[HN Gopher] Facebook said my article was false - now the fact-ch...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook said my article was false - now the fact-checkers admit
they were wrong
Author : nradov
Score : 375 points
Date : 2021-12-29 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
| godelski wrote:
| I think what many here and the writers of the article are missing
| is that you can both be truthful and misleading. These are not
| mutually exclusive. Let's start with the title: "The Study That
| Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk
| Science". If you just read this (titles are very important and
| most people only read these) what will you take away? What the
| authors are trying to say is that this one study has problems.
|
| But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in
| general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely
| from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is
| effective, they continually question if it is. This is really
| problematic. The study being wrong doesn't question _if_ masking
| is effective, but _how_ effective. There's a major difference in
| these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts
| and don't know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more
| science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The
| article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this
| study is bad we get to question all the others.
|
| So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only
| questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more
| fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much?
| Harder to say. There's a few old sayings such as "the devil never
| tells a full lie" or "the devil sows doubt" (often with truth).
| These are the errors that the authors are making here.
|
| I would conclude that they aren't inaccurate, but are misleading.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| > They don't say masking is effective, they continually
| question if it is. This is really problematic.
|
| Forbidding questioning is really problematic.
| mike00632 wrote:
| The Reason article makes perfectly clear that masks are very
| effective and should be worn in school. It's then totally
| dishonest for the article to have that headline which
| seemingly questions the effectiveness of masks. The author
| knew what they were doing.
| syshum wrote:
| Your very statement of "which is something we know is highly
| effective (purely from a physics point of view). " is
| misleading
|
| As both this story, and the "fact checked" story (as well as
| the position of many others) is not really talking about masks
| at the physics level (though new data about omicron is placing
| that in question now as well) but masking as a POLICY
|
| it may be true that masks themselves are effective, but due to
| human nature masking POLICIES, including masking POLICIES in
| schools are not. Human interactions with the mask have we have
| seen countless times are far far far from perfect, people
| pulling on the masks, masks around chins, removing the mask to
| cough or sneeze, etc. Children will be even less disciplined
|
| So I dont think they are questioning the mask as a technical
| barrier to stop covid, they are questioning the masks as a
| public policy given that humans are involved
| crisdux wrote:
| You are coming to this article with your own biases. You seem
| to be basing your analysis that we "know" masking is highly
| effective. That is not true. The evidence used to justify this
| policy is low quality(don't you remember the CDC hair salon
| study) and dependent on the precautionary principle. High
| quality evidence on masking has either low effect sizes or is
| inconclusive. It is certainly not settled science.
| relaxing wrote:
| Mask resistance is what's dependent on the precautionary
| principle.
|
| The science is pretty clear. "Mask distribution and promotion
| was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic
| SARS-CoV-2 infections." -
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
| crisdux wrote:
| I am completely aware of that study. That study is exactly
| what I had in mind when I wrote my comment. The effect
| sizes were barely significant. Not all groups managed any
| effect of significance. There are biases, confounding
| factors and limitations of that study. Those results are
| not the slam dunk you think they are. I implore you to read
| the study carefully.
| relaxing wrote:
| Barely significant? What is that supposed to mean?
|
| The evidence is clear - mask wearing reduces infections.
| You seem to be arguing something else.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| According to the study itself, the evidence is _not_
| clear:
|
| > _Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests
| that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both
| an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at
| all_
| mike00632 wrote:
| You're making a mistake by drawing conclusions that masks
| aren't effective. Pointing to one study which has non-
| significant data means you shouldn't draw any conclusion
| at all from it.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm not drawing conclusions from that study, I'm pointing
| out that the study which the OP used to say "the science
| is pretty clear" and "the evidence is clear" does not
| reach the same conclusion as OP.
|
| Your comment should really be directed at the OP, not me.
| flerchin wrote:
| We do know masks prevent the spread disease. Look in any
| Operating Room. If masking by the general public is shown to
| be ineffective, that only argues for further education on how
| to mask properly.
| crisdux wrote:
| You are obviously conflating the use of surgical masks in
| operating rooms that are for stopping droplets with using
| masks to stop a respiratory airborne virus. How can this
| possibly be the basis of your argument? It's utter
| nonsense.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| I see the "surgeons use masks in operating rooms, this
| proves public masking prevents the spread of COVID"
| argument nearly every time a mask debate appears on this
| site or others, and it just seems so...obviously fallacious
| and absurd to me on a dozen different levels, that I almost
| feel like I'm missing some fundamental point about it.
| mike00632 wrote:
| The point is that masks are obviously effective. It
| requires a lot of mental gymnastics to reach the
| conclusion that masks are not effective despite the
| overwhelming evidence in support of masks. Even the
| Reason article admits that masks are effective despite
| its misleading headline that suggests masks are not
| effective.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Simple observation: The huge difference in infection rates
| between Democratic and Republican areas--far more than can
| be accounted for by the vaccination rate. That says
| behavior (masks + distancing) is definitely a substantial
| factor.
|
| Also note the much smaller effect of mask mandates--it's
| compliance that matters, not merely the rules.
| yucky wrote:
| Don't New York and Florida have essentially identical
| rates of infection though?
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| merpnderp wrote:
| What article are you talking about because the one you
| mentioned doesn't say what you state it does?
|
| It does not go on to make further judgements of masks as you
| stated. And it's not very long. Are you conflating an article
| from somewhere else?
| godelski wrote:
| The article is talking about another article. I'm talking
| about the other article. The one that was originally flagged.
| Arnavion wrote:
| I assume merpnderp understands perfectly well which article
| you were talking about.
|
| You said:
|
| >But reading further in the article they rise doubt about
| masks in general, which is something we know is highly
| effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't
| say masking is effective, they continually question if it
| is.
|
| There are five parts of the article that contain the word
| "mask":
|
| 1. On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and
| Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the
| results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need
| for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in
| Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's
| Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that
| schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times
| more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.
|
| 2. "You can't learn anything about the effects of school
| mask mandates from this study," Jonathan Ketcham, a public-
| health economist at Arizona State University, told me.
|
| 3. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of
| these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in
| which they should be required in schools. But the data
| being touted by the CDC--which showed a dramatic more-than-
| tripling of risk for unmasked students--ought to be
| excluded from this debate.
|
| 4. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study
| ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may
| not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the
| question. Any public official--including and especially
| Walensky--who purports to follow the science should toss
| this one in the trash.
|
| 5. Hopefully, we see something similar [death rate not
| rising in DC despite a spike in cases, as with delta] with
| omicron, though everyone should prepare for Democratic
| officials to bring back mask mandates (and maybe lockdowns)
| in response to rising cases. Mayor Muriel Bowser will
| probably reinstate D.C.'s mask mandate--just as soon as her
| own holiday parties are over.
|
| None of these are, as you claimed, "continuously
| questioning if wearing masks is effective". (1) describes
| the study that is the subject of the article. (2), (3) and
| (4) are specifically saying, exactly as the submitted
| article describes, that they _don 't_ think wearing masks
| is _ineffective,_ just that this study doesn 't prove that
| they _are effective._ (5) is just saying people should
| expect masks to become mandatory again for everyone soon.
|
| (And to be clear, the parts of the article that I didn't
| quote above don't question the effectiveness of masks
| either. In fact, the part about college campuses being
| closed due to omicron specifically points out that vaccines
| have not been sufficient to prevent that from happening.)
|
| You're welcome to say that you think the article's title is
| suggestive of something the article doesn't claim. I happen
| to agree; I think it's clickbait. But your points about the
| _content_ of the article are unfounded.
| relaxing wrote:
| That article linked to this article
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 on a
| controlled randomized study that claims "Mask distribution
| and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce
| symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections."
| umvi wrote:
| > which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a
| physics point of view)
|
| This in itself is a tricky claim to make with confidence. I
| agree we know certain types of masks (N95) are highly effective
| at preventing spread of airborne illness _if_ worn properly.
