First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on April 28, 2024. View the original post.
Viewpoint
Utility trumps truth in the world of information: useful information survives and gets repeated, even if it's not accurate. Truthful information goes extinct if it's not useful.
Background
About 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a corporate training program with a presentation from our company's chief scientist. One of the few things that I still remember from that training program was his assertion that within 10 or 15 years, "Everything that can be digitized will be digitized." I suppose he reached this conclusion because the rapidly falling cost of digital storage seemed to suggest that storage would eventually be nearly free and inexhaustible.
Here we are twenty years later, and a lot of information has been digitized, but there is also a lot that has not yet been saved. It's conceivable that much of the information that exists at a given moment may never be saved, let alone repeated. The question that occurs to me is, "why does some information survive and reproduce while other information evaporates?"
pixabay license from Vika_Glitter |
Introduction
We would like to think that truthful information is more likely to survive and false information is more likely to go extinct - that human knowledge is getting perpetually closer to the target of "truth". But, I'm starting to question this.
A little under a year ago, I posted about Donald Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Shortly after that, I read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene, of course, is a famous book because it introduced the idea of the meme as an evolutionary information concept that is analogous to the biological gene.
If we set these two readings against today's information landscape, maybe it provides some insight into the pervasive reach of "fake news", "misinformation", "disinformation", "malinformation", "Community Notes", and "fact checkers" that seem to dominate much of what we see, hear, and read from modern media sources.
Let's recall some relevant ideas from the two books and see how they apply to the survival and reproduction of information.
