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I think it’s great to think about what projects should maybe exist and then pitch them! Kudos to you for doing that; it seems potentially one of the highest-value activities on the Forum.
I think that information flows are really important, and in principle projects like this could be really high-value already in the world today. Moreover I agree that the general area is likely to increase in importance as the impacts of language models are more widely felt. But details are going to matter a lot, and I’m left scratching my head a bit over this:
When I read the specific pitch here, I think I don’t think that I have a clear enough picture of what kind of topics this is going to cover, and what audiences it will serve
Is it best thought of like “Wikipedia, but for news”? Something more EA-focused than that?
You talk about the importance of having things that are just news, not advocacy
But it also sounds like most of what you’re imagining is links to other sources of information
Most news sources at the moment come with some degree of opinionated views slanting how they’re presented; presumably you’re not going to exclude anything being linked just because of that?
If this impartiality is really important, would it maybe be better to more just collect the bare facts, rather than link to external articles?
This could be more efficient in information-per-word, as well as reducing spin
Hi, the general model for the platform would be something akin to a web-based news site (e.g. WIRED, Vox, etc.) and a subreddit combined. There’s the human run in depth coverage part, where the work should be done to increase impartiality, but there’s also the linklist part which allows community members to “float” content they find interesting without getting bogged down in writing it up, so to speak. The links shared will be opinionated, definitely, but that should be mitigated by the human coverage, and the limitations of human coverage (speed of updates, long reading time) can hopefully be compensated by the linklist/subreddit portion of the site.
My initial thoughts around this are that yeah, good information hard to find and prioritize, but I would really like better and more accurate information to be more readily available. I actually think AI models like chatgpt achieve this to some extent, as a sort of not-quite-expert on a number of topics, and I would be quite excited to have these models become even better accumulators of knowledge and communicators. Already it seems like there’s been a sort of benefit to productivity (one thing I saw recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16977). So I guess I somewhat disagree with AI being net negative as an informational source, but do agree that it’s probably enabling the production of a bunch of spurious content and have heard arguments that this is going to be disastrous.
But I guess the post is focused moreso on news itself? I appreciate the idea of a sort of weekly digest in that it would somewhat detract from the constant news hype cycle, I guess I’m in more favor of longer time horizons for examining what is going on in the world. The debate on covid origin comes to mind, especially considering Rootclaim, as an attempt to create more accurate information accumulation. I guess forecasting is another form of this, whereby taking bets on things before they occur and being measured by your accuracy is an interesting way to consume news which also has a sort of ‘truth’ mechanism to it—and notably has legible operationalization of truth! (Edit: guess I should also couch this more so in what already exists on EAF, and lesswrong and rationality pursuits in general seem pretty adjacent here)
To some extent my lame answer is just AI enabling better analysis in the future as probably the most tractable way to address information. (Idk, I’m no expert on information and this seems like a huge problem in a complex world. Maybe there are more legible interventions on improving informational accuracy, I don’t know them and don’t really have much time, but would encourage further exploration and you seem to be checking out a number of examples in another comment!)
I think overall this post plays into a few common negative stereotypes of EA: Enthusiastic well-meaning people (sometimes with a grandiose LoTR reference username) proposing grand plans to solve an enormously complex problem without really acknowledging or understanding the nuance.
Suggesting that we simply develop an algorithm to identify “high quality content” and that a combination of crowds and experts will reliably be able to identify factual vs non-factual information seems to completely miss the point of the problem, which is that both of these things are extremely difficult and that’s why we have a disinformation crisis.
Responding to this because I think it discourages a new user from trying to engage and test their ideas against a larger audience, maybe some of whom have relevant expertise, and maybe some of those will engage—seems like a decent way to try and learn. Of course, good intentions to solve a ‘disinformation crisis’ like this aren’t sufficient, ideally we would be able to perform serious analysis on the problem (scale, neglectedness, tractability and all that fun stuff I guess) and in this case, seems like tractability may be most relevant. I think your second paragraph is useful in mentioning that this is extremely difficult to implement but also just gestures at the problem’s existence as evidence.
I share this impression though, that disinformation is difficult and also had a kinda knee-jerk about “high quality content”. But idk, I feel like engaging with the piece with more of a yes-and attitude to encourage entrepreneurial young minds and/or more relevant facts of the domain could be a better contribution.
But I’m doing the same thing and just being meta here, which is easy, so I’ll try too in another comment
It is true that this is not likely to solve the disinformation crisis. It is also true that the successful implementation of such a platform would be quite difficult. However, there are reasons why I outlined the platform as I did:
Small online newsrooms like 404 media have recently come into existence with subscriber based models that allow them to produce high quality content while catering to specialised audiences. If the sufficient resources are there to attract high quality reporters (whom I note in the post perform a function that cannot be easily replaced by algorithms), then the platform has a good chance of producing technical, scientific, or cause based news that is worthy of reading on its own.
Subreddits have been widely noted as efficient ways of finding answers to complex domain-specific questions, largely because they concentrate a domain-specific regular technical userbase and feature ruthless downvoting for posts that spread misinformation. Similarly, facebook’s system of emoji reacts has been found to correlate certain reactions strongly with inflammatory news spreading. Of course, both of these platforms have monetisation incentives that mean that they cannot act properly on these signals. A subscription based model would hopefully reduce these perverse incentives and allow for better algorithms than exist today.
“High Quality” as an indicator here is not about the quality of the reporting, evidence etc. in a given link but “relative quality” in a manner similar to content-agnostic ranking algorithms like PageRank. Since the model approximates news tickers with new links coming in over time rather than having websites linking to each other spatially, a version of reddit’s content ranking algorithms (which are open sourced) can be used.
Finally, I understand being dismissive of certain expert groups and some forms of crowd based information sourcing. However, if you reject both of them at once then we’re really left with quite limited options for information gathering.
Again, this is not a solution in the sense of a silver bullet. But it is also not as fanciful as perhaps it appears at first glance. A lot of the technology is here, and with the proper investment and application it can be used to provide a positive impact.