[Fis] misinformation, a lecture

Wed Jan 15 20:44:09 CET 2020

Dear FISers,

Thanks Terry. You are quite right about the chilling dimensions of the 
problem. The struggles for power have always corrupted human 
communication, from face to face outright lies, to falsification of 
written messages. Even Julius Caesar had to encrypt his military and 
political messages. The printing press generated soon a wave of 
pamphlets and libels that were very difficult to counteract. Classical 
journalism could partially overcome that problem by means of competition 
and reputation, plus severe laws arbitrating the defamation attempts. 
Somehow the social countenance of defamation/disinformation has been 
partially working; but nowadays the new technologies have left obsolete 
that classical countenance. I remember in early 1980s a booklet by 
Michael Arbib stating the great improvements in grass-roots democracy 
and communication that the nascent computer world could generate: direct 
democracy, voting every afternoon, fantastic collective management... I 
could hardly swallow that very sweet candy, but kept in mind the 
capacity for self-delusion of the new technology. Anyhow, two main 
alternatives can be seen today: centralized censorship (as already 
practiced in some countries) versus complete lack of control and 
overwhelming disinformation. Paradoxically, the advancement of "deep 
fake" tools, as described in Barstow's talk, may bring the future 
discredit of those info sources that lack sufficient 
authentication--like spam in mail systems. In my view, the quest for 
technological tools that bring "reinforcements to truth" is important 
and necessary, although it looks difficult in so fastly evolving 
systems. In the meantime, I think, the information pillars to be trusted 
are the remains of the traditional media ecosystem, with all its 
limitations and biases...
A role for IS4SI? I think so. Maybe we can promote a stable "reflection 
group" or special working group and see what kind of theoretical/applied 
contributions are we able to make.

Best--Pedro

counteract El 09/01/2020 a las 19:13, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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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-- 
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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