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How to buy/sell access to true information when adversaries and third parties benefit from your deprivation thereof?
Imagine a hypothetical future where the contextualized value of every entity, as determined by a benign and almighty super intelligence, is incorruptibly beamed right above it as you look at it. Say you're at a major life juncture and need advice; you can trust that 9.9/10 godly friend with your life. If he tells you to jump off a bridge, he must know something you don't about the afterlife, or something grand is waiting for you in the river below. Or you stand at a literal fork in the road, and you see to your left a 1.3/10 who looks nasty and is shouting insults at passersby, and to your right a 1.2/10 who is beautiful and sending you coquettish smiles--well, better endure the olfactory and verbal abuse lest you get shanked in the back.
If resources remain scarce relative to wants in this future, the good news is we can eliminate much waste. No longer do businesses need to throw away 25% of margins on sales and marketing; consumers just pull up a list of products on sale and pick the one with the highest contextualized number for themselves. Applying to a company or joining a gym? Sure, narrow down the field given your personal preferences, but no need to worry that you'll join a sinking ship or get ripped off. Everything is perfectly priced--that 9.5 dentist charges a premium to patients who can trust the root canal isn't superfluous, while the 3.0 pays 5x in malpractice insurance and treats clients who can't or don't care to pay for more. The 1.7s lose their licenses and maybe get sent to jail. When it comes to dating or finding friends, if you happen to be a 7, no need to waste time on 9s or 5s; the market is perfectly efficient because the information is perfect, so walk up to other 7s and assess compatibility while knowing you are certainly worthy of each other--if there is a spark.
If you think this life is too boring, the benign almighty gives you the temporary or permanent option to disable the floating numbers, and you go back to a life of adventure. Maybe there is a community somewhere that only allows in those who opt out of this feature.
I'm sure a good writer can make the above into a horrible dystopia. Until then, I'd pay big bucks to subscribe to download this killer app on the Neuralink or Apple Vision Pro app store.
…because it seems to me that true information is more expensive to acquire than ever.
This isn't about waging the culture war, but I'm afraid I'm stuck in it even if I just want to escape it. At the risk of preaching to the choir, on matters of "the truth," I trust ChatGPT a little less with every update; Google has been largely useless for years; Amazon reviews are shockingly useless; Youtube shows no dislikes, Reddit still helps for many niche questions but is working overtime to enshittify itself ahead of the IPO and beyond. I'm sure everyone here has consciously or unconsciously picked up "tricks" to make sense past the deafening noise; a few of mine are:
The narrative is pervasive, and maybe universal. Pictures and videos everywhere, from brochures and web landing pages to movies and TV commercials, all give me a very different impression of the demographic composition of western society and economy. Of course I know that, and can try to mentally reverse the skewed weights behind the scenes. But this adjustment is imperfect: every now and then I'm shocked to realize just how many incredibly attractive people there are in real life--you wouldn't know from all the clothing and makeup ads that once showed the world beauty standards that roughly aligned with your lying eyes.
The problem worsens greatly when you deal in unintuitive or complex information. Scott's recent post on whether schizophrenia should be described as genetic is one example. Excerpt:
And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?
I don't see any of this changing because structurally, special interest groups benefit from your broad ignorance. Information is power, right? So I'm more powerful if I can keep it from you.
I'm too weak to dwell much on the mass suffering attendant to systemic bad information, and frankly, I think most people are doomed because they lack some combination of ability, time, and interest to try to make better sense of a too complex world.
What I want to know is, how do you stay cleareyed when the entire system seeks to turn off the lights at every step?
I can see three paths forward:
Before #1 is possible, for those unlucky to go with #2 and are unwilling or unable to indulge #3, what else is there?
Facilely, some kind of near-anonymous and semi-private digital community/wiki might do the trick. But you'll need safeguards and complex features, like reputation scores, membership vetting, dispute resolution, witch-culling, and maybe even a judiciary to handle defectors and saboteurs. I don't see this taking off commercially.
Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?
I certainly wouldn't turn down the advice of a benevolent weakly-godlike ASI, but I would much prefer to become one myself.
I wish to not need GPT-Ω at all, but to be able to understand the world better myself.
Now, I don't think reliance on such an entity would be anywhere near as bad as Scott's story about The Whispering Earrings, especially since I would expect that if it truly meets my criteria for benevolence wouldn't let me become little more than a puppet following strictly optimal decisions. I wish to make those myself.
Do you see what the common thread is, in all the problems you've mentioned?
It's a lack of intelligence. While not a panacea, it is as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. Someone with an IQ >120 will do a much better job trying to parse the world on their own terms than a true midwit who is probably better served by accepting the wisdom of authority figures diffused through noisy channels. Thinking for yourself is powerful. It is also dangerous.
There is no human alive, nor did one ever exist, who possessed the level of intelligence needed to grokk the entire world from first principles. Even geniuses need tutors, but their genius lets them learn the lessons well, and more importantly, know how trustworthy the tutor is.
An underappreciated, if distasteful to my libertarian sensibilities, is how well the modern world has built guard-rails around people managing to do grievous harm to themselves from their stupidity. For most of history, you could make the best decisions you could, strive earnestly and intelligently, and yet starve to death during a famine, or have a barbarian deprive you of your head.
