % into any of your options, and I would generally assume accidental has a higher probability then purposeful (these categories are problematic because shells that are intentionally fired will inevitably his things by accident, so there is always some degree of intentionality).
That statement is based on a kind of anachronistic mental framework of highly-coordinated events such as these.
There are in fact no such neatly separable concepts as "US did it" and "Ukrainians did it" as opposed to "Lots of partners who were willing to have it done pitched in and did their part to make it happen."
One of the many unfortunate aspects of our day's intellectual climate is not the kind of reasonable but reflexive disdain for anything that smacks of a low-class hare-brained conspiracy theory.
But that this attitude is taken too far and gives rise to its own bias of overgeneralization and overextension that creates a giant blind spot over the exception to the rule dismissing conspiracy theories, which is that COORDINATED ALLIED ARMED CONFLICT is, in fact, a kind of "conspiracy", a partnership that is both openly and secretly conspiring against ... THE ENEMY!
Point is, nobody can just wander past the waters of all these countries with ships full of divers and high explosives and then blow some of the most important pipelines in the global economy sky high and get away scot free and ain't nobody knows nothing.
I have to admit I don’t pay much attention to current events - especially the convoluted ones - because I have a sort of time preference for waiting to hear about it in twenty years when the truth is more likely to be established.* I know little about tech (wrt “don’t nobody know”). Also, I don’t really care in some instances such as this. I am not confused about where to assign ultimate blame for this war. I can see that for close watchers it would be of great interest, of course. *Admittedly I’m not sure if there will be a next generation of writers and researchers coming along to do this any longer.
The problem now is that everybody with a time preference higher than zero also has a time preference higher than what it takes to believe in anything at all.
Excellent perspective on probability, implications, and "path to refine" as information increases.
Let's add a thought from game-theory.
In one-turn cooperate/cheat game, players can split gain or try for all. If both greedy, both lose. There is no stable solution for one turn (ask me for persuasion example that worked!).
Applied to Middle East, one side has proven "All cheat!" That leaves the other side no choice.
There is historical precedent proving "Tit-for-Tat" works. In WW2, the irredeemable German regime did NOT use gas against Allies, because they learned the lesson from use in WW1.
In Middle East, the implacable side will never learn.
It took two nukes to end imperial Japan. There is no alternative but destruction of the implacable.
Yes, who stands to benefit the most and/or lose the least by lying? That is a test (of course it's not infallible) I use when seeing events reported. This also assumes that what we're being shown is even close to accurate. Parking lot or hospital building? Etc.
A derivative of you construct is less about probability, and more about "If true then what"
It is hard to ever get to the truth. But it is easier to understand the consequence of an event.
If Israel bombed the hospital then..... <Fill in Blank>
If you do this for each case, you then get insight into the consequence. Once you understand the consequence, then you can often better understand the probability.
It would be worthwhile to run this for "If Hamas executes a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, then...."
Run that case with several response scenarios:
1) Israel does little
2) Israel invades
3) Hezbollah enters with Iran support
4) Abraham accord collapses
It becomes easier to understand what might happen next and how to prepare. Or avoid.
No offense, but this heuristic/intuition based thinking seems a lot like the "Bayesian" thinking Rationalists overlay on top of their intuition (better known as: over-specialized, semi-intelligent post hoc rationalization) so "reality" makes sense.
This is what you get when you use Allists to design a system your entire species ongoing existence depends upon.
According to ABC news (via Zerohedge), the Biden administration is drafting a $100B aid package, the bulk of which is for Ukraine, with just $10B for Israel (and it is not clear Israel needs the aid), and a small token for border security as a bone thrown to the GOP. In the aftermath of the failed 'counter-offensive,' Ukraine is a dead man walking. I am curious to see whether Arnold remains charitable towards Biden if the latter's response to the attacks on Israel is tied to the Ukraine fiasco.
"an ABC news story saying the same thing" is 0.0001% likely to mean, "independently corroborated by our trustworthy man in the field" and 99.9999% likely to mean copy-paste, chain-letter 'journalism', the grotesque human centipede masquerading as "news" again and again to every subsequent mouth in the agonizing chain.
