Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995) • Hacker News Board

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#31

Post by gregmac » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct. If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.

However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#32

Post by epicide » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

I mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive?

People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text".

What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1].

The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space.

That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this).

Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed.

And then there are things like analytics.

[0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before".

[1]: Namely, Google.

[2]: Or some other Big Internet Company™.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#33

Post by coldtea » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

>Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks.

It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same for mainstream media (though for them it's their business model).

The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions.

Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels).

Of course people would also be able to voice their support those things, but that we be business as usual. People touting the elite's opinions were never without a soapbox in the mainstream media. The revolution is in the ability of the "unwashed masses" to speak for themselves.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#34

Post by loceng » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

I like the clock analogy - especially when tying in the solution of having digitally transmitted clocks from a source we trust, and so points to solutions that we must each decide which source(s) of trust we subscribe to. The issue then becomes funds being allocated to support this - and I like Andrew Yang's solution relating to supporting democracy (and countering impact of larger contributions by individuals or organizations), of using tax money giving everyone $100 to contribute to any party they want - we could do the same with journalism, and perhaps one in the same with journalism - do it also with allowing organizations to be funded who curate and moderate content for us.

There is some foreseeable scary potential to this though: if say 30 million of your population have been manipulated and contribute their $3 billion to fund the campaign of a pathological liar, someone on the path towards tyranny - perhaps a puppet of bad actors from other nations, then how could that unfold? Perhaps it would balance out however if the remaining population aren't in propaganda media silos and the amount of funds contributed to their campaigns are enough to fund enough action to respond.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#35

Post by coldtea » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #29

hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

This is a great analogy. The scary thing is, there are countries that do only have one clock (totalitarian regimes that control the press), but that's worse than having multiple clocks.

Actually it can be much better. As has been argued time and again (including by people who have suffered both), with a totalitarian regimes that controls the press means the population knows to distrust the press.

A "free press" instead, while still controlled by the elites (press empires, their politician buddies, corporatism, etc), on the other hand, gives the false impression of pluralism and trust...

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#36

Post by orpheline » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

I'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response.

I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th.

Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#37

Post by inflatableDodo » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

quirmian wrote: post #19

inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

> children’s comedy novelist Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? - A butthurt Discworld fan in his mid 30s.

>Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story?

Wrong person to ask. For me it was a toddler's bedtime story.

My dad used to play the radio series for me when I was very little. Though I have read the books countless times since then and used to be able to quote the first one in its entirety.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#38

Post by bmmayer1 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

If you read the interview, Bill Gates rightly predicted the rise of sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading and what isn't. It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations--it's just human nature to be predisposed to confirmation bias.

But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is patently false today. Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. The only problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'fake' is different.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#39

Post by theoh » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #12

There's always something magical about the naïveté of thinking that technology can solve people. Bill Gates understood business and technology. Terry Pratchett understood people. Gates is literally arguing in favor of filter bubbles here without the clarity to realize that those bubbles go both ways.

I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful, but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an expert on sociology.

Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a free-for-all. And Gates correctly observed that ranking systems like HITS (or PageRank) would recreate, online, the way information sources gain authority in the offline world.

The fake news problem has nothing to do with the web's openness—it thrives on FB. Offline, and independent of the web, the narrative Fox pushes is arguably very close to fake news as well. Neither Pratchett nor Gates displayed significant insight into the that kind of political problem.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#40

Post by sbmassey » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

josephorjoe wrote: post #20

inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

No one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature. His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious. Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature.…

The Pratchett's I have read seem to be full of basic human archetypes, riffed off for comedic effect, rather than anything approximating how real people think. He's no Shakespear/James Joyce/Henry James.