No Stupid Questions

So, where does that leave us? There’s always been unreliable knowledge from people.

I think we need to recognise our knowledge is sketchy, stolen, faked and from there, start to rebuild in our own way. It's ok to accept that we don't really know if we landed on the moon, or if E=mc^2^. I feel both of those are true btw, just sayin'.

I've found myself feeling better when I let go and swap to a "I feel that..." or "seems that..." style. My certainty is now mostly for things I've intellectually bled for, like my epistemological understanding that truth comes from the best attempt of reducing conflicting knowledge.

I've investigated conspiracies and scams, magic tricks, con artists, "truths" and statesmanship. In the end I realised that I ultimately faked that I knew, until i put in hard work to investigate, and after confirming some scary things, I stopped lying to myself and assuming I knew most. I might talk big sometimes, but I've got some heavy doubt that id mention if it was easier to type out.

Here's a starting point to consider. Have you actually checked the words you type in the dictionary or an etymological dictionary? I found out i was massively assuming and guessing, and that I was totally wrong. It got to the point where I was checking definitions each day and feeling stupid and enlightened each step.

Now compare that to an LLM that feigns confidence and sounds coherent. Once I could see through peoples deceptions that they just pretended to know, I realise too that an LLM is really functionally the same.

Maybe we need to relearn tricks from the old irl days, even if that loses us some of what we could gain from globalised knowledge and friendship. Perhaps we can find new ways to apply these to our internet communities. I don’t think I’m saying anything new here, but I guess fostering a culture of thinking about truth and trust is good: maybe I’m helping that.

Yep! The geniuses that design my processor know the answer, not me. I can let go and claim a vague probably wrong idea of how it really works but I no longer need to pretend to know what I don't. Our silly chains of trust are damning humanity. We assume that the products we use don't have massive negative repercussions and now look at it all. We are destroying forests, poisoning rivers, pollution our bodies with PFOAs and microplastics, we are depressed and fat, lonely and anxious. We assume this is good because it's progress. We FEEL that this isn't great, but trust the experts.

Almost as an aside (so I don’t ramble twice as long like my crashed-firefox answer!): The best philosophical one-liner I’ve found for first-principleing trust, is, does this person show love? (Kindness, compassion, selflessness.) To me, and/or to others. Then that imparts some assumed value to their worldview and life understanding. Doesn’t make them an expert on any topic, but makes a foundation.

:D I once wrote the first voluntary essay of my adult life entitled "us vs them" and it boiled down to "If we don't know which side is right, the easiest way to tell who is wrong, is to look at who is using dirty tricks and dishonesty". What you wrote was the other half :) I would consider this the good/bad faith explanation. You described good faith, I described bad faith. Our instinct is to rely on good people and avoid bad people. It's not perfect but our instinct helps us a lot with it.

Yes. If you mean, is their comment more noteable than most others, in a public debate, then no. But if you’re pointing towards, are their experience, understanding and internal processes valuable, then yes, and that’s important to me. (Though I’m not great enough to hear, consider or interact with everyone!)

I was talking about the average persons sapience in an absolute or relative way to other people. I didn't think you would see it against AI stuff. Most people aren't using their sapience like you seem to be, to question and wonder, to learn and process information. Most people are very fixed and will do as you said before, they will do what makes them sound right, or win favour. They are faking their skill. It takes a ton of effort to really do new things, and most people just don't bother very much.

As for the GPT thing. It should be pretty bad and easy to spot right now, I'm still just worried about the secretly optimised ones and totally secret techs that are similar. In a real convo you can detect a persons sapience, but not the people talking in bad faith.

ChatGPT is optimised with high grade texts but a diff one could be trained in final stages to mimic incoherent bad faith arguments. The higher level arguments should give away chatGPT currently as it'd be heavily scrutinised.

Thanks for the reply btw, I know how annoying it is to lose a huge response lol. Don't upvote while proof reading!!!!!!