Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course…
> We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet". I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a…
I think that previous generations were not any different. For most people, trusting is the default mode and you need to learn to distrust a source. I know many people who still have not learned that about the internet in general. These are often older people. They believe insane things just because there exists a nicely looking website claiming that thing.