|
| But... in the context of the article you referenced, are you
| prepared to defend the claim that cloth masks which haven't
| been washed for months and are frequently touched, adjusted,
| and worn incorrectly by kids and teens are "highly effective at
| preventing spread of airborne illness"?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You adjusted the parent's assertion by saying "worn
| incorrectly by kids and teens" where they only said "masks
| are effective".
|
| Sure the original article was talking school mandates, but
| that wasn't the parent's point.
|
| I don't understand how anyone can assert that masks are not
| useful in preventing the spread of airborne saliva and mucus
| particles. Have you never in your life had someone talking
| toward you and had some spit land on you? Have you ever been
| to a salad bar and seen a sneeze guard? Do you cover your
| mouth when you cough?
|
| Particles spread a lot when forcefully exhaling, and not just
| when coughing or sneezing.
| umvi wrote:
| Yeah but my point was the claim that "wearing masks is
| highly effective" needs more qualifiers.
|
| There are many kinds of masks and many different
| communicable diseases. A cloth mask will not block covid
| aerosol transmission at all, and covid is known to transmit
| via aerosol. A cloth mask may prevent some spread via
| droplets, but it's unclear if it's "highly effective" or
| just "marginally effective" or even "ineffective" given how
| often people touch and adjust cloth masks and how rarely
| people wash them.
| godelski wrote:
| Cloth masks definitely prevent said spit that lands on
| you but not fine aerosols. My point was how effective,
| not if
| stickfigure wrote:
| The science on _cloth_ masks is pretty settled - they are
| ineffective at preventing covid transmission.
|
| Huge study by pro-masking people at Stanford and Yale,
| N=350,000: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-
| news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
|
| Cloth masks had no statistically significant effect on
| the transmission of covid. There is good news though - a
| 20% increase in masking with _surgical_ masks resulted in
| a 10% decrease in transmission.
|
| You should consider _cloth_ masks to be purely
| psychological protection.
| mike00632 wrote:
| "not statistically significant" means you cannot draw
| conclusions from it. You're mistaken when you draw the
| conclusion that masks are not effective.
| stickfigure wrote:
| When we're talking about well-executed studies with
| N=350,000 I think the practical conclusion is pretty
| obvious. This is not an underpowered study. The effect
| size was tiny.
| nmz wrote:
| Nice logical fallacy you got there. move that goalpost.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Just because inferior masks poorly handled aren't worth much
| doesn't mean masks aren't worth much.
| merpnderp wrote:
| But it does indeed mean the mask mandates weren't worth
| much.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It means mask mandates that allow cotton masks as opposed
| to surgical masks or N95s aren't worth as much.
| merpnderp wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the CDC to explain why last year
| when they were explaining how N95 masks required expert
| knowledge to use and that us dummies in the public would
| just poke covid in our eyes if we tried to wear them, how
| exactly that changed. Are we no longer dummies and
| capable of using masks without poking covid in our eyes
| or were they lying? And if they were lying, how many
| people died from using inferior masks since then based on
| the lie that cotton masks are somehow useful.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| Which is what they were.
|
| So we all agree they weren't worth much.
| relaxing wrote:
| I had to scroll pretty far to find someone willing to address
| the substance of the article. Kudos to you.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| literallyaduck wrote:
| It would be nice if a case was brought for libel and all Facebook
| and the fact checker communication was subpoenaed to show a clear
| instruction and bias to mislead. Without paying a price they will
| continue to gas light, lie, influence elections with funding from
| foreign powers.
| IsThisYou wrote:
| rvz wrote:
| So fact-checking has become a new way of distorting and censoring
| articles that have credible sources but seem to disagree with the
| overall bias of the platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
|
| Maybe one should just go back to the age old saying: _' Don't
| believe everything you read on the internet.'_ Given that even
| these so-called _' independent fact-checkers'_ can also be wrong.
|
| Who checks the 80+ so-called fact-checkers? Or the _' trusted
| news initiative'_ [0], which Meta (Facebook) is part of?
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-
| initiative...
| Clubber wrote:
| Unverifiable theory, but I think when the news was just the few
| media companies who ran TV and newspapers, selling a narrative
| was easy. Look how easily we got tricked into going into Iraq
| and staying in Afghanistan for 20 years. Now that news is more
| distributed (as originally intended) by independent journalist
| on things like YouTube and substack. Not only do these
| independent journalistic outlets exist, they are more popular
| than traditional news (TV/print), making various propaganda
| efforts much more difficult to stick. This is one of several
| strategies to regain control of that propaganda channel.
| rmellow wrote:
| Sorry but there was enormous international pushback against
| it (curiously this is when they started calling French Fries
| "Freedom Fries"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmenta
| l_positions_on_th...
|
| I'm sceptical that the population that was "tricked" back
| then wouldn't be just as easily swayed nowadays. Political
| affiliation is largely an emotional matter to a great mass of
| people, and rationality has a limited role in it.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Sorry but there was enormous international pushback
| against it
|
| Sure, there was domestic pushback too, but the "trusted"
| news sources actually countered that pushback by not
| questioning the government line and bolstered the whole WMD
| fear mongering. The NYT actually apologized for it after
| the fact to try to save their reputation.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpubli
| s...
|
| The NYT, et al also refused to publish the Snowden
| revelations until they absolutely had to (after the
| guardian pushed it). Same with the Clinton/Lewinsky thing.
| They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop either,
| which, like it or not, is "fit to print." There were also
| quite a few anti-Assange articles if I recall.
| loceng wrote:
| I've seen multiple hit pieces to defame on "fact check"
| articles including on Reuters - which prior to that I thought
| was credible as a brand. These hit piece articles aren't
| balanced either and I even contacted a site once to ask for
| citations for their counter-claims - not to mention the other
| dishonest tactics to diminish someone's arguments/statements,
| where they didn't actually list any author, where they promised
| to respond within 48 business hours to all inquiries - but that
| was months ago and I haven't heard back. These are all for show
| but people trust them because they look good, just like poorly
| done science dressed up to look like it's science to the
| layperson - but then used as a primary citation by bad actors
| or incompetent ideologues who want to push a certain narrative
| or toe the line to not cause friction in their life. We need to
| figure out proper trust networks again, and how to teach/train
| everyone to be critical - and provide the time for this, and
| societally, culturally, make this process perhaps the sole
| thing we put on a pedestal - truth, the base or other side to
| coin of love.
| mikotodomo wrote:
| > The article in question was this one: "The Study That Convinced
| the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
|
| Shouldn't be surprising that something so close sounding to anti-
| masking is automatically blocked. Just tell them if it's an error
| and they will fix it.
| rapind wrote:
| My guiding principles reading news stories:
|
| 1. Fact checking is usually biased. 2. The more sensational the
| headline, the higher the chance of garbage journalism and bias.
| 3. The more boring nuance the better the chance of accuracy.
|
| If I was building a news ranking engine I would use these
| principles. It would probably be at least somewhat useful in
| filtering out the garbage, except no one would use it because the
| articles near the top wouldn't get people to click, and the only
| possible revenue stream would need to be paid since it can't be
| optimized for engagement and still function.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Boring can also have bias, frequently in the form of damping
| bad news or a painful action.
|
| On HN, shutdown and departure posts tend strongly in this
| direction. It's a general and widespread PR tactic.
|
| There's also the distraction (or bread-and-circuses) model of
| propaganda. The former Page 3 Girl in the _Sun_ , sport,
| celebrity gossip, or horse-race political coverage come to
| mind.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Might still be worth prototyping though?
| timr wrote:
| I once heard someone on a podcast (forget who) propose that the
| #1 thing that the social media platforms could do to promote
| accuracy is to establish a "moderation filter" -- something
| that looks for extreme language, and down-weights it.
|
| It's interesting to think about what the unintended
| consequences of this might be. An entire media of passive-
| aggressive political intrigue?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I don't actually like the idea of fact checking. That said, just
| because it makes X (or X%) mistakes doesn't make it a bad system.
