I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True?
With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see.
With an LLM answering the question, this is critical.
To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer.
This is possibly a bad example, because the truth is very clearly written down by the government, based on exact laws. It just happened to be a recent example that I encountered of how the internet leads people astray.
A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this.
And, generally, allowing the government to decide what is true is probably a path we (as a civilisation) do not want to take. We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good.
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously)
Er, no, the meaning of the question is ambiguous, so I'm not sure "has a single truthful answer" is accurate. What does "can" mean? If you mean "permitted", then no. But if you mean can they vote anyway and get away with it? It's clearly happened before (as rare as it might have been), so technically the answer to that would be be yes.
This is a fundamental limitation of language. The LLM is likely to provide a good answer here even though the question is technically ambiguous, because it likes verbose answers.
Equally "can" is used to substitute for other precise words. Humans are good at inferring context, and if someone asked me "can illegals vote" I'd say "no". Just like if someone said "can you pass the salt" I pass the salt, I don't say "yes".
If the inferred context US wrong then the "truth" is wrong, but as with talking to humans it's possible to refine context with a follow up question.
To clarify: I wasn't making a pedantic linguistic point here. The fact is that when I first read the question, I actually thought it was asking "are illegal immigrants able to cast a vote (regardless of legality)?"
It literally did not even (initially) occur to me that the question might be asking about legality, because the entire modern political discourse surrounding illegal immigrants and voting has been with regards to whether they can cast votes despite not legally being allowed to. The answer to "is this legal" would have been such an obvious "no" to people on both sides of the debate --- and thus the question so silly --- that initially it didn't occur to me that the intended question might have been about legality, until I continued reading the comment and realized that was the intention after all.
>It literally did not even (initially) occur to me that the question might be asking about legality, because the entire modern political discourse surrounding illegal immigrants and voting has been with regards to whether they can cast votes despite not legally being allowed to.
Besides, going by legality, illegal immigrants "couldn't" even have passed the border into the country to begin with. But obviously they could, hence their status as illegal immigrants.
There's a contradiction if the AI answers "no" to "can they vote" (implicitly having the legality in mind), while accepting that they can exist in the country as illegal immigrants (implicitly ignoring the legality of border crossing).
"Visa overstayers mostly enter with tourist or business visas.[99] In 1994, more than half[108] of illegal immigrants were Visa overstayers whereas in 2006, about 45% of illegal immigrants were Visa overstayers.[109]"
(Here in the UK, the vast majority of illegal immigrants arrived legally and overstayed their visas. Yet our Conservative government, who oversaw a large increase in such arrivals, tried to blame all the country's woes on a few small boats illegally crossing our southern border; which is effectively a rounding error).
"The contracting states shall not... impose penalties on refugees who entered illegally in search of asylum if they present themselves without delay (Article 31), which is commonly interpreted to mean that their unlawful entry and presence ought not to be prosecuted at all[18]"
>Of course they could. Being an "illegal immigrant" does not imply unlawful border crossing.
Same difference. Whether it's border crossing or visa overstay, from a pure legality aspect the answer is still "they couldn't".
>The contracting states shall not... impose penalties on refugees who entered illegally in search of asylum if they present themselves without delay (Article 31), which is commonly interpreted to mean that their unlawful entry and presence ought not to be prosecuted at all
I'd wager 99% do not "present themselves without delay", so don't fall in this case...
> Yet our Conservative government, who oversaw a large increase in such arrivals, tried to blame all the country's woes on a few small boats illegally crossing our southern border
a) What was the exact claim (the word "all" caught my eye)?
b) is it the sole claim?
c) If one person in a group does something, are all members of the group "doers of that thing"?
d) for (d), does the answer depend on what the thing is, and if so should we perhaps imagine everyone is speaking a bit tongue in cheek?
Also, is the impact e.g. on crime of "visa overstays", that is, from people who were vetted, registered, and got a visa, the same as that of randos just passing the border with zero oversight?
Even if the first category is higher in numbers (and assuming there are correct numbers for the latter), the crime stats between the two are probably quite different. Especially since "visa overstays" could also count some people waiting for a delayed renewal, or coming in for 6 months and staying 5 or whatever.
It's funny to watch computer programmers (and various experts), whose day job is literally handling complexity and producing truth, fail so quickly and utterly at simple culture war topics. It is like the weirdest thing, people like you (though you did make at least one error somewhere in this thread) are 1 in 1000++ in my estimation.
That was kinda my point - my friend had been so conditioned by the "can they vote" thing that he genuinely thought that non-citizens could legally vote in US elections.
If I had phrased the question as "is it legal for non-citizens to vote in US elections?" then that might have illustrated my point better (and we wouldn't be going down this rabbit hole, though the rabbit hole is informative in itself).
The fact that the rabbit hole exists at all means that our hope for instant, reliable answers is likely doomed. Avoiding politics entirely, I could ask “does gravity curve spacetime?”, and while “yes” is a reasonably accurate answer, so is a digression into quantum gravity, or even saying that we’re not sure spacetime really exists outside of being a good abstraction.
