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Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

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Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#111

Post by unabst »

uptown wrote: post #41

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in orde…

> fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust

Which leads to what needs to be considered the greatest sin and betrayal of all: The creating and promoting of such videos.

No one creates a false video by accident. They know what they are doing, and their intentions are clear.

And this is not free speech.

Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#112

Post by philwelch »

snowwrestler wrote: post #45

It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet. Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal…

"The problem with quotes found on the internet is that they are often not true." --Abraham Lincoln

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#113

Post by lightbyte »

opportune wrote: post #80
lkbm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people believe Pizzagate is real? That's a question that made me want an answer. It seems that, as of 2016, it may have been a lot: > Among the questions asked by pollsters was whether respondents believed that leaked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and published by WikiLeaks prior to the Nov. 8 election “contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse — w…

We must never forget that half of voters are even dumber than the average voter

That's not how averages work. If 9 people have an IQ of 100 and 1 has an IQ of 10, the average is 91. 9/10 people are still above that.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#114

Post by Bartweiss »

CM30 wrote: post #109
acjohnson55 wrote: post #69

I think it's important to note that the truth has never been widely available, to the point where it might be useless to think of truth as being a real concept to begin with. One could say that for a blip of time, we lived in a world where a large percentage of human were pushed largely accurate (if incomplete) information by mass media, allowing for something resembling consensual reality and informed democracy. We…

Similarly, it's also worth noting that the means of verifying a story or claim weren't widely available for a long time either. Seriously, go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so. How did you verify any claims at all? You usually just took people's word for it, or assumed their writings/paintings/memories were accurate. Unless you had the means to actively verify a claim yourself and the claim was…

> go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so

My favorite taste of this is the Blackadder episode Money. Blackadder ends up blackmailing a bishop with a portrait of the man in a compromising position, and everyone simply assumes that if there's a portrait of an event, it must be real.

It's a great bit of comedy just by pushing a plausible event into the past, and it looks like we're headed to that same scenario in the future. The loss of faith in photographs isn't going to be some unprecedented collapse of truth, it's going to be a return to the default position of politics and society after a mere century of novelty.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#115

Post by lolc »

baq wrote: post #101
lolc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're able to distinguish entertainment "fake" video from "real" video in our minds. The separation is not clear-cut, and fictional movies affect our thinking about real events. So I understand the concern. But faking video is not a new invention. It's happened before and in a way I welcome the broad availability of faking-tools to inoculate against the fakes that have been with us since video existed. Now everybody…

Now everybody will be able to create convincing fakes. That's not continuous progress, that's a phase change.

I'm sure the same line of argument was made when desktop printers became abundant.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#116

Post by jnwatson »

snowwrestler wrote: post #45

It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet. Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal…

The point of the article was that, while one might be skeptical at first, the provenance of data is forgotten faster than the data itself.

The emotional impact of a video will be remembered long after it was discovered to be fake.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#117

Post by philwelch »

lightbyte wrote: post #113
opportune wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must never forget that half of voters are even dumber than the average voter

That's not how averages work. If 9 people have an IQ of 100 and 1 has an IQ of 10, the average is 91. 9/10 people are still above that.

“Average” can mean “median”.

Also, human IQ is distributed in such a way that the mean is approximately also the median, which, by definition of IQ, is 100.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#118

Post by mistermann »

godelski wrote: post #107
uptown wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Raw data is freely available (noaa and others)" But still - this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others. His point isn't really even about climate change. It's about debating the merits of any position, and what sources of information you trust to reinforce your position.

> this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others I should mention that this is fairly easy to verify, at least with part of the data. For land temperatures one of the big sources they use is meteorological data gathered at airports (METAR). You know, the same data that pilots use to calculate take off and landing distances, altimeter settings, etc. So a concerned citizen could compare this these dat…

Ok, but what are we verifying, the pre-adjusted numbers, or the post-adjusted numbers? And is there a document a reasonably intelligent layman can refer to to get the complete story behind how various measurements have been adjusted?

For fun, sometimes I try to find someone who can explain to me where the "97% of scientists support the man-made global warming theory" statistic came from, and I'm pretty sure I found the original source, but the problem is, it doesn't say 97% of scientists support it, or that 97% of papers support it. Now, if The Informed would just be up front and admit that "ok, that particular claim is a bit imprecise to be quite honest, here's the actual story....." this would be perfectly fine with me. But when instead both official authors and any advocate I've encountered online instead doubles down on the misstatement, or refuses to answer perfectly straightforward questions but instead attacks me and starts calling me names.....well, my spider senses go off a bit.

And then I read things like: "The US right, for decades now but accelerating in recent years, rejects mainstream institutions: not just science but academia, journalism, and government. It has devolved into thoroughly tribal epistemology: what is good for us is true." ....and the logical side of my brain says "well yes, that is certainly true for a lot of conservatives, but certainly not all" and then I start to notice a pattern where very few pro-AGW-thoery people seem to be able to resist saying things that are not true, when lying is absolutely not necessary in any way, and I think to myself, this whole situation seems a bit suspicious.

So, partially because I'm genuinely skeptical, partially because I have quite a number of issues with the current political climate and state of discourse, and partially to return just a small portion of the cntiness I've experienced from online know-it-alls, I'm going to set my launch chair just on the other side of the "denier" line, because "fck me? Well fck you too!"

Besides, the economic prospects in the future for my kids doesn't look so bright and no one seems to give two shts about that, so maybe I'm not overly motivated to care about your interests either.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#119

Post by eric_h »

lolc wrote: post #72
rossdavidh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought is that it is much like what to do about any new technological threat, for example too many calories or too much information or too many distractions while driving. Bad things happen, and after about a generation coping mechanisms get developed, and some people adopt them more successfully than others. One is reminded of how populations adapt to new diseases. One valid question, though, is whether or not t…

We're able to distinguish entertainment "fake" video from "real" video in our minds. The separation is not clear-cut, and fictional movies affect our thinking about real events. So I understand the concern. But faking video is not a new invention. It's happened before and in a way I welcome the broad availability of faking-tools to inoculate against the fakes that have been with us since video existed. Now everybody…

> fictional movies affect our thinking about real events

A creative writing instructor of mine many years ago told a story about watching Saving Private Ryan with his grandfather, who was on the beach at Normandy for the invasion depicted in that movie. Watching the fictional movie had a profound emotional impact on him (driving him to tears) in a way that actual footage of the Normandy invasion never did.

His point was that the power of fiction can be much greater than the power of fact. His take wasn't that this was a bad thing (it was a creative writing course, after all), but that fiction in service of the truth is a powerful tool and a useful one. Of course we didn't get into the power of fiction in service of misinformation, but this predated the current scourge of misinformation by about a decade and a half.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#120

Post by leot »

uptown wrote: post #41

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in orde…

This is similar to the pre-elightenment skepticism of alchemists. Soon after the printing press, scientific communication was invented as a way of addressing the trust issue. The internet might be forcing a similar shift.

I wrote a bit more about this here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/0...

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