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How to buy/sell access to true information when adversaries and third parties benefit from your deprivation thereof?
Imagine a hypothetical future where the contextualized value of every entity, as determined by a benign and almighty super intelligence, is incorruptibly beamed right above it as you look at it. Say you're at a major life juncture and need advice; you can trust that 9.9/10 godly friend with your life. If he tells you to jump off a bridge, he must know something you don't about the afterlife, or something grand is waiting for you in the river below. Or you stand at a literal fork in the road, and you see to your left a 1.3/10 who looks nasty and is shouting insults at passersby, and to your right a 1.2/10 who is beautiful and sending you coquettish smiles--well, better endure the olfactory and verbal abuse lest you get shanked in the back.
If resources remain scarce relative to wants in this future, the good news is we can eliminate much waste. No longer do businesses need to throw away 25% of margins on sales and marketing; consumers just pull up a list of products on sale and pick the one with the highest contextualized number for themselves. Applying to a company or joining a gym? Sure, narrow down the field given your personal preferences, but no need to worry that you'll join a sinking ship or get ripped off. Everything is perfectly priced--that 9.5 dentist charges a premium to patients who can trust the root canal isn't superfluous, while the 3.0 pays 5x in malpractice insurance and treats clients who can't or don't care to pay for more. The 1.7s lose their licenses and maybe get sent to jail. When it comes to dating or finding friends, if you happen to be a 7, no need to waste time on 9s or 5s; the market is perfectly efficient because the information is perfect, so walk up to other 7s and assess compatibility while knowing you are certainly worthy of each other--if there is a spark.
If you think this life is too boring, the benign almighty gives you the temporary or permanent option to disable the floating numbers, and you go back to a life of adventure. Maybe there is a community somewhere that only allows in those who opt out of this feature.
I'm sure a good writer can make the above into a horrible dystopia. Until then, I'd pay big bucks to subscribe to download this killer app on the Neuralink or Apple Vision Pro app store.
…because it seems to me that true information is more expensive to acquire than ever.
This isn't about waging the culture war, but I'm afraid I'm stuck in it even if I just want to escape it. At the risk of preaching to the choir, on matters of "the truth," I trust ChatGPT a little less with every update; Google has been largely useless for years; Amazon reviews are shockingly useless; Youtube shows no dislikes, Reddit still helps for many niche questions but is working overtime to enshittify itself ahead of the IPO and beyond. I'm sure everyone here has consciously or unconsciously picked up "tricks" to make sense past the deafening noise; a few of mine are:
The narrative is pervasive, and maybe universal. Pictures and videos everywhere, from brochures and web landing pages to movies and TV commercials, all give me a very different impression of the demographic composition of western society and economy. Of course I know that, and can try to mentally reverse the skewed weights behind the scenes. But this adjustment is imperfect: every now and then I'm shocked to realize just how many incredibly attractive people there are in real life--you wouldn't know from all the clothing and makeup ads that once showed the world beauty standards that roughly aligned with your lying eyes.
The problem worsens greatly when you deal in unintuitive or complex information. Scott's recent post on whether schizophrenia should be described as genetic is one example. Excerpt:
And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?
I don't see any of this changing because structurally, special interest groups benefit from your broad ignorance. Information is power, right? So I'm more powerful if I can keep it from you.
I'm too weak to dwell much on the mass suffering attendant to systemic bad information, and frankly, I think most people are doomed because they lack some combination of ability, time, and interest to try to make better sense of a too complex world.
What I want to know is, how do you stay cleareyed when the entire system seeks to turn off the lights at every step?
I can see three paths forward:
Before #1 is possible, for those unlucky to go with #2 and are unwilling or unable to indulge #3, what else is there?
Facilely, some kind of near-anonymous and semi-private digital community/wiki might do the trick. But you'll need safeguards and complex features, like reputation scores, membership vetting, dispute resolution, witch-culling, and maybe even a judiciary to handle defectors and saboteurs. I don't see this taking off commercially.
Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?
Rootclaim has a few analyses that diverge from what the official narrative. The Syria chemical attack, for one.
https://www.rootclaim.com/
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