A government related alignment may lead to increased truth?? Have you been paying attention in the last year where the government is cleansing government websites of any facts that don’t support its narrative
Yes, I believe the reason we have got to this point is the destruction of institutions such as the press.
Historically the press had pushed narratives controlled by state elites who also had a vested interest in the state wellbeing.
Today these are pushed by foreign entities or the more extreme the more engagement.
That's why conspiracy theories replaced established truths, the populist left believes in anti-state slogans such as "defund the police" and the populist right wants to destroy the supreme court
AI alignment might return the elites controlled narratives which were apparently crucial for democracy
You realize you are being part of the problem that fell for the same talking points you accuse others of right?
The “leftists” were arguing to demilitarize the police and spend money on mental health programs and when someone is having a mental health crisis, send someone trained to help the person instead of trigger happy untrained police who don’t know how to de escalate
It is the same thing, it's taking institutions of the democratic state and dismantling them
exactly like trump's attack on the supreme court which could also be explained with excuses such as "a non elected institution is trying to curb the will of the people", and that's just the top off my head
No one said “not to have a police force”. They said not to have a militarized unaccountable police force. Three of the nine members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Trump and three other justices are conservative. They almost always rule in his favor and have given him unprecedented power
the slogan is "Defund the police" not "eliminate the police force militarization" or "realign police funding to mental health". It is an anti-institution rally call.
The fact that Trump has appointed Justices does not make Trump's attacks on the supreme court whenever they cancel any of his radical programs less real.
You are trying to argue that he shouldn't attack the supreme court, while I am arguing destroying institutions is ingrained into populism
> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.
This is wildly overstating the influence of post-modernists or universities in general. There is a war on objective reality but it grew out of religious (creationism, anti-feminism/LGBTQ) and industrial (pollution) sources, not a bunch of French intellectuals in parts of some universities, and that started long before post modernism. Even if you think they’re equivalent, there’s simply no comparison for the number of people reached by mass media versus famously opaque writings discussed by many orders of magnitude fewer people.
Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".
The essay is written by academics who ignored all the evidence that their precious institutions are none of the things they claim to be. Universities don't care about truth. Look at how much fraud they publish. The head of Harvard was found to have plagiarised, one of her cancer labs had been publishing fraudulent papers for over a decade, the head of Stanford was also publishing fraudulent papers, you can find unlimited examples everywhere.
Universities have made zero progress on addressing this or even acknowledging the scale of it because they are immersed in post-modernist ideology, so their attitude is like, man, what even is truth? Who can really even say what's true? It's not like science is anything specific, riiiiiight, that's why we let our anthropology department claim Aboriginal beliefs about the world are just as valid as white western man's beliefs. Everyone has their own truth so how can fraud be a real thing? Smells like Republicans Pouncing!
> Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".
First, it absolutely does those first two things: climate change denial has been a half century of pretending that scientific truths, even those confirmed by e.g. Chevron’s own employees in the 70s, were just some subjective opinion to be argued with. The modern right-wing attacks are founded on the legacy of trying to exempt policies from rational examination and are very much about constructing your own personal truth which is just as valid as the experts.
Secondly, even to the extent that you’re not grossly exaggerating, you’re describing things which not even a majority of academics believe. Maybe there is someone in the anthropology department who really does believe in the caricature you portrayed but they don’t represent a majority of even their university. What you’re saying is like saying everyone on HN are crypto grifters trying to get rich quick, simply asserting without evidence a claim which is known to be false when applied to a large group.
So not very many, and even fewer support your sweeping assertion. This is nowhere near the repetition or reach of messages pushing religious or anti-environmentalist groups because a publication in an obscure journal is read by a tiny rounding error of the number of people who will hear a popular podcaster or news personality.
> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.
Call me crazy, but the situation may be more nuanced than this (and your next statement). For example, all universities embraced post-modernism? Also, universities are the arbiter for truth? If so, which universities and which truths? Or is it the transcendental Truth all universities gave out? Lastly, post-modernist ideas on media or some other part of culture?
Post modernism is pretty universal among humanities research in universities for a long time now.
My point here was that these institutions were undermined for a long time back, while aligned AI at least in its current state creates a notion of "truth" that is sane rather than the alternatives out there, and I believe will be safer for democracy
