“Information has no essential link to truth”: Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus

More information does not lead to more truth. It wasn’t true in the past, and it’s certainly not true now.

Guttenberg’s printing press contributed to the Scientific Revolution, yes, but also to the explosion of witch hunts. Copernicus’s “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543) sold far fewer copies than The Hammer of Witches (1486), an international bestseller. The Industrial Revolution led both to wealth-backed investments of research, and also imperialism and totalitarianism.

That’s a main argument of Nexus, the latest book from popular historian Yuval Noah Harari, which uses the long arc of history to explore the age of artificial intelligence.

“Information has no essential link to truth,” Harari wrote. “Its defining feature is connection rather than representation “

That connection is a balance between truth and order. Information was used from the repressive Qin empire and the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Empire to relatively more tolerant reign of the highly-distributed Roman Empire and the United States. To get a (relatively!) more benign version, self-correcting systems are necessary. AI, though, could be used as new attempt at an infallible god, even as past epochs of human history have involved groups of people attempting to mediate between god.

Below my notes for future reference

My notes:

• If we sapiens are so wise why are we so self destructive?
• naive view of information: more information leads to truth which leads to wisdom and power
• Reagan: information is the oxygen of the modern age
• Obama: the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes
• History is not the study of the past it is the study of change
• Louis Brandeis in Whitney California 1927: to combat false speech, use more speech. This is same as our naive view of combating mis and disinformation
• “Information has no essential link to truth…rather what information does is to create new realities by together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation “
• Bible and astrology are information (a social nexus) but not accurate, music can’t be called false
• In the context of history it can be helpful to ask how well information represents history but more productively the question is how well it connects people
• “Rejecting the naive view of information as representation does not force us to reject the notion of truth, nor does it force us to embrace the populist view of information as a weapon.” Some information connects people by accurately representing a portion of reality but “creating more powerful information technology” will not “result in a more truthful understanding of the world. “
• The most powerful oldest information technologies we created include the story
• About 70k years ago homo sapiens made “human to story chains” that allows more complex trade, culture and coordination possible
• Today the Bible, communist national identity and currency are stories that connect Catholics, Chinese and 8b global trade members
• Subjective, objective and inter-subjective (storytelling like corporations or gods)
• “If you want to make an atom bomb, you must find a way to make millions of people cooperate.” Robert Oppenheimer needed physics but also those to mine uranium and farmers to make food for the 130k people who worked in Manhattan Project. Social order is more important than full truth
• Physics without truth and your bomb won’t explode; ideology without truth and it may still be explosive (33)
• “An uncompromising adherence to the truth is essential for scientific progress, and it is also an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy.”
• Plato in Republic: “the noble lie”