Via at tweet, Biden just announced $100M in humanitarian assistance for Gaza and the West Bank. So Hamas can rebuild their tunnels after they are destroyed by the IDF. It just keeps getting better and better.
"Now that we see what AI’s are capable of, I could make a case for reviving the FITs project."
Actually, it's just the opposite.
Now that we've seen what the AI's are capable of, you could make a much stronger case that we have already tumbled into the irreversible pitfall of a beyond-Black-Mirror world that makes anything like a FIT's project utterly hopeless.
The Gaza Hospital Incident is indeed a tragedy. But in the scheme of things, it is a minor tragedy, one of countless other such tragedies that swirl as mere specks in the ember-glowed smoking vortices of violence and warfare and death and destruction that is the destiny and fate forever for all who dwell in such lands until the very end of days.
But the PROBLEM of the Gaza Hospital Incident, of trying to figure out the true story, of who and what to believe, is THE REAL TRAGEDY and one of -monumental significance- that dwarfs all other concerns or any of the actual details of our squabbles, even though we may flatter ourselves into promoting the value of a few hundred or thousand human lives, as if they weigh -anything- in comparison to what is really at stake for us all.
They say that, "In war, truth is the first casualty." That's always been true, since the dawn of us.
But this time is different! Now, the casualty is not just some little truth, but "THE TRUTH"! Not just some facts or claims in dispute, but the very conceit that we have some reliable way of discerning the real state affairs from ... merely well-crafted illusions! Because the truth we now know is that we can't know the truth!
That is because no intellectual can now judge from a distance who or what can be trusted -as even real-.
Consider, "Photoshopping is rampant and misleading videos are everywhere."
Photoshopping?! There are AI-generated videos that look more real than any real video - already. Today. Millions of them. They can look so much better than real, that we start to doubt that something real could look that good, so they actually have to introduce the perfect amount of perfectly applied imperfections to perfectly fool us into thinking it's just imperfect enough to be 'real'.
Plato's cave, but the cave wall seems more realistic than reality, even to those looking in from outside the cave. "Damn, the progress in your cave displays has taken us out here in reality by surprise. I mean, that looks, like, more real than it actually is out here, even though, I'm like, looking at reality with my own eyes and stuff, but, compared to what's on your wall, hey, we're coming in, ok? Scoot over, make room, this is amazing!"
What makes conspiracy theories implausible is that the costs are implausible, that is, the costs of fabrication, coordination, etc. are implausibly high. But those costs just fell to the floor, and -everybody knows they are on the floor- so now what? Convincing fakes is not something for states or big companies or even experts, but something your cousin can do, and in fact does do, all the time.
What's the "health of intellectual discourse" value when you solve for the new equilibrium?
Reality is both material, and the information about those materials, so empirical evidence about facts involves the famously economically distinct atoms and bits. But if your atoms were not in close proximity to the atoms in a 'current event', everything between them and the intellectual's conception is just bits, and those bits are now -all- plausibly perfectly-realistic and incredibly-convincing lies.
To give you an idea of the trouble we're in, consider that there is no difference in principle between "socially-constructed" and "artificially generated". Content that has ideological or multimedial verisimilitude close enough to real to be trusted, will be able to convey just enough untruth as is calculated to effectively mislead.
Or in the alternative, to the extent a 'denier' of certain obviously true things was once a well-deserved epithet, it is now the case that literally everyone can plausibly deny the reality of any fact they find uncomfortable or inconvenient, simply because everyone knows it is now so easy, cheap, and fast to create realistic fabrications of any non-physical, bits-world, immaterial 'evidence' of anything.
Which is to say, "Evidence Is Over". And if evidence is over, there is no intellectualism possible beyond the pure airs of the peaks of considerations of mathematical and logical abstractions of greater and greater beauty, depth, elegance, subtlety, and sophistication.
Which is nice and all - I happen to enjoy what little I can grasp of it - but it's not "trying to discover the truth about the state of the real world of human affairs", which now seems to be in the process of flying beyond all our grasps. Instead of trying hard to keep firm hold of a few trustworthy tethers and anchors, we rushed to set them all aloft in the winds as lost feathers or worse, "Ashes to the Flames We Ourselves Lit!"