In contrast, the stupid/luxurg beliefs here are, in absolute magnitude, practically harmless to those who hold them:
The /r/aww Redditor gushing over velvet hippos will almost never have a nanny-dog maul them and theirs. Even the levels of criminality and destruction of the commons that bleeding heart tolerance for a criminal underclass stewing the commons with needles only reduces QOL to a degree far above what most of the 97 or so billion anatomically modern humans have tolerated. Vegans may suffer nutritional deficiencies, they are not likely to starve because the shaman demanded they ritually sacrifice their last goat to call back the rain.
People are insulated from the worst consequences of their stupidity. This is both a triumph and a tragedy of modernity, but the former outweighs the latter by orders of magnitudes. The strong, intelligent and self-sufficient are more enabled by the stability of modern society to make the most of their gifts than we lose from the average person being deeply stupid.
Most things don't matter. Your opinion on land value taxes or your choice of candidate in the next election have minimal effect on your well-being. This is why explicit Rationality is more of a hobby than a guaranteed means of success, Yudkowsky framed it as the systematized art of winning, and you don't need a system to win. Of course, if their efforts to cry wolf when the great of AI was a mere pup pay off now that it possesses teeth, it will all be worth it nonetheless.
Accept that your agency is limited. That most of your opinions will not change the world. That is okay. That is true. Do not let it dissuade you from trying to be better.
The market can remain stupid longer than you can remain solvent, but it approximates efficiency nonetheless, given enough time. We can give it a helping hand, as I endorse @faceh in thinking Prediction Markets are some of the best social technology we could ever build, if only people would get the fuck out of the way when they're being implemented.
Surprisingly, Manifold outperforms real-money prediction markets, which I wager is a combination of the Crowd being larger and thus more Wise, and because Fake Internet Points and reputation on leaderboards have enough intrinsic value to users that they can substitute cold hard cash.
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Here's a fourth path. Money. If you want information better than the available sources you mention, you need either a quant or a consultant. Both of these are very expensive for a reason.
As for review systems specifically, these get gamed both by people seeking to damage a business for malicious reasons, and by the review system wanting to punish customers who dislike certain business practices. In the long run review systems seem to inevitably devolve into politics.
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Yes, if the Government would allow the proliferation of reliable prediction markets. Kalshi is making headway, but it turns out that the government doesn't like people betting on election outcomes so they're still feeling out the boundaries for what is and is not permissible to make contracts on.
One of my slightly tin-foil-hat theories is that the government does not WANT prediction markets to proliferate because that allows people to bypass the state in some subtle ways, and making information about, e.g. legislative policy outcomes and national elections legible; thereby making it harder to influence those outcomes in desired ways. There's really no other way for me to square the fact that they're allowing the proliferation of sports betting across the country but are squeamish about allowing people to bet on national election outcomes.
Me, I would pay a decent sum for a killer app that was basically an (AI-assisted?) prediction market aggregator where I could have consistent feed of the market predictions for various events that might influence my life, then I could enter queries about stuff that I need to make decisions on and get an immediate estimate on the odds of [X] occurring and recommendations for how I can hedge the risks based on my desired outcome. Bonus points if I can set alerts based on a particularly complex set of contracts that signal, e.g., that a war is breaking out or a major disaster is occurring.
Simple example: "My birthday party is scheduled for this weekend, what are the chances that it will rain or otherwise have uncomfortable weather" and then it provides an estimate and provides me with the option to buy shares that will pay out if it rains out my party.
Now, if I were building a business that was trying to make the information environment better, I would try starting up a journalism/news company whose source of revenue was based on accurately reporting on stories before anyone else. That is, the journalists should actually be good at their jobs and confirm breaking stories before the general public hears about them, then when we buy a position in a prediction market that corresponds to our story being true, and when we publish the story, we include a link to that prediction market in the broadcast so the audience can bet against us if they don't believe it.
The main effect here is that our company only profits if we are better at detecting true events before they become common knowledge, and anyone who has better information can try to beat us at our own game. And we don't have to rely on advertisers and thus we're less susceptible to being bent towards an ideological agenda.
I think it would make people more interested in watching 'the news' if they could 'play along' and bet against us if they think we screwed up a story or that they can profit by buying in early because they trust our accuracy.
This does all tend to fall victim to the Oracle problem. That is, who do you trust to be the final arbiter of truth when there's a dispute over an outcome. And THAT is where this benevolent superintelligence of yours might need to come in. I know of no way to truly eliminate counterparty risk, although Augur came close.
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For one of your problems, namely:
Then I think the answer is yes. Check out Kagi. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement on Google in my opinion
There is definitely the problem (not intractable, but hard) where Google is so dominant that their name is synonymous with search and so they are everybody's default first choice, and getting everyone to switch en masse is practically impossible without some LARGE screwup by Goog itself.
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Be careful about using bad Yelp reviews.
Google up "yelp review blackmail". (Unfortunately the first link I get looks barely above ChatGPT.
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Rootclaim has a few analyses that diverge from what the official narrative. The Syria chemical attack, for one.
https://www.rootclaim.com/
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I mean, that's true. I've known pit bulls with good owners who were as gentle a dog as you could ever ask for. I've also known pit bulls with shitty owners who turned out to be a menace. But that's on the owners, not the breed. It just happens that shitty owners gravitate towards pit bulls.
No its not true. The big strong jaw is what makes them dangerous. No amount of love will change this. Sometimes dogs that got nothing but love will snap.
No the shitty owners do not just happen to gravitate towards dogs that were bred to fight other dogs.
The selective breeding was originally not for dog fighting, but for dogs that want to bite bull faces and never let go.
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