A thing that’s not mentioned here but is super salient to my personal experience of navigating an untrustworthy world is reputation-based strategies—asking your friends, transitive trust chains, to some extent ratings/reviews/forum commments are this-ish too. This is perhaps a subset of “blind yourself” (I often do kind of blind myself to anything not recommended by friends, when I can afford to). And I guess this kind of illustrates how even though we’re in an age where anyone can in principle access any information and any thing, it’s common to restrict oneself to what one can access through one’s personal network, as though we were village-dwellers of centuries past.
But I think more concretely, I think it motivates a principle I hold very dear to my heart: “Do not be the kind of actor that forces other people to be paranoid”.
I’d enjoy a follow-up post going into more detail on this.
...also I think it is in part my paranoia-based epistemic strategies that cause me to violently bounce off of a lot of LLM output, which is a pretty disabling amount of blinding myself for the current environment, I guess
Good post.
A thing that’s not mentioned here but is super salient to my personal experience of navigating an untrustworthy world is reputation-based strategies—asking your friends, transitive trust chains, to some extent ratings/reviews/forum commments are this-ish too. This is perhaps a subset of “blind yourself” (I often do kind of blind myself to anything not recommended by friends, when I can afford to). And I guess this kind of illustrates how even though we’re in an age where anyone can in principle access any information and any thing, it’s common to restrict oneself to what one can access through one’s personal network, as though we were village-dwellers of centuries past.
I’d enjoy a follow-up post going into more detail on this.
Yep, reputation-based strategies are a huge part of how to navigate this. I have lots of thoughts about it, and hope to write more about it!
...also I think it is in part my paranoia-based epistemic strategies that cause me to violently bounce off of a lot of LLM output, which is a pretty disabling amount of blinding myself for the current environment, I guess