I want to agree with you, deeply, but the number of people who fall for simple PR/advertising in today's world suggests otherwise.

I think we'd have a chance if they taught PR tricks in schools starting at a young age. Or at minimum, if websites that aggregate news would identify sources that financially benefit from you believing what they're saying.

I've long thought that high school should require at least one course that I like to call "defense against the dark arts" (kids still dig Harry Potter, right? Hahaha).

The curriculum would mostly be reasoning, how to spot people lying with graphs and statistics, some rhetoric, and extensive coverage of Cialdini's Influence. The entire focus would be studying, and then learning to spot and resist, tricks, liars, and scam artists.

That's a good thing to teach but I do think that there are a large number of people out there that just don't have the capacity to do that. By virtue of being on this forum you are likely in the top quartile or near it of the population in terms of intelligence for whatever good that metric is. There is a cognitive bias that everyone frames most people as more or less the same as the person sees themselves and for me, a pretty skeptical person, it's tough to view the world through the lens of someone less skeptical. (I think it's the false consensus bias)

> In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.

> > In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

> Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.

It's a hard battle against status quo and bureaucratic institutions but I still think it's possible to reduce that by a lot. I'm willing to bet that a lot of those people are below basic because they weren't given chance to succeed due to child poverty, schools playing numbers game[1] and various other factors. We don't even have to add new curriculums. Just by getting the "basics" right, we can lift those numbers up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uonc7BEZ4g

A lot of the messages that are valuable exist as regular idioms that are pretty simple. 'Don't believe everything you read.' for example is only a few ideas away from 'the government, media and corporations are manipulating you for their benefit.'

One is probably generally considered good advice, the other is likely dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense.

We probably need a few more simple ideas like for modern times. "Facebook profits most when they make you depressed" "Tiktok is exploiting your sexdrive to influence your personal politics" "Google is telling people what you masterbate too for money"

They'd have to be less direct of course. I guess one modern one is, "if it's free, you're the product". But that tragically overlooks the generosity of the FOSS community so I'm not a fan.

When you say "everything online" do you mean every untrusted source? Surely the genie is out of the bottle on communication over the web. That local source will have a website. Because of that I feel like we'll always just have to be vigilant, just like we always should have been. After all, local scams still exist. Real humans are behind the bots.

> Real humans are behind the bots.

Yes, but those humans are usually anonymous and on the other side of the planet which makes them feel safe. And that allows them to be evil without repercussions.

Back in the days, I went to LAN parties. If someone spotted a cheater, they would gang up with their friends and literally throw the offender out of the building. That was a pretty reliable deterrent. But now with all games being played online, cheating is rampant.

Similarly, imagine if those Indian call centers that scam old ladies out of their life savings were located just a quick drive away from their victims' families. I'm pretty sure they would have enough painful family visits such that nobody would want to work there.

Accordingly, I'm pretty sure the local expert would have strong incentives to behave better than an anonymous online expert would.

To argue that scams didn't exist or weren't a problem before the internet is pretty indefensible, no matter the anecdotes.

I was merely trying to argue that scams within a local community would be less severe than scams between strangers, because they are easier to punish and/or deter.

I suspect that many chat groups (such as Facebook groups), even small niche ones, already have GPT-3-like bots posting messages that seem to fit into the group but that are trained to provide opinions on certain topics that align with the message that the organisation/country controlling them wishes to push, or to nudge conversations in that direction.

Aww, that reminds me of the good old IRC days where everyone would start their visit with !l to get a XDCC bot listing.

Your second paragraph is very intriguing. I never really thought about this. I wonder if people will actually be able to restrict usage though. Its software, and historically it has been hard to restrict it. Of course cloud based systems have two advantages, software is hidden behind the API and they have really powerful systems. But the former requires a single lapse in security to leak and latter just requires time till consumer hardware can catch up. If I use past data to predict future (which might be a bad idea in this case), it might be almost impossible to restrict AI software.

I've heard this for years, but software will eventually face its own regulation and barriers to entry much as healthcare and accounting have theirs.

I'm not sure the experts have to be local. I can't be sure that a random twitter account isn't a bot, but I can be pretty sure that tweets from @nasa are reasonably trustworthy. People will form webs-of-trust: they trust one source, the people viewed as trustworthy by them, etc. Anyone outside of that will be untrustworthy.

That's not too dissimilar from what we do today, after all people have always been able to lie. The problem is just that if you start trusting one wrong person this quickly sucks you into a world of misinformation.

I find your point about regulating AI interesting. We already see some of this, with good recommendation systems being harmful to vulnerable people (and to a lesser degree most of us). This will probably explode once we get chatbots that can provide a strong personal connection, replacing real human relationships for people.

HN is a good example (or precursor) of webs-of-trust. Nice phrase.

This is the outcome I see as well, and I think it is a good thing. Every form of communication beyond physical face to face will be completely untrustworthy. It will affect banking. Remote work. Dating. Clubs. Everything.

So you’re predicting a return to Stone Age tribalism

Huh? How does that follow? Also, I’m not entirely sure we ever left Stone Age tribalism…