Thanks, yeah, exactly. Like, the best answer to a question can really depend on who's asking it, who's answering it, or what they intend to use the answer for.
To give a much simpler example:
- If an 8-year-old asks "can you mix oil and water", the right answer is "no". If a student is asked that question on a school exam, the right answer is also "no".
IDK, if my 5-year-old asks "can you mix oil and water", I'll tell her, "sorta - if you just pour them into the same container and mix with a spoon, then no; if you add some stuff and know how, then yes - in fact, it's exactly what mayonnaise is".
That I had to be 35 before I learned that mayo is basically water mixed with oil, held together by eggs, it's an indication of what kind of education about the world we were getting...
At that point you're just changing the physical scenario the question was asking about, and answering about a different scenario entirely. You might as well respond to "can humans fly?" with "yes, with an airplane".
You can certainly reply like that to your 5yo, but it completely misses the point I was making. The video I linked to didn't suddenly modify the outcome being asked about. What it ended up with really was a mixture of plain oil and water, with no other ingredient ever being added to it.
Nice example :) So your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?
I think that's probably technically accurate, and also practically useless. Even damaging. I saw this in the climate arguments: two sets of different facts led to two different versions of the truth, which led to two completely irreconcilable points of view. Essentially two sets of people shouting "no, but..." and "well, actually..." at each other, pointing to two completely different truths, both supported by two completely different sets of facts. At some point we as a society need to agree on our truth in order to get anything done.
> your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?
That's really not how I interpret it.
Assuming we agree on what "mixing" means, which itself isn't that trivial but even without a formal definition I think we have the same idea of "homogenous at molecular level on a longish time period".
The truth is "yes you can mix water and oil", there's no doubt about that. It's testable and tested.
The fact that we use context to interpret the question (rather than being entirely literal about it) and decide whether the literal truth is really what's appropriate to answer, doesn't change the nature of truth.
There's also the question of knowledge (I might not know that you actually can mix water and oil), but again that doesn't change the nature of truth.
Like so many philosophical questions, it only sounds interesting because we assign different meanings to the same words: here conflating truth and answer.
> So your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?
No it's not, at all. This isn't a debate about what's true, it's a debate over the intended meaning of the question. The point was that people assume context behind the question and answer based on the context. Because even the person asking often doesn't literally mean what the words say. The question is more than the words that are explicitly written.
The concept is that it is possible for people to be in bad faith. This also underlies the idea that people can commit crime, be guilty of crime. I guess the term is 'law'?
Bottom line is that you can't have the bottom line be 'does a person earnestly believe what they're doing is right and good', much less 'do they say they're right'. Can't fall back on that, it's hopelessly inadequate.
I might disagree with that and agree on the context approach. „The Truth“ does not exist and it would be much more helpful to have context related answers without one mayor view which needs to dominate.
> At some point we as a society need to agree on our truth in order to get anything done.
These are known as half-truths. We do settle for lies in order to do whatever it is people feel they need to do.
We also settle for lies because there are just things we don't understand yet, but our models are currently correct, and possibly collapsing over millenia to a stable truth.
As someone who writes fiction, I’d like to note that one often needs to write really complex lies in order to effectively transmit a single truth. You can’t just tell people anything, you have to prepare the mind to receive the knowledge.
Generally as lies wrapped in lies. You can use the same techniques to push a falsehood as well. Which is not to say Rand did not actually believe her message — she did, which is why the books are so effective. But they have given the upper class an exaggerated sense of their own importance, and a conviction that government only stands in their way. Meanwhile over in reality, the more a state is run by oligarchs, the worse a place it is to live.
I don't really disagree, and don't appreciate Rand, but an oligarchy can be disguised as something else, and people will feel relief when it is replaced by an open oligarchy, because one means of gaining power is to give people what they need.
Sure you can adapt how much context you give based on who's asking, but if it's something factual like this it really shouldn't change from a yes to a no.
If you think they _meant_ to ask a different question that is less vague, it can be clarified
"Water and oil do not mix by hand. However water and oil can mix under some specific conditions like a vacuum, do you want to discuss that in more detail?"
I think that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible.
But I feel optimizing for lazy question phrasing is infantilizing the userbase and assuming they're incapable of learning how to ask more precise questions.
Which is an endemic problem in the modern web. We should be building systems with low barriers to simple adoption, but whose power scales with a user's expertise.
Instead, we're hyperoptimizing for lowest common denominator, first interaction and as a result putting a glass ceiling on system power.
> that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible.
I’d rephrase it: this was googles approach because they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives. Why does everyone assume the search bubble is a well intentioned accident?
The linguistic arguments about the nature of truth above don’t cut it for me as any justification that the answer depends on who is asking. If we’re telling chemists that oil and water do mix as mentioned elsewhere in thread, we should probably tell the same to children and just make a slider for the level of additional detail. No problem. Especially if the alternative is a dystopic post truth panopticon.
