[HN Gopher] Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking
___________________________________________________________________
Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking
Author : ingve
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-05-10 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| ch33zer wrote:
| I wonder what kind of ethics are involved in this kind of study.
| The recent linux kernel/UMN affair [1] has made me more aware of
| what can or should be considered human research.
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/855479/
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Presumably, if they put it before a review board, that board
| would have found that correcting people's misunderstanding of
| the facts of topic X is not unethical. Regardless of what one
| thinks of public "debunking" generally, the position of most in
| academia seems to be that telling people their news sources are
| not sound science, is not unethical.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Actually, no.
|
| Virtually everything the leftist media has printed in the past 4
| years has been shown to be false:
|
| - WaPo admitted Trump's phone call conversation to an election
| official was faked (used in the second impeachment)
|
| - Twitter has admitted they shouldn't have suppressed the Hunter
| Biden stories
|
| - fact-checking by many social media sites has been outsourced to
| interested parties, often controlled by the Dem party or CCP
|
| - there was no insurrection, since the 5 people who died were not
| killed by rioters, were mostly let into the Capitol by police,
| and didn't have guns.
|
| I could go on, but it turns out the left/Dems are outright daily
| liars.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108755.
|
| It is only going to take us to a Trump flamewar, and a Trump
| flamewar isn't going to take us anywhere new.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > - WaPo admitted Trump's phone call conversation to an
| election official was faked (used in the second impeachment)
|
| False:
|
| """However, Trump has used the correction to claim in a
| statement that "the original story was a Hoax, right from the
| very beginning," which is untrue. The original story that got
| so much attention was Trump's call with Raffensperger, for
| which we had the full and accurate transcript all along. It has
| not been corrected. Furthermore, it remains the case that Trump
| did in fact call Watson to insist he won the state and that she
| should turn up evidence revealing fraud. "The country is
| counting on it," he said.
|
| Overall, the Post's correction changes what we know about the
| exact words Trump said to Watson, but it doesn't fundamentally
| change our understanding of what Trump was saying and doing to
| Georgia state officials at the time."""
| thomasmg wrote:
| I would be interested in the sources of your claims.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I'm not. It's become my opinion that there's a substantial
| political movement that will say or do anything for victory.
| Back in the day we saw Nazis and fascists take these
| rhetorical angles, because even many many years ago people
| had worked out that you could seize power by negotiating for
| victory rather than in good faith. The techniques of this are
| really long established and not even the technology is really
| new: back in the day, it was the existence of radio that was
| the technological breakthrough, and now it's control of
| things like Twitter and Facebook that correspond to that
| situation.
|
| The poster you're responding to doesn't appear to be
| operating in good faith, so the sources are irrelevant:
| they're purely vapor. You can just make stuff up and claim
| it, and if you can get someone to argue over the stuff,
| you've just become ONE SIDE of a both-sides narrative and
| legitimized the thing you made up. You can con yourself into
| believing it if you're a paranoid type, or you can be just
| out to manipulate. It does not matter whether you're sincere
| or not. It's the outcome you're after.
|
| I'm not interested in their sources. They're giving enough
| 'tells' that they're operating from sort of a post-reality
| position, and it really doesn't matter whether that is out of
| delusion or manipulation.
| legerdemain wrote:
| In the end, what works is propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. Not
| truth, not facts, not numbers.
|
| Look at the "no campaign"[1] that got the ball rolling on
| removing Pinochet from power. They won on rainbows, birds, and
| flowers. "No" is happy good-feeling, "yes" is scary and bad.
|
| Don't correct, or debunk, or engage. Just flood the channels with
| your message. Infiltrate. Buy the opposition. That is how you
| govern effectively.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Chilean_national_plebisci...
| Applejinx wrote:
| This isn't an indictment of any side, even: it is a fundamental
| truth about the human mind. Not a one of us truly has
| rationality: at some point we're building our realities on
| sand.
|
| Anyone who's done therapy where they managed to deconstruct
| some of their childhood crap, and gained some re-evaluation of
| the deepest tenets of their existence (note: if that's you,
| then it was probably a good thing because you probably were
| suffering under some ugly nonsense absorbed as a child, that
| you're better off without!) knows the truth of this.
|
| There's no specific moral position to propagandizing the human
| mind. It's about what you're doing with it, and why. Bottom
| line is you can't do without that story, without that
| propaganda, so come up with a good story to go with your good
| purpose. It's story vs. story, all the way down (or up, if
| you're optimistic).