We are not ready for a world in which existentially radical skepticism about everything one is being shown and told goes from being something associated with the mentally ill to being -completely reasonable- as the most rational course of action in a world capable of making fabrications with infinite speed, costlessly, perfectly. What's a "whistleblower" in that world? Anything? What's Brin's "Transparency" in that world, a transparent lens to a kaleidoscope of illusions?
Now, ok, I get it, there is so much crazy """AI""" hype out there, that strikes as similar to all the other pipedream vaporware bubbles, that it is easy to adopt a kind of world-weary eye-rolling snarky attitude about it all, like it's really not even 1% of the big deal that it's made out to be.
Wrong. If anything, if you can even believe it, the hype-meisters are -under- selling it. They are probably not even trying to under-sell it, it's just getting better so fast that their attempts to over-sell are too slow for the reality to surpass their puffery!
Things aren't really as bad as you are making out. Once everyone realizes how easy it is to fake photos, videos, audio recordings, etc., these will no longer be considered (on their own) as evidence of anything. But that doesn't mean that we're in a post-truth world, or anything like that. We're just in the world of 200 years ago, before the invention of photography, audio recording, etc. People back then didn't think that judging what is the truth was a hopeless endeavor...
No. We are absolutely NOT going back in the world of 200 years ago!
That whole social-cultural-legal-commercial equilibrium was built on the assumption that in most cases of dispute there -wouldn't exist- any kinds of evidence that weren't of the nature of records of text or the sworn testimony of witnesses.
Having full knowledge for thousands of years of how reliance on such sources of evidence could go awry in a huge variety of ways, the cultures of our predecessors adapted with a number of institutional approaches to increase the chances that the information upon which they depended for all awareness of the world outside their narrow domain, information that was indeed often a matter of life and death, was reliable, credible, and trustworthy.
But those institutions were the accumulated work of millennia of civilizations effort and refinement. Rome had them, but as the saying goes, they didn't build them in a day!
And what you are proposing is that we'll just rebuild Rome all again in a day! We can't, not even close. Not even the actual Romans could, and we're nothing compared to them.
We got rid of most of those institutions when we got all the modern kinds of scientific, material, forensic, and digital evidence. I don't need to take your word for what happened because I have a video from the camera that was pointed at the action.
And we have build up a modern way of receiving and intermediating information about our world that has taken the accuracy and verifiability of those mediums and forms of evidence completely for granted, and that places no emphasis whatsoever on making sure that actual human testimony and reports are accurate portrayals of reality.
And now ALL those mediums, ALL that evidence, is completely, plausibly fake, because cheap, easy, and fast for anyone to fake. The world of 200 years ago could at least trust what the people they trusted said to them. But people don't speak to each other face to face - the screens are everything. The glowing pixels are more the window into reality than our actual reality. Now you do not even know if you are having conversations with actual real people, or indeed if I am a real person or some Handle-pattern-perfectly-imitating comment-bot.
There is no point whatsoever in trying to console oneself by hand-waiving away the abysmally deep trouble we've gotten ourselves into.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a Handle bot-and think a Kling bot, or Tom Grey bot, would be easier to fake.
This year.
AI gets better faster, and personality simulators, too.
Once again Handle articulates many of my thoughts better than I would have. Any who want to believe in a non true alternate reality of other’s injustice will soon be making deep fakes as real as any factual digital recordings.
Since Kling and most FIT folk deny that deep state censorship of the truth means the rigged election was stolen, there remains even a definitional problem, as well as Lenin’s always relevant Q: What Is To Be Done?
I doubt that Kling nor most FIT folk will support Trump 2024, no matter how terrible Biden & the Dems are, in reality.
But maybe I’ll enjoy my next computer game now.
*Something like* the FIT project is exactly what we need, only several orders of magnitude more sophisticated.
An impossible standard. These days the best of our liars aren't even clever enough to keep their lies straight.
What "standard" are you referring to here?
Are you certain you are qualified to be judging the cleverness of others?
Please be explicit.
"Remember Moab"
If you cite Brin, cite Stephenson's _Dodge in Hell_ also
Now you have forgotten end with "Have a nice day."
