[Fis] misinformation, a lecture

[Terrence W. DEACON]

Dear colleagues,

I am glad that we're having this conversation. It is not just timely, but
urgent.
The video that Stan posted of David Barstow's talk at the UC Berkeley
Goldman School of Public Policy is chilling.
Please take the time to watch it.
Whatever else you want to quibble about with respect to the words "truth"
"reinforcement" "coherence" or whatever
the danger of not taking this problem seriously is monumental, existential,
and deserving our serious attention.
It is the challenge of understanding referential error-correction as
opposed to the mere rectification of signal corruption.
And although it is not merely an "academic" issue, it demands serious
intellectual effort by those of us who study the very nature of
information. But I fear that we are lagging behind in our theorizing and
being overwhelmed in the same way that journalists are being swamped by
spin factories and powerful demagogues. We are still arguing over the
definitions of information, battling over relativism and meaning, and still
lack a shared formal analysis of reference, interpretation, and
informational causality. I see some faint glimmer of hope in progress made
in encryption and decryption and in the way that blockchain systems help to
provide a form of encrypted transparency. So even as AI is making deep
fakes possible and social media enables disinformation to spread far more
effectively than carefully vetted information, it may also be possible
to explore how these same tools might be repurposed to provide a kind of
informational immune system or automated therapies to combat information
pathogens and information cancers. IS4SI has a role to play in this drama.

— Terry

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 7:09 AM Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "the truth needs reinforcement" is slightly chilling don't you think?
> Isn't this an epistemological error?
>
> Does beauty need reinforcement? Or goodness?
>
> So what is this? An institution steps in to defends the grounds for its
> continued viability and claim to be the arbiter if truth. Its defense is
> amplified as the uncertainty of its environment increases and its
> judgements questioned. And its defense if itself (and "truth") increases
> environmental uncertainty, as (among other things) other institutions
> defend their competing versions of truth.
>
> Positive feedback isn't it?
>
> What's lost is not truth, but coherence.
>
> Mark
>
> On Thu, 9 Jan 2020, 14:44 Stanley N Salthe, <ssalthe at binghamton.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> STAN
>>
>> https://ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=35394
>>
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-- 
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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