Hugo argues that while many people believe that human beings are gullible and easily persuaded of false ideas, in fact people are surprisingly good at telling who is trustworthy, and generally aren’t easily convinced of anything they don’t already think.
That’s because communication couldn’t evolve among human unless it was beneficial to both the sender and receiver of information. If the receiver generally lost out, they would stop listening entirely.
I’m confused. I thought the general take was “people are tricked into believing things that are not true”, not “people are tricked into believing things that are bad for them”. The above argument is a reason to think the second claim is false, but not the first claim (since you can have false beliefs that are nonetheless not bad for you).
Also, could you not have communication evolve even if people are gullible, so long as it is good for groups to have unity/cohesion/obedience? Groups and tribes with more gullible members might have outcompeted groups with more independent-minded members if the former were more united/cohesive.
Some other questions:
What does he make of the claim that all cognitive biases at heart are just confirmation bias based around a few “fundamental prior” beliefs?
Is he an atheist, and if so what does he make of humanity’s history of belief in religion? I am thinking especially of times and places that were especially fertile ground for new religious ideas, e.g., the Mediterranean prior to and during the spread of Christianity, the Second Great Awakening, and the Taiping Rebellion in China. I think those were times when many people readily believed false ideas—why?
On social media and fake news, can he imagine any plausible information ecologies that would cause major problems? How would those look, and why will we avoid them?
Similarly, can he imagine an ideal information ecology? How different is it from what we have today, and how much would things change if we could switch over?
You could argue that fake news is a problem not because it convinces people of falsehoods, but because it spurs them into action, or extremizes their beliefs (e.g., by providing more extreme evidence of their beliefs’ truth than does reality). What does he make of that argument?
Presumably people sometimes do change their mind. What’s his model of how that typically happens? (Presumably it mostly involves things you would not call persuasion.)
Does he think LLMs and voice synthesis will be widely used for scams in the next decade? If not, why not? If yes, does scamming not involve persuasion?
That looks like a great interview subject!
I’m confused. I thought the general take was “people are tricked into believing things that are not true”, not “people are tricked into believing things that are bad for them”. The above argument is a reason to think the second claim is false, but not the first claim (since you can have false beliefs that are nonetheless not bad for you).
Also, could you not have communication evolve even if people are gullible, so long as it is good for groups to have unity/cohesion/obedience? Groups and tribes with more gullible members might have outcompeted groups with more independent-minded members if the former were more united/cohesive.
Some other questions:
What does he make of the claim that all cognitive biases at heart are just confirmation bias based around a few “fundamental prior” beliefs?
Is he an atheist, and if so what does he make of humanity’s history of belief in religion? I am thinking especially of times and places that were especially fertile ground for new religious ideas, e.g., the Mediterranean prior to and during the spread of Christianity, the Second Great Awakening, and the Taiping Rebellion in China. I think those were times when many people readily believed false ideas—why?
On social media and fake news, can he imagine any plausible information ecologies that would cause major problems? How would those look, and why will we avoid them?
Similarly, can he imagine an ideal information ecology? How different is it from what we have today, and how much would things change if we could switch over?
You could argue that fake news is a problem not because it convinces people of falsehoods, but because it spurs them into action, or extremizes their beliefs (e.g., by providing more extreme evidence of their beliefs’ truth than does reality). What does he make of that argument?
Presumably people sometimes do change their mind. What’s his model of how that typically happens? (Presumably it mostly involves things you would not call persuasion.)
Does he think LLMs and voice synthesis will be widely used for scams in the next decade? If not, why not? If yes, does scamming not involve persuasion?
Why did the ad media industry have over $800B revenue last year?