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think this is another booolean vs spectrum issue. If that
| were universally true and people bought into it, it'd be a
| very sad world indeed. Luckily, most people really do try
| their best at keeping track of their values and living in
| accordance with them, even if we often fail around the edges.
| It's how we offer consistency and fairness to each other.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "false political news" and "fact checking websites" are small
| band aids over large areas of contention that could alter the
| conclusions here.
|
| Who decides which politics are wrong? If that isn't "every
| individual who is faced with the choice, on their own" then is it
| still politics, or is it more herd management?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| If there were any real trustworthy fact-checking web sites,
| this study would mean a lot more, but there's a LOT of obvious
| bias on any of the fact-checking sites. That's not to say that
| nothing is objectively false (or true), but just to say that
| it's been "fact-checked" doesn't tell anybody which it is.
| burnished wrote:
| Could you point to some examples? Most of the claims of bias
| I've seen have seemed to come from a person whose position
| isn't supported by reality, so it becomes easier to deny it
| and claim bias. But I haven't made a study of it and would
| love some counter examples.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Take the local one here, faktisk.no:
|
| They'll do real fact checks, but are very selective on
| _what_ to fact check.
|
| So a journalist from the state broadcasting service states
| on TV that "these soldiers will shoot at anything that
| moves".
|
| She says that about what is known by everyone who has a
| clue to be some of the more restricive and professional
| soldiers that exist.
|
| Will it be fact checked if I submit it?
|
| No. I tried.
|
| They'd rather publish a bunch of factual but funny and
| trivial fact checks than pointing out that a mainstream
| reporter is - at least in my opinion - lying through her
| teeth to make people hate a certain small nation.
| octopoc wrote:
| Here's one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-
| healthcare-pass-the...
| ahelwer wrote:
| Here's a well-known one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-
| check/joe-biden-no-empathy/
|
| You'd have to be pretty biased to call a literal quote
| unchanged by context a "mixture" of truth.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I'm at a loss. The claim is clearly "Former U.S. Vice
| President Joe Biden once said he had "no empathy" for the
| plight of younger people." If you read that broadly, like
| in the sense that any normal person would read it the
| first time they come across it, it reads as if Biden made
| some sort of blanket statement applying to all plights of
| all younger people, period. Like he's basically admitting
| to be a sociopath against younger people. I mean...
| that's clearly not what he said or meant.
| SaintGhurka wrote:
| You might take a look at this one:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/unemployment-low-trump/
|
| The claim is that Trump got unemployment to a 50 year low.
| Snopes rules it "Mostly False".
|
| The problem I have with that is that unemployment really
| was at a 50-year low. Snopes just wanted to deny Trump any
| credit for it so they throw up a lot of dust and smoke
| about whether the president deserves credit for it.
|
| Compare that with this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-
| check/obama-created-more-jobs-tr...
|
| In this case, the claim is that Obama created more jobs
| than Trump during adjacent 3-year periods. Snopes rules it
| true, full stop. They don't throw in any caveats about
| whether the president should get credit.
|
| Whether a sitting president deserves credit for economic
| conditions is always a debatable point. Politicians will
| just hold whatever position is convenient for them and
| partisans will line up on their respective sides. I can't
| help but notice that Snopes lines up pretty predictably on
| one side of any political issue.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Liars adapt. Whatever becomes the popular method of checking
| the truth, they will create their own version of that tool.
|
| There is a similar arms race in science: Charlatans use
| scientifically sounding language. So you tell people "to be
| real science, it needs to be published in a scientific
| journal". Then the charlatans create their own journals. So
| you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be supported
| by a meta-analysis". Then the charlanatans create their own
| meta-analysis. Etc.
|
| It always takes some time to adapt, but if you tell people
| e.g. "always verify political statements at fact-checking
| websites", as soon as your idea becomes popular, politicians
| will create their own "fact-checking" websites. (Or take over
| the existing ones, whichever is easier.)
|
| I have some heuristics that I use for myself to determine
| what information I trust... but if they became public and
| popular, it would be quite easy to subvert them.
