Post AiLiZLE7Iv0CD5BbKy by Adoxograph@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by Adoxograph@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AiLfw0sioTCDuPIX9E by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T11:33:30Z
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These AI SEO spam operations have used lists of common searches to ensure that their pages come up first in searches in the “long fat tail” the kind of search where it used to be about 50/50 if you’d find a page addressing your needs. But, it used to be *if* you found something like “The top 15 smallest ants in the world” it wouldn’t be nonsense. It’d either exist and be the work of another person who cared OR you found nothing. Not so now! I can possibly over-stress how bad this is! 1/
(DIR) Post #AiLgMeABO59tGfAI52 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T11:38:43Z
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The funny results: like the ones telling you to cook with glue hide the fact that some portion of these attempts at impersonating information are not easy to detect. For every obviously bad result there are others going unnoticed since they were plausible enough to pass. And those flawed results are being regurgitated and reprocessed by further AIs spreading the rot and half truths deeper and deeper into the body of human knowledge. Like scratching an infected wound. 2/2
(DIR) Post #AiLhBotDGbvRIsd2eW by NatureMC@mastodon.online
2024-05-28T11:47:43Z
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@futurebird I don't think that you overstress. In social media (the amplifier of the whole thing), one can already recognise tendencies where knowledge loss as a cultural phenomenon is reminiscent of biodiversity loss. Experts *still* recognise it. But what if the baseline shift is no longer noticeable?#AI #LLM #generativeAI #Google #search #knowledge #loss #baselineShift
(DIR) Post #AiLhXlOQwmzGpXhB8C by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T11:51:55Z
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Once you could count on some things posted online probably being true because, well, why would anyone bother to put out misinformation about a topic so obscure or uncontroversial? now the simple fact that someone might want to know a bit of information makes it worth faking if it can get their eyeballs on an ad— or improve the search ranking for some company. The harmless act of *being curious* about the world causes misinformation to spring to life. We have made wanting to learn destructive.
(DIR) Post #AiLhgZTGdtHGSe9kTA by Lyle@cville.online
2024-05-28T11:53:31Z
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@futurebird Yes. I didn’t post it because it wasn’t very interesting, but my first test of the new Google AI was “what is Charlottesville known for” and it was all Thomas Jefferson and vineyards. Wrong, but sneakily so.
(DIR) Post #AiLhtNhZiAVFiwxO0O by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T11:55:51Z
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Some day soon a child will ask “what is the smallest ant in the world?” and discover that, unless they want to become and expert they simply can’t know. This is the death of polymaths— a hurdle for interdisciplinary learning— and a return to a kind of human gatekeeping for real information: you best ask someone qualified if you are expert enough to tell on your own. (this was already true for contentious topics, but now it will be everything)
(DIR) Post #AiLi3xyxg0C78q8XBI by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T11:57:35Z
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@Lyle I would have just believed that. :(
(DIR) Post #AiLi8RwQEPLVDT5Qoq by promovicz@chaos.social
2024-05-28T11:58:27Z
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@futurebird As a dropout I'm an autodidact, but I don't think that anyone can follow in my footsteps anymore because the academic Internet no longer exists (or can't be found, where it does). There are other ways to learn, but people will have to be fervent (maybe not more or less than me, but in a different way).
(DIR) Post #AiLiU8wxWNx0gcgLtA by seawall@mastodon.nz
2024-05-28T12:00:09Z
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@futurebird this is absolutely something I'm feeling, for myself and my very bright and curious 7yo
(DIR) Post #AiLiZLE7Iv0CD5BbKy by Adoxograph@mastodon.social
2024-05-28T12:00:51Z
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@futurebird I feel lucky to be of an age and education where I learned about how to do research, and remember before the www when the internet was a magical wonderland of people who were experts in things I wasn't, but I could ask them directly about random things I wanted to know. Many times they were even excited to answer!