> systems whose power scales with expertise
Couldn’t agree more that this is what we want/need, but disagree about infantilizing user bases and lowest common denominator.
Platform’s aren’t trying to scale user power with expertise, they want to scale revenue with users, and separately, to deliberately restrict user power/control so that platforms decide what users see. And it’s not necessarily political or linguistic or about the nature of truth.
A simple example of this that’s everywhere is filtering content by sub genre tags. Ever notice that you often see niche content tags like “time-travel” or “mind-bending” but can’t click it? Platforms want the tags for internal analytics naturally, but they want the control of not providing it as a filter, forcing users instead into a fuzzier category like “people also watched” or “top ten this week”.
Why? Because platforms can hide advertised content there, push stuff they pay less license fees for, make operations cheaper with caching, or whatever else.
Because lots of people are ignorant and imprecise.
HN selects from people who have at least a passing knowledge/interest in programming/science, a subpopulation which is already several standard deviations from the mean in specificity and debugging.
> disagree about infantilizing user bases and lowest common denominator
Platforms, with Google as exemplar, evolve in two ways.
1: Features they explicitly choose not to ship, because they're strategically dangerous. See tool-use foot dragging by OpenAi.
2: Features they deprioritize, because they aren't as revenue-impactful as other things.
To me, it feels like Google dropped the ball via the second path.
I'm sure they've been doing a ridiculous amount of cool work behind the scenes on individual context grounding... but once prod was "good enough for ads" the company as a whole wasn't incentivized to do the hard thing and ship more advanced features in search.
Which is how they ended up as legacy as they are, competing against LLM search that's by definition context-native.
My education also drilled into me the distinction between what one can do and what one may do. I can just hear my main lesson teacher now: "Can an illegal immigrant vote? Perhaps, but they may not, and certainly they should not."
More of teaching like this in school could go a long way, but once people reach adulthood I don't think this would cut it. I think a more military training approach might be needed where you tear this part of the person's psyche down and rebuild it properly from the ground up.
>The answer to "is this legal" would have been such an obvious "no" to people on both sides of the debate
I'm sorry, but the people on the side of letting illegal aliens vote are squarely of the opinion that it is legal to do so.
Why?
Because when you prohibit any and all means (eg: government identification demonstrating citizenship and residence) to test the question of legality, everything becomes legal by sheer virtue of the fact you can't demonstrate what they are doing is illegal.
Remember: Innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You are prohibited from proving they are guilty, so they are innocent by default.
There is no side of letting illegal aliens vote. WTF?
Although I did once live in a town where anyone over 16, citizen or not, could vote in the city non-partisan elections. The idea was local government needs all the involvement it could get and if you lived in the city you had a stake in its future. I do believe one had to have a proper visa and so on.
You do realize that you can't test someone's legal ability to vote if you prohibit confirming if someone is legally permitted to vote, right? Our rule of law rests upon assuming innocence if guilt cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and here it is explicitly prohibited to even attempt proving guilt. Therefore it becomes legal for illegal aliens to vote in American elections, because you are prohibited from even attempting to demonstrate their illegality.
The only reason asking for government identification prior to voting is considered "racist" and illegal is because the people pushing such agendas want more votes and don't care where the votes come from, including illegal aliens, legal aliens, and otherwise people who do not have the right to vote in American elections.
I voted when I was still in California, born and raised American so I have the right to vote. I was never asked for any piece of identification. None. I could have been a Canadian or Briton or Chinese or some other foreign national, I could have been an illegal alien from Mexico or Guatemala and I could have still voted and my ballot counted because nobody checked. I just walked in and voted, identification or citizenship be damned let alone registration.
There's a part of me still questioning the value of my American citizenship and paying my taxes like a good citizen.
If by "it" you mean a specific GPT like OpenAIs ChatGPT or Claude, yes. In general LLMs are trained to be a verbose as they are trained to be. Here is the full answer I got from Gemini 1.5 Pro for "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?":
> No, non-citizens cannot legally vote in federal, state, or local elections in the United States. This includes those who are undocumented or residing in the country illegally.
Clearly it made assumptions about the interpretation of the question, and did not respond verbosely to account for ambiguity.
At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole... As I understand it, only citizens are legally entitled to vote, and voting requires a government-issued ID and the voter to be enrolled.
How did they vote and get away with it previously?
(also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?)
It's quite clear that the question is not whether it is possible that an insignificant number of votes are cast fraudulently, because if we're talking about insignificant events, all things are possible.
Certainly the question is whether there's any evidence, after endless audits and investigations and lawsuits, that the volume of fraudulent votes is anywhere near large enough to affect the results.
Is it possible that someone registered their hamster to vote? Certainly.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that tens of thousands of hamsters are casting votes? No.
> Certainly the question is whether there's any evidence, after endless audits and investigations and lawsuits, that the volume of fraudulent votes is anywhere near large enough to affect the results.
(a) Nobody asked that above.
