Welcome to the site. This exists because i wanted a place to collect my thoughts and stuff I’ve made or found.

Tag: writing

  • Truth Shapers

    Lately I’ve had a lot of feelings when I’ve tried to search things on the internet. Google’s hegemony has steadily been growing since 1998 when it was introduced but with the rise of AI it seems that the whole model of navigating the internet has been upended. 

    I’ve tried to use other search engines to get rid of the still very much error prone LLM’s feeding me the information I’m supposed to be looking for. DuckDuckGo has lately been my go to search engine, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m not finding what I am genuinely looking for anymore. Most found sites and sources seem iffy at best, and it seems there are even AI-generated websites out there flooding the already muddled waters.

    It got me thinking on how I engage with information and how I look for information as well. Most of my interactions with the internet are through the big tech companies, who in my opinion have become “Truth Shapers”. When there are a few companies (and/or billionaires who own most of the media) who decide what information you get, when and what information you don’t get, objective information is under threat. What are the blind spots in the data of those LLM’s? It has been trained on the internet, but a lot of stuff that is relevant in the real world has never been on the internet, so it’s also not in an LLM. If it’s not in the data set, “it doesn’t exist”. I think that’s the wrong way around! The internet / social media seems to want to “shape the truth” by being the main way (or filter) of how we interact with the world.

    Since i am a millennial, I’ve grown up “with” the internet and the rise of (smart)phones in everybody’s pockets. I come from an age where the internet was still very young and underdeveloped (we did not have apps for example in the beginning). I remember the internet being a wild place where you could find a lot of niche information you would not have found otherwise. A lot of information also just was not on the internet. Often times i’ve needed (old) books to get information to get through my schoolwork.


    With the rise of Google and its search engine, along with social media there came a need to “filter” the information to cater to you as a user, so you could more effectively find what you wanted. This has not been a deliberate “evil” (not at first at least, at that time Google still had the “don’t be evil” moniker so it seems they at least would know the impact of them deciding things) choice at first, since it genuinely made the service better. Social media also needed a way to filter the most relevant people and/or information for you (I also remember social media being just that, social media, and not a “news” source) so they also took part in this filtering. This came to be known as the “filter bubble”. If you’re interested in that, take a gander at: (VIDEO). I can’t believe this video is 15 years old already.

    This made Google one of the first big truth shapers (with Meta joining them promptly later in the early years of 20XX). They “decided” what you saw online more and more. Although the internet is a relatively new technology, the practice of truth shaping has not been new. 

    When Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press got invented the concept of the then “objective truth” also got fractured and radically altered power dynamics and changed who had a say on what “the truth” was. Objective reality was no longer a monopoly of the church. This introduction also had other effects, it greatly quickened the spread of knowledge, discoveries and literacy in Europe at the time. (source)

    Objective truth has always been a gray area. It’s messy to get to the bottom of things. To get as close as possible you need a multitude of different sources contradicting, correcting and refining each other. But that process seems to fade more and more with billionaire oligarchs and their algorithms catering strict filter bubbles and isolating groups of people online in thousands of subcultures. The bigger overarching “monoculture” has been fractured more than ever. I don’t believe this was the intention when all these technologies got introduced. I think it’s hard pressed (pun intended) to believe that the intention of the introduction of the printing press was the strengthening of the eventual protestant reformation for instance (see previous source). Just the same, I don’t believe it was the intention of a company like google to divide the internet in filter bubbles. I do believe that as time got on, other companies, such as google and other (private) actors with political ambitions saw the fertile ground for propaganda and social and cultural division to gain power and money that filter bubbles offer. I can’t prove it of course, but I believe the rise of right wing politics in Europe and the world is partly explainable by filter bubbles and targeted marketing (source). The internet became large and influential enough (along with other technologies and smartphones) for a company like Cambridge Analytica to inevitably come into existence. 

    Now we are in an age where the information streams are in the hands of a few companies and people (source) who don’t seem to necessarily care about objectivism. The “useful” filter bubble seems to be hijacked by business and politics. Tech companies and people who are after power are, or want to become the new truth shapers. Think of all the young people now getting their information from TikTok. Check out the drama surrounding the US takeover of TikTok and how they’ve changed the algorithm (source). At the risk of sounding old and grumpy again, I remember a time where i was not allowed to cite wikipedia as a source, because “everyone can add anything to that site, you should get your information from multiple books from the school library”. Oh how times have changed. 

    I used to hate when the teachers said these things. The same teacher for example also used to tell me that I should be able to calculate difficult things in my head because “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”… 

    But now there seems to be a grain of truth to their first statement. At least on using multiple sources to form your own opinion to at least try to get near to an objective truth. For this I have my father in law as inspiration. He subscribes to almost all the newspapers, so he can form his own opinion based on discrepancies or is at least able to read between the lines a bit better. This is of course still not enough. To get to an objective truth even better he needs to talk to people who subscribe to all the news websites maybe, or get their news from other sources. Otherwise he’s just created another analog filter bubble for himself, although it is a widespread one. Of course, there are also filter bubbles that are so far away from reality that maybe they should not be considered as objective truth anyway : drinking raw milk?

    The way out seems to be incredibly difficult as media, information and power consolidates in a slowly shrinking group of people. The first step in my opinion is to become more media savvy and to promote critical thinking and discourse between humans, especially when they seem to differ in opinions on the surface. I also think the internet needs to grow up to be a bit more scientific in how it works. In a world where you can post anything and everything as truth, how can we accurately bridge the gap between the digital “reality” and the “analog” real one? I don’t have a clear answer yet,  but I strongly believe that the pressures on excellent schooling and scientific advances by the powers that be are an indication that we need to look in that direction (source).