(DIR) Post #AiLibR06o72ahHdFYG by CatDad@mas.to
2024-05-28T12:02:52Z
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@futurebird You've touched on one of the more pernicious aspects of LLMs, and that's lack of sourcing. With an expert, you can look at their education, their writings, their sources, and make a judgement about trustworthiness. LLMs don't cite sources for anything. You have no idea what they've been trained on, and sometimes they can't even replicate their own results. It's impossible to create any sort of trust or reputation outside of "trust me bro".
(DIR) Post #AiLiirOp3Y8Kb8jTw8 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T12:05:08Z
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@seawall It’s good to teach young people to pay attention to sources and to question information presented as factual: but it’s also a hurdle. “what was the first shark?” “do birds eat meat?”“what is the smartest insect?”Used to be the kind of questions anyone could innocently explore and stand a chance of finding their way to better sources and better questions… now I have to give all of these extra warnings “some pages that look like they are about science are just traps”
(DIR) Post #AiLjTD1Szf8CyxuPXk by pmakholm@norrebro.space
2024-05-28T12:13:06Z
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@futurebird That is probably not entirely right.I would guess that the idea of blinker fluid predates the internet by decades. Glue in pizza sauce might have been original, when it was posted to Reddit 11 years ago, but I can assure you that we had the same sort of prank answers on Usenet 25 years ago.The change is the how fast these pranks propagate and the chance at each transmission looses the context of the idea being a prank and for LLM's this chance approaches 100%.
(DIR) Post #AiLjgvNrN46CKYvISO by ianrogers@mstdn.social
2024-05-28T12:14:54Z
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@futurebird the Socratic paradox, as described by Plato. "All I know is that I know nothong".
(DIR) Post #AiLlDR5N8jDhsBLHDE by vxo@digipres.club
2024-05-28T12:33:03Z
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@futurebird I have to wonder, how are they getting the list of search terms to target? I've had a LOT of instances when using Google (which I've mostly given up on) where I was searching for something fairly specific and two dozen random sites come up with page titles of "my search query", 74% Off
(DIR) Post #AiLlpqRLJyXjVovwWW by drexer@ciberlandia.pt
2024-05-28T12:39:57Z
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@futurebird fucksomehow this paragraph really made it click for me a large part of my desperation nowadays.I see colleagues and friend using search engines and tools to solve problems which even at best will give them the immediate answer, and not give them a trip through the "close enough" or documentations for their problems, which was what made me evolve to understand not only my disciplines, but all other which touched on them.And at worst it will only give them a thousand of regurgitated spam pages which won't give any correct results.I have no idea how the concept of learning evolves from this.
(DIR) Post #AiLluSuIFBdXyQg6M4 by MyWoolyMastadon@toot.community
2024-05-28T12:40:49Z
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@futurebird @seawallHere's something I have noticed, front page search results all look like they were created specifically for your search question. Like they were written middle schoolers who took a test question and turned it into the first sentence/topic of their low lexile answer.You no longer land on a resource written last year or 10 years ago.And the ads! Oh, the ads! Every four sentence paragraph begins and ends with an ad an most likely a floating video box.
(DIR) Post #AiLm9c54PzC8llwT1E by rayhindle@mastodon.social
2024-05-28T12:43:11Z
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@futurebird True knowledge is not knowing all the answers, but knowing where to look for the answer, or who to ask.
(DIR) Post #AiLnN2lcbtd5FpoTXE by trachelipus@masto.ai
2024-05-28T12:57:11Z
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@futurebird It's like we have recreated the medieval bestiary - republishing real information such as the vocal mimicry of magpies, fanciful imaginings such as barnacle geese spawning from shellfish on driftwood, and dangerous information such as using mercury soaked undergarments to repel lice.
(DIR) Post #AiLo29bq4lNKLdq9g0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T13:04:40Z
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@MyWoolyMastadon @seawall I used to feel delight when I found an obscure page with a list of ant facts— now I don’t even want to read it because it will make me angry (and it’s probably SEO for exterminators of all things trying to sell people on sterilizing their yard killing all beneficial bees & ants: making a biodiversity void pests love)Information is developing similar biodiversity voids —they are filling up with the same generic voice the same empty text.