| Not in isolation. Arguing against it because it isn't perfect is
| bad faith.
| mc_woods wrote:
| Many see just the headline, draw conclusion and may then repost /
| share, many more read only the headline. Click-bate headlines
| will fall foul. Robby (article author) - just write more accurate
| titles and the fact-checkers can't argue.
| jerf wrote:
| "Fact checking" is one of the best scams in the past couple of
| years. In this case I scare quote it because it really is _that
| specific phrase_ that I am referring to, not the process or the
| people. Somehow, labeling something a "fact check" gave whatever
| was so labeled immense authority and gravitas, merely by virtue
| of being a "fact check". It also proved it was Platonically Non-
| Partisan, because Fact Checking is just intrinsically non-
| partisan, because it's a Fact Check. Do you not trust the Facts?
|
| It was a good gig, but political partisans can't help but spend
| all the gravitas and authority they can find as quickly as
| possible, and what you see here is the account drying up. It'll
| take a while longer to complete that process but I don't expect
| people to have any more trust in "fact checks" than anything else
| in 5 years.
|
| "Fact checks" are nothing special. Political partisans have been
| "fact checking" each other forever, complete with
| misrepresentation, failures to even _read_ the thing they 're
| fact checking, all the usual errors. They just didn't _call_ it a
| "fact check". Merely labeling something a "fact check" changes
| nothing, and quite obviously did not impose any sort of higher
| standard on the so-called "checkers" either. Nor does Facebook
| have any authority or capability in any sense of the term to
| bless any particular "fact checker" with them being anything more
| that Facebook's official opinion. (In this, their argument in
| their lawsuit is completely correct.)
|
| Of course, that causes problems. If Facebook indeed somehow has
| direct access to the Fountain of Truth, they can perhaps be
| justified in decorating the speech of other people with the Truth
| from this fountain. If, on the other hand, they're just opinions,
| that raises a whole host of questions. Why do they feel like they
| can decorate other people's speech with their own opinions? On
| what basis do they declare these "facts"? How amazing it is that
| Facebook, a corporation whose purpose is to serve ads and
| incidentally provide a service to people to gather information
| for those ads, are also medical experts, political experts, and
| experts of all sorts of other things. What accountability will
| Facebook have when it turns out their opinions, which again I
| remind you include very strong _medical_ opinions, are wrong?
| (Don 't get too caught up on Coronavirus specifically; having
| started making _medical_ decisions we can believe they will
| continue to do so. Even if you believe they have the perfectly
| correct balance of Truth today, there is no reason to believe
| that will continue indefinitely. And with their leverage, they
| have the capability to multiply the consequences of error hugely,
| perhaps more than anyone else.)
|
| If they are not lofty, impartial experts graciously spending
| their money to guide the masses to the Truth, then they almost
| immediately collapse into something more like arrogant jerks who
| bully their particular biases onto people with the threat of
| kicking them off the world's largest platform if they don't
| conform.
|
| One imagines that Facebook would not prefer to be seen that way.
| They've really bet rather a lot on the Fact Check mythos.
| nllsh wrote:
| Was the study bogus?
|
| Reading the article
| (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/mask-gui...)
| from the Atlantic that this article is truncating as well as the
| original study
| (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7039e1.htm?s_cid=mm...)
| you might find that the Atlantic article presents the following
| arguments towards the point that the study has serious flaws,
| they are as follows:
|
| 1. The author (David Zweig) points to
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/school-mas...
| as proof of skepticism about the costs and benefits of mandating
| that children 2-12 wear masks in school. That article begins with
| the statement "The potential educational harms of mandatory-
| masking policies are much more firmly established, at least at
| this point, than their possible benefits in stopping the spread
| of COVID-19 in schools." but ends with the statement "Do the
| benefits of masking kids in school outweigh the downsides? The
| honest answer in 2021 remains that we don't know for sure." The
| author has failed to present a coherent thesis for their
| skepticism, and as it reads it appears that their view actually
| softens by the end of the piece.
|
| 2. David Zweig begins their second critique of the Arizona study
| with, "This estimated effect of mask requirements--far bigger
| than others in the research literature--would become a crucial
| talking point in the weeks to come." yet this is a fundamental
| misread of the study that happens often in science reporting.
| They study actually says, "In the crude analysis, the odds of a
| school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools with no mask
| requirement were 3.7 times higher than those in schools with an
| early mask requirement (odds ratio [OR] = 3.7; 95% CI = 2.2-6.5).
| After adjusting for potential described confounders, the odds of
| a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools without a mask
| requirement were 3.5 times higher than those in schools with an
| early mask requirement (OR = 3.5; 95% CI = 1.8-6.9)." This is not
| a _causal_ statement, it is a _correlative_ one. This is to say
| that the study does not make the point that the mask mandates
| cause reduction in covid outbreaks, but that those schools with
| mask mandates _clearly_ experience fewer outbreaks. This
| conflation is made many times throughout the rest of the article.
| It matters because, like most science, the study adds to our
| understanding of reality, and if we misunderstand the science it
| 's likely we are misunderstanding reality.
|
| 3. Jonathan Ketcham is quoted, at first without an actual point,
| as saying: "You can't learn anything about the effects of school
| mask mandates from this study". This isn't really an argument so
| it's interesting that it's made it into the an article on the
| science section of the Atlantic. It also shows that Jonathan
| Ketcham may have conflated causation and correlation as well.
| Without naming them or providing any other attribution, the
| article then makes an implicit argument from Ketcham's quote:
| "His view echoed the assessment of eight other experts who
| reviewed the research, and with whom I spoke for this article.
| Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these
| experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they
| should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the
| CDC--which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for
| unmasked students--ought to be excluded from this debate." So the
| experts interviewed all agreed that masks "may well help prevent
| the spread of covid" and that there "may well be contexts in
| which they should be required in schools", but the data in the
| study we are citing should be excluded from the public discourse.
| To me, this section requires a lot of brain twisting work. The
| experts (even those critiquing this study) say masks help (this
| is not a may well statement). The experts say we might want to
| mandate masks in schools. But for some reason, this study that
| finds some valid correlations shouldn't be talked about in the
| public debate. I find this nonsensical considering the article
| that wants the public to not use this research in debate must use
| the research to achieve its goal. If the author really wanted
| that data to go away it should be doing what any good scientist
| would do, which is more science. Get some more data, show that
| the models presented by the study are in fact wrong.
|
| 4. Noah Haber is quoted as saying that the research is, "so
| unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the
| public discourse." Great quote for a science article. It's got a
| lot of information to sink your teeth into. At this point in the
| article I find that I'm very annoyed by the lack of actual
| science reporting. It mostly reads as shit stirring to me.
|
| ...continued
| nllsh wrote:
| 5. David Zweig makes the argument that some schools are open
| for six weeks instead of the three. The article has some
| ambiguity here due to the writing style. Zweig states, "After
| reviewing school calendars and speaking with several school
| administrators in Maricopa and Pima Counties, I found that only
| a small proportion of the schools in the study were open at any
| point during July. Some didn't begin class until August 10;
| others were open from July 19 or July 21. That means students
| in the latter group of schools had twice as much time--six
| weeks instead of three weeks--in which to develop a COVID
| outbreak." It is unclear whether the "latter group of schools"
| here refers to those open on July 19/20 or to the group of
| schools with mask mandates. I think it's referencing the dates.
| Megan Jehn, one of the study's authors responded to this by
| saying that the median start date for the non-mandate schools
| was August 3rd and those with mandates started on average on
| August 5th. She also responded with, "It is highly improbable
| that this difference alone could explain the strong association
| observed between mask policies and school outbreaks." I would
| like to see more disaggregated data in the study but at some
| point you've gotta believe an epidemiologist when they tell you
| that your counter point isn't so good. However, Ketcham is
| quoted again here saying, "If schools with mask mandates had
| fewer school days during the study, that alone could explain
| the difference in outbreaks." I agree with Ketcham, that
| _could_ explain the difference in outbreaks. Does it, though?
