But that's sort of the point, isn't it? It's generous even to call "skeptics" a group. There are just "people who have skepticism about X," many of whom have skepticism for wildly different reasons — many of them bad reasons — and therefore are not convinced by good evidence.

AI will produce whatever evidence a person needs in order to shore up their own "skeptical" beliefs. Same problem as social media, where finding 1000 other people who share your fringe beliefs looks like compelling evidence for your belief being true. Just now it's on-demand, hyper-personalized, responsive to your own doubts, and there's no chance of you realizing "ah, my comrades on the other end of the tube are actually idiots!"

I'd bet an AI product that tells a flat earther that "it's an open question" will be much more successful than an AI product that attempts to dispel that myth. That is, at least until an AI can effectively convince people away from their beliefs, which almost certainly will not happen via "calmly providing solid logical evidence," given that this is not usually an effective vector for persuasion anyway. Now you've got a new problem, which is a technology capable of convincing people of all sorts of insane things.

Some people might be a little more receptive to objective evidence coming from a robot, if it made their ego feel less threatened. After all, there's no danger that the AI tells other people you're a moron after arguing with you.

> Skeptics can be convinced, they just need evidence

The past couple of years has convinced me this is 100% untrue.

People are very capable of ignoring evidence, in favour of something that:

a) reinforces previously held beliefs

b) allows them to remain in a social group

You describe dogmatism, not skepticism. Unfortunately, dogmatists often declare themselves as skeptics, but this is a rhetorical trick. Dogmatists doubt the competing beliefs, but not their own beliefs.

r/skeptic on reddit fits this perfectly. No one there is actually a skeptic just dogmatic and no evidence or counter points will sway them. If it was the time of Copernicus the sub would 100% side with the Church that the sun revolves around the earth and how Copernicus is "dangerous".

Neither a nor b are sceptics in general sense.

Yes, most people are not skeptics at all.

Most people believe what they are told at face value.

I stop just short of Feynman questioning the dentist on the evidence for brushing one's teeth. That there is potentially this ritual that goes around the globe as the sun rises of people pointlessly scrubbing their teeth.

Of course, with such a high % of people addicted in a clinical sense to the group think and propaganda engine of social media that is not how most people are going to think or even be capable of thinking.

If Feynman was more popular youtube would ban that video for dentistry misinformation even when the point of the video is to view things from a different perspective.

Skeptical people? You mean people who distrust everything? Because "post truth" doesn't stimulate to question reality, it incites total distrust. After which society heads straight for dismantling the state, and all the violence that comes with it.

We already have post truth behavior in our society, it just isn't well distributed at the moment. Imagine a society where every response looked like the stereotypical HN top comment, "Actually, the opposite is true..." Here the behavior is rewarded, presumably it makes the community better and results in a diversity of thought. I'm curious why wouldn't this be similarly rewarded in the offline world?

How are we going to provide that evidence? And make sure that evidence is actually true, instead of AI generated? Send them a link to a wiki page that has been mutated by an AI bot updating it? ;-)

How have we done this so far?

The only two answers I can come up with are

A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test those experimentally); or

B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that, if the government answers a Freedom of Information Act request with documentation about brainwashing experiments conducted by the CIA then you have good reason to count them as evidence. And you spread the word about this by showing the proof to a reputable newspaper who write about it, or writing a book and publishing it at a publisher known for fact-checking what they publish.

Anything that isn't independently verifiable or has a chain of provenance is already hearsay. In the age of social media we got used to basing a lot of decisions on hearsay, so maybe we have to dial that back. But AI being better at generating hearsay doesn't mean it gets better at creating evidence.

> reputable newspaper who write about it

But as for the case of the Fauci emails from FOIA requests no "reputable" newspaper reported on it. So people still to this day dismiss it since it did not come from a "reputable" source despite the fact you can confirm the provenance and authenticity of these documents by confirming with the agency that released the documents

What utter crap:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/ton...

> If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that

We're talking about MKUltra right? The classic "crazy" conspiracy theory that turned out to be true but was discredited for decades?

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of when writing that example.

Eye witness testimony, public key encryption, reputation matters. No more anonymous viral "information".

Here's an elaboration of what I mean.

Writers should adopt two habits: (1) Sign your statements. If you say something, sign it, so that others know you said it. Cryptography is good at this. (2) Hash your citations. If you cite something, include a hash of it. This way, if the thing you cited is altered, readers can tell that that's not what you were citing. Note that this idea can be applied to audio and video, not just text.