Whatever twitter's faults, WSJ, NYT and everyone else ran with the unlikely, if not false, story that "Israel did it." (They haven't really corrected anything either . . . they're now just saying that the US agrees with Israel that it was the Palestinian's fault, but the framing is largely unchanged.) That twitter contains false and unverified information is a strawman. So does the MSM. Twitter is self-correcting, however, if you're a reasonably capable "truth-seeker." The MSM is not. If anything, it's twitter that keeps the MSM in line.
Another scenario appears it might be closer to the truth- it was a Hamas rocket failure and the claims it hit the hospital are false along with the reported casualty numbers. The surveillance and photographic evidence suggest the rocket came down in a parking lot without the amounts of damage required to produce even 100 casualties unless someone was holding a meeting in the parking lot.
I mean, if Scott Alexander were doing one of those prediction things he finds so fascinating and I find so boring - “will there be within the next few days a story about Israel bombing a hospital?” - I assume we’d all be at 100%.
I have read the same account. If true, it suggests that the conflagration in the hospital was due to its possible dual purpose as a weapons storage facility. I put a significant probability on that interpretation since it would further motivate Hamas to lie about the cause to avoid blame.
P.S. An Israeli spokesman says it was an Islamic Jihad rocket rather than Hamas. He also claims that about a third of Islamic Jihad rockets fail, which if true further heightens the probability that they were the source of the errant weapon.
Yep, whoever launched the rocket hit a parking lot, not a hospital, so the entire story is a complete nothingburger.
A summary of the evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYVr0lE4S9o
Who benefits from the hospital explosion? Israel loses international support regardless of if they did it or not, since the calls for restraint increase in lockstep with the Gaza death count. Hamas benefits, regardless of if they did it or not, because it rallies Arab/Muslim countries to their cause and may provoke Hezbollah to attack. Jordan already cancelled Biden's visit.
The fact that Biden said "it was the other team" on camera suggests US military intel supports the IDF conclusion.
My own assessment is 95% likely misfire from Hamas/PIJ rocket.
Exactly. Hamas benefits because the hospital incident because this story dominated the news cycle for an entire day and knee jerk reactions about who bears responsibility won’t be updated in light of new evidence.
It may be worth explicitly noting that your facts are actually heuristic predictions, subject to your cultural training (like how AI is trained).
wrong wrong wrong
The audio intercept the IDF released in which two speakers seemingly acknowledge the explosion was Palestinian in origin is telling. Even if the speaker was incorrect, the fact that the Israelis are willing to expose their SIGINT capability (and probably the target and/or medium of collection) to refute their culpability in the explosion is a pretty drastic measure.
I would suggest that the Israelis realize that the propaganda war is of much more significance than some exposure of their intelligence capabilities.
The Israeli's may also be using psychological techniques here as a substitute for actual ability. Say what you want, they're not dumb!!
No sense in over-weighting it - one doesn't expose anything of lasting importance by releasing such audio intercepts.
My start point in the search for truth, is motive. What would Israel’s motive be for bombing a hospital? A concealed rocket launcher perhaps? I have seen video of Israeli drone strike on a Hamas rocket launcher, being delayed whilst nearby buildings were evacuated. It seems unlikely they would deliberately target a hospital without warning or at all - the PR fall out would negate any benefit. It’s possible a malfunctioning Israel munition did it accidentally, but I think Israel would own up and gain credibility. I don’t think Hamas deliberately caused the explosion, but most likely a rocket misfiring. It has happened before injuring their own citizens, and they always cashed in by blaming the Israelis.
Motive's not good enough. Ask any really crazy conspiracy theorist. The stronger any argument you make for why something obviously didn't happen, is at the same time exactly the perfect kind of lie to tell for, "That's what they WANT you to believe!"
Normies are hardly in a position to mock conspiracy theorists, of which I am one.
I look for a motive - I wouldn’t ask the crazy.
The limit of "thinking in bets" is that there's no way for the market to resolve and pay out. The hard part about prediction markets is designing useful questions.
"A wealthy foundation put on a grueling three-day conference to brainstorm ideas for improving public discourse."