| shoemakersteve wrote:
| Please stop peddling this post-truth bullshit. No one is
| "deciding which politics is wrong", they're talking about
| people spreading things that are verifiably false.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I disagree with your assessment. "Verifiably false" typically
| means "Corporate media says it's false."
| potta_coffee wrote:
| Media on all sides cannot be trusted. You're being
| downvoted by people that trust media.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Everyone who tells you something had a reason to do so.
| If it wasn't "you paid them", then its a good bet someone
| else did. Even when you paid them to tell you the truth,
| you have to assess what they mean by "truth" and how
| honest their effort to deliver it was.
|
| If a doctor says "take this pill," do you huck it down or
| look it up and see if its something you actually wanted
| to eat?
|
| People trust "authority" too much.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Saying that "fact-checking" websites are often crap isn't the
| same as saying there's no such thing as true and false. And
| have you read the paper? If you haven't, what are you
| spreading?
| oogabooga123 wrote:
| Asking "who fact checks the fact checkers" is not post-truth
| bullshit.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That is pretty reasonable thing. In science we do peer
| review. So why not in fact checking? Not that peer review
| process isn't corrupted in many ways, but still it is
| there.
|
| Not that I think similar process was possible in fact
| checking...
| Natsu wrote:
| Of course there's truth and falsehood, but the fact checking
| is hardly 100%.
|
| For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3gy_CLXho
|
| Or you can read, e.g. Snopes' explanation that being
| convicted of making bombs to blow up a government building
| doesn't make one a "convicted terrorist" because there's no
| such crime as "terrorism."
| anotha1 wrote:
| If you indirectly contribute to terrorizing people based on
| race because you provide aid and comfort to a racist, are
| you a terrorist?
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I think in that case the person is a racist. I find the
| label and term terrorism extremely troubling as it always
| can be spun as _" what is a terrorist in one group might
| be the freedom fighter to the other"_
|
| the label terrorism is usually only successful in the
| most homogenos and brainwashed cultures, where all
| complexity and nuance is stripped away. it's great for
| propaganda or when you need to criminalize a whole
| society of people.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please not post flamebait and/or unsubstantive
| comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it
| destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| allturtles wrote:
| I don't know what the relevance of the Maher clip is. I
| stopped watching after a couple minutes, but all I saw was
| about how Democrats have false beliefs about COVID. I don't
| see what this has to do with fact checking.
|
| If you're referring to this Snopes
| (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-
| rosenberg/), the "mixed" ruling seems perfectly reasonable.
| Saying someone is a "convicted terrorist" is a fuzzy claim,
| because there is no such charge one can be convicted of.
| It's not like "convicted murderer".
| Natsu wrote:
| > I don't see what this has to do with fact checking.
|
| It's weird that the group that is getting the most
| dangerous misinformation about Covid has a better idea of
| the risks of it. And this is one area in which fact
| checking has been prominent and possibly over-zealous. It
| can shut down conversations too quickly instead of
| letting people come to understanding.
|
| I think it's at least partially because it's hard to
| advocate for a middle-of-the-road position, each side
| thinks you're an undercover partisan for the other. So
| it's hard to advocate for something like quit complaining
| about masks, they're not that great but they are helping,
| vaccines work and you should get them unless you have
| medical issues, but they're not 100%, some lockdowns
| probably cause more harm than help, some of the rules are
| either nonsense or enforced in silly ways that have
| nothing to do with Covid risk, and the virus is dangerous
| but the risk isn't evenly distributed across all
| populations, and even if it's not a big risk to you
| personally, you're being a real jerk if you go out a lot
| and help unknowingly spread it.
|
| For the latter point, bombing government buildings is a
| central example of terrorism and nobody thinks there's a
| crime of "terrorism" when they hear "convicted
| terrorist." By the same standard, Snopes would have to
| say that the 9-11 hijackers were not terrorists. The
| slipperiness of the word is entirely a matter of people
| who want it to be about the goodness or badness of the
| person instead of achieving political goals by initiating
| violence.
| allturtles wrote:
| I'd agree that the fact-checking infrastructure is not
| well-adapted for COVID, or any kind of rapidly developing
| situation where the facts are not entirely clear.