(DIR) Post #AiLoesb9FySGsmz0RU by justafrog@mstdn.social
2024-05-28T13:10:21Z
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@futurebird There is some hope that educators and experts in a field would curate information, but I doubt that'll happen meaningfully for the sort of obscure topics you're talking about.Those are more at the level of "people even talk about this at all?"And if one obscure expert creates a good resource, it's likely to get buried in a torrent of shit which has better SEO.
(DIR) Post #AiLoj0DEt9RNellWiW by Red_Shirt_no2@c.im
2024-05-28T13:10:32Z
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@futurebird Perhaps a new age will dawn, where we turn to WikiPedia _first_, and Google’s stock tanks.
(DIR) Post #AiLplibktkuZsc5kw4 by beckett@triangletoot.party
2024-05-28T13:24:03Z
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@futurebird That “plausible enough to pass” is usually known as “bullshit.” @gl33p
(DIR) Post #AiLpt2n8FrlqVMuFhQ by jeruyyap@hachyderm.io
2024-05-28T13:19:01Z
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@MyWoolyMastadon @futurebird @seawall I feel like at some point I need to do a longer post about pitfalls like this, but IMO searching for "questions" has always been bad for reasons besides SEO spam.To put it bluntly, people who know their stuff almost never present information in that manner, so whenever you "ask" a search engine a question you're almost always leaning on whatever semantic behaviors that search engines is doing to dissect that question.
(DIR) Post #AiLpt3db6njp85S9Tc by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-28T13:25:24Z
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@jeruyyap @MyWoolyMastadon @seawall If you write nice keyword searches most engines aggressively try to convert your words into a “natural language question” anyways. And don’t get me started on the way words like “AND” “NOT” “OR” are ignored. But really there should be nothing wrong with searching for a question: that is the kind of parsing that’s reasonable to expect to work, but right now it probably makes results worse.
(DIR) Post #AiLqkR14uxfcz8t7yq by RosyMaths@mathstodon.xyz
2024-05-28T13:34:52Z
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@futurebird Simultaneously on point and super distressing!
(DIR) Post #AiLsw2sGheVfUdQoZU by jeruyyap@hachyderm.io
2024-05-28T13:59:34Z
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@futurebird @MyWoolyMastadon @seawall To be clear, I don't mean to discount the impact of LLM generated SEO spam, as that has definitely made things much worse.I'm more trying to point out that human written BS also has that same "shape" that also makes searching for questions hazardous.That said, admittedly I genuinely disagree that search engines should be able to parse questions due to all the problems that behavior leads to, but that's it's own whole can of worms.
(DIR) Post #AiLthWF3KiPkBXj4Ay by jackyan@mastodon.social
2024-05-28T14:08:02Z
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@futurebird Plus, those lists are bogus sometimes. My name has been on one for the last five months, linked to Google and SEO. This is BS, but it hasnʼt stopped hundreds of people writing misinformation about me, just so they think they are pleasing Google. Then there are new idiots who join in (at least one a day) and their LLMs then reference the earlier junk. Real GIGO. Medium and Quora have deleted the posts there, but Linkedin says misinformation is OK.
(DIR) Post #AiLuXNvPV3apRvGn3I by thelovebing@mastodon.nu
2024-05-28T14:17:01Z
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@futurebird I think this is a good thing. We were fooled into believing quality information was, could be, for free. It never was. It’s always hinged on people doing the work. Often without pay, but that doesn’t mean it’s gratis. Just means someone else paid.
(DIR) Post #AiLuq6HrIknkFSh65g by vruz@mastodon.social
2024-05-28T14:20:25Z
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@futurebird Yes and no. Wanting to learn is not the same thing as wanting to satiate a need.There is a vast difference between radical geekery and curiosity that's easily satisfied with non-answers.I think you are conflating two very different things.
(DIR) Post #AiLvir8LLLRJB5Lw6S by faassen@fosstodon.org
2024-05-28T14:30:24Z
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@futurebirdI read this fan theory a while back where the reason Star Trek only makes cultural references to the twentieth century and before is because of this AI cut off point. After that culture stopped being productive and only regurgitated.
