AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

LessWrong is, sadly, an example of a forum that got flooded with low quality content. It's been Septembered beyond recognition from what it was in the early 2010s.

Just looked at lobsters and there are zero comments on almost all posts.

Odd flex, but ok.

Assuming the question was

> How much time in day, do you think you spend reading what random people you dont know are saying?

Rather than "so what?", which I will come back to later: For me, probably several hours per day. It's not just here, or twitter/fb, though that's probably an hour by itself, it's also:

• Blog authors (parasocial relationships!) • Newspaper writers • Wikipedia editors • Review writers on Amazon, Google maps • Question and Answer writers on Stack Overflow • The first few comments under some Youtube videos • Comments sections on news stories

(Technically also book authors given the way you phrased that, but that's a different issue and current generation text generators make no difference there anyway).

Now assuming the question was "so what?", because that dovetails into the rest of your spiel:

The problem is not usefulness to you, it's "can this be used to automate convincing you?".

Make a half-decent sales pitch personalised at whoever for whatever: "Boiling eggs? Yeah that's easy, but I find organic is the best and well worth the cost", or "Oh, you're visiting Berlin? Yeah, I had a really great time at $insert_restaurant_here" or "Don't fall for the Lib Dems, they keep saying they can beat the Tories but look what happened when they got into power. That's why I vote $insert_uk_political_party_here". All personalised to just you, in the form of a friendly looking and natural response that probably seems more natural than any of my examples, because chatGPT is only reliably worse than domain experts and I'm not a domain expert in sales.

Also: You replied to me, and I'm a stranger, so we both know you engage with strangers on the internet, QED there's a place where you might get a bot trying to sell you a product or idea while pretending to be human.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the status quo is a good reference point here: Current advertising categorisation on social media sucks (easy way to find out: make GDPR request to FB or Twitter for all the data they have about you. They think I'm interested in languages I can't speak and politics of countries I don't live in).

You wrote: >

We can summarise this comment as "Eternal September"-ism.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Be wary of falling trap to the feeling of: >

In late high school, watching the daily local television news around 6PM, I began to realise that when local news programmes interviewed local residents, they were always seeking the same response: >

Examples: Traffic; politics; manners; dress code; respect for elders; price of "milk and bread" (ask anyone in their 90s about it!); Internet discourse; buying/selling used cars; kids driving cars; fashion; fast food; the latest technology (radios, TVs, Internet, video games, mobile phones) ..., etcetera!

My point: Do not assume that things that are different from when you were young(er) are automatically worse. Really, really: Try harder. In 1920, "old people" were complaining about "young people" listening to too much radio -- made them "soft". Repeat for television in 1950. Repeat for Internet in 1990s. Repeat for mobile phones in 2010s. Repeat for video games in 2020s. I see this pattern repeat over and over again, and I chuckle to myself when I see old men complain about it!

As a counterpoint: This website is an amazing counterpoint/weight that "all things are getting worse all the time". I have been here for a few years now, and this community always manages to adapt to changing standards and conditions... and produce inspiring and thoughtful discourse about recent news.

And now for my over-the-top inspiring comment to end this post: Simply put: We, HN community, are the antithesis for Sturgeon's law "ninety percent of everything is crap"! (Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

I think as soon as people see "verified humans" posting things they utterly disagree with, the temptation to call those people "bots" will be too great to resist. A substantial portion of internet commenters will sooner call a human verification system into disrepute than admit that some real people really do earnestly disagree with them. They'll spin conspiracy yarns about how "the other side" controls the verification process and allow their own bots to participate.

I think the solution to all of this is smaller tight-knit discussion groups where all the participants know and trust each other. Echo chambers will inevitability form. I don't think there is any way around this.