|
| As for Rosenberg, you're focusing on the terrorism and
| ignoring the convicted. She was not convicted of
| terrorism, or even of bombing buildings, but of
| explosives possession. The word "convicted" has to mean
| something. I believe that O.J. Simpson is a murderer, but
| calling him a "convicted murderer" would be false. If the
| claim was "convicted of felonies due to her involvement
| with a terrorist organization", there would be a much
| better case for "true."
| Natsu wrote:
| Snopes is the one choosing which version of the claim to
| fact-check, though, so choosing that version to downplay
| the whole "helped bomb a government building" thing is
| not very reasonable here, just like the choice of saying
| that "convicted terrorist" can only mean "convicted of a
| crime called terrorism that does not exist" instead of
| the meaning most people would use which is being
| "convicted of a crime that involved bombing government
| buildings, which is a central example of 'terrorism'".
| allturtles wrote:
| They are fact checking the particular claim that went
| viral on twitter. Nuance doesn't go viral. If you care
| about the veracity of the claim, presumably you will read
| the extensive explanation of the 'mixed' rating and form
| your own conclusions. That's why it's 'mixed' and not
| 'false.' You can't just go to Snopes and say "oh snopes
| says it's false" in this case.
|
| p.s. the crimes she was _convicted of_ did not include
| bombing government buildings, that part of the tweet is
| strictly false.
| Jiro wrote:
| Claiming that it's mixed because there's no such charge
| is avoiding the question, which is "if a normal person
| reads this, would he get an accurate impression of what
| happened?" If someone is convicted of a crime which an
| ordinary person would look at and say 'that's terrorism',
| then it's true or mostly true. The fact that there isn't
| literally a definition of "convicted of terrorism" should
| at most change "true" into "mostly true".
|
| That's how fact checking sites usually introduce bias--
| they don't actually lie about literal facts, they just
| have shifting standards about when things need to be
| absolutely literally true, when they can give false
| impressions, and what counts as "mostly" when something
| is mostly true or false or mixed.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| " _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names._ "
|
| " _Eschew flamebait._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| legulere wrote:
| For a democracy to work you need a basis of shared facts with
| opinions on top that need decision. In the later years we have
| seen a movement to erode this basis of democracy to make
| discussions on top of the basis of facts impossible and replace
| it with tribalist attacks against each other.
|
| Preventing fake news and fact checking is not about attacking
| sound political opinions, but about making them possible.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I agree with you up to the point where "consensus" becomes a
| replacement for "verifiable fact", which is usually the next
| step in this chain.
| daenz wrote:
| This seems hardly surprising. Publicly fact-checking someone
| makes them feel vulnerable and potentially stupid, so if they are
| not a person with integrity or humility, of course they are going
| to double down and get defensive. This is always been the case.
|
| It doesn't help that we choose to ride these people for years and
| never let them forget about their mistakes, so much so that some
| mistakes can be a death sentence for your future career. So what
| incentive is there to admit that they made a mistake?
| Lendal wrote:
| Defensiveness? Possibly, but that's just one. I believe they do
| it mostly because they want to antagonize. They don't care if
| the info is false because it's all just a game anyway. If
| there's fact-checking, it proves that the information is
| valuable enough to cause someone of importance to waste time
| debunking it. Therefore, it is high-value material and should
| go viral even more.
|
| It's the same reason my dog steals socks. If someone is chasing
| them for a stolen sock, it must be of high value and therefore
| it must be stolen more frequently, carried away, and buried in
| the backyard. It's a part of the brain we share with dogs,
| apes, sheep, and cattle.
| daenz wrote:
| Sounds like you interact with a lot of trolls. I know there
| is some overlap but I think there is a distinction between
| people who are wrong and trolls. They should be treated
| differently because of this distinction.
| r7f7udheg wrote:
| >so if they are not a person with integrity or humility<
|
| >we choose to ride these people for years and never let them
| forget about their mistakes<
|
| Maybe it's the people who refuse to acknowledge they're
| contributing to that climate of douchebagery while producing no
| dialogue of productive value who lack integrity. If you're
| public fact checking someone in 2021 it's because you're either
| an asshole or unaware that you're being an asshole.
