The Information Apocalypse (2018)
I generally agree with the article that people get too caught up in imaging sci fi deepfakes incidents swaying entire populations, when the economy of beliefs is way more complex than that.<p>People have been able to fake photos for a hundred years, and yet fake photos aren&#x27;t commonly sparking national emergencies. It&#x27;s not because photos aren&#x27;t sufficiently lifelike, it&#x27;s because the ways we validate that information are very straightforward.<p>Photographer and subjects mysteriously unavailable for follow-up questions? Huh.<p>Meanwhile, people thrive on validating misinformation.<p>TFA is right this is a psychological problem not a technical one.<p>In the 1951 study &quot;They Saw a Game,&quot; students supporting each side of a football match counted a different number of infractions and reported referee bias in opposite directions.<p>Key takeaway: It is impossible to have a neutral arbiter that is also perceived as neutral.<p>That&#x27;s why even the most innocuous filtering and sorting algorithm is accused of pushing a bias by interest groups.<p>If you have the AP cryptographically sign &quot;real&quot; news, the only thing that will do is sentence the AP to allegations of bias.<p>And this isn&#x27;t that new. Journalism in the US used to not even bother trying to be objective. Papers would have Republican or Democrat in their name. Political Reddit threads, rabble rousing echo chambers that they are, are also a reversion to the mean.<p>This may be intractable, but I think our best hope is greater education about cognitive biases, to give people the language to discuss biases with each other that&#x27;s more clinical and less charged, and to help people recognize the most common traps.<p>Or maybe just know this is an old problem and just hang on for dear life.