The rest of the responsibility falls on readers:

(1) Read (i.e. consider) citations.

(2) Read (i.e. consider) the sources of evidence you ingest.

Don't just find a video and believe it happened. Determine who has claimed to have witnessed those events.

For this, a public database of back-references might be helpful. But even without one, a decentralized solution is possible. Writers, whenever they cite something, could simply send their citation (and its context) to the author of the cited material. If the cited author attaches the back-citation to the content that was cited, then anyone who comes across the content can see who has cited it.

There is of course the problem that some back-citations will be rejected -- if you cite what I wrote to call it stupid, I am unlikely to want to share that fact with the world. But if what I wrote is sufficiently important, then hopefully someone will waht to host a "nemesis" site, which collects negative citations.

A public database of nemesis sites would be helpful.

(3) Read (i.e. consider) the reputations of authors you read.

This is nearly the reverse of the last point. When deciding whether to believe what someone has said, consider what else they have said.

This is of course a hard problem. An author might be qualified in one area and writing about another. An author's reputation might be damaged for extrinsic (e.g. malice) reasons, rather than intrinsic ones.

But a statement's author is too important a context to ignore.

(4) Do cool graph-traversing investigations.

Determine who someone tends to cite. Identify misinformation cliques -- close-knit collections of liars who all cite each other. Identify readership patterns that make people productive.

We have seen how social network information can make a corporation money. As a society, I suspect there is a similar amount of value to be extracted from them.

Yep, that's only some of the methods which can be employed to ensure authenticity and integrity of information. A lot more are possible.

The parent comment, mentions that an encyclopedia page can be modified by a bot. That holds true for wikipedia, but we can create encyclopedias strictly edited only by humans.

Just have a prominent individual issue a top ecdsa identity, with correspondence to the real person's name info known only to him. He publishes that ecdsa identity somewhere, let's say on a blockchain to be always available and secure from deletion. Let's say this prominent individual is the Ronaldo football player. He publishes 1000 ecdsa identities to a public digital highway somewhere, all of the real names connection known only to him. That set of 1000 identities is called Ronaldo's social graph.

From then on, each child identity derived from the top identity, when they edit a wikipedia page, they are pseudonymous if they like. No need to reveal their name, only Ronaldo knows that, but we know they are human, because Ronaldo has met everyone in person in order to issue the top identity. But pseudonymous is only as far as they can go, because someone will always know their real name. A.I. actually spells the end of anonymity on the internet.

One more property of an organization structure like that, is that as soon as a person loses his wikipedia account for some reason, he can always get it back, because he can create a new ecdsa child identity, and prove that his older account and his new, match exactly the same top identity. So he can always invalidate older accounts and use the same data, karma etc, with new accounts.

The only downside of that organization structure, is that top identities which belong to the public social graph, have to be absolutely secure. As soon as a person loses his top identity, Ronaldo has to issue a new one, but the encyclopedia cannot invalidate accounts not matching the top identity in an automated way, if the real name is not published. That means a human on the other side has to be involved and boureocracy ensues.

Evidence is a consensus.

I wonder if the rise of skepticism will actually lead to people decreasing their use of the internet. Once the internet is full of crap (like 1000x what it currently is) and everyone realizes nothing is real, or can be trusted. Will people turn away, and start reading books and talking to neighbors again. Could the new renaissance be talking to other humans again, because face-to-face personal contact would be only form that can be trusted to be real.

We might also wind up kinda like the book "Rainbow's End", where the internet just has too much crap to parse, so people subscribe to a "reality sphere" that filters the internet into a single view that is shared by anyone else who wants to see that sphere.

Why wouldn't the books be AI-generated too?

You are right. That could happen too. I guess I was assuming there would still be editors and staff, some infrastructure that checks the contents of a book before printing. But guess that could go out the window too.

Of course that could be what happens. An entire new industry of "Certifications", companies that "Verify" media.

The New York times and Washington Post spilled a lot of ink fact-checking Donald Trump. Did it help? (Honest question; I don't know the answer.)

If you exclude natural-world input, humans almost exclusively ingest stuff produced by other humans.

Just like humans eventually learn that not all input is equally trusted (for example the input "2+2=5"), so should AI eventually learn to sift through.