| The authors of the study, who have done the work in this case
| say its improbable, the economist Jonathan Ketcham says it
| might explain the diffence. I 'm not sure this qualifies as a
| severe issue in the study, but it's something that could likely
| be put to rest with a little more public data.
|
| 6. Louise-Anne McNutt and Ketcham point to a possible detection
| error in the study. Namely, "...according to Maricopa County
| guidelines, students are considered 'close contacts' of an
| infected student--and thus subject to potential testing and
| quarantine--only if they (or that infected student) were
| unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask
| mandates may have been less likely than students in schools
| without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure."
| To this the study authors responded that it is, "highly
| speculative to make the assumption that identified close
| contacts are more likely to be tested than other students."
| This is a little harder to muddle through as we are getting a
| core argument on designing a reliable study. So, we are looking
| at the definition of an outbreak. The study states its
| definition thusly, "A school-associated outbreak was defined as
| the occurrence of two or more laboratory-confirmed COVID-19
| casesSS among students or staff members at the school within a
| 14-day period and at least 7 calendar days after school
| started, and that was otherwise consistent with the Council for
| State and Territorial Epidemiologists 2020 outbreak definitionP
| and Arizona's school-associated outbreak definition." The CSTE
| defines an outbreak thusly, "Two or more laboratory-confirmed
| COVID-19 cases among students or staff with onsets within a
| 14-day period, who are epidemiologically linked, do not share a
| household, and were not identified as close contacts of each
| other in another setting during standard case investigation or
| contact tracing." The confounding factor that McNutt and
| Ketcham are referring to, which is that if two people are
| considered an outbreak they could have caught covid from
| outside of the school instead of each other, is sort of moot
| here as the paper states they conducted adjusted logical
| regression analysis against many factors including the, "7-day
| COVID-19 case rate in the school's zip code during the week
| school commenced". That means that detection bias should not be
| present and we can be fairly certain that the definition of
| outbreak in this study is both consistent and likely means that
| the two or more cases are in fact school related.
|
| 7. Jason Abaluck makes the point that vaccination status could
| be a confounding variable. It can be! This is a flaw in the
| study that the study itself acknowledges. I'm not sure how this
| is an argument for the study being junk science. It's a little
| like one of the first probability and statistics examples I was
| taught. In this example a study was done on Coney Island where
| the scientists looked at ice cream sales and the number of
| drownings in the area. They found that there is a clear
| correlation between them as when ice cream sales went up so did
| drownings. In the study they unfortunately could not get access
| to temperature data or visitor counts. They concluded that ice
| cream sales are a good indicator of drownings. Of course, the
| reason ice cream sales and drownings are correlated is because
| people go to Coney Island when it is hot out. They also eat ice
| cream when it is hot out. With more people going to Coney
| Island there are more people that are likely to drown. The
| study did not make the claim that ice cream sales cause
| drownings, just like this study does not claim that mask
| mandates reduce covid outbreaks. However, in both cases the
| indicator is useful. In the case of mask mandates we also have
| data that shows masks reduce covid transmission in many other
| scenarios. So, yes, vaccination status is a _known_ confounding
| variable that I 'm sure the authors of the study would like to
| control for. Since they can't they did the next best thing and
| established that mask mandates are a good indicator for reduced
| covid outbreaks.
|
| 8. David Zweig attempts to reproduce some of the data himself.
| He attempts to build part of the data set used in the study for
| Maricopa county. In the end he gets the list of schools from
| the study authors. He writes, "Yet it still included at least
| three schools in Pima County, along with at least one virtual
| academy, one preschool, and more than 80 entries for vocational
| programs that are not actual schools. In response to a follow-
| up inquiry, they acknowledged having included the online school
| by mistake, while attributing any other potential
| misclassifications to the Arizona Department of Education."
| This is interesting, but ultimately the misclassification of
| some schools does not ultimately change the statistical methods
| used.
|
| This is it. Eight arguments meant to show, "...the study's
| methodology and data set appear to have significant flaws." I
| don't see the points made as exposing significant flaws.
| However, I am a simple programmer who studied mathematics and
| reads technical specifications in my spare time.
|
| At the end of the day please remember these truths. Covid kills
| a lot of people, mainly the older ones. Covid transmits via
| aerosolized bodily fluids (coughs, sneezes, breathing), and
| things like wiping your nose then touching doorknobs where
| someone does the same in reverse order. Masks, preferably well
| fitting n95 and kn95 ones, irrefutably reduce the spread of
| covid. Washing your hands well and often irrefutably reduces
| the spread of covid. The science here is icing on the cake and
| it just tells us, sometimes roughly, how _much_ these things
| help. Beyond those two things the vaccines are an entirely
| different story (because thanks Trump), but the science is more
| clear there, they also help.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Internet Fact-Checkers with de facto censorship capabilities
| funded by shady corporate interests. What could go wrong?
| criddell wrote:
| Lots of things could go wrong but nobody realistically expects
| perfection.
|
| Do you think the fact checkers have ever taken down anything
| that was total bullshit and potentially harmful? Probably,
| right?
|
| So some things could go wrong, but hopefully many more things
| go right. I also hope the process isn't static and evolves
| after failures like this one.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > So some things could go wrong, but hopefully many more
| things go right.
|
| I think way, way more things go wrong than right with "fact
| checking".
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| This was all figured out in 1517, letting the clergy be the
| sole arbiters of information does not end well.
| mannanj wrote:
| It couldn't have been figured out, because we kept the
| 1st Amendment for a reason. We figured not having the
| ruling class/big corporations/government/big media be the
| sole arbiters of information truth doesn't end well
| either.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah and they figured out how to deal with disinformation
| on social media too, which existed back in the 1500s.
| criddell wrote:
| I bet most of what they take down is bullshit claims like
| Bill Gates put a tracking chip in the COVID vaccines.
| bdhska wrote:
| > Do you think the fact checkers have ever taken down
| anything
|
| Aren't the people who take things down censors (not fact
| checkers)?
| baq wrote:
| _takes a look at facebook_ no moderation at all could happen
| unholiness wrote:
| Fact-checking sets up a seemingly-circular definition where "a
| trustworthy source is a source trusted by trustworthy sources"
|
| It reminds me of a similarly recursive definition in Google's
| original pagerank algorithm: "A popular site is a site linked
| prominently by other popular sites". for pagerank, there was a
| nice way around the issue: apply popularity iteratively.
|
| You can imagine starting with some initial guess (perhaps that
| every site is equally popular), then score sites which are
| heavily linked higher to update the score. Then, use those scores
| to weigh the value of their links (unpopular sites' links matter
| less, popular sites' links matter more) and evaluate popularity
| again, and again...
|
| Of course, this is simply a matrix multiplication applied
| infinitely many times. If the matrix is not singular (which, if
| your system is sufficiently connected, is vanishingly unlikely),
| then the final solution will converge to the eigenvector with the
| largest eigenvalue _no matter what your initial guess was_. The
| definition of popularity which seemed which recursive, wasn 't.
| It doesn't matter who you assume is popular to start with, if you
| apply the definition enough times, you will arrive at the same
| result.
|
| It makes me wonder if there is a possible computational aid to
| some of these fact-checking dilemmas, where we don't need to
| trust anyone a priori to have trust in the whole network. In
| areas where we can't look at truth as some absolutely thing, that
| doesn't mean we should we throw our hands up and say "everything
| depends on who you ask". We can still have a goal of evaluating
| things that are incredibly likely to be true, false, misleading,
| etc.
|
| Society has _lots_ of imperfect tools for evaluating information
| from those who know more than us: We can look at their past
| performance, we can understand their incentives (e.g. brand harm
| if discovered), we can check if others disagree, we can use
| quality heuristics (e.g. superficial flaws can be a sign of
| deeper flaws), we can gain some small expertise to help evaluate
| the greater experts. None of these things are perfect signals but
| they are strong signals.