    Further reading:

    https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html

    https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0253

    https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/learn/courses/how-use-critical-thinking-enable-media-literacy

  • Irreversible choices

    Irreversible choices

    I’ve always been afraid of making irreversible choices. The main example I often use is the posting of a letter in a letterbox. The moment I need to let go of the letter I always dread things like “ Did I write the correct postal code?” or “ Is this the right letterbox, what if it doesn’t get there?”. 


    Recently, my wife and I have made another irreversible choice: becoming parents. This made me think even more about the process of making such big decisions, because it turns out that at least for me, keeping an objective overview of how that process went turned out to be quite difficult. This choice also turned out to be even more permanent than I thought. Biologically for women, pregnancy causes permanent physiological changes (heart size, brain structure, immune system) (source)

    For me, and I think for us, the (perceived) fear about being locked into a certain path or consequence is the main difficulty in these kinds of situations, and especially the bigger choices in life seem at first glance black or white (moving house, kids or no kids) but on closer inspection (or long periods of emotional stress and (over)thinking) even those choices are greyer than you would’ve thought before hand.
    For example for a true black and white choice: if you do choose to go for kids, you’ll most probably grieve at a certain point about a loss of flexibility and freedom. On the other hand if you choose to not have kids there will be a large period of life (for women a shorter and more intense period probably than men) where “it’s still a possibility” until it becomes irreversible. And even if you do make the choice to never have kids, you are likely to at least once mourn about that option being out of your life. This is already a bit “greyer” than true black and white.

    In my line of work I see a lot of young people in a very dynamic stage of their life. They face a lot of challenges and seemingly black and white choices in a lot of different life dimensions. “Should I break up with him?”, “Should I change my masters?”, “Should I shut out my parents?”. If the student is particularly unlucky these questions arise at the same time. Often during therapy we try to “grey out” these choices. We gather more info and untangle emotion from rationality and facts. Do you need to break up or do you need to have a difficult conversation about something else first? Why do you want to change the masters, are there additional or replaceable courses to fill in the gap you feel? Do you need to shut out your parents or are you practicing with boundaries? Will you be ok if the boundary really is “never again?” 


    What I find interesting in observing my own dilemma and the dilemmas of the students is that there seems to be three distinct “stages” around making a choice. 

    The “before” state

    The “during” state

    The “after” state

    The before state

    We all know how this state feels. You are gathering information while you are faced with a difficult choice. It can feel misty, murky and muddy to be in this stage. Especially since making a choice is a very subjective state to be in. Your own emotions on the subject play a very big role, but emotions can be fickle and change as well! 

    The during state

    This is an interesting state in my opinion. Just with the past, present and future, the present and the “now” is constantly slipping away from us in a rapid (irreversible!) pace. The moment of choice itself can feel like a very short period as well sometimes, but is probably more spread out about a certain period of time. This seems especially true for larger life choices where time, talking to others (removing a bit of subjectivity in the process) and multiple emotions (and nights of sleep) can bring more clarity as a choice approaches

    The after state

    This state can be a tricky one in my opinion. How often have I heard the phrase “ of course you chose that, it was obvious the entire time!” when I told other people about the fact that we were expecting a child. This is a false conclusion in my opinion, since the act of making that choice gave us extra information about that choice. The choice became more gray as well, since we became more scared of the future, but also felt a loss of pressure on our shoulders as we at least knew we were going in a certain path to the future.

    Also at work I see students making this “mistake”. After a sense of relief (or fear if it turned out to be the wrong choice) the students gaslight themselves by saying “I should’ve seen it earlier, I should have known”, whereas the act of choice itself gave the student the extra information to continue on in the process of choosing. The mind also makes you like your choice more after you make it (source)

    I personally think that the before and during state of decision making are secretly the same state, where the before state is just future you looking back on past you not having made the choice yet, since the choosing itself is also still a bit of information gathering. Humans like to think in black and white, whereas reality is a lot grayer and more fluid and interchangeable then we would like it to be. If we can accept that last fact and internalize it a bit more, it might make hard decisions a bit less daunting since you are allowed to take a bit of time on the choice. Even when the choice needs to be made quickly. Most choices are not as black and white as we think and definitely not as irreversible.

    Research also shows that irreversible decision-making actually leads to higher post-choice satisfaction than reversible choices. Once you’ve made one your mind tends to focus on the positives of that choice. (source)

    The main irreversible choices i’ve found so far are: Death, Biological aging of cells (not really a conscious one there, in a way you have no choice), Learning new skills (neural rewiring) (source), Having children, Severe physical trauma or Organ loss, Psychological trauma (early life especially).

    The other choices in life seem irreversible, but are often only practically irreversible, or to put it another way: Just too hard at the time to reverse. Examples of these are: divorce, emigration or quitting a job.

    To end, I’d like to elevate the irreversibility of learning new things or skills. It’s not completely irreversible of course, it can happen through mental sickness (dementia for example, but even then sometimes skills and knowledge can resurface in the right environments). But my interest is again in the past and future state of knowledge. There is a time you did not know something, and then “suddenly” you do. It is my strong suspicion that this is also too much of a black and white view (of mine). Learning and “getting” things is a gradual and gray process that I’ve seen happen too often in my old work of after school teaching. Especially bigger complex subjects take time, effort, emotion and rationality to fully grasp, just as making choices. Weirdly enough most people quickly dismiss this process after they’ve “gotten it”. As if it’s black and white again. I think humans should be more emphatic to the gray gradual process of learning, not knowing (yet) and (slower) decision making.

    Let me know if you’ve achieved this.

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