Aasterisk Seventeen

“Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today!”
― Mark Twain

“Don’t believe everything you think. Chief Inspector Gamache wrote that on the board for the incoming cadets at the start of every year at the Sûreté academy, and it stayed there all year.”
― Louise Penny, All the Devils Are Here

“The right to mental security does not appear to be enshrined in the Universal Declaration. Articles 18 and 19 establish the rights of “freedom of thought” and “freedom of opinion and expression.” One’s thoughts and opinions are, of course, partly formed by one’s information environment, which, in turn, is subject to Article 19’s “right to . . . impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” That is, anyone, anywhere in the world, has the right to impart false information to you. And therein lies the difficulty: democratic nations, particularly the United States, have for the most part been reluctant—or constitutionally unable—to prevent the imparting of false information on matters of public concern because of justifiable fears regarding government control of speech. Rather than pursuing the idea that there is no freedom of thought without access to true information, democracies seem to have placed a naïve trust in the idea that the truth will win out in the end, and this trust has left us unprotected.”
― Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control