• Every human information network is trying to find truth and maintain order, and the latter matters more
• Bureaucracy is literally (by word origin) rule by the writing desk: must create drawers and then this “human to document” view of the world trades some truth for order
• Carl Linnaeus had to create species categories but there is overlap
• Saint Augustine: to err is human; to Persist in error is diabolical”
• Jews disseminated bibles to both democratize wisdom (hold leaders accountable) and limit changes, because there were many distributed copies — all followed after they canonized a version by CE, dispelling of many disparate parts including some in Dead Sea scrolls, but rabbi interpretations mattered more so then Mishnah was set in 3rd ce — and then Talmud
• The New Testament similarly developed as a curation answer
• The church formed like the Rabbinical class: if rabbis evolved to interpret the Jewish holy books, then Christianity wanted to just be direct with god but Catholic Church evolved to interpret its books, then Protestant reformation (each wave tried to remove what it viewed as an unnecessary intermediary and then created its own)
• Printing surge: From years CE 1454-1500: 12m+ volumes printed In Europe; previous 1,000 years, it was 11m
• Print didn’t cause scientific revolution anymore than it caused witch hunting — but it accelerated both. More information isn’t more truth
• But witch hunting had bureaucracy and stories and books (The Hammer), this made it an inter subjective reality
• Copernicus’s “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543) sold badly but The Hammer of Witches (1486) was a bestseller
• “The history of print and witch hunting indicates that an unregulated information market doesn’t necessarily lead people to identify and correct their errors, because it may well prioritize outrage over truth.”
• “Is it possible to establish better creation institutions that use their power to further the pursuit of truth rather than to accumulate more power for themselves?”
• The Royal Society of London (1660) and French Academy of Sciences (1666) and early journals and the encyclopedia were these curation institutions for scientific revolution (not the universities)
• “Scientific institutions did accrue influence thanks to a very original claim to trust,” and a self correcting mechanism, and self-skepticism, that the church did not have — gained influence slowly
• “The scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance.”
• Religions have come to accept Individuals might make personal mistakes but not in religious interpretation. As Islamic Ijma teaches via one hadith Mohamed: “Allah will ensure my community will never agree on error”
• Yes science has attacked good ideas but has self corrected faster: Look at the experience of junior chemist Schetman finding quasi crystals but being attacked — by Linus Pauling most notably — and Georg Cantor being attacked for his idea of infinite numbers. It’s correct that scientists have the same bias as everyone but they have a self-correcting mechanism — and give Nobel prizes for turning convention
• But Lysenko persisted for a time with Stalin Russian support — while Vavilov was killed
• “The history of information networks has always involved maintaining a balance between truth and order. Just a sacrificing truth for the sake of order comes with the cost, so does sacrificing order for truth.” 116
• Scientific journals don’t police streets or oversee militaries
• “One of the biggest questions about AI is whether it will favor or undermine democratic, self correcting mechanisms”
• A dictator is a centralized information network: democracy is distributed
• “Democracy is not the same thing as major majority dictatorship.” Self correction, limits on power at the center (99% of voters can’t vote to kill the other 1% because that ruins both self correction and power limit) — it’s not just elections because after all Putin has elections (human rights, like to life; and civil rights, like to vote)
• Erdogan: “Democracy is like a tram” get off at your destination
• Strongmen supporters are sometimes genuinely confused by the idea of a check on majority rule, which they view as unlimited
• “Allowing the government to supervise the search for truth is like a pointing the fox to guard the chicken coop”
• Independent self correcting systems that overlap and seek truth differently (courts, press, and academia for example)
• Jam-Werner Muller: populism is a leader who claims to be the sole voice of a unified will of the people
• Could the Roman Empire have sustained a functioning democracy? Don’t conflate democracy with elections alone, they’d need to have a society wide conversation which requires both technology to allow dialogue and education for most to interpret it
• Camillus in 390BCE was named dictator for the short predetermined time to confront emergency that dictators originally were for
• Even as Rome evolved into empire (more from this book), there maintained local elections where it was possible to maintain them
• Pompei has preserved election graffiti : “If honest living is thought to be any recommendation, then Lucretius Fronto is worthy of being elected,” and “Elect Gaius Julius Polybius to the office of aedike. He provides good bread.” … “All the mule drivers request that you elect Gaius Julius Polybius”…. “All the drunkards ask you to elect Marcus Cerrinius Vatia”
• Mass media makes mass democracy possible
• In 1830, 78k newspaper subscribers, many of which were businesses and associations so multiple readers , so maybe couple hundred thousand readers — they were expensive subscriptions and no new stands. I. 1824 elections, 1.3M Americans were eligible to vote though only 300k did
• In 1863, many passed in Lincoln’s speech
• Qin Empire may have been farthest reaching attempt at complete authoritarian control but only lasted 15 years
• Technology that allowed mass democracy also allowed true totalitarianism (complete authoritarianism)
• Why isn’t the Catholic Church the same as totalitarian regime? (Controlling daily habits); it wasn’t overlapping and self reinforcing but often clashed with the state (kings) and resisted change (no revolutionaries)
• Three Mile island News came from the independent press, NGOs and government, and lessons learned even lessened the damage from Chernobyl — but that news was suppressed until Swedish scientists found it

Name	Birth–Death	Best-Known Role	One-Line Summary
Vladimir Lenin	1870–1924	Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution	The revolutionary architect who founded the USSR.
Leon Trotsky	1879–1940	Red Army founder, theorist	The brilliant but exiled idealist of the revolution.
Josef Stalin	1878–1953	Soviet dictator after Lenin	The ruthless consolidator who built Soviet power.

