Demand the Platonic Oath
Information Disorder will only worsen as Artificial Intelligence spreads. We need a plan.
Plato and Hippocrates were contemporaries. Maybe there’s something they can offer our truth-scorched society.
If truthful information is the lifeblood of democracy — and it surely is, because it’s only with a grasp of what’s true that voters can make good choices when they cast ballots — then maybe what we need now is a sort of Hippocratic Oath for information brokers. You know, a pledge like that “first, do no harm” commitment that new medical school graduates solemnly make, only in this case something for journalists, politicians, public relations practitioners, cable TV hosts and anybody else who communicates with a lot of people.
Although we should note, to be perfectly accurate, that the physicians’ oath doesn’t include those precise words that are so often cited. A favored translation from Hippocrates’ original Greek typically binds new doctors to a vow to “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.”1 Imagine if we asked such folks as Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene — or Donald Trump! — to likewise raise their right hands and swear to that standard. What, no mischief? You have to wonder: Would it make them think twice before they unleash some of their typical whoppers?
Not likely, I suppose. For starters, if a promise mattered to Trump, he wouldn’t have been twice impeached for violating his presidential oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” nor would The Washington Post have documented more than 30,000 lies he uttered during his presidency.2 And, anyway, the notion is unenforceable. The practice of medicine is regulated by the state, which we’ve authorized to revoke the medical licenses of those who deviate from Hippocrates’ standards, but a free society couldn’t tolerate that kind of state intrusion into what people say or publish.
Still, it’s intriguing to consider what we might gain if we created something we might call the Platonic Oath, in honor of the assertion by Plato, a contemporary of Hippocrates, “Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.” We might then ask people to take a Platonic Oath, like, “I will present nothing that is not true, and thus the beginning of every good.” (But for the religious inference, you might call it the Lutheran Oath, in honor of Martin Luther’s admirably tight phrasing, “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” That man could have been a decent journalist.)
While we’re at it, though, our 21st-century Platonic Oath of truth would have to rope in the software developers who work on artificial intelligence systems, and the digital corporate titans who finance their work, too. As the publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, noted at an industry conference this week, AI “is almost certainly going to usher a torrent of crap into the information ecosystem, totally poisoning it.”3 Inelegant language, but you get his point.
Because AI can create false content that is so much like what’s real, and spread it before humans have time to act, it threatens to overwhelm the truth. That’s rather terrifying, since it comes even as we are already failing to effectively cope with a flood of disinformation worldwide that predates the recent emergence of AI as a threat.
Two years ago, after a nearly year-long study, a blue-ribbon commission concluded, “Information Disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information become as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.” That report, from the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, noted that disinformation makes progress difficult on such issues as climate change, and encourages racist, ethnic and gender attacks. Viral lies, including those sown by hostile governments, can threaten national security and undermine trust in our society. We see its effects every day in the division that is tearing our country apart.4
While we can’t solve Information Disorder, the commission noted, we might “mitigate misinformation’s worst harms” by such steps as compelling social media platforms to share details about their content moderation work and to contribute to a Public Restoration Fund. That fund could help fight misinformation by supporting “education, research and investment in local institutions” — the latter apparently referring to local journalism.
The likelihood of that happening, though, is remote. A year ago, a Biden administration attempt to create an office to coordinate the fight against disinformation in the Department of Homeland Security was disbanded just three weeks after it was set up, after the new Disinformation Governance Board became the victim of a right-wing smear attack — ironically, the very sort of disinformation the office was intended to research. Critics claimed the new office — which had no regulatory power — was an effort by liberals to squelch conservative speech, and compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.”5
There was likely some justification to the right-wing fear of being targeted, of course, but that’s because the recent history of free speech in America has been suffused with distortion and outright fabrication from so many conservative forces. This is not a case of calling out one side for something that the other side engages in, as well; there is no paragon of prevarication on the left like Trump is on the right, nor a progressive commentator with the record of fabrication matching Alex Jones, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson and so many more of their reactionary cohort.
Sometimes, paradoxically, disinformation is spread by silence. This week Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after his conviction on seditious conspiracy charges. Rhodes was a key player in the plot to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was the first sentence for a sedition conspiracy in more than a decade, and a key development in society’s effort to deal with the lie spread by Trump that the presidential race was rigged — a lie now embraced by six in 10 Republican voters. The Rhodes sentence, and that of a colleague to a 17-year prison term, was inarguably important news for Americans to hear if the truth is ever to overcome that massive lie suggesting a terrible blot on U.S. history.