Please do post that summary. I have a professional interest in the topic
I get that Hamas is known to place military activities among civilians to make it more difficult for Israel to neutralize. Even so, I'm troubled by your belief that it is 10x more likely Israel did it on purpose than unintentionally.
I'm not sure if I'm more troubled you believe that or because you might be right.
Ultimately, I've come to see this kind of utilitarianism as short-sighted and too easily gamed.
Palestine has deliberately adopted the strategy to make targets that are normally considered "off limits" in warfare to be militarily important. In effect, it creates a Trolley Problem for Israel. To kill Palestinian combatants, Israel must endanger the innocent hostages (often Palestinian civilians) they take.
But this differs from the normal Trolley problem in two important ways. First, there's the agency of the Palestinian combatants. They are shooting too, and ultimately it's their unjust act (using hostages) that is the issue. Second, it's not a single shot "game". Refusing to endanger the hostage leads to another round, where more hostages are taken and more Israelis are killed. The only way to stop hostage taking is to show the strategy is ineffective. In the long run, that will minimize the suffering and shorten the war.
That is why I think that rewarding Hamas for using human shields is a war crime. In the past, Israel has exchanged prisoners for hostages. Given how that worked out, I wonder if those exchanges should be regarded as war crimes by Israel. If you reward hostage-taking, you just get more of it.
There’s a lot baked into what you mean by “reward.”
Giving in to a demand of a hostage taker because of some a priori moral constraint or concern for the life of the hostage is not conveying a reward.
If I pay a terrorist a ransom to free a hostage, and they use the money to go kill other people, I’m not guilty of a crime nor morally culpable.
It may not be the optimal choice in any situation, but a bad choice doesn’t equate to a criminal or immoral one.
How many times do you think US has traded prisoners for hostages with USSR and Russia?
The US government has indeed recently paid many enormous ransoms for many hostages. You don't have to be some kind of "public choice / median-voter-theory" grandmaster high strategist or whatever to realize that it's some kind of a sham.
It's the logical extension of the Warren Court's "pretext cases" jurisprudence that ginned up phony disputes between secretly-cooperating parties in order to generate holdings that """forced""" elected officials to do what they all wanted to do anyway but couldn't get the pesky voters to agree with them on! "The Justices have spoken! My hands are tied! What can I do?!"
Now we get "settlement agreements" that likewise 'force' local jurisdictions into doing what the local elites wanted to do anyway, or which give away billions to a number of well-placed class action litigants without even giving the public the merest courtesy of pointing out exactly who did the bad thing, did anything happen to those people, and why was it bad again?
And now we have international "deals" which are more of the same choreographed fakery.
For one thing, notice that the public is not only not clamoring for the release of these hostages, they literally do not even know they exist, and, even after their release is splashed all across the front pages as part of some """deal""", can anybody remember their names, what they were imprisoned for, for how long, in which country, " ... um ... uh .... Are these like "our boys" we were trying to bring home like POW's, or .. no .. but ... uh ...??"
That's a pretty weird thing for a democratic country to go ALL OUT to do, right? Spare No Expense measured in capital-B Billions for those eight whoever-they-ares! "Ok press corps people, now put your cameras right here for the photo op for the heart-warming family reunion of ... what were their names again? ... or, whatever, who cares, not important ... anyway ... "
It's especially weird since EVERYBODY knows AND HAS ALWAYS KNOWN that it's common knowledge that you don't do this and can't do this. And, of course, we don't actually do this. It is not like Israel, which - though it tries as hard and as fast as it can to squander it! - still has so many orders of magnitude more social cohesion and solidary than we do such as to make them feel practically alien to us in their feelings as if every captured soldier was a beloved member of their own family. For them, huge ransoms of redemption still make ZERO strategic sense, but at least they make emotional sense, you can understand WHY, compelled by such intense but inevitably self-destructive emotions, they are being foolish enough to make these obviously terrible mistakes.
But none of that holds for USG, which has no such pressure from Americans which have no such feelings. The USG never actually does this, except when it WANTS to do it, for other reasons.
"And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
...
It is wrong to put temptation
in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested
to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game
is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
As for which side could find evidence, the Israelis and the U.S. would be in the best positions to know with a good degree of certainty what the truth actually is given their air surveillance capabilities.