• Pavel Rychagov was a high-ranking Soviet Air Force commander who was executed in 1941 during a purge of the Red Army.
• “Information systems can reach far with just a little truth and a lot of of order.” 185 Stalinism was powerful!
• “Technology only creates new opportunities; it is up to us to decide which ones to pursue.”
• In Facebook Rohingya situation: its algorithm was more like a news editor elevating than like a printing press (platform)
• Intelligence is the ability to reach a goal; consciousness is ability to experience feelings
• Jaswant Singh Chail and Sarai
• Comparing AI to human level intelligence is like comparing airplanes to bird level flight
• Marko Kothenburger: “The definition of Nexus, based on a physical presence should be adjusted to include the notion of a digital presence in a country”
• Section 230: should it not let platform companies grow so big?
• Romanian computer scientist named Gheorghe Iosifescu who for 13 years had a Romanian agent sit with him to review his computer work until regime fell in 1989 but he never learned the silent agent’s name
• Skynet, “ we kill people based on metadata” said former CIA and NSA director
• Previously there were technical limits to the amount of surveillance possible but that is closing
• Facial recognition technology caught J6 protestors, found long lost Chinese children and weeded out Danish soccer hooligans — but also used to enforce the Iranian hijab mandatory in June 2023 auto sending warning SMS text messages to women found without hijab in their private cars
• Shoshana Zuboff: surveillance capitalism
• Stalkerware tech, half domestic violence partners use
• Social credit system
• Solzhenitsyn gulag ; Stalin clapping story
• Fisher chaos machine book: YouTube algorithmic focus on engagement over truth was a choice, aiddd Brazilian far right and the “dictatorship of the like” — many mobilized by auto play videos
• Social media is the paradigmatic example we already lived through of radicalization by ignorant and ubiquitous tech platforms — it is a precursor to the alignment proble
• In 2016, a Facebook internal report discovered 64% of all extremist group joins are from recommendation “
• Pwint Htun on July 5, 2014 write that Facebook was being used in Burma like radio in Tawanda, two years before massacre — and banning word “Kalar”
• Clausewitz On War: war is the continuation of policy by other means” so only once a political goal is clear can a military strategy be developed (Napoleon and Iraq war didn’t do this)
• Nick Bostrom’s paper clip concept from 2014 is reminiscent of Goethe’s sorcerer poem — the engagement algorithm was an example of this warning for Facebook and YouTube
• Dario Amodei 2016 boat race AI maximizes points and finds loop in game — it’s the alignment problem
• How to ensure alignment? Deontologists like Kant said maximize intrinsic goodness; or utilitarianism, limiting suffering (Jeremy Bentham )
• Utilitarianism easy for clear imbalance (Holocaust) or victimless crimes (homosexuality which Kant dehumanized as a universal value) but more complicated when we have no “calculus of suffering“
• Communist Stalin believers argued present pain would be worth future happiness under real socialism
• John Maynard Keynes: even rational people are in support of some myth maker
• Social credit score like a google algorithm that we maximize and creates data for intersubjective beliefs with real outcomes
• Megan o Gieblyn: god Hunan, machine: AI risk being used as infallible god like past but the. Holy books and rabbinical class and church evolves to interpret this
• Teach AI it is not infallible, self correcting mechanism
• “Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology.”
• For example, Industrial Revolution gave rise to imperialism as big powers spent a century finding resources before finding it was too painful
• Blake’s satanic mills created prosperity but we still are ecologically developing
• Technology is rarely deterministic “democracy can choose to use the new powers of surveillance in a limited way, in order to provide citizens with better healthcare and security without destroying their privacy and autonomy.”
• First principle is benevolence: our physicians, accountants and lawyers and therapists have legal, ethical and cultural reasons to seek our self interest (pay for digital services with money rather than information);
• Second principle is decentralization; third is mutuality (increase surveillance of individuals then do the same of government and corporations) ; fourth: change and rest
• “A single archive makes censorship easy”
• Healthcare shouldn’t predict illness (for insurance companies) but help us avoid them (via recommendations and nudges)
• Hubert Dreyfus in 1972: what computers can’t do “ wrongly predicted they couldn’t do chess, but dish washing has proved harder to automate
• Creativity is the ability to recognize patterns and know when to break them
• Some relationships we may choose to have: Will drivers be replaced before protests?
• Corporations are already legal persons in United States
• Traditionally, progressives have said let’s try to make it better and conservatives via Edmund Burke have said it’s all more complicated than you realize so your change can be worse (Bolsheviks replacing Tsarist Russia with what became Stalin’s Soviet)
• Conservatives are more about pace than policy
• In February 2013, Eric Loomis was found driving a car that had been used in a shooting. He was arrested, and pleaded guilty to eluding an officer. In determining his sentence, the judge looked at his criminal record as well as a score assigned by a tool called COMPAS.
• GDPR: right to explanation; right to be forgotten
• March 2016: alpha go match move 37
• Single cause fallacy: we seek simple narratives but algorithms don’t need to
• In addition to digital totalitarianism there could be digital anarchy
• 2022: Similar Web predicted 5% of Twitter accounts were bots and created nearly 30% of tweets
• Daniel Dennett: we outlawed counterfeit money, so we should outlaw bots, or these counterfeit humans (unless disclosed)
• Dictators dilemma: What if an AI went rogue against an authoritarian state ? Despots have reason to want control too — they have narrower information flows so easier for AI to hijack. They might trust a fallible AI over a defense minister
• Russell Einstein manifesto for nuclear war could be mirrored for AI — attracting democracies and authoritarians
• Sept 30, 2012: AlexNet wins ImageNet
• Data colonialism: data profiles of all leaders of small countries owned by big ones
• Silicon curtain between China and U.S. led worlds
• Mind body problem of old religion now happens with virtual worlds: Old Testament mind-body union or Luther’s doctrine of sola fide from 1520 (closer to “union with Christ by faith alone” than to “justification by faith alone.” His major metaphor is the union of the believer and his Bridegroom) can our virtual avatars be separate from our in person deeds?
• Global rules should be argued like the World Cup: we share similar rules but compete as patriots (push back against globalist /patriot divide)
• Hans Morgenthau and John Mearsheimer argue international fights inevitable “ state’s ultimate goal is to be the hegemon in the system”
• Frans de Waal calls this realipolitic “veneer therory” in which we hide our true viciousness but biologists argue that real jungles have plenty of cooperation
• “The most important role of information is to weave new networks rather than represent pre-existing realities”
• So why are we so self destructive if we are so wise? “Due to the privileging of order over truth, human information networks have often produced a lot lot of power, but little wisdom.”
• Tiberius in his Capri villa: we have an AI intermediary that might not give us the full picture