If you want to improve collective epistemics I think a potentially underrated tool is AI for investigative journalism and corruption tracking.
I think with the coming wave of multi-step reasoning and data compiling systems they could be pointed at keeping leaders in charge accountable and showcasing when people’s actions are different from previous commitments.
One can also likely look into paper trails in a lot more automated way and through that reduce corruption and other things that are bad.
Hopefully, the truth remains an asymmetric weapon at least in convergence. We have not been in a very good time for truth recently on average but I see it a bit like the stock market, it might be strange for a long time but after a long time it should return to baseline due to outperforming non truth on average.
Like a our world in data but aimed at corruption and with a generalised set of tools that anyone could apply to do automatic data analysis.
I do think this would be good to do, but I think I’m more pessimistic about the effect size.
For example, there’s plenty of evidence (circulating on Twitter, etc.) of Trump and his crew contradicting themselves across time. How much did it harm his support base? I think not much. AFAICT, most of the drop in support came from big unpopular actions, like the war with Iran.
A fundamental issue seems to be that people filter out what they allow themselves to observe or even take sufficiently seriously to enable updating their beliefs at all.
If you want to improve collective epistemics I think a potentially underrated tool is AI for investigative journalism and corruption tracking.
I think with the coming wave of multi-step reasoning and data compiling systems they could be pointed at keeping leaders in charge accountable and showcasing when people’s actions are different from previous commitments.
One can also likely look into paper trails in a lot more automated way and through that reduce corruption and other things that are bad.
Hopefully, the truth remains an asymmetric weapon at least in convergence. We have not been in a very good time for truth recently on average but I see it a bit like the stock market, it might be strange for a long time but after a long time it should return to baseline due to outperforming non truth on average.
Like a our world in data but aimed at corruption and with a generalised set of tools that anyone could apply to do automatic data analysis.
I do think this would be good to do, but I think I’m more pessimistic about the effect size.
For example, there’s plenty of evidence (circulating on Twitter, etc.) of Trump and his crew contradicting themselves across time. How much did it harm his support base? I think not much. AFAICT, most of the drop in support came from big unpopular actions, like the war with Iran.
A fundamental issue seems to be that people filter out what they allow themselves to observe or even take sufficiently seriously to enable updating their beliefs at all.