|
| Currently fact-checking is cobbling together these signals
| informally, with responsibility spread out culturally among the
| organizations' internal hierarchy, the fact-checked victims
| complaining, some outsiders who bother to fact-check the fact-
| checkers, everyone's subjective trust of brands, etc. I wonder if
| there could be a more formal way to do this, where sources fact-
| check each other in a decentralized way. The ultimate score of
| trust would come _not_ from one single source of authority, but
| from a global evaluation, which anyone could calculate, of this
| recursive definition of trust.
|
| It would come with its own set of problems (google-bombing was a
| common thing in that era for rarely-searched terms) but it still
| seems like a massively useful tool, and one I've never seen an
| attempt to formalize.
| pharke wrote:
| Human nature never changes, for an entertaining take on our
| current situation see part 3 of Gulliver's Travels published in
| _1726_
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jonathan-swift/gullivers-t...
| zuminator wrote:
| I'm curious as to whether the people on this thread who are
| adamantly against fact-checking and censoring of any kind also on
| principle refuse to downvote individual posts or threads on
| online forums.
|
| A downvote is akin to fact-checking, marking a post with your
| disapproval (generally of its veracity, although it could be its
| attitude, logical coherence, or other reason). And enough
| downvotes can cause a post to disappear, to be effectively
| censored.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >But that doesn't mean the status quo is particularly satisfying.
| It's good that the fact-checker reversed course in my case, but
| needless to say, Facebook should revisit its formal, contractual
| relationship with an organization that routinely misquotes the
| people it scrutinizes.
|
| The problem is that Facebook is using fact checkers as a crutch
| to deal with the problem that...
|
| 1. They have a monopoly on the attention of gullible old people
|
| 2. As a result of this, anyone who wants to exploit said
| demographic goes through them
|
| The easiest way to actually fix the problem of gullible old
| people would be to just ban them from the platform so everyone
| else can enjoy their free speech[0] in peace. Instead, Facebook
| deliberately targets them. This is not limited to fake news,
| misinformation, or right-wing political screeds that you might
| disagree with; they are also one of the biggest platforms for
| scammers to sell fake products to that same group of people.
| Facebook, like everything else these days, optimizes for "whales"
| with high value to the business, and that just so happens to be
| gullibility.
|
| Fact checking in this sense is like the "drink responsibly" they
| whisper at the end of a beer ad. It's not for actual safety, it's
| to have something to throw at critics during a crisis.
|
| [0] "Free speech" in this context refers to a private platform,
| not the government. Yes, this is a slightly different definition
| and Facebook isn't bound by the 1st Amendment.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't see how Facebook could staff a fact-checking operation
| with a high quality army of nothing but sharp, critical thinkers
| who have excellent reading comprehension. Those kinds of people
| will tend to be educated and have real jobs.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Fact checking is a blunt instrument against the lack of subtlety
| and polarization going in internet discussions
|
| In fact, about the article concerned, even if correct in essence
| (and I don't see a reason why not) it is probably not conductive
| to good discussion. Because it wants to set a tone at the
| headline level (amongst other things).
|
| > For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought
| to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a
| good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question
|
| Exactly! (from the article in question). But it's beside the
| point. If the study is good or not is a perfect valid discussion,
| if the CDC has made a good decision it is a perfect discussion,
| except discussing this in a magazine article is BS.
|
| Because it is assigning blame and picking a side. Wearing a mask
| in a pandemic is a tiny issue, but it's being blown out of
| proportion. That study is _one_ of the inputs the CDC takes to
| take a decision (again, in a pandemic, under pressure and under
| changing scenarios). And if the CDC is wrong then revert it.
| Again, nobody is dying for wearing a mask.
|
| So, if fact-checking it was petty, the article itself was petty
| as well. Nothing of value was lost.
| vixen99 wrote:
| As another example of Facebook's 'expert fact checkers', here's
| the letter recently written to Mark Zuckerberg by the editor in
| chief and others of the British Medical Journal - which is, as
| they say, one of the world's oldest and most influential general
| medical journals.
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr-80
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So, the article was _technically_ correct, which of course is the
| best kind of correct. Author says they didn 't say there wasn't
| _any_ science behind masking in schools, just that the
| _particular_ study that the CDC is alleged to have used was
| wrong.
|
| Given that Reason is a political rag, and I doubt very much their
| intent was to further scientific discussion on the issue, I have
| a hard time getting super angry at FB in this instance. It is
| arguable how helpful their 'fact checkers' really are at
| preventing the spread of misinformation, but it doesn't seem
| malicious.
| lghh wrote:
| Calling out the CDC for using studies that will jeopardize the
| public's trust in them in a time when public trust in the CDC,
| assuming they are correctly using that trust to help thwart the
| global pandemic, is of critical importance is pretty much the
| opposite of what a "political rag" would do.
|
| It was both _technically_ correct and also correct on its face.
| I will say that the article is a bit of a rehash of the quoted
| The Atlantic article, but that should be even more reason that
| its fact-checked removal is dubious. They even have very
| similar titles, so it's not like Reason's title is particularly
| inflammatory. Is The Atlantic also a political rag?
| mike00632 wrote:
| According to Reason's headline, the CDC looked at one study
| and it convinced them that masks were effective in schools.
| Even Reason disputes what their headline implies, admitting
| it's misleading. Also, how did Reason know that that one
| study is what convinced he CDC? Isn't that totally made
| up?/Fabricated?/Fake news?/In need of fact-checking?
| Clubber wrote:
| Isn't FB also now a political rag?
| seibelj wrote:
| It does appear that any half-assed study, done on the quick
| with obviously poor data, is trumpeted immediately as "trust
| the science!", but completely obvious facts, like that no one
| in Florida is wearing masks even in tight spaces (I'm in
| Florida now, and bars / restaurants / beaches / streets are
| packed with no-maskers), yet their covid rate is lower than New
| York, California, and Massachusetts which have very strict
| requirements. It's hard for me to trust any official statement
| on covid anymore.
| mannanj wrote:
| Same. No one talks about this, especially not our "official
| organizations" who clearly have no agenda to fear monger or
| increase expansion of control and power through fear, and
| then people wonder why trust levels are so low.
|
| It takes a lot to violate ones trust, but once its there, you
| don't get it back overnight. I speculate we are at the cusp
| of no return- the only way I can see new trust in any big US
| govt organization is well what history tells us. Destruction
| and recreation.
| cbuq wrote:
| I was interested in the numbers from covid.cdc.gov
|
| Theses are 7-day metrics for positive cases. - California:
| 59,487 - Florida: 179,586 - Massachusetts: 49,628 - New York:
| 93,309
| nradov wrote:
| Case numbers are meaningless for comparisons between states
| due to inconsistencies in testing. If you want to make a
| valid comparison then look at hospitalizations and deaths,
| then adjust for differences in population demographics.
| czzr wrote:
| What's your explanation for the difference between New York
| and Florida?
| seibelj wrote:
| Florida accepted that everyone will eventually get covid,
| and the statistics for death / hospitalization rates for
| the non-immuno-compromised and non-elderly are very low, so
| they just did the "Keep Calm and Carry On" ethos and it
| became endemic much sooner. However they did have strict
| requirements for nursing homes.
|
| Basically, let everyone choose their own risk tolerance,
| and accept that we can't control this. Very slowly, after
| years of trying to fight the inevitable, liberal states are
| understanding this. But they are still pretending that a
| force-field surrounds you the moment you start eating food
| or drinking which makes masks not required at that moment,
| which is obviously absurd.
| floren wrote:
| > But they are still pretending that a force-field
| surrounds you the moment you start eating food or
| drinking which makes masks not required at that moment,
| which is obviously absurd.
|
| Here in SF the force field comes into effect the instant
| you sit down at your table and only dissipates when you
| stand up to leave... but God help you if, after a 90
| minute maskless meal, you don't put your mask back on for
| the 15 second walk to the door.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > yet [Florida's] covid rate is lower than New York,
| California, and Massachusetts
|
| If you're talking about deaths/1M pop, California (1905) is
| much lower than Florida (2905) whilst Massachusetts is
| fractionally higher (2922) but New York (3068) is
| dramatically higher, yes.