(DIR) Post #AiLwJavgYKrVdUwzdg by SoniEx2@chaos.social
2024-05-28T14:35:28Z
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@futurebird can we say universal web search is colonialism?
(DIR) Post #AiLwNkAo7sfBSp0COG by tuban_muzuru@ohai.social
2024-05-28T14:37:14Z
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@futurebird I taught my kids - nobody can know everything. But there is one person in your life who can get pretty close to finding out - the school librarian. They'll help you find out.
(DIR) Post #AiM1UYfnmUO9awZIh6 by drahardja@sfba.social
2024-05-28T15:35:11Z
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@futurebird Like someone said, you don’t have to burn down the Library of Alexandria to make it useless; you just have to stuff it full of plausible-sounding scrolls that actually contain nonsense.
(DIR) Post #AiM2giNhc1xh8JSlqS by NatureMC@mastodon.online
2024-05-28T15:48:46Z
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@futurebird A positive view from someone who learnt so much on the internet: There will always be people who fight back (perhaps many polymaths, at least hackers). People fight against image-AI, they bring LLMs to hallucinating even more. After global protests against it's AI, Google gave a code to search without AI (I'm not sure, if it kills everything), the udm=14 https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160741/turning-back-the-clock-on-google-searchAlternative search machines are developped.Here you can test the code-view: https://udm14.org/
(DIR) Post #AiM7RWJQhZ0n842Ro8 by TofuTheSquirrel@piaille.fr
2024-05-28T16:42:07Z
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@futurebird recently I tried to know if a given plant required direct sunlight or not. I found every answer possible 🤷
(DIR) Post #AiM8YEOLpQALWx6Wum by demiurg@fosstodon.org
2024-05-28T16:54:34Z
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@futurebird I agree that it is very bad to have generated SEO spam. I think it just boosts a problem which already was present, though. Misinformation was there before and Wikipedia is no scientific source. Imo the problem is that we fail to teach our society what valid sources are and how science works. The internet never represented 'truth'. Also we have no real definition of 'truth' itself.
(DIR) Post #AiME30tkXxAaQeHw9o by bornach@fosstodon.org
2024-05-28T17:56:02Z
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@futurebird And it's even worse for asking about consumer products. Try finding the best keyboard to buy in 2024 on Google...https://youtu.be/yL1d3n-BNuE
(DIR) Post #AiMNzVRg1v9TYK7jaC by funambolo@mastodon.world
2024-05-28T19:47:27Z
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@futurebird I'm genuinely worried about the generic LLM's that use Internet as their dataset while at the same time feeding content into that dataset. It will, over time, result in real facts getting buried between persistent and random "hallucinations" (at worst) and low quality content (at best). Personally I don't think there is sinister motive here: human greed and a sort of AI mass psychosis (all are doing AI, I must do AI) is enough to explain most of it.
(DIR) Post #AiMTnXIbuZF1YHYgWO by IAmDannyBoling@mstdn.social
2024-05-28T20:52:08Z
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@futurebird Wow. If this doesn't make people sit up and pay attention then I don't know what will. VERY good analysis here. (and in the rest of the thread!)
(DIR) Post #AiMcSnmSL1KmArhrd2 by ccunning@mastodon.world
2024-05-28T22:29:41Z
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@futurebird @briankrebs It feels like the second burning of the library of Alexandria…
(DIR) Post #AiMgNPKCEiQEh8Agvw by negative12dollarbill@techhub.social
2024-05-28T23:13:33Z
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@futurebird I want there to be a "Report" button like there is on social media for entire websites.I searched for some information on Kurt Cobain's guitars the other day and found an entire site which looked useful but was randomly generated garbage. After I'd confirmed I wasn't having a stroke I looked for a way to tell Google about the site but it doesn't seem to exist.
(DIR) Post #AiN3FhS5FnZjXo9dWi by trisweb@m.trisweb.com
2024-05-29T03:29:54Z
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@futurebird we need a knowledge bank, kind of like a seed bank but for knowledge untainted by AI.
