Notices by Scott, Drowning in Information (vortex_egg@ioc.exchange)

@jonny One of the funny parts is that statistical generative language models are dynamically opposed to the production of knowledge at a logical and mathematical level.

Another funny part is what is even the point of knowledge if nobody actually enacts it by doing the work to know it in the first place? There’s some kind of weird conception of the nature of knowledge and science (as commodity?) going on here that is intensely anti-epistemic.

Super cursed knowledge society.

We are all so terribly misinformed to the degree that we are misinformed about how we are misinformed and thus unable to differentiate between the empirically verifiable ways in which we are misinformed and the harmful conspiracy theories about why we are misinformed.

And that was the baseline situation prior to the range of digital information technologies, social media influence networks, digital propaganda operations, recommender algorithms, large language models, etc etc coming onto the scene.

I’m reading an article for class about how the idea of “digital natives” is actually non-empirical bullshit, and it is going into an analysis of how the idea got to be so widely believed based on no factual foundation in the first place.

Anyway, I’m just musing about how so much of what we believe to be “true” about reality are counterknowledge and false constructions, and that this dynamic exists simultaneously to corporate and socially produced agnotologies and to cultic conspiracism about “mainstream media”, education etc.

The more I’ve learned about information science, effective information behaviors, the organization of information, information literacy, and the research process, I realize that the common thing uniting all of these things is summarization.

In short, the key skill for making sense of the world of information is developing the ability to concisely and precisely summarize some body of information in your own words.

Trying to replace this learning process with automated tools is the antithesis of intelligence—the value in summarization is not the produced summary as an artifact, but is rather in the act itself of creating the summary.

This is a great summary of one of the issues at stake with AI and dataism:

“ChatGPT continues this trend. It offers further evidence of the rise of what is, in effect, a post-rational, post-scientific world view: a belief that if you gather enough data and have enough computing power, you can “create” authoritative knowledge.”

https://mastodon.social/@bhaggart/109739895287073768

@thegibson Oh no...