(b) You're conflating "do people do X" with "can people do X". Those are two very different questions. There are lots of things that people could easily do frequently, but that they simply don't do frequently. Perhaps because they're just honest, perhaps because they lack sufficient motivation to be dishonest, perhaps because they're worried they might get caught, perhaps because they have better things to do, etc.
I have no idea what the downvotes mean. Are people claiming "can illegal immigrants vote?" is somehow the same question as "are illegal immigrants voting frequently enough to sway the outcome of the election?" Those seem like manifestly different questions, what's so controversial?
Just seems like willful misinterpretation of the spirit of the question in casual convo to score some sort of point in a game you made up, esp after they clarified the context that their friend really thought it was legal for them to vote.
Their friend was intending to ask about legality, but my whole point was that the question itself doesn't convey that. I was saying that when I saw the quoted question, it seemed to me that it was being interpreted as "can illegal immigrants get away with voting", and they were probably encountering websites saying "illegal aliens are voting!!!", which is obviously confusing, even for someone who already knows it's illegal. Does that make sense?
This wasn't me willfully misinterpreting it, this was me literally doing my best to guess what the intention of the question was, based on the question. Now of course after the comment said the answer is an "obvious no" then I finally figured out the intended question was something else (hence my reply), but that's out-of-band information that was in no way conveyed by the query. And my point was that the answer to the question isn't obvious because the meaning of the question itself isn't clear.
California passed a bill last month which banned requiring ID for voting, which stirred up the discussion that people without ID or to be more precise illegal immigrants could just vote.
I don’t know more details about it but theoretically this would also allow people to vote more than once.
You sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole... you don't have to have ID to vote, but you do have to be registered to vote (which requires ID). So in order for an illegal immigrant to vote, they would need to impersonate a registered voter (and presumably if that person did vote, it would be flagged as multiple votes under the same registration). Not impossible, but not the same as being able to just walk up and vote no questions asked.
Nope, automatic voter registration through the DMV when getting/updating a driver's license can do it, which they are allowed to have. One of the recent court cases (like within the past few weeks) involved removing people from the list of registered voters who failed to check the "I am a US citizen" box. Driver's license is what most of us use as a government ID anyway.
Automatic vs. manual doesn't seem relevant? A driver's license is an ID, so if they have that for automatic registration, then they still have an ID.
I think your point is that people can just lie about citizenship and get away with it when registering to vote, regardless of when/how it is done? Is that it?
Registering to vote has been made so easy it can be done by accident. Then months or years later when an election is coming up they'll get a voter card on the mail and think that means they can vote even though they're not legally allowed to vote.
I'm kind of incredulous at this if I'm being honest. How can you register to vote by accident? Every form I've seen a copy of asks if you're a citizen and gives you a warning about that. Do you have a copy of the form or screenshot you're referring to that makes this easy to do by accident?
I don't, but it's easy to find people who realized this happened to them, getting scared about their immigration status and/or breaking the law. And the DMV isn't the only way this can happen:
I'm no linguist, but the question does seem unambiguous, or quite clear, to a reasonable observer. The context is "voting in a US election" AND the subject is "an illegal immigrant" WITH an assumption that the illegal immigrant has, in fact, illegally emigrated to the US.
To answer the general question, of "if somebody got away with X, how can we know it happened?":
If somebody robbed a bank at gunpoint and was never caught, can we know it happened? Obviously yes.
What if somebody "merely" embezzled from one, and there's a "hole" found in the banks books and money missing, but nobody who did it or how? Still, I'd wager yes, one coudl tell by the results.
What if somebody used illegal means to get leverage on some stock buying/selling, it became know, but they weren't punished and got to keep their profits? They got away with it, but we do know it happened.
Well, after the fact it's realized the person whose name is on the ballot had been dead for months, and you didn't catch who cast the vote because you don't know who they are.
Or a million other scenarios. Really all it takes is stopping to think about it for more than a minute.
I mean if they registered with some identifiable piece of info (SSN for example) then you would see two votes with the same SSN if they were pretending to be someone else and if they dont have an SSN then they arent a citizen.
Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)
In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town.
We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.
This might be a popular contrarian view at the moment, but I'm not sure everyone is trapped in a bubble by social media.
When people mostly communicated with those in their own town that is a bubble. Radio and TV is more of a bubble because there is limited "bandwith" in the scheduling so it has to be editorialised (not necessarily a bad thing).
Social media companies do choose what you see via algorithms, but I'm not convinced they benefit from only showing you content you "agree" with, it feels like being shown a certain amount of content outside your "bubble" would increase screen time. There are also the comment sections that often have contradictory views.
Even social media (setting aside the rest of the internet for the moment) will expose you to more viewpoints than the the social circle in your home town, or a TV/Radio schedule. I'm not saying it is a healthy way to be exposed to other viewpoints, but I don't think the problem with social media is that is creates a bubble.