|
| If you're not talking about deaths/1M pop, which rate are you
| looking at?
| nradov wrote:
| The more relevant metric is age adjusted death rate. Age is
| the primary risk factor for COVID-19. There is a much
| higher percentage of elderly people in Florida.
|
| https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-
| age-...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| They don't seem to explain their methodology for how
| they've "age-adjusted" the figures which is a shame.
|
| But assuming these are valid numbers: by this metric,
| both California (214) and Mass. (206) are doing better
| than Florida (235) which again contradicts the claim. Or
| am I reading these numbers wrongly?
| nradov wrote:
| Yes sorry I was looking at the wrong row. Edited my
| comment above.
| peteradio wrote:
| I don't know, I think CDC may have diminished capacity in
| putting out good justification studies for it's
| recommendations/edicts. That should be called out with or
| without "bad intent". The crazy thing is that you will only
| find these bold call outs on political rags, why don't we see
| "moderate" media scrutinize the science behind the decisions
| affecting hundreds of millions?
| snurfer wrote:
| "Founded in 1968, Reason is the nation's leading libertarian
| magazine. We produce hard-hitting independent journalism on
| civil liberties, politics, technology, culture, policy, and
| commerce. As the magazine of free minds and free markets,
| Reason exists outside of the left/right echo chamber. Our goal
| is to deliver fresh, unbiased information and insights to our
| readers, viewers, and listeners every day."
|
| https://reason.com/about/
|
| Political: Unverified; Sensationalist: Unverified
|
| (Edit: small "l" libertarian does not equal political party or
| affiliation)
| setr wrote:
| The title of the reason article is: The Study That Convinced
| the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science
|
| And a quote from the article: For these and other reasons,
| Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely:
| Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this
| study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official--
| including and especially Walensky--who purports to follow the
| science should toss this one in the trash.
|
| They weren't simply technically correct -- they were being
| quite cautious about clarifying that only this study is under
| question.
|
| > Given that Reason is a political rag, and I doubt very much
| their intent was to further scientific discussion on the issue
|
| That's exactly the kind of thing "fact checkers" shouldn't be
| factoring in. What Reason says elsewhere should have little to
| no bearing on what they say here, beyond a question of less or
| more scrutiny.
|
| This isn't an issue so much of malice, but the inherent
| political bias provided by these self-declared independent
| arbiters of truth. It's a nonsensical setup.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| They were absolutely not being "quite cautious."
|
| Quite cautious would have been, "A Study That the CDC Used,"
| which connotes that the evidence was considered. Rather than
| "The Study That Convinced the CDC," which connotes that
| without this evidence, the CDC would have been convinced NOT
| to have mask mandates.
|
| They had a click bait title, and Facebook temporarily pumped
| the brakes on spreading the story.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _That's exactly the kind of thing "fact checkers" shouldn't
| be factoring in. What Reason says elsewhere should have
| little to no bearing on what they say here, beyond a question
| of less or more scrutiny._
|
| Maybe this all depends on the scope of what Meta is trying to
| do. Think of a blog dedicated to lies about the shape of the
| Earth. Let's say most of their content wouldn't pass muster,
| but they post one truthful article a week about which team
| won that week's football games, just to get published on
| other platforms. Now, people can click to honestly see who
| won the game, but all over the page are headlines full of
| lies that link to stories that would otherwise not be allowed
| on other platforms. Is this other content on the page
| included in teh fact check? I don't think Meta is open about
| that...
| Bud wrote:
| One problem I see right off the bat is: how does the author
| know that this is "the study" that convinced the CDC?
|
| He doesn't. That's made-up BS. The CDC is a large scientific
| organization that has built up a lot of credibility over
| decades. I trust it far more than any single off-the-cuff
| writer like this guy. And unless there is very strong
| evidence, I don't accept the claim at face value that CDC
| acted, or generally acts, on the basis of a single study.
| lghh wrote:
| Did you read it or the linked The Atlantic article? CDC
| representatives site the 3.5x number over and over again as
| the justification. The number came from this study. A led
| to B led to C.
| Bud wrote:
| I don't care what CDC reps cited in a single presser.
|
| Did The Atlantic conclusively report that that was the
| only data evaluated by CDC? No, of course not. Does The
| Atlantic even know? I doubt it.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| If you and I are experts, and I gave you a hundred pieces
| of evidence, and you were already convinced by the 20th
| piece of evidence, and they're all complicated and hard
| to understand, and then I gave you one more piece of
| evidence that had a really easy to understand statistic
| you could easily share with lay people, how would you
| communicate with the public? Would you purposefully avoid
| sharing the really easy to understand statistic? Would
| someone be correct that that one piece of evidence was
| "what convinced you?"
|
| You and I don't know how heavily this study weighed in
| their deliberations, and we especially don't know it to a
| degree of certainty to say " _THE STUDY_ THAT CONVINCED
| THE CDC. "
| josephcsible wrote:
| If the CDC intentionally chose to lie to the public about
| their reason for a decision, that's really really bad.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| If josephcsible intentionally chose to lie about running
| a dog fighting club, that's really really bad.
|
| I have as much evidence for my bad faith statement as you
| do for yours.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'm not saying that the CDC actually did lie in this
| case. I'm continuing the hypothetical from your previous
| comment, where you said that the CDC would be convinced
| by evidence piece #20, but then tell the public that they
| were convinced by evidence piece #21.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| They did not "then tell the public" that "the one that
| convinced them" was this one study.
|
| In communicating with the public, they happened to cite
| #21, because explaining all 21 would take too long and be
| confusing for you, and be distracting.
|
| Refuting the specific evidence in #21 does not directly
| refute the other 20, and does not make the conclusion
| "Junk Science" as the headline apparently unintentionally
| implied. And the headline had no business saying "The
| study," when they have no idea how many studies the CDC
| internally considered.
| lghh wrote:
| I don't see any evidence that they intentionally chose to
| lie. Do you?
| josephcsible wrote:
| I suppose I could have worded that more clearly. I wasn't
| saying they did in real life. I was continuing a
| hypothetical started in the comment I replied to, and in
| the hypothetical they obviously did.
| lghh wrote:
| Me: "Hi boss, because of Y the company needs to do X".
|
| Boss: "Okay".
|
| a few days later
|
| Boss: "Y is not true, we should re-evaluate X since Y is
| what convinced us"
|
| This would be a totally fair exchange and 100% correct.
| It does not matter if there are 5 other things that
| prompted me to bring this up to my boss. I hung my hat on
| Y being true and that's how I presented it. It's what
| convinced us. It shouldn't be a big deal for me, as an
| adult and a professional, to say "yep, I messed up.
| here's the other reasons to still do X."