The American government will trust what American officers report. The Israeli government will trust what Israeli officers report. They would be fools to trust each other, but at the same time, they also both know that they can't make claims to the other government even in secret that are even slightly likely to contradict those internal reports.
So, in the absence of public dispute between the Americans and Israelis on such a claim, one ends up with only two scenarios: that the Americans and Israelis are on the same side of the actual truth, or that they are on the same side of a shared lie.
It's easy for people trying to learn and say the truth, to be on the 'same side' by means of the transitive property of equality. On the other hand, Franklin's Law weighs against anything that requires lots of people to stay secret a long time about a big lie, which is incredibly difficult and unlikely.
And, even if ever attempted, they wouldn't blow all that effort and cost on something like this! Not that any of this matters to those who are determined to believe otherwise.
It's also possible that everyone is mistaken due to being Neurotypical.
This is a rather clever abuse of the English language's ability to unintentionally misinform.
Just for you Johnny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYVr0lE4S9o
Another human speculating without realizing/acknowledging it - is this significant in your opinion, and if so why?
It isn't wild speculation with the video and photographic evidence. While this could be fake too, to claim so requires some evidence.
Are you asserting a specific fact on the matter that you would like to debate, or do you prefer sticking with innuendo?
LOL! I suspect no amount of evidence would convince you.
The Ukraine war is the first I've been able to observe in real time as an adult with modern internet access. What you describe happened an awful lot in that war. Conflicting stories of what happened or is happening that can't all be true. Some of this intentional and some not.
There was the Ghost of Kiev, which was a story now acknowledged as having been made completely up by Ukranian propaganda on purpose.
Then there was the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline which was universally blamed on Russia by all right thinking media until later Seymour Hersh blew the story open and now everyone admits it was done by the US and lied about it.
Then there is the Dnieper dam that blew up. Which like Nordsteam everyone blames on Russia but I doubt for the same reason I doubt Nordsteam (it was not in the Russians best interest to blow the dam).
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-dam
Then there was the counteroffensive where I was reading headline after headline about how the Ukranian blitzkrieg was going to be in Crimea any day while I was simultaneously watching twitter threads about stacks of destroyed Ukranian vehicles piled up at the front.
I'm sure that Russian State TV probably has equivalents of all these, but as I'm not exposed to that I notice what the NYtimes and CNN do.
And getting out of war just think about something like the "Steve Sailer Hate Hoax News Cycle".
1) There is some Hate Hoax/Campus Rape
2) Steve Sailer published a blog or tweet about how ridiculous the idea is.
3) Ross Douthat or some other "Steve Sailer Idea Launderer" publishes the same basic idea.
4) The NYTimes issues a retraction on page 26.
In such a world how do you trust what's real?
Usually asking "Cui Bono" gets you most of the way there, but even that can be misleading.
At the beginning of the pandemic I saw the way the Chinese were reacting to COVID and assumed that it must mean COVID is a big deal. Why would China act that way if it wasn't a big threat? For the first couple of months of the pandemic that was my leading thought, I didn't really get over it until the summer rolled around.
Anyway, I'm pretty low confidence as far as figuring out "who is responsible for an explosion in an urban war zone." I wouldn't put too high a % into any of your options, and I would generally assume accidental has a higher probability then purposeful (these categories are problematic because shells that are intentionally fired will inevitably his things by accident, so there is always some degree of intentionality).
Seemingly conflicting stories can certainly and easily both be true if you hire professionals to write your news.
I missed that the US blew up the pipeline - incontrovertible evidence?
The thing about huge explosions deep under the seas is that there isn't going to BE any evidence of anything.
I thought the last I heard the Ukrainians did it - is it inferred that they haven’t that underwater expertise?
That statement is based on a kind of anachronistic mental framework of highly-coordinated events such as these.
There are in fact no such neatly separable concepts as "US did it" and "Ukrainians did it" as opposed to "Lots of partners who were willing to have it done pitched in and did their part to make it happen."
One of the many unfortunate aspects of our day's intellectual climate is not the kind of reasonable but reflexive disdain for anything that smacks of a low-class hare-brained conspiracy theory.
