Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
With the rise of AI and the deterioration of search engines (i.e. you can pay enough to be the first result), preserving knowledge that can not be easily accessed because it is not in the main distribution (i.e. Tail Knowledge and Knowledge Collapse) will be increasingly important. Because, realistically, good solid theology will most likely find itself in the tail. Being less accessed and more easily forgotten and pushed aside.
It is important to differentiate between consensus truth vs real truth.
Search engines show you things based on who has paid more or has the most traffic. You can’t always trust the search engine to actually show you what you need or are looking for as the most accurate information or resource.
Ai works similarly with responding using the most statistically likely response to the request. More complicated models have other mechanics and rail guards in between but the basic mechanic is till spitting out things it has seen the most often in training. In other words, Ai will serve up stuff from the center of the normal distribution of data it was trained on.
This leads to what we are talking about as “tail knowledge.” That is stuff that is hard to access because you have to ask for it specifically or even know it exists in order to access it through ai or search engines. But if it is so hard to access it will be accessed less and less and in new generations of ai and search which only reinforces the difficulty to find it. If this goes on too long or is reinforced too much that tail knowledge will be lost and forgotten leading to a constriction of available material and “knowledge collapse” over time.
Question
Therefore, how do we as a community preserve truth when it sits in the tails of the distribution?