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Doctor: "You should eat a healthy diet and exercise,
| especially because of your blood pressure readings
| today."
|
| You: "I just ran up the stairs, so that blood pressure
| reading is junk science."
|
| Doctor: "Oh, okay then, yeah, then you are unique in all
| of mankind that you no longer need to worry about a
| healthy diet and exercise."
|
| It is totally reasonable to ask for the other evidence
| they used to support mask mandates for kids, yes, for
| sure. It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for
| kids are junk science. Not yet.
|
| Should we continue our dialog with the CDC? Yes.
|
| Was the CDC intentionally basing its decisions on Junk
| Science? No.
|
| Was this one study the one that "convinced" the CDC? Some
| people in this thread (including the author) seem certain
| it was. I believe their certainty is ridiculous.
| lghh wrote:
| Your analogy is not representative of what I posted or
| what happened in the article.
|
| I think we're talking past each other.
|
| > It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for
| kids are junk science. Not yet.
|
| Nobody did this. I didn't. The posted links didn't. This
| never happened. Can you point out what you read that made
| you think this was anyone's point? In fact, the linked
| article specifically says this isn't the case.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| > Nobody did this.
|
| I am stating my belief that the article headline did
| exactly that:
|
| "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask
| Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
|
| That reads to me as click bait, which gives the
| impression, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
|
| I can state that because the headline has the phrase,
| "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science" at the end of
| it, and people are lazy readers.
|
| I'm also stating my belief that the author has NO WAY of
| knowing how many studies the CDC used to convince them to
| support Mask Mandates in Schools, so it's wildly
| inappropriate for the author to use the word "THE." They
| should have instead said "A."
| lghh wrote:
| > That reads to me as click bait, which gives the
| impression, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
|
| It strictly does not do that and neither does the article
| beyond the headline. We'll agree to disagree.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Why are you so certain that _no one_ will get that
| impression?
|
| I even gave you a reason why they would: people are lazy
| readers. Do you deny that?
|
| The phrase at the end of the sentence is what people will
| pay attention to. Do you deny that?
|
| I'm informing you: there are people who will get the
| wrong impression from that headline. Apparently among
| them, Facebook Fact Checkers.
| Bud wrote:
| CDC _does_ admit things like that, and changes its advice
| all the time based on evolving facts. Every day,
| practically.
|
| Which is why they have 100x more credibility than some
| uncredentialed anti-masker with an axe to grind.
| lghh wrote:
| I agree! In fact, they just did it with their 5-day
| quarantine recommendation. Which is why I think it's
| important that the facts they use to publicly justify
| their decision are under constant scrutiny. If they are
| not, the CDC's credibility disintegrates.
|
| I'm glad we're both on the same page.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| There are reasonable discussions to be had about the
| CDC's credibility.
|
| Then there are bad faith discussions about the CDC's
| credibility.
|
| Are you aware that repeatedly exposing someone to false
| information leads them to believe it?
|
| If you start from the belief that the CDC is credible,
| you can use phrases like, "The CDC made a mistake in
| relying on this study."
|
| If you start from the belief that the CDC is not
| credible, you would can use phrases like "CDC / Junk
| Science."
|
| You could, as another commented on this thread, say "If
| the CDC intentionally chose to lie to the public about
| their reason for a decision, that's really really bad."
|
| There's is ZERO EVIDENCE that they intentionally lied.
|
| That's like me saying, "If user lghh was involved in dog
| fighting, that's really really bad."
|
| I have no evidence of it, and it gives people a bad
| impression of you.
|
| The CDC has well-earned credibility, and the people who
| are questioning the CDC most effectively in the public
| circle (Fox News, Infowars, Joe Rogan) should have lost
| any credibility they had long, long ago. But questioning
| the CDC is profitable. People are exploiting fears to
| make money.
|
| So, if you want to engage in good faith discussions,
| that's awesome. But maybe, just maybe, avoid phrases like
| "The study (implying there was only one) that convinced
| the CDC to support mask mandates in schools is JUNK
| SCIENCE!"
| m1117 wrote:
| Please don't use facebook. Use twitter.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| Was a /s intended here?
| abernard1 wrote:
| One day, humans in the future will look in awe that a role such
| as Fact Checker was viewed with anything less than contempt.
|
| They will also remark on how odd it was that a small little dot
| in Northern California felt themselves capable of this task, and
| simultaneously did not understand why they were unpopular with
| everyone but themselves.
| dagmx wrote:
| It's depressing that the majority of the comments here are just
| reiterating the same trite arguments of authoritarianism.
|
| Whenever even mildly political posts show up on this site ,
| especially regarding US politics, it becomes a shitshow.
|
| For example, you'll find the anti-maskers/covid-deniers arguing
| that this is proof that masks are ineffective and just another
| step towards government control. That's despite the author
| actually saying anything to that effect.
|
| Then you'll have the libertarians (with some Venn diagram cross
| over) saying that fact checkers don't allow individual thought,
| without acknowledgihow damaging false information spreading on
| social media is.
|
| You'll also have well meaning progressives completely fumble the
| nuance of the situation.
|
| in the end, the issue here is the author wrote a clickbait
| blogspam specifically to exacerbate emotions, got the expected
| result and then followed it up with another to capitalize on it.
|
| Their original article had a specifically written title or "Junk
| Science" to seem more incindiary than the source they quoted
| (which used "shaky science" instead). That's a dog whistle of a
| title.
|
| Perhaps Facebook needs more nuance in their fact checking
| classification with the ability to label something as clickbait ,
| requiring authors to pick less inflammatory titles for their
| content. I suspect that would go a long way to improving social
| media anyway. Perhaps it could put the post behind a clickbait
| warning clickthrough or a strong clickbait text below the
| article. Or perhaps, like on HN, the post titles could be altered
| to directly represent the content.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| None of this should be taken as an argument against fact-checking
| either in theory or in practice. There is no set of fact checking
| policies that will be free from errors. (Indeed nor are the
| journalists who write the articles infallible, as they would
| surely admit.)
|
| What's important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and
| recognize that they are fallible too.
| bko wrote:
| I think it promotes false certainty.
|
| Also note that the fact checker errors are not random
| uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a
| political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will
| this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct
| but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will
| consider that when choosing how to check the claim.
|
| For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults
| in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in
| schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking
| does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools,
| which is not what the article was about.
| mike00632 wrote:
| On the contrary, it seems that the anti-vaxx misinformation
| is what's political. I've never seen such strong resentment
| of vaccines, public health policy and science in general
| until Republicans came out against vaccines in 2020 for
| political reasons.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I think you are conflating censorship with errors
| luckylion wrote:
| If a censor makes a mistake in censoring a book and later
| admits it, did he not censor it?
| peter_retief wrote:
| To call something fake news when it is actually true is not
| an error it is deliberate manipulation of information and
| is censorship not an error. Deliberately misunderstanding
| something is also not an error but disingenuous. Why is
| this so hard to understand?
| luckylion wrote:
| Sorry, I've misunderstood your original comment / lost
| the context between it and the parent comment. I had
| somehow read your comment to mean that it's an error, not
| censorship.
| mannanj wrote:
| What's important is fact checkers will never be right all the
| time, and we should have an inherent UI design to account for
| that and/or convey it to the user rather than the current
| "witch hunt style" where anyone who posts content is vilified
| and attacked until a later correction is made (which of course
| is done under the shadows without the erring entity making any
| kind of update to your audience that they were wrong).
|
| Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?
| crisdux wrote:
| These people aren't making honest errors. They are censoring
| opinions they don't like. It's becoming increasingly more
| absurd as time goes on.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Maybe they should stop calling themselves fact checkers and use
| a label like "our thoughts on this issue" like most people do
| when giving their opinion. Elevating their opinion to the level
| of fact is arrogant and antisocial. Don't understand why anyone
| would defend this other than perhaps a belief that the "fact"
| checkers will always be inclined to "fact" check in favor of
| their ideological bias. History shows monsters rarely obey
| their creators once they get powerful enough to break free of
| the creator's control.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| By who though? Facebook?
|
| Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent
| process with democratic legitimization.
|
| Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking
| seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that
| over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in
| that area in the future.
| beervirus wrote:
| huntertwo wrote:
| After they've already imposed their biases and censored
| information.
|
| It's ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I
| owned up to it after all.
|
| Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of
| the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is "good",
| sometimes it's "bad". But let's call a spade a spade - this
| isn't fact checking. This is bias imposition.
| mannanj wrote:
| They don't even own up to it after the fact. Fixes are
| implemented in the "shadows". These things reek and smell
| like politics.
|
| I wish I had an alternative to social media.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I wish I had an alternative to social media._
|
| That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an
| alternative to heroin."
|
| The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social
| media.
|
| This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many
| employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch
| of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001%
| situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs
| the massive harm that social media has done over the last
| decade plus.
|
| This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any
| questions?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Couldn't you just stop using it? Get a subscription to a
| local newspaper and call it a day?