But that this attitude is taken too far and gives rise to its own bias of overgeneralization and overextension that creates a giant blind spot over the exception to the rule dismissing conspiracy theories, which is that COORDINATED ALLIED ARMED CONFLICT is, in fact, a kind of "conspiracy", a partnership that is both openly and secretly conspiring against ... THE ENEMY!
Point is, nobody can just wander past the waters of all these countries with ships full of divers and high explosives and then blow some of the most important pipelines in the global economy sky high and get away scot free and ain't nobody knows nothing.
I have to admit I don’t pay much attention to current events - especially the convoluted ones - because I have a sort of time preference for waiting to hear about it in twenty years when the truth is more likely to be established.* I know little about tech (wrt “don’t nobody know”). Also, I don’t really care in some instances such as this. I am not confused about where to assign ultimate blame for this war. I can see that for close watchers it would be of great interest, of course. *Admittedly I’m not sure if there will be a next generation of writers and researchers coming along to do this any longer.
The problem now is that everybody with a time preference higher than zero also has a time preference higher than what it takes to believe in anything at all.
Excellent perspective on probability, implications, and "path to refine" as information increases.
Let's add a thought from game-theory.
In one-turn cooperate/cheat game, players can split gain or try for all. If both greedy, both lose. There is no stable solution for one turn (ask me for persuasion example that worked!).
In the iterated version, both must get to a minimum gain, e.g. hunters sharing catch to survive winter. For that, there IS a best solution, here: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/axelrod.html
Applied to Middle East, one side has proven "All cheat!" That leaves the other side no choice.
There is historical precedent proving "Tit-for-Tat" works. In WW2, the irredeemable German regime did NOT use gas against Allies, because they learned the lesson from use in WW1.
In Middle East, the implacable side will never learn.
It took two nukes to end imperial Japan. There is no alternative but destruction of the implacable.
Glad to elaborate.
Yes, who stands to benefit the most and/or lose the least by lying? That is a test (of course it's not infallible) I use when seeing events reported. This also assumes that what we're being shown is even close to accurate. Parking lot or hospital building? Etc.
A derivative of you construct is less about probability, and more about "If true then what"
It is hard to ever get to the truth. But it is easier to understand the consequence of an event.
If Israel bombed the hospital then..... <Fill in Blank>
If you do this for each case, you then get insight into the consequence. Once you understand the consequence, then you can often better understand the probability.
It would be worthwhile to run this for "If Hamas executes a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, then...."
Run that case with several response scenarios:
1) Israel does little
2) Israel invades
3) Hezbollah enters with Iran support
4) Abraham accord collapses
It becomes easier to understand what might happen next and how to prepare. Or avoid.
No offense, but this heuristic/intuition based thinking seems a lot like the "Bayesian" thinking Rationalists overlay on top of their intuition (better known as: over-specialized, semi-intelligent post hoc rationalization) so "reality" makes sense.
This is what you get when you use Allists to design a system your entire species ongoing existence depends upon.
According to ABC news (via Zerohedge), the Biden administration is drafting a $100B aid package, the bulk of which is for Ukraine, with just $10B for Israel (and it is not clear Israel needs the aid), and a small token for border security as a bone thrown to the GOP. In the aftermath of the failed 'counter-offensive,' Ukraine is a dead man walking. I am curious to see whether Arnold remains charitable towards Biden if the latter's response to the attacks on Israel is tied to the Ukraine fiasco.
"via Zerohedge" ... yeah ....
For the record, there is a link that does go to an ABC news story saying the same thing, but far be it for me to dump on someone else's skepticism.
"an ABC news story saying the same thing" is 0.0001% likely to mean, "independently corroborated by our trustworthy man in the field" and 99.9999% likely to mean copy-paste, chain-letter 'journalism', the grotesque human centipede masquerading as "news" again and again to every subsequent mouth in the agonizing chain.
Via at tweet, Biden just announced $100M in humanitarian assistance for Gaza and the West Bank. So Hamas can rebuild their tunnels after they are destroyed by the IDF. It just keeps getting better and better.
Now that is the “we can have it all” left we know and love.