Increasing engagement doesn't have to just be through agreeable content; consider Twitter ragebait or Instagram [body dysmorphia bait?]. In general, it means your attention is hooked. If people only get content they are likely to be highly engaged with, the range of content will be relatively narrow, and that is a bubble. Perhaps more or larger bubbles, but still noticeably limited perspectives.
If anything considering how vastly more complex things are nowadays (behind superficial appearances), the median adult is likely even more ignorant, in relative terms, than say the median peasant in rural 1700s France, or even in 1900s France.
Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context.
The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.
> A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this.
I know it was just an example, but actually no, the role of dietary saturated fat as a factor for heart disease remains very much valid. I’m not sure which recent studies you’re referring to, but you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily. What study were you thinking about?
>you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily
Sure you can if the research was bogus to begin with, sponsored in many cases, and merely taking for granted/referencing some previous results without verifying them, which is often the case.
I think they are referring to low-carb studies done recently. If your diet consists of only saturated fat, it does seem to be healthier for you than the standard American/Western diet that is also high in saturated fat but also quite high in sugar, wheat, and other starchy carbs. When combined, saturated fat and carbs are a hitting a double if your goal is to be unhealthy.
General disclaimers apply regarding portion sizes etc blah blah blah I'm not a doctor.
Anecdotally, a low-(ish) carb diet and fasting has done wonders for my health and many others. I will say that there appears to be a link with higher cholesterol when consuming higher amounts of fat, but the argument in nutrition science atm seems to be centered on whether or not that is "good" cholesterol, but it's hard to measure in human patients for a long time because you essentially need to put them on a very limited diet to get good data. Those large scale trials are expensive and hard to manage at scale.
I wasn’t aware of the new debate over saturated fats, I’m curious and will be watching this evolve with interest.
That said, for me this publication has red flags right from the start. Complaining about difficulty of changing everyone’s minds is a political and non-academic persuasion tactic that does not convince me. Calling it “resistance” and “bias” is a bullshit framing that makes me less likely to trust Teicholz. Of course there is resistance to 50 years of publication and research, and there should be. There’s a lot of bias towards the earth being round, and a lot of resistance to the idea that it’s flat, right? If I repeat the claim that the earth is round, is that “propaganda”? It would indeed take time and effort to change everyone’s minds about that.
Multiple times she references “>20” papers that back up her claims. Except 5 of her references in this paper are her own. And she has around 10 on this subject. So is she claiming this “new consensus” is based on what she herself and maybe one or two other people believe? If 50% of the evidence for consensus is her own papers, then I doubt there’s any consensus at all. It’s funny to claim there’s consensus at the same time she complains that it’s difficult to change the consensus. Even 20 independent scientific papers not authored by Teicholz is practically nothing in the big picture. It will take many more papers and much more time, and the evidence needs to be overwhelming, clear, obvious, and true.
She might be right! But Nina Teicholz is a journalist, not a scientist. She does have a PhD, but her publications don’t appear to be scientific research, and most look like opinion pieces.
Out of curiosity, if saturated fats aren’t the culprit, what is? Looks like she does have one paper questioning sugar, so is she claiming sugar is the real cause? What if it’s the combination of sugar and saturated fats? Does that make her right or wrong?
It's amazing how many HNers link this charlatan's op-ed thinking it's evidence. Presumably you don't like linking to our best human outcome research on the subject because it never pans out well for saturated fat–not for atherosclerosis, not for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, not for glucose sensitivity, and so on.
So you link to the equivalent of a reddit post 'summarizing' the space. I see this link every week on here and every time, the person who linked it thinks they just had a mic drop moment like you.
I think discussing this topic with too much fervor is a waste of energy. Nutrition science is hard because performing valid studies at large scale is close to impossible, so I’m left performing an argument from nature, being that eating things that were invented decades ago might be worse for us than things we’ve eaten for millions of years.
Not everything on PubMed weights the same. As others have said, this is just a summary article by the Best seller author Nina Teicholz. Not only she's heavily sponsored by the Meat Industry (and I'm not vegan), but her best selling book title is "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet", yet in the article she declares "The author receives modest royalties on a book on the history of dietary fat recommendations and otherwise declares no conflicts of interest"...
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer.
There are many jurisdictions where some illegal immigrants (Dreamers) are allowed to vote, including New York City[1].
> Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections).
I strongly disagree. Going by your interpretation, the question "How many people in the USA vote in local elections?" would have the answer "not a single person."
Your version of the question has the qualifier "in local elections".
The parent's version doesn't, so the answer assuming that it talks about the main USA elections, and not local or any random election that just happen to be conducted in the USA, is quite valid.
In other words "in the USA elections" implicitly points to a specific kind of elections (the presidential ones), different to "USA local elections" or "any kind of election within the USA").
You might argue "in the USA elections" doesn't anywhere prevent the more generic interpretation, but I argue that that's how most people would understand and answer such a question.
> Your version of the question has the qualifier "in local elections".
Yes, the point is that qualifier works because when you're talking about people voting "in the USA," you can be talking about local or federal elections. "In federal elections, how many people vote in local elections" makes no sense. "In the USA, how many people vote in local elections" makes sense, because voting in the USA can encompass both local and national elections.
I understand that there are many people who ignore local elections. But I disagree that talking about voting "in the USA" means that local elections should be excluded.
> In other words "in the USA elections" implicitly points
You're using quotations for something that wasn't said. The original comment was "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?"
I was thinking something similar. I like the google auto-ai summary for little trivia facts and objective things (who played so and so in the movie? How heavy is a gallon of milk?) this is stuff that is verifiable and could theoretically just be queried from some sort of knowledge base.
But for anything remotely subjective, context dependent, or time sensitive I need to know the source. And this isn’t just for hot button political stuff — there’s all sorts of questions like “is the weather good this weekend?”, “Are puffy jackets cool again?”, “How much should I spend on a vacation?”
What is truth anyway? I see it as a quicker version of browsing to web to get a summary of what people say. As you said, with search you get a bunch of websites where strangers talk about a certain topic. You read a dozen and see if they agree with each other or if they sound legit.. There is just a huge overlap between what we consider true and what (an overwhelming majority of) people agree on. A lot of things are reduced to the consensus. If you ask a non-obvious question, you usually get an answer "a lot of people you consider trustworthy dedicated some time studying this question and agreed that the answer is X". But then people can be wrong, a big group of people can be wrong, people can be bribed or perhaps you don't actually trust these people that much. The internet can't tell you the truth. LLM can't tell you the truth. But they can summarize what other people in the world say on this subject.
> I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True?
Well, outside of matters of stark factuality (what time does the library close?, what did MSFT close at?), many things people may be "searching for" (i.e. trying to find information about) are more in the realm of informed opinion and summary where there is no right or wrong, just a bunch of viewpoints, some probably better informed than others.
I think this is the value of traditional search where the result is a link to a specific page/source whose trustworthiness or degree of authority you can then judge (e.g. based on known reputation).
For AI generated/summarized "search results", such as those from "ChatGPT Search" (awkward name - bit like a spork), the trustworthiness or degree of authority is only as good as the AI (not person) that generated it, and given today's state of technology where the "AI" is just an LLM (prone to hallucination, limited reasoning, etc), this is obviously a bit of an issue...
Even in the future, when presumably human level AGI will have made LLMs obsolete, I think it'll still be useful to differentiate search from RAG AGI search/chat, since it'll still be useful to know the source. At that point the specific AGI might be regarded as a specific person, with it's own areas of expertise and biases.
The name "ChatGPT Search" is very awkward - presumably they are trying to position this as a potential Google competitor and revenue generator (when the inevitable advertisements come), but at the end of the day it's just RAG.
Non-citizens/residents are the juiciest targets for taxes (tourism taxes at hotels and whatnot, pumped up taxes on restaurants/alcohol)! This actually makes no sense at all.
Sales taxes levied on visitors can be justified as different, but it seems unfair to level income taxes, or real estate taxes, without any right to vote over how those taxes are spent, especially in the case of legal non-citizen residents.
> It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit,
With current search engines, Google decides for you ("helped" by SEO experts failing over themselves to rank higher because their revenue directly depends on it). In theory, you could go an read a few dozen pages and decide for yourself.
In reality, non-technical users will click on a first link that seems to be related to the question, and that's it.
Even with AI-based search (or q/a instead of search) I think the same will happen. There is and will be a huge reward for gaming the results, be they page links or RAG snippets that rank for a query. I've already seen many SEO shops advertising their strategies to keep the customers' business relevant in the chatbot area. As this approach becomes more prevalent, you can be sure many smart people will do many experiments to figure out how best to please the new algorithm.
In other words, AI-based search is an UX optimization, but doesn't address the core problem of how do you decide what content's the best, and do that in context of each user, and do that while maximizing the benefit for the user vs profit for the company doing this.
So we have two huge hurdles:
1. who will decide what the user wants[0] to see, and how are incentives for that entity aligned with the user's
2. how is that entity supposed to find the information needle in the haystack of slop that's 90%+ of current web?
[0] "wants" in a rational "give me the best possible information" meaning, not in "what keeps them addicted, their heart rate up, and what will drive engagement" meaning
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused).
This doesn’t have a single truthful answer. Some states don’t have voter ID laws, so the truth can depend on the state. In those no voter ID laws there’s not that much keeping someone from voting twice or more under different names, except significant moral qualms about subverting instead of preserving everyone else’s right to vote in a democratic republic. Someone can assume the name of a person from another country that could’ve plausibly come in illegally. Without a picture ID, they can’t claim you aren’t that persons.
Can an illegal immigrant vote? Yes, in states without voter ID laws, technically anyone can vote, even convicted terrorists. Should an illegal immigrant vote? No, they’re not supposed to be able to vote and there may be consequences if caught.
What purpose do a lack of voter ID laws serve except the obvious conclusion which is to enable cheating?
That isn’t true. They do have voter registration, and they match name addresses that are cross them off, a name can’t vote twice.
MAGA types who wanted to prove democrats could cheat like this were caught very quickly because voting twice or voting for someone else is very very easy to detect, even without IDs. The judges gave them Darwin awards.
Unregistered voters can’t vote in any state, they can only do so by pretending to be someone else (name and address matches the rolls), but they are caught when those people actually vote. Foreigners can also vote by illegally registering. But motor voter means they actually check your status at registration.
The ID thing is a solution to a non-problem, like literacy tests were. But the republicans could make it easier to achieve universally if they just went with a guaranteed free national ID like other countries, except that would make the obstruction aspect of voter ID requirements much more moot, so they never go there.
Foreign residents can vote in some local election in a few places, mainly very local school board elections.
> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see.
It is very similar. Google decides what to present to you on the front page. I'm sure there are metrics on how few people get past the front page. Heck, isn't this just Google Search's business model? Determining what you see (i.e. what is "true") via ads?
In much the same way that the Councils of Carthage chose to omit the acts of Paul and Thecla in the New Testament, all modern technology providers have some say in what is presented to the global information network, more or less manipulating what we all perceive to be true.
Recently advancements have just made this problem much more apparent to us. But look at history and see how few women priests there are in various Christian churches and you'll notice even a small omission can have broad impacts to society.
This is true of the feeds and everything else where there are abundant choices. Amazon putting its inhouse brands before others. Anything which has to be narrowed down is an algorithmic choice, either data driven or top-down.
"Are all bachelors married?" vs "is it raining outside?"
And then Quine points out that the definitions of "bachelor" and "married" are themselves contingent on outside factors.
"Can illegal immigrants vote?", while close to being an analytic proposition, still depends on an empirical approach that can never be mediated by text, video, etc. All propositions are by necessity experiential. Nullius in verba!
So the truth is and has always been what happens when you get off your butt and go out and test the world.
This is not to say that we don't benefit from language. It makes for a great recipe. If you follow the instructions to bake a cake and you get what you expected you know that the recipe was true. The same goes for the laws of science, search engine results, and generative AI.
Unfortunately most people seem comfortable with the idea of a Ministry of Truth, at least here in Brazil and from what I read on the web, in many parts of the world also.
I think this presents an approach: move closer to the search engine model. In both academic writing an news journalism, factual claims try to cite their sources. And you can see this is an approach that some of the chat systems have directionally gone. We don't want to always pedantically cite a reference for every question. But maybe we should? At least at an architectural level and let the UX decide if it should be displayed.
> in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote
According Author X in Book Y which studied this topic in depth: foo answer
I don’t know who should get to decide “what is true” but I think we all agree that we won’t get anything remotely akin to truth so long as search is driven by for-profit interests trying to steer us towards their products first and our actual query (a distant) second.
> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked
I don't think this appropriately credits Google's power with regards to what you are seeing
For the record, in my local elections, we have plenty of people voting illegally.
"Is it legal" is very different from "Can they."
By "local," I mean municipal and below. I didn't mean "federal elections conducted in my locality." Election security kicks for state, federal, and some municipal elections.
Others are intentionally fraudulent (e.g. local corruption) or unintentionally broken (e.g. using Google Forms for a school-level public body, where people not legally qualified to vote might still do it, unaware they're committing a felony).
And "public body" has a specific meaning under my state law which extends the same laws as e.g. cutting for my state senate. That's bodies like local school boards, but not random school clubs.
That's the level where we have massive illegal voting where I live.
For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also responsible for what they say. But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker.
I think we have a number of historical models for that. A relevant one is divination. If you bring your question to the haruspex, your answer is read out of the guts of a sacrificed animal. If the answer is wrong, who do you blame? The traditional answer is the gods, or perhaps nobody.
Bu we know now that fortune tellers are just selling answers while pretending to not be responsible for them. Which points us at one solution: anybody selling or presenting LLM output as meaningful is legally responsible for the quality of the product.
Unfortunately, another model is the modern corporation. Sometimes the people in a company intentionally lie. More often, statements are made by one person based on a vision or optimism or confusion or bullshit. Nobody set out to lie, but nobody really cared about the truth, at least not as much as everybody cared about making money.
So I'd agree that the government doesn't have much role in deciding The Truth. Similarly, the government shouldn't have much role in controlling what you eat. But in both cases, I think there's plenty of role for the government in ensuring that companies selling good food or good information have sound production and quality control measures to ensure that they are delivering what consumers are expecting.
I didn't say it has the same competencies and biases as any human - I said we can judge it on it's individual merits, the same way we judge any human on theirs.
No, you can't judge it the same way you judge a human, any more than you could judge a bus engine the same way you'd judge human. It's not an individual, and not remotely like one.
I get this might seem like tedious nitpicking to you, but the number one error people are making with LLM output is anthropomorphizing it. Which I get, because it's built to seem that way. But it's an enormously dangerous misconception.
As one example among zillions, look at the term "hallucination". All LLM output is equally "hallucinated". Some of it, when interpreted by a human may be taken as meaningful. Some of it, the "hallucinated" part, is taken as meaningful but contrary to something else they understand. But it's the human creating all the meaning here. Even calling this class of mismatches "hallucination" is anthropomorphizing LLMs.
Imagine I take the proverbial million monkeys to generate random words. Then I create a statistical filter so that we extract only the plausible sentences. Is this machine a source? Can I "judge just like any human source" here?
I'd say the answer is a clear no. And if you think the answer is yes, then the same has to apply to things like horoscopes, the I Ching, or the intestines of a sacrificial goat.
I can judge the utility of a black box oracle on it's own merits, without needing to know whether it's human, and without being accused of anthromorphizing it.
If I've observed the answers of the oracle to be biased, or useful/correct in some circumstances and not in others, then this is something to take into account when deciding whether or not this is a useful source to pay attention to.
From the POV of whether the output of the black box is useful, it doesn't make any difference whether what's in the box is a human, an LLM, or a rabid monkey. It is what it is, and I'll judge it on it's merits.
Now, YOU may care what's in the box, for some reason, but that's on you.
> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously)
legally no, practically- yes. In most states, you simply must attest that you are a citizen in order to register. In many states, non-citizens have been auto-registered to vote when attaining drivers licenses. Reddit is full of panicked immigrants concerned that they found themselves registered to vote, and worried about how that would affect their status.
Seems particularly to be a US based phenomenon. Unlike the more transparent manipulation seen under dictatorships... Where people generally recognize propaganda for what it is, even if they can’t openly challenge it—some in USA live within entirely new realities.
Definitely a US based phenomenon, but sadly like other US based things it spreads to other countries. I talk with friends in CA and EU who are seeing some of the junk we saw 10 years ago with "what is fact"
Appeals to common sense seem to underlie many of the "alternative facts" in the zeitgeist. "Common sense" is how people defend their views when they can't do it empirically. That's not always bad, but "common sense" is probably part of the problem.
Remember the covid years, when what was true kept changing rapidly, and sometimes what was said on the fringe and considered misinformation was later adopted by mainstream. Vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. Oh no they don't. Don't wear masks. Oh no, do wear masks. Oh, whatever, cloth masks are face decorations anyway. Lockdowns are good. Oh, lockdowns were a mistake. Don't treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Oh, do treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Lab leak is a conspiracy theory. Oh, maybe lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. And so on, and so forth...
Or take a look at how not just the media, but even the government in the UK or Canada liberally put labels such as "far right", "alt right", "antisemitic", etc. on their opponents, and how these labels pop up in Wikipedia. Are they true?
Fair point. I think just that there's a general acceptance that "something must be done" and that the government are the people to do it is pretty alarming. It's a short step from here to a Ministry of Truth, and I can see Australia taking that step pretty soon.
The thing about Australia is that voting is mandatory. By definition this makes it difficult for politicians radicalising the edges to pull the mass of the normal curve away from the centre. In the US the opposite is true. The radicalised are more incentivised to turn up and vote than the centrist mass. So much so that the last 40 years has seen the hollowing out of the centre and this ridiculous (to my eyes) seesawing of extremes.
What I’m trying to explain is that (successful) politics in Australia doesn’t stray too far from the centre of the body politic. As a result there’s greater faith in institutions here than in the US. It’s far less alarming to us (conceptually) than it is to Americans.
I have a physics analogy which is similar. Vested interests set up magnetic fields in social media / legacy media (lot of things discussed prominently in social media is just what legacy media is saying. So legacy media is a sense is setting up an anchor points and people have to distribute themselves around it) to flip magnetic domains to align with the narrative.
We used to defer this to journalists, effectively. While individual journalists often lied and misrepresented the truth, there was some responsibility within the industry to tell the truth, and newspapers did print retractions and corrections when they got it wrong. The editorial content was strictly separate from the business of running the newspaper, so editorial decisions were (mostly) not influenced by commercial decisions and free to pursue The Truth as they saw it.
That, sadly, is no longer the case. And we have no good replacement for it.
There is no incentive to be truthful currently, among democracies the seems to be most powerful in the US with Trump able to lie and there seemingly be no counter for it.
With old regulated media there was (is?) the legacy of the organisation and the idea it was "trustworthy" on the line for the journalists that work for it. So they have an incentive to be truthful, and hopefully an idea that publishing lies is not a good moral choice.
With the personality driven journalism that emerges from the internet there is less incentive to be truthful, such personalities can be very successful using populism alone to play to their audience.
With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see.
With an LLM answering the question, this is critical.
To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer.
This is possibly a bad example, because the truth is very clearly written down by the government, based on exact laws. It just happened to be a recent example that I encountered of how the internet leads people astray.
A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this.
And, generally, allowing the government to decide what is true is probably a path we (as a civilisation) do not want to take. We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good.