I’ve only listened to the first 8 minutes of this, but that’s what I want to talk about. The link has notes, so I won’t put in time stamps and all that. What he’s talking about is the lesson that i hope we get right this time around with our latest populist authoritarian rulers. We thought we defeated fascism, but we did it by force, and that always has more problems. We didn’t examine how we deal with the overwhelming amount of information in the world. We continue to teach facts as if they don’t require constant questioning.
Truth doesn’t bubble up from a pile of information, no matter how much correct and factual information is in there. With the kind of information we currently have flooding our minds truth sinks to the bottom. We have to learn how to fish for it. If we don’t, dictators will continue to capture the minds of people looking for answers but not knowing how truth is discovered.
“When everyone lies to you all the time, the result is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything any more. A people who can no longer believe anything can no longer form an opinion. They are deprived not only of their capacity to act but also of their capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can do whatever you please.”
Hannah Arendt, 1974
Translated back from French
You can use the 13:46 short cut to the discussion of populism. It’s important to understand because we are well into this cycle and knowing how we got here will help get us out.
It first sows’ distrust in all institutions, conspiracies of elite cabals, that’s the highway to dictatorship
Once trust is destroyed, society starts to break down, the dictatorship (oligarchy in America’s case) doesn’t need trust, it uses terror to keep the wheels of the economy going. People will choose the strong man over anarchy.
Distrust feels like liberation. Talk to any conspiracy theorists, you’ll see this in a minute
The choice of populism is a cynical view of humanity, that the only reality is power. Both Marx and Fascist dictators agree on this. This is why Trump can critique Critical Race Theory and people accept it. They see the cynicism of the simplistic view of that theory. Meanwhile, conservative economists base their theories on people wanting stuff and wanting power, so, go figure.
17:00 – This idea of power-crazy humans is simply wrong. There are situations where it’s true but start talking about happiness and you’ll see people want more than that. But we have trouble seeing that in others, we think we are the seekers of truth, and all those other people are just power hungry.
He talks about how institutions can interrupt the cycle, but it takes constant diligence to keep them in place.
20:00 as populist leaders gain power, they can point to anyone who isn’t on board with them and say they are not in the group, not a citizen. They don’t look at 320 million Americas as 320 million individuals, they treat them like one big mass, and if you don’t agree with the leader you are an enemy.
The interview is about how the trust in that institution has broken down and the consequences of that. Stating the principles of the institution doesn’t restore trust.
I agree, but you cannot blame an institution. It is up to the people within that institution to adhere and enforce truth, such as “truth-in-lending” practices.
I’m not blaming the scientific methods, they don’t have thoughts. I can blame how scientists created a system where science papers are behind pay walls, and where academia is filtered through liberal culture.
But that’s not really the interview. The interview is about lies and a flood of information that claims to support truth, but doesn’t. Most people don’t realize they are part of it, they repeat what they hear from people they trust without knowing how to demonstrate that what they say is true or how those people they trust came to know what they know.
The US has over the last eighty years-controlled countries around the world by controlling the data and money. We hire highly schooled people to get what we wanted by misinformation and the dollar. My biggest fear has been if these departments ever turned on us. We could lose the country. The departments did turn on America and we almost lost the country. A country is no better than its morals. Laws are a gauge of a country’s morals. In the last forty years we have gone through an experiment of allowing science to write the laws. Not only did the departments fail, the good science we once knew was also destroyed. History has shown us what works. Greed and mistrust keep us from reaching that point. My hope today is that AI will allow us to control the greed and misinformation and move forward.
Point being – Lower the cost of truth & information by using AI.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson observed that as long as we can keep a human in the chain for final approval of any potentially dangerous action, AI is unable to act from its own agency.
It is when we grant AI its own decision-making agency without any kind of supervision, that real problems may occur.
We should never let any group or entity ever control AI. Need several AI to keep competing for business. Put another way. God is knowledge. AI is knowledge. Are more gods better than one god? What happens when the gods do not agree? History has shown that people can change gods. We don’t want the government to control our knowledge base.
We need transparency and truth.
What is the root word of god? What did god mean to people of history? Answer: God means “knowledge”. The people of “knowledge” were the scientists of their time. Then the scientists got controlled by the political elite. The political elite controlled the “knowledge”. Scientists to Deities by Constantine started around 313 CE but came into full force during the medieval period.
The best thing about AI is its ability to move “knowledge” back to science. We really need to stop any political control of our “knowledge”.
And you think they had it right?
OK, you claim knowledge. Define God as a causal entity. You cannot , because the assumption of a sentient and motivated God is not knowledge at all.
There have been 4000 gods. Do you have knowledge of the true god?
OTOH, if there is a god it is a mathematical entity that needs not be sentient at all.
It needs to function mathematically, then it all makes sense and can be “defined”.
Which science has done by codifying and symbolizing the universal;mathematical properties of a god as an impersonal mathematical entity.
I haven’t finished this yet because it’s football day.
It goes into more depth on what this idea of what “truth” is. T[he first answer to the definition of truth vs knowledge is pretty good here.] (epistemology - Truth vs Knowledge - Philosophy Stack Exchange) Mike’s comments about god and scientists are irrelevant.
It’s a great interview, covering story telling, disinformation, Putin, Musk, AI, even an answer to what we do about social media. Yuval is not a policy maker, but he is providing politicians with a lot to think about.
More is being learned about human history as time goes by. We do know the number one issue for civilization is protein. 90% of the protein sources we use today were domesticated in history and pre-history. The language we use today also was rooted in pre-history. Yes, they had a lot of things that make our lives better right.
I don’t have to prove anything. “The Kingdom of God is Within You” is the key phrase in Luke 17:21. Do you think Jesus was saying you are a god? In John 10, Jesus quotes from Psalm 82, saying, “You are gods.” Does this mean human beings are gods, or is something else going on? Jeremiah 23:23-24: This verse says that God is everywhere and not in one place only.
The greatest god ever known to us is Ra. Who controlled the greatest civilization known to mankind. Ra means “knowledge”. Babies are born without knowledge. Knowledge was believed to be stored in the heart. Ra lived in the sun. You would ask the temple priest for knowledge for your children. The priest would send the message to Ra. Ra would send the knowledge by sunlight so it would end up in your heart. Early church had windows and painting with Jesus and god on a light giving cloud that omitted light. This light was understood by the people to be knowledge; thus, Jesus was a teacher of knowledge. Science claimed that ether was a hypothetical, weightless, transparent, and frictionless substance that was thought to permeate all space and matter. It was used to explain how light could travel through a vacuum. This was because they were scientists, and science was based on earlier scientific ideas based upon older Egyptian traditions.
The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 was designed to detect the existence of a hypothetical medium called “luminiferous aether” which was thought to permeate space and carry light waves. It took Einstein’s theory of special relativity to disprove the need for such a medium.
There is a whole scientific field of gnostic religions you can study at colleges today. “Gnostic” is a term that means “knowledge” or the “knowledge religions”.
Jerusalem as a town was first named “Salem”, which means “knowledge”. Or town of knowledge. With ancient sky burials in the area, it is possible the Salem’s roots could go back to the time of Avaris and the people of knowledge.
Agreed. Not just religious control, but political control too.