| schoen wrote:
| Maybe people presume that corrections represent a political or
| ideological attack. After all, I've seen people assume that
| sometimes on HN, which tries _not_ to be a space for political
| flamewars and dunking.
|
| If you think that someone trying to correct you is likely to be
| a political opponent trying to score points, it makes sense
| that you would be vigilant and defensive.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/arguments-as-soldiers talks about
| one aspect of this where people might feel like they have to
| defend anything that "their side" says and dispute anything
| that the "other side" says.
|
| Sometimes people online actively try to defuse this by adding
| some context expressing sympathy or a non-judgmental or non-
| confrontational attitude. (That is, assuming that they merely
| want to counter mistaken ideas and information, and not people
| who hold or spread them!) I wonder to what extent that works.
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| Correcting false articles with bot accounts and links to Scopes
| should not produce a change of mind in an educated person. Snopes
| hasn't been reputable since its original creator lost majority
| control in a divorce, and twitter bots are irreputable for reason
| I hope I don't have to state.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Since there's no such thing as news anymore, it's all op-ed, and
| the debunking sites all have a POV, I mostly just ignore peoples'
| politically oriented links except for primary sources.
|
| It's hard to argue with a video or a transcription.
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| > It's hard to argue with a video or a transcription.
|
| You'd think so, but people either refuse to watch it, or claim
| they have watched it but then have no trouble saying something
| wild that's a complete contradiction.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| On the contrary, even with primary sources, there's almost no
| event that can't have its narrative completely turned around by
| additional context. In particular, such a primary source is
| almost always an anecdote rather than data. Data always
| introduces a possibility for bias. Truth is hard. There are no
| shortcuts
| briantakita wrote:
| This begs the question, "who fact-checks the fact-checkers?" If
| the institutional "fact-checkers" & institutional opinion is
| incorrect, as it has been many times in the past, then the heavy-
| handed "correcting" of the critics is counter-productive to
| accurate & representative public discourse.
|
| IMO, a more useful approach is to bring forward all novel
| perspectives on a topic and let people make up their own minds.
| Many people don't like being told what to think & distrust the
| notion of "authoritative sources". However, full disclosure of
| knowledge & reasoned arguments demonstrates a good-faith account
| of a particular issue. Institutions having to resort to
| "correcting the record", especially when the title begins with
| "No, ..." & the predictable comparison to the flat-earthers, only
| sows more distrust in the institutions. The refutation by
| strawman may make the proponents of the institutional narrative
| feel more self-righteous & confident, but only insults &
| strengthens resolves to resist such narrative from opponents of
| the institutional narrative.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This study was limited to Twitter which may skew results
| strangely kind of like how many University studies are limited to
| wealthy young people of European descent.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think it's really difficult to tease apart "believing something
| that isn't true" from "going out on a limb and sharing it in
| public".
|
| In other words, if someone responds badly, it's hard to say
| whether it's more because they hate discovering they're wrong
| about something, or more because they hate feeling humiliated by
| being called out in public.
|
| When sharing information is intrinsically tied to risking public
| shame if you're wrong... maybe that's what can be better managed.
| dovrce wrote:
| Can't find the paper text, but here's the video showing it was an
| article about the Clinton Foundation and some snopes link
| https://youtu.be/WUDiBiKQxPk?t=141
| dreamlayers wrote:
| For the person doing it, sharing of such news can be more like
| the person expressing their own emotions than like sharing
| information. If that expression gets invalidated, the motivation
| to express those emotions remains.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, whenever you see someone debunking on Twitter, be sure to
| reply to that with a link to this study. :)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I think there is a lot more to say about this subject.
|
| I'll give a personal example, a few months ago, a leading French
| newspaper (Le Monde) published a debunk about the coronavirus
| origins, mostly trying to debunk that it originated from a lab in
| Wuhan.
|
| The problem is that what was presented as undeniable facts was in
| practice very poorly constructed, and we know today that things
| are not that clear cut.
|
| In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in
| the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as
| possible.
|
| Unfortunately, this is not what I am seeing.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| "Debunking" in the modern sense mostly just means calling
| someone an idiot for having a different opinion than you, with
| an added dose of self-assured smugness because obviously
| "science" and "the experts" and "everybody knows" are on your
| side. Debunking is bad enough when it actually comes from a
| place of real science, because even then the self-
| congratulatory nature of it makes people want to punch you
| rather than engage in a conversation. But when "the science" is
| really just a bunch of anecdotes, propaganda and Just-So
| Stories people in certain social circles keep repeating to each
| other ad nauseam, it becomes a complete joke.
