Perhaps there is some real cost to changing your opinion. What is that cost, and how can it be lowered? Or raised, for that matter?
Physiologically: Changing ingrained opinions on which many others are formed probably requires a good deal of brain re-wiring and may require solid plasticity. I'm unsure how much of a problem this is for the brain.
I guess there are a lot of other costs, but I can't come up with more.
It certainly makes you feel like you look incompetent. I wonder how much it makes others judge you as incompetent. Perhaps this issue has been researched? (I'm guessing that it might matter a great deal how one was wrong; there are different ways to be wrong, and different levels of wrongness.)
The upshot of each is that your previous understanding of the world is overthrown. It's not so much that it's the world which has ended as your worldview.
Mental models are difficult and expensive to construct. It takes an entire childhood and adolescence for humans, arguably a fair bit of adulthood as well.
Leaving those comfortable confines, even where they're wrong, is pretty distressing. We'll often work hard to re-shoebox reality into models to which it fits at best poorly instead.
Well lets take this into the extreme. Lets assume you adopt a new opinion that a life is only worth it's economical value. The amount of mental work to integrate that believe in your current set of opinions (by changing them) is huge. So you'd rather not do it.
Another example: the lie your company is on a good path. Knowing accepting it is on a bad path, means a lot of work.
And as we know humans are lazy by design.
Sorry, how did 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers' not exist (and in even worse form) when you could lie?
Lying is literally what enables us to work and live together. Even something as simple as telling a friend or coworker that that thing they do isn't that annoying counts as lying.
Lying could almost, literally be defined as: 'the ability to stroke the political and emotional biases of people through distortion and disinformation in self-serving echo chambers'.
The OP is claiming that eliminating lying actually increases the occurrence of distortion and disinformation (through an undisclosed mechanism).
To me, this would seem to be contradiction: eliminating the bad thing actually increase the occurrence of the bad thing.
If one can technically verify level of belief, then one can both insist upon it in coercive capacities (the NSA does not want any employee who has any doubts about its holy mission), and tune arguments for it in non-coercive capacities (The breakfast cereal marketing department's learning algorithms will be able to test jingles against a fully verifiable 100% accurate human model).
Blowing things off and consenting because you just want to move on, ceases to be an option once it's detectable. Instead, the opponent can iterate on strategies of persuasion until the job is genuinely done. This doesn't produce an easily swayed populace for the same reason an unsecured computer doesn't produce an egalitarian botnet host: It is in the interest of every memetic attack to install defenses against other memes. Will you tell your new girlfriend, that her brown hair looks nice when your preexisting bias in favor of blondes has been hyped up into a whole obsessive fandom by your last girlfriend, who jealously insisted on the mental calcification of True Belief?
Mindreading in the form of an accurate lie detector of some sort is a large portion of mind control, once you extrapolate it to routine applications throughout society.
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More specific to the article's point:
Datamining truth verification is more likely to be a problem for us due to the asymmetry: It benefits large organizations and only large organizations. It benefits the people with the best AI to search your history and only the people with the best AI to search your history. The NSA is already capable of performing a background check, utilizing the whole of its resources constructively, that would point out any doubts you have; But we are not similarly capable of deducing facts about the NSA.
>If one can technically verify level of belief
I'll just let that one hang there for a second.
Yes, if one can do that -- and I'm not sure there is any reason to believe that it is even possible to achieve, in an absolute/practical meaning of 'technical' [I'll just add, that I believe that people may believe any number of impossibilities and attempt to act in accordance with those beliefs] --, then all manner of horrors may be possible.
To your point about the article:
Does the NSA do anything special? Anything that others could not achieve (in, the 'technical' sense)?
On a tangent, I find this idea fascinating. What would produce an egalitarian botnet host? A Xen instance that spawns a bunch of WinXP VMs each networked such that they can only be reached by a random /16 CIDR block?
That's actually a pretty tough indictment of human nature, if true.
>How are you feeling. >Good.
Or my favourite: >Wow, good job!
People learn by example, and they see these lies (in their technical definition) as acceptable and even encouraged behaviour and hence follow. Then we have parents lying to their children all the time, and then later when they learn the truth they will likely carry on their tradition of lying (aka Santa, Monster Under The Bed ... God) to their kids because, hell, my parents did it.
The list goes on and on.
Or maybe I'm just a sad cynic.
The use of statistical learning to create targeted user experiences will only exacerbate this. It works because one generally doesn't read because they like to learn, so much as learn what they like to read.
The web is a formidable vehicle for sowing confusion and ignorance, as much as it is a place to obtain knowledge.