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   22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Jun-2023 12:10:43 JST 22

   Seeing people wringing their hands, “people might read something WRONG on the internet—and believe it! 😱 we’re dooooomed”

   Let me tell you a story.

   “Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard.” —Richard Feynman, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

   Even the most disciplined of scientists, who have access to the means of directly probing reality itself, look harder when they find a “wrong” answer, and equally damningly, stop looking when they find a “right” answer.

   I’m not worried about the existence of fake news or the risk that people’s echo chambers or ChatGPT or whatever the new bugaboo is will deliver them to disinformation, because the only solution to that is to teach people to be be militantly mindful of Millikan’s followers’ mistake. And we are laughably far from that.

   No. The hand-wringing about disinformation is kind of like Ted Chiang’s explanation of how many fears about AI are actually fears about capitalism, and have nothing to do with tech (https://octodon.social/@22/109940499391380263).

   Fear of the new thing spreading fake news is actually fear of fascism’s merciless attack on human rights in western liberal democracies.