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I wish I had an alternative to social media.
|
| You honestly believe that you don't? That's the problem
| right there.
| i67vw3 wrote:
| Most of the time, you need to mail them a dozen times to get
| the "fact-check" tag off from your articles. If their fact
| check is proven to be false (which it usually happens) they
| do not voluntary alter and take back their fact-check. They
| are quick to jump for bogus fact-checking, but not for taking
| back their wrong fact-checks.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Whatever, better to block the spread of medical information
| from uninformed sources even if a stopped clock is right
| twice a day. Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm
| concerned. The misinformation is worse.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's plenty of misinformation coming from MDs too. Just
| because they have an MD doesn't mean they know anything
| about topics outside of their specialty.
| mannanj wrote:
| In science you constantly have MD disagrees. How do you
| propose to reconcile this? Someone very qualified will
| inherently be "fact checked" because the information the
| fact checker acted on was old and outdated.
|
| Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what
| they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without
| an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You
| propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to
| killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and
| those with the stance to dumb down all information to the
| safest common denominator are making the social media
| experience worse for everyone else.
| brightball wrote:
| Well, the article highlighted above was censored and fact
| checked for calling out a bogus study used to support
| nationwide medical policy...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Science does make mistakes but the process in general is
| thorough enough that they are rarer than idiots dishing
| out medical advice & spreading fear on Facebook.
| brightball wrote:
| In this case, we aren't talking about science though. We
| are talking about fact checking something that accurately
| questioned the science.
|
| If what is being spread can't stand up to questioning,
| then it's merits need to be questioned even further.
| nradov wrote:
| Actually most published medical research is false.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371
| /jo...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The
| misinformation is worse."
|
| Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times.
|
| The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can
| just buy a MD in certain parts of the world?
|
| So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries
| MD's do we recognize to speak censor free?
|
| (and who are "we" btw.)
|
| And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse
| and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And
| they take ages to get along and make contracts.
|
| So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer
| bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Even the MDs shouldn't be able to speak "censor free."
| MDs also need to be, and are, held to truth standards by
| censors.
|
| But considering medical boards can strip them of their
| MD, maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false
| statements.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false
| statements"
|
| Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts.
|
| And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at
| all, if you have to be scared, that some government
| commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do
| not like your results.
| hattmall wrote:
| Lots of MDs have been censored lately.
| tomp wrote:
| Thanks, but no thanks.
|
| If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that
| sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is
| better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g.
| early-pandemic WHO announcements).
|
| I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to
| evaluate information) than in any member of any government
| (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).
| MrMan wrote:
| unfounded confidence in your critical thinking skills is
| a huge cognitive bias
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes, but what alternative is there when health
| institutions are willing to blatantly lie for political
| reasons?
| Bud wrote:
| Could we not use the word "censored" where there is no
| censorship going on?
|
| And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning
| those facts is NOT censorship. We see that claim all too
| often these days, and it's absurd.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Censorship is not inherently bad. The USA has never
| extended the general principle of freedom of speech to the
| subject of medical information, for good reason. Medical
| speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will
| take over. Organized medical societies must retain a
| monopoly on medical speech.
|
| In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored
| less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been.
| Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment
| in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or
| wants.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil
| salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must
| retain a monopoly on medical speech.
|
| Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an
| approach that absolutely will not work within the
| framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this
| by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies
| to have and show medical credentials. Those who
| fraudulently claim to have these credentials are
| viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push
| whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do
| not mislead others into thinking that they are
| credentialed.
| DarylZero wrote:
| The FDA censors medical speech. There is no
| constitutional issue.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| To my knowledge, the FDA only gets involved when you try
| to sell things because that may qualify as false
| advertisement. However, Facebook posts like the ones in
| question here don't fall under that umbrella.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way
| the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is
| censorship.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| It would be very interesting if the outcome of Facebook's
| contracted checking was to prominently indicate such
| credential or lack thereof, rather than trying to
| indicate true/false.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil
| salesmen will take over.
|
| Everybody talks about snake oil salesmen in the 19th
| century, but do you know what _doctors_ were hawking back
| then? You can find plenty of examples of garbage products
| not because of the lack of regulation but because of the
| lack of contemporary science. Even medical professionals
| at the time didn 't know any better -- or else anyone
| could have asked their doctor about Snake Oil(TM) and
| known not to try it.
|
| Today nobody is going to believe that you can cure a
| disease with "Indian blood" or any of that nonsense,
| because the information on its harms or ineffectiveness
| is widely available and not seriously in contention.
|
| The problem comes when you get to the medical information
| which is still in contention today. That's when
| censorship is the most _harmful_ because when something
| is still actively unfolding and it 's poorly understood
| with limited data, there is no basis for anyone to
| authoritatively declare something to be definitively
| true. And if the thing authorities are telling everyone
| is _false_ , censoring the people challenging them is the
| harm.
| nradov wrote:
| That is not legally correct. The FDA has some limited
| authority over _commercial_ speech by companies selling
| drugs, supplements, and medical devices. However there is
| no legal basis for the government to censor medical
| speech. It is perfectly legal for a physician (or anyone
| else) to make bullshit claims like "5G radiation causes
| COVID" or whatever. Organized medical societies have no
| special legal standing when it comes to speech.
|
| Of course Facebook has a legal right to censor anything
| they want for any reason, or no reason at all.
| DarylZero wrote:
| I didn't mean to say that that was the status quo. Just
| that it would be OK.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning
| those facts is NOT censorship.
|
| Until the "fact check" gets used by platforms to declare a
| possibly-true statement "misinformation" and censor it,
| which has happened repeatedly.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Fact checking has _no benefits_? Really? How about reducing
| the spread of harmful misinformation? Or is that not a good
| thing?
| huntertwo wrote:
| I misphrased it, the "good" result of imposing your biases
| I was referring to is preventing the spread of
| misinformation in places like Myanmar where genocide is
| rampant and amplified by social media. If there were no
| theoretical benefit, social media platforms would have
| never been pressured to start fact checking.
|
| Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good
| or bad results. But it's not in defense of the truth.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Most biases are detrimental (political, cognitive, various
| phobias), but I'm not sure that a bias toward truth ought to
| be discouraged. If "in favor of truth" and "leftist" happen
| to correlate for some particular issue, that doesn't
| necessarily mean a truth bias needs to be avoided.
|
| Nice username :)
| huntertwo wrote:
| EDIT: hello fellow hunter2
|
| I'm not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I'm more
| "leftist" than the average person, so I'm assuming I'm more
| "leftist" than the average fact checker. That doesn't mean
| I'm absent of biases towards things that are not true.
|
| The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or
| any sort of standard based one evidence to make their
| determinations. They're using politically aligned news
| sources and their own opinions.
|
| I've not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other
| "reputable" news source be fact checked even though I know
| they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and
| I've missed it - would love to see that). I've seen obvious
| bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And
| I've seen cases like this article where actual facts are
| superseded by political opinion.
|
| I'm not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that's
| not what's present. We can act all high and mighty and
| pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn't.
| We're guided by what our side says is true and don't
| question it and don't look at the science. When someone
| actually looks at the science and negates what our side
| says, we fact-check it and say it's misinformation.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Fact checking is first and foremost a political tool to
| suppress undesired opinions or truths.
|
| You start off with blatant unimportant things like flat earth.
| Then move toward stuff that will tip elections. "Son takes
| millions in bribes"
|
| Eventually you reach Chinas level were truth is whatever the
| leading politician says it is. re-eduction camps for anyone
| confused about "facts"
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Brava, you've drawn a line from "Politifact exists" to "AHHH
| WE'LL ALL BE IN REEDUCATION CAMPS". When you've calmed down,
| consider that there are reasons we should compare claims
| against reality (i.e. fact check) that are not "suppress[ing]
| undesired opinions or truths".
| MrPatan wrote:
| And you conveniently danced around the middle step that
| maybe was important and went right into the absurd one.
| Maybe you shouldn't be so calm, