It's a bit of reverse check kiting: The bank changing when your check clears so that you actually don't have the money you think you do.

Now, there were fine print that stated only X dollars worth of your deposit would be "Available immediately", but even that was a lie.

Except, for people who were gently motivated, that information was already pretty well democratized by libraries. You could trivially go to the library, and get whatever books were published on a topic, even if the only copy was on the other side of the country. Tons of the famous names from previous decades got their start teaching themselves things from a book in a library. It was very common in the technical churn of the 20th century that a new project at work meant you went to the library and grabbed books on a brand new topic and self-taught. This for example is how some programmers in the 90s developed 3D engines.

There was even a short period of human history where it was common to pay a few thousand dollars for a family encyclopedia. I got my start reading an 80s encyclopedia, focusing on the more technical tomes, before I found Wikipedia. The drive to access and learn information lead to me learning about computers in a time and place where a formal education on the subject was unavailable to me. I owe my career to it.

After the existence of Ebay, a few hundred dollars could populate a shelf with the standard reference books and material for nearly any interest. All it took was a willingness to look for books, buy them, and sit down and read them.

Similarly, the internet did the same since the 90s. Specifically, it allowed for non-physical clubs to supplement the fact that not everyone lived in Silicon Valley and could access those rich clubs on niche topics. But special interest magazines were already providing some of that functionality.

The primary filtering LLMs do is provide new access and ability to people who are far too lazy and unmotivated to do the real work necessary to learn about something without being literally spoon fed.

This helps explain why the primary thing LLMs have done is increase the noise floor of information, and explains differing sentiments. People willing to put in minimal effort to learn things had zero issue learning new information in the previous regime, so aren't that impressed when an LLM regurgitates the wikipedia intro paragraph or summarizes a popular reference. They already read that. They note that the LLMs confidence is often unwarranted, and they get reasonable results because they have foundational understanding of the domain and already know which pitfalls and problems to be concerned about, and how to prompt the LLM to make the right choices.

For people who largely are unwilling to take minimum effort to learn something new, of course LLMs feel magical, because Wikipedia level introductions to topics are magic to people who aren't already seeking them out. Of course, the question is, what in the world was previously stopping you from learning new things?

Why were you not confident with literal how to videos and documentation, but became confident when a chatbot generated probable text?

The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.

There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.

Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.

The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.

And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.

The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.

Kennedy was already pushing bullshit during the UK Measles vaccine fraud/scare, back in 2005. He was doing this along with a few other celebrities.

This also involved, whether he pushed it or it was organic, the tabloid press of the UK.

Eventually this filtered back to the US, despite already being largely debunked and retracted, but that didn't matter to the early 2000s celebrities looking for whatever confirmation bias sources they could.

The histeria started in the UK, slowly crept over the atlantic to the US, and now has filtered back, all while it was based on absolute fraud and lies, the exact criticism all these morons insist applies to real scientists.

The modern anti-vaccine movement was nearly entirely started by a doctor fraudulently publishing fake science to make money. The supporters of course refuse to see that, because it would burst their bubble, so only their enemies can possibly be guilty of it.

Even the 12 or so parents involved in that fraudulent "study" cried foul, as he literally put words in their mouths and made up testimony from them to support his scheme. Actual autistic children continue to suffer from his bullshit, entirely made up illness.

There's no such thing as "Common Sense", and every single niche, culture, demographic, etc has their own set of things that "Everyone knows"

IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups.

That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse.

Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other.

Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.

It's like people obsessing over window managers. 99% of the time, the amount of windows you have showing is not the problem, you can't really focus on more than one at a time anyway.

Consider as a demonstrative example, race car drivers. They have had options to have extremely detailed Heads Up Displays with all sorts of absurd data available at a glance for decades. But they largely do not use tons of data like that, because it's just not compatible with the human brain. They already are looking at things more often and processing more info than a "normal" person while racing, but that heads up display would not benefit them.

Similarly, the Heads Up Display for modern fighter jets is very lightweight, focusing on allowing you to see around it and provide you the very basics of flight instrumentation and a standard orientation instrument.

People just have wild ideas about how to "optimize" their lives that are just not supported by reality.

You would be better off making flash cards about those things you want to "know" in that moment and drilling them.

I too used to be drawn to this idea. Back in 2016ish, I got an ODBII dongle for my car and app for my phone and was so excited about all the data I was going to have at a glance, just like some sort of pro! But the data was pointless and meaningless. Oh, timing advance is at 20 degrees in this throttle regime. Cool I guess.

Eventually I gave up and only have my car showing instantaneous fuel efficiency, which is the only valuable data point for my needs.

The world is made of HR departments and executive suites chock full of people who insist they are somehow special and immune to all the things we know about how fallible humans are at making decisions.

It's like how nearly everyone believes themselves to be an "Above average" driver, including the morons who get into an accident every single year because they text and drive constantly.

All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.

"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.

Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.

You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.

They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.

Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.

It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.

Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.

Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.

The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.

Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.

Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.

This is what actually drives the "We talked about X and then I got an ad for it" effect. You talked about X because something you were presented with prompted your brain to think about it, and the platform knows that people in your cohort who were presented with that thing often navigated to X later, so it should show it to you to claim an impression for it. It doesn't actually have to figure out any connection of the prompting source to X.

But some people are somewhat immune to this populism. I find short form content like TikTok and Twitter/Bluesky to be actively anti-engaging. The format and medium and "Virality" mechanic drive constraints on content that are actively signal negative. Somehow my brain rejects it, even though I'm ADHD and have addictive tendencies for things like Youtube in general, novelty, and used to get extremely addicted to Reddit. I'm pretty snobby about media, so maybe whatever drives me to have that preference makes me likely to bounce off that kind of populism system. Maybe there's a biological component to Hipsterism, like a certain kind of anti-authority issue.

I strongly believe that making a product, media, or content more palatable to "General audiences" or similar large cohorts forces you to sand off all the edges, cut out any opinions or takes, and become far less palatable to a different cohort, possibly one that describes itself as having "Taste".

So in some sense, the platforms self select for people who are vulnerable to them, which simplifies classification somewhat as well, even though that is the vast majority of people. But TikTok would never find what I like because what I like cannot be found on TikTok. Notably, this includes creators who I follow like a lost puppy on youtube, because the ways you have to change and modify your output to "work" on TikTok make it worse in many ways.

Meta has entire teams.

It's like believing that cigarettes are fine and shouldn't be specially regulated because 50 years ago everyone occasionally smoked a pipe and it wasn't that big a deal, completely ignoring how the two are incomparable, entirely because the industry made it more addictive to be more profitable

There are many parts of the US that have legislated away all sex education other than abstinence, despite it having the obvious effect on teen pregnancy (and therefore abortion rates where it is legal!)

There are tens of millions of fundamentalists "christians" in the US.

"I haven't personally seen it so it can't be real" is absolutely a wild take in a place as heterogenous as the US, with 350 million human beings, huge diversity in backgrounds.

Have you even stepped foot in a random Christian church? Or "Christian" church? They are utterly insane, and will have a hundred loyal adherents even in rural towns.

The "christian" cults that were common around northern maine included one that banned Halloween and reading harry potter.

There is, right now in the US, a stupid cult of "Catholics" that insist the church's official policy stances after about 1970 were blasphemy, and that they want to go back to pre Vatican-II policy, which includes such gems as Jewish people as a whole being officially labeled at fault for the crucifixion of Jesus

The US has, in it's history, cultivated up to SIX "Great Awakenings", which were events in US past where millions of dumbasses just started following whoever showed up to give speeches in the park, where multiple modern "Christian" religions spawned, including Mormonism and "Christian Scientists" which were literally a harem of morons who fell over themselves trying to please an insane woman who made up stories of former illness so she could claim she was "Healed". Her lies were mostly stolen from a quack practicing Animal Magnetism.

Go look up Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis folks. Their absurd Noah's Ark gets a million visitors a year.

Insane fundamentalist christians in the US are so big and powerful that they run an entire parallel economy for all their grifty grievance propaganda, where you can buy shoddily produced ripoffs of popular teen movies that have all the writing removed and replaced with "The government wants to murder us for believing in god", because it's essential they keep their kids indoctrinated in a belief that they are forever victims, so they can justify their absurd acts like voting in a literal pedophile just so they get supreme court justices who will overturn Roe V Wade, and as they show with their refusal to actually educate teens about sex and it's risks, they do not care about reducing abortion or unwanted pregnancies, and instead simply want "Sluts" to be made to suffer, which should be the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ would do, as Jesus made a big show of accepting the literal untouchable class of people like a prostitute and lepers.

About 35% of Americans, 100 million people, will state directly that they believe the earth is less than 10k years old. They explicitly believe that God created us as we exactly are now, that evolution is impossible, and therefore that all of science is in a gigantic conspiracy to mislead you, and therefore all of science must be an agent of Satan himself.

The other two options in this poll were "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but god was involved in this process" and "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but God is not involved".