[khiner]

That is true, 3 would help steel my strawman. I agree that we’ll increasingly have capabilities to generate and publish garbage that’s _just_ good enough to generate clicks, and incentives to do this. In addition, I think we’ll increasingly have tools to produce content that is much more rich, imaginative, insightful, and factually correct in our future. Some more interesting questions to me are then: What will the ratio be? How will that ratio compare with what we see today? How easily will I be able to identify misinformation when I care about factual accuracy (again, compared with today)? How easily will I be able to avoid the garbage, vs find the good stuff?

[mkmk3]

How can fact checking be better facilitated as tech develops? It seems like a distinct social issue to me, one that I imagine requires verification from people with reputation (which could be aided by improved social networks probably). Id be very interested to hear if you have other ideas, as you seem optimistic on this front and would like to share in that :)

[khiner]

I can think of a few directions for technology aiding in fact checking:

1. Much of finding out what’s true or false is about finding consistency amongst lots of observations. So this is the science direction. If you can analyze lots of data, say from first-hand direct measurements like from a scientific instrument, or analyzing second hand observational data, say from many news sources reporting on a political event. One could also imagine multimodal analysis combining these first and second-hand kinds of data to arrive at a consensus estimate of a “true” perspective. E.g. analyzing video and audio streams recorded at said political event, combined with many text reports of the event. So this point is about data mining, and jointly estimating semantic meaning from natural language and other kinds of data, in a way that’s consistent with everything else considered factual.

2. Provenance-tracking: Think block chain - if we can provably trace a piece of data back to its primary sources, tracking all its modifications along the way, this could help with establishing provenance, and verifying legitimacy of any modifications along the way.

3. Consensus, staking/voting, etc. A lot of deciding what’s true is about seeking consensus. One thing I’m generally optimistic about here is that, for any given fact “out there,” there are many more ways to describe it incorrectly than correctly. So even though it sounds scary for consensus to be an aspect of truth finding, it always will be, and at the very bottom it’s all we can hope for. One way that’s already getting traction to make consensus mean something, is the idea of staking. So you have to put something down on the table when you claim you believe something to be true. Software can (and already is) helping to build confidence behind some claims more than others by backing claims with value (money).

4. Humans are insanely bad at reasoning rationally, because of lots of reasons. Pick your favorite fallacy. We evolved to survive long enough to reproduce and rationality is a happy accident. One could imagine software being less susceptible to simple tricks, could be less incentivized to outright lie for personal gain or power seeking, or claiming to represent their actual beliefs when they are actually pursuing other goals by conveying something they don’t actually believe.