I am not talking about criminals or similar, for that I agree with you.
I am talking about political. There has been a MASSIVE explosion of fakeness since covid, coupled with people who completely lost their ability to actually check information, and anything that makes it easier for anyone to propagate is dangerous in my view.
We've reached the point where "check by yourself / do your own research" moved from what the proponent of the truth used to tell people to go check, to what the other side is now using to give as much value to their facetok videos and whatnot (I am speaking in the general sense).
> There has been a MASSIVE explosion of fakeness since covid, coupled with people who completely lost their ability to actually check information, and anything that makes it easier for anyone to propagate is dangerous in my view.
The best part about this statement is it doesn’t even matter what “side” you are describing because all “sides” are subject to the same issue. Hell for more than a year every covid article from New York Times quoted an obscenely high 4% “death rate” despite it being off by multiple orders of magnitude. And if pressed they’d be able to easily “prove” their rate by citing some dodgy data model, using badly collected data, or just not understanding how to interpret the data. And that “truth” propagated by the NYT was cited all over causing all kinds of wildly over the top responses.
We live in a post truth world. You can always find some authoritative sounding source to support whatever it is you want to believe. There is always a way to massage the data and “facts” in a way that supports your claim as the “true truth”. It does even matter what “team” you are on… you’ll always be able to craft “the truth” by selectively using whatever source material you want.
I don’t even know how you’d solve this problem because it is a core issue with trust. It’s very, very hard to establish “knowledge trust” on something like the internet.
After having very similar observations I accidentally went down the philosophy rabbit hole. I would look up wiki pages like "Newton's flaming laser sword" and get into a neverending cycle of reading all the "see also" links recursively and started to realize just how meta-ly subjective literally everything is.
And while I was already super logical being a programmer and such, I don't even think that I like having did this, because now I am starting to lose the ability to "posit" or believe something is true, because one can always argue that so many things are subjective that it is impossible to come to an agreement on something in any reasonable amount of time.
Or an other perspective is that politics and religions are just byproducts of propaganda mesmerizing people. So they are already many battle proofed efficient way to brain wash people, and probably many more furtive and cost effective than these new stuffs.
Thankfully you still can rely on fellow HN commenters like myself to bring you thoughts free of any mind binding manipulations and exempt of sarcasm.
I am talking about political. There has been a MASSIVE explosion of fakeness since covid, coupled with people who completely lost their ability to actually check information, and anything that makes it easier for anyone to propagate is dangerous in my view.
We've reached the point where "check by yourself / do your own research" moved from what the proponent of the truth used to tell people to go check, to what the other side is now using to give as much value to their facetok videos and whatnot (I am speaking in the general sense).