Apr 22, 2025, 1:52 PMThis is obvious, but if people broadly rely on a black box to give them answers that help them understand the world, whoever controls the black box controls those answers and therefore the understanding that comes from them.
Openness is safety.
@ben This is also the planet who gave away all their privacy so it could be sold back to them.
It’s what plants crave.
Apr 22, 2025, 2:43 PMSorcerer's Apprentice
@ben does that include the black boxes that count our votes?
@GoodKing @ben Always has. https://xkcd.com/463/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
There are non-black-box ways to do voting machines, but I'm sure you already know that.
@ben Framed that way, it is like returning to a world where priests explain the will of the gods to us, like an Enlightenment in reverse.
@ben they basicly want to recreate platos cave.
Apr 22, 2025, 5:20 PM@ben Wait. You mean the Oracle at Delphi was not always correct?
@ben whoever controls the data that feeds the blackbox, control the output.
The blackbox is just math.
The blackbox without data is useless... the data itself is useful but too large for humans to process.
@Mrpotatoqc9 @ben depends what's in the black box, and whether it's a black box for everyone, or just for the user, and not for the owner.
@naught101 @ben
Here is an example of what can be found in the blackbox.
https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.LeakyReLU.html#torch.nn.LeakyReLU
You can take any model and train them on the anarchist-archives.com and get some pretty wild result.
Data > model
Right, my point was that you can have a very terrible model based on good data. So even if someone trustworthy controls the data, the output could still be garbage, depending on your use case. It's not enough to trust the data, you also need to trust the model.
@naught101 @ben
Fair enough
And that goes for search engines, social media, content etc etc…
Too important to trust commercial parties with this.
@ben in conjunction with the move to defund research on misinformation, what we’re seeing is a very deliberate move by the technocracy to establish a monopoly on truth. it is deeply unsettling.
White supremacy did this with medical books.
This is why some black people died during the pandemic because their skin color meant they didn't get accurate readings for oxygen.
We have been doing this for a very very long time...
@ben
Which is exactly why religion is disastrously dangerous.
> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
~"Dune", Frank Herbert, 1965
@ben and this could be read applying to a lot of things... Like the Bible.
May 2, 2025, 10:23 PM@ben so is education. You don't need to rely on the black box as much if your brain already has the answer