But Fox News, the leading information source for Republican voters, barely mentioned the story that day — once in the hour after 1 p.m., and once in the hour after 6 p.m.6 That’s hardly surprising, since Fox was so eager to spread Trump’s Big Lie from the get-go that it has been compelled to pay $787 million to the voting machine company it defamed along the way. Yet it shows how easily disinformation presents itself in America today. It’s hard to imagine how we can hope for most Americans to once again trust in the legitimacy of our democracy if major news purveyors amplify and encourage distortions of the truth by people we elect to lead us.
Such hostility to truth-telling in so-called legacy media underscores the even greater threat posed by the new technology of artificial intelligence, which can create and spread falsehood almost instantaneously. It’s hard to imagine that today’s Information Disorder won’t metastasize into a pandemic-like ailment, with our democracy directly in the path of its spread.
Like a physician using all the tools of modern medicine to attack a disease, then, we need to commit to combatting Information Disorder in the very short time before the devastation it can wreak becomes inevitable. In the face of so massive a challenge, we can individually play a role in the necessary healing by insisting on the cleansing salve of truth-telling — by those we elect to office, and by those in the media we reward with our attention. If that is the standard for casting our vote or choosing our channel, regardless of our ideological bent or issue preferences, we might begin to stamp out Information Disorder on a cellular level, until our public life is someday dominated by people who would be willing to take the Platonic Oath.
It may not be all we can do, but it is something we all can do. For, as Plato noted, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” We need to fight the infection.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/first-do-no-harm-201510138421#:~:text=And%20in%20fact%2C%20although%20%22first,the%20Hippocratic%20Oath%20at%20all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#inbox/WhctKKXwxsmMQtBfXqTrZhDQkhTCRcGbhchfTmqNdTLTkZdbfctBQFCMJqpPzSxffJNKPzL
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/commission-on-information-disorder-final-report/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/18/disinformation-board-dhs-nina-jankowicz/
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#inbox/WhctKKXwxsmMQtBfXqTrZhDQkhTCRcGbhchfTmqNdTLTkZdbfctBQFCMJqpPzSxffJNKPzL
NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES
Dispatches from our common ground *
Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illumLinating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.
This week, we share reporting published here:
Chittenden County, Vt. (Burlington Free Press, burlingtonfreepress.com)
Peoria, Ill. (Journal Star, pjstar.com)
Pueblo, Colo. (The Pueblo Chieftain, chieftain.com)
Pensacola, Fla. (Pensacola News-Journal, pnj.com)
NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes each Wednesday, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!
VERMONT
Rabies control raining from the sky
Rabies, a deadly virus that affects the brain, has been on the rise in Vermont’s most populous county since last year. So, as Lilly St. Angelo reports in the Burlington Free Press, the state is placing — and using helicopters to drop — 37,800 edible rabies vaccines, in the form of sweet-smelling green capsules. The state assures residents that the capsules aren’t poisonous to people or pets, but it does urge that if a pet eats the bait, or a child touches it, the state should be notified via the rabies hotline. The airdrop follows an effort by hand to catch and vaccinate more than 700 raccoons, foxes and skunks last fall.
ILLINOIS
No more letter grades for kids — at least, for now
Peoria’s public schools will eliminate letter grades for K-4 this fall, reports Leslie Rennin in the Journal Star, and expand it to middle schoolers next year. But there’s already controversy over the move, which raises the question of how long the idea will last before falling to the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way crowd. Students will get a numerical grade, from 1 through 4, and will be rated don both academic performance and be rated on behavioral standards — being responsible, respectful, engaged and safe. The goal, educators say, is to better assess student performance uniformly across the city’s schools. The district has a plan to educate parents, including back-to-school nights in the fall, but some board members are expressing concern.
COLORADO
Severe nursing shortage comes amid unemployment drop
There’s a nationwide shortage of nurses, and a good example of it is found in Pueblo, a city of about 112,000 in south-central Colorado. Josué Perez reports in The Pueblo Chieftain that the city had 459 job openings for nurses in March, the most recent month reported, which we calculate to be a 49 percent increase from November. That’s even though overall unemployment dropped during those months in the area. A study in March 2022 from the American Nurses Foundation reported that 60% of acute-care nurses in the United States then felt "burnt out" and 75% of respondents were "stressed, frustrated and exhausted." At least 52% reported that they want to leave the profession.
FLORIDA
‘Elephant graveyard’ from 5 million years ago found in Florida
Paleontologists describe it as a “once-in-a-lifetime” find: the fossilized remains of extinct antecedents of elephants known as gomphotheres. Brandon Girod reports for the Pensacola News Journal that the first uncovered early last year was a skeleton that was “among the best” ever found in North America of the species, according to a state paleontologist, but that more fossils soon emerged. The research team soon realized that there were several complete skeletons, including one adult and at least seven juveniles; the adult probably was about 8 feet tall at the shoulders, and with the tusks included, the skull measured over nine feet in length. The site where the bones were found is a 45-minute drive south of Gainesville.
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