| kiba wrote:
| People are not convinced by facts and science, but by people
| in their trust networks.
|
| No amount of truth will ever convince someone who is
| predisposed to not believe you.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| That's not debunking, that's dismissing.
|
| I'm not ashamed to admit that I've dismissed plenty of people
| in my life.
|
| I don't have time to argue with and debunk Holocaust deniers
| and Neo-Nazis, nor do I think it would be productive, because
| in my experience almost all such people are way beyond
| reasoning with.
|
| Also, when such people "debate", they're often just trying to
| spread their propaganda to bystanders, and not engaging in
| any kind of good-faith argument with you.
|
| Finally, I recognize that if these people ever get power they
| will crush, in a very literal way, using violence, anyone who
| doesn't agree with them, who is not "pure" enough for them,
| or who stands in their way.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I find that's a vital realization to have. It's also more
| than a bit sad: anybody from ANY political angle who's
| desperate enough will sink to this level. That said,
| there's some political angles that I see a lot of this
| from.
|
| Nazis lie, is the way I frame it to myself. I try to
| recognize the tells, the techniques that are being used,
| the pivoting and debating attitude, the historical
| precedents, if possible the escalation as masks are dropped
| and the ideological payload is hinted at or delivered.
| There's always a payload. Everything else is the game.
|
| Nazis lie. I'm interested in identifying them, not debating
| them. If I can identify them, I can identify their payload
| and odds are it's something I'm going to want to walk away
| from, and I'll do just that.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, at this point I can't tell trolls from idiots. Like
| it's a lifestyle.
|
| You're at a restaurant on the ocean and some fairly
| educated dude wants to go all flat earth. I'm like, "let me
| go get some binoculars and you can tell me why the bottom
| of the container ship falls below the horizon first. We can
| even estimate the distance based on size of ship and
| magnification factor to get a radius for the earth"....
| "No, it doesn't work that way".
|
| Huh? Why are all the other planets round? Why does the
| earth cast a round shadow on the moon (vice versa for
| eclipse)? Why can you fly to India in either direction in
| the same amount of time? It's conspiracy theories all the
| way down.
|
| Stupid, angry, or willfully ignorant, they're painful to
| talk to.
| chmod775 wrote:
| This.
|
| When you want to convince someone and win them over to your way
| of thinking, never _ever_ lie, make your position out to be
| stronger than it really is, or treat them as anything less than
| an intelligent human being.
|
| If you can't do that it is better to stay silent, because
| speaking is likely to have the exact opposite of the intended
| effect.
|
| This applies to everything from parenting to political
| discussions.
| headmelted wrote:
| I mean that would be nice, but it's also unrealistic because of
| the imbalance in educating someone who _wants_ to be ignorant.
|
| The problem I've seen is that people want others to disprove
| their crazy theories. Disproving _anything_ takes substantially
| more time and work than just saying any old nonsense in the
| first place.
|
| This is made worse by the hordes of crazy/stupid people on the
| internet who demand (in bad faith) that everyone who disagrees
| with their obvious falsehoods takes the time required to
| provide evidence (that they'll never accept anyway) is the
| biggest part of the problem.
|
| tldr; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
| Unfortunately most of the people spreading this kind of thing
| online don't understand what actual evidence is.
|
| Try debating a flat-earther, and then explaining that we knew
| the Earth was round for thousands of years prior to NASA. It
| will not compute.
| Applejinx wrote:
| That, or: extraordinary claims require extraordinary empathy.
|
| If the story is horrible, you've got to understand what in
| that is so desirable for the person to believe. Why do they
| cling to that particular narrative? Something about it,
| works, for them.
|
| I think there's a lot of people out there absolutely
| terrified and right on the edge of un-survival. They are
| genuinely in continuous, ongoing danger, and need a narrative
| that will give them a target for their terror, one that could
| maybe be attacked and fought back against.
