by FloorEgg | 2025-11-26 20:35:40+00:00
My move is to focus on making it easier for college students to develop critical thinking and communication skills. Smoothing out the learning curves and making education more personalized, accessible, and interactive. I'm just getting started, but so far already helping thousands of students at multiple universities.

There's one thing that I just realized hasn't come up in our discussion yet which has a big impact on my perspective.

Everything in the universe seems built on increasing entropy. Life net decreases entropy locally so that it can net increase it globally. There also seems to be this pattern of increasing complexity (particles, atoms, molecules, cells, multi cells, collectives) that unlocks more and more entropy. One extremely important mechanism driving this seems to be the Free Energy Principle, and the emergent ability to predict consequences of actions. Something about it enables evolution, and evolution enables it.

This perspective is that gives me more confidence that within collectives the future will include more shared truth than the past, because at every level of abstraction and for all known history that has been the long term trend.

Cells get better at modelling their external environment, and better at communication internally.

The reason why I am so confident we are not "post truth" is because lies don't work, not in the sense that people can't be deceived by lies (obviously they can), but dysfunctional lies won't produce accurate predictions. Dysfunctional lies don't help work get done, and the universe seems to be designed for work to get done. There is some force of nature that seems to favor increasingly accurate predictive ability.

Your perspective seems to be very well informed from what feels like the root of the issue, but I think you're missing the big picture. You aren't seeing the forest, just the trees around you. I know you assume the same of me, that I don't see these trees that you see. I believe you, that what you see looks grim. I also agree we need to understand the problems to solve them. I'm not advocating for any lack of action.

Just suggesting that you consider:

- for all history life has gotten better at prediction

- truth makes better predictions than lies

What's more likely? we are hitting a bump in the road that is an echo of many that have come before it, or something fundamental has materially changed the trajectory of all scientific history up until this point?

Your points about the cost of information and the cost of content are valid. In a sense, content is pollution. It's a byproduct of competition for attention.

I can think of a few ways that the costs and addictive nature of content could become moot.

- AI lowers the cost of truth

- Human psychology evolves to devalue content

- economic systems evolve to rebalance the cost/value of each

- legal systems evolve to better protect people from deception

These are just what come to mind quickly. The main point is that these quirks of our current culture, psychology, economic system, technological stage and value system are temporary, not fundamental, and not permanent. Life has a remarkable ability to adapt, and I think it will adapt to this too.

I really appreciate you engaging with me on this so I could spend time reflecting on your perspective. If I ever came across as dismissive I apologize. You've helped me empathize with you and others with the same concerns and I value that. You haven't fundamentally changed my mind, but you gave me a chance to hone my thinking and more deeply reflect on your main points.

It feels like we agree on a lot, we are just incorporating different contexts into our perspectives.