> After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right?
The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve.
There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.
The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve.
There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.