|
| It is not terribly difficult to take panicked people and
| persuade them to run away from the exits, or attack the
| doctors, or otherwise direct their energy and panic towards
| some goal. The reason to do that is not arbitrary, rather it
| is to gain power through controlling those people, and it's
| always worked very well.
|
| You take away that power and control not by arguing with the
| angry, panicky people, but by persistently removing the
| threats that generate their panic. The worst enemy of an
| ousted demagogue is a boring, reasonably trustworthy rival
| that does things to remedy the material distress of the
| panicky and angry people. You don't have to argue them into
| submission, you defuse them by making them comfortable, and
| that's why we see desperate attempts to maintain the panic
| and terror.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Not that you're wrong necessarily, but in my own anecdotal
| experience the people clinging to the sorts of narratives
| you're describing aren't exactly the picture of precarity.
|
| They're aging suburbanites whose TV came with a youtube
| app.
| kodah wrote:
| This might be useful imagery for mockery but it's far
| from accurate. That, and I mean, mockery is wrong in any
| meaningful discourse.
| zackees wrote:
| The debunkers are highly biased and typically choose the
| lowest hanging fruit of some fringe individual, debunk that,
| and then claim that this represents the conservative
| argument.
|
| This misinformation is therefore being laundered by the fact
| checker.
|
| The people see the "fact checkers" as what they are: a highly
| biased group being funded by shadow money that work in
| lockstep to support the msm cartel's narrative.
| dang wrote:
| Anyone who wants seriously to look at this problem needs to
| grapple with the following: preferring one's beliefs to
| counterevidence is not just a property of "crazy/stupid
| people", but of humans in general, including oneself and
| everyone on one's own side. This is a difficult fact to face,
| and to the extent one can face it, I think it changes
| everything. Even if one makes the smallest beginning at doing
| so, it already starts to change everything.
|
| For this we have to stop pointing the finger at the others--
| their ridiculous beliefs, their preposterous disregard of
| evidence--and face that we ourselves are just as ridiculous
| and preposterous. It is not that the others do it more; it is
| simply that it is easier--much easier--to see it in them. If
| you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you
| don't do it _as much_ , this is because you are lacking in
| self-awareness. (I don't mean you personally, of course, I
| mean all of us.) And let's be honest: we all feel that we
| don't do it _as much_. I feel it myself even as I write this.
|
| A timeless essay on this is Orwell's "Looking Back at the
| Spanish War" (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel..., discussed last year at [1]). The depth
| of consciousness that Orwell reached in that essay is
| profound, but its profundity is obscured by how simply he
| states it, and no doubt also by the fact that we all think we
| already know it and are the exception to what he describes.
|
| _Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on
| grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the
| atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own
| side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
| Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period
| between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when
| atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there
| was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed
| in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any
| moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and
| yesterday's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a
| ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has
| changed._
|
| ---
|
| _Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly
| reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I
| saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the
| facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an
| ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had
| been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men
| had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely
| denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never
| seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary
| victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these
| lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
| superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw,
| in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened
| but of what ought to have happened according to various
| 'party lines'._
|
| [1] _Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 - Nov 2020 (128
| comments)
| headmelted wrote:
| Oh I'm most certainly a stupid person on the Internet. I
| have no problem accepting that whatsoever.
|
| To your point though, I don't think it's accurate to
| suggest everyone is as consistently wrong as everyone else
| when there are groups of people suggesting that the entire
| concept of science itself is propaganda.
|
| I will read what you've linked though, as it seems
| genuinely really interesting.
| dang wrote:
| It doesn't follow that everyone is as consistently wrong
| as everyone else, and I'm not saying it does. One needs
| to be extra careful about deriving consequences from this
| phenomenon too quickly, precisely because it's so hard to
| see it in the first place. More precisely, it's hard to
| see _in oneself_ --but to only see it in others is not to
| see it at all.
|
| Let's all practice simply seeing it for a while (I'm
| tempted to say 20 years might be a good minimum), and
| then maybe we'll be in a position to accurately derive
| consequences in a way that doesn't just re-establish the
| original self-deception.
|
| p.s. I took out this bit of my comment above: "Or, if you
| prefer, we're all crazy/stupid in this way." because
| after reading your comment I realized it was too baity.
| Mentioning it that here because I don't want to deprive
| your post of that context.
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