(DIR) Post #AiNALqZOxv4jEwSJ60 by wrosecrans@mstdn.social
2024-05-29T04:49:17Z
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@futurebird So far everybody I've seen claiming "AI consistently gives me accurate information" has actually been saying "I asked AI something I don't know about, and I found the responses plausible but of course I didn't do a lot of boring research to verify any of it because that would have negated the convenience of asking AI."So at this point "The Terminator" seems like an optimistic view of humanity's fate with AI.
(DIR) Post #AiNIIA7p7JqGMeJHu4 by ericalaeta@ruhr.social
2024-05-29T06:18:16Z
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@futurebird Hm… your point makes me reconsider selling my 13 volume encyclopedia. It‘s 22 years old but beautiful and (I guess mostly) correct.
(DIR) Post #AiNPxtnSunZ3Z3dWF6 by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
2024-05-29T07:44:23Z
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@futurebird I think that the glue answer _highlights_ that fact, not hides it.If it produces obviously and horrifically wrong answer for such a simple question, then of course it will produce equally wrong answers for other questions, the only difference being that we know enough about food to see that the glue answer is wrong; but if one is searching information about a topic they're not expert in, they won't be able to detect whether the answer is another glue thing.(The glue answer was also plausible enough! The only thing that made most people realize it's wrong is their preexisting knowledge of this specific domain area.)
(DIR) Post #AiNZ82uUmmGaJQq19k by mina@berlin.social
2024-05-29T09:27:00Z
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@futurebird "The world's 15 smallest ants" would have definitely triggered me into opening the article.That's for sure.
(DIR) Post #AiNZzd9alQDU4FRytc by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-29T09:36:47Z
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@mina I'm cooking up something on the smallest ants in the world myself, though it's a much more dificult question than one might think! Not least because for many species of ants we don't have representative of every cast, therefore size estimates for nanitcs are just that, estimates.
(DIR) Post #AiNaIXNGTZXFe2rRvE by mina@berlin.social
2024-05-29T09:40:01Z
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@futurebird I am still definitely looking forward to reading your post on the topic.In any case: We should definitely cherish the small things (and animals) more.True, big ones are impressive, but tiny wonders too.
(DIR) Post #AiNbFCDQmpi96lES2K by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-05-29T09:50:35Z
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@WuMargaret @mina Not at all! The degree of variation also varies wildly!
(DIR) Post #AiNoEcTexXn1fisWBc by tuban_muzuru@ohai.social
2024-05-29T12:15:58Z
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@futurebird @mina ... wouldn't we be better off sorting these guys out by DNA? Seems to me Linnaeus just won't do what's needed.
(DIR) Post #AiPTMrw9eh4nDMDdBY by Urban_Hermit@mstdn.social
2024-05-30T07:31:53Z
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@futurebird the first time I found a website that mentioned the Corpus Cristi International Kite Museum I knew it was fake and created by an AI because it told me to expect exhibits on Mammoths and the Era of Trains, because AI is awful at understanding the importance of adjectives like international & kite. I even went to the address on Google Maps and looked for it.But now, several other results refer to it. One even claims it is inside the hotel at that address. Is this inference or real? 🤷
(DIR) Post #Aib2fliLL39WAvKG6S by Steve98052@dice.camp
2024-06-04T21:29:22Z
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@futurebird I remember when Altavista was new and wonderful. I remember when search engine optimization spammers figured out how to make Altavista searches painfully unreliable. I remember when Google figured out how to do search in a way that dodged the Altavista search engine optimization spammers. I remember when search engine optimization spammers figured out how to make Google searches painfully unreliable. I don't remember what happened next.
(DIR) Post #Ak2Mn1W6jwmgx6cBhQ by falcennial@mastodon.social
2024-07-17T23:44:05Z
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@futurebird problem well described, but I challenge the causal assertion. curiousity doesnt cause deception any more than the growth of a tree causes logging.the causal evil behind acts of deception is separate to the situations they exploit. I think evil is caused by accumulated experience and biochemistry, not an individual situation or opportunity to do it.deception has been around forever. we dont eliminate it, so it proliferates. our acceptance of it enables it, not our curiosity.