Does our society incentivize disinformation? | Daniel Schmachtenberger

So if I’m in a competitive game and I have some information about reality, the reality of the playing field that I’m in, then that information can be a source of strategic competitive advantage against whoever I’m competing against. And so I have an incentive to withhold that information from other players and maybe even disinform the other players.

So we see this in actual games. This is bluffing in poker. This is fake left and go right in soccer, football. But we also would see this in keeping the knowledge to ourselves of where the water is or where the goal is from another tribe or another kingdom or whatever, and maybe even trying to throw them off the scent trail with an intentional leaked fake treasure map that has them going the wrong direction so they don’t accidentally discover what we discovered. Things like that.

So within a rival risk context where information is strategic competitive advantage, there is an incentive to disinform. And as we get increasing information technology, which is media technology and computational technology and statistics and all these things we have, we really have exponential information processing. But applied to disinformation, the incentive to disinform, we have exponential disinformation capacity.

This means the ability to customize inflammatory, fake news, propaganda, narrative warfare to specific demographics, and all the way down to specific types of people that are the types that are most likely for that person to believe, be upset by, affect their actions. So we see with social media platforms like Facebook the capacity to be able to target the things that are going to be the stickiest for an individual.

And the stickiest often is by appealing to limbic hijacks of what is scariest to them or hits addiction buttons the most or creates a sense of ingroup-outgroup dynamic or things like that. So when you think about having a society that has an incentive to both withhold information and to disinform, and you think about a huge number of different agents who all have increasing disinformation capacities, you also think about the radical asymmetry between an individual just trying to make sense of the world and a huge platform like Facebook or Google or a company that is doing split test, optimized marketing.

You have an asymmetric information warfare of the largest powers in the world with agendas that are not the same as the agenda of the individual for themselves being put forth on radically powerful information technology platforms.

So you look at the world today and whether it’s climate change or whether it’s what the extent of the damage at Fukushima is or what the actual tactical capabilities of North Korea are or how long we actually have with coral die off, or most any of the things that are the most critical issues in the world.

What goal other countries or what effect other countries had in influencing U.S. elections. No one really knows the most important things clearly to be able to inform good choice-making, even about how we survive as a species.

So this is critical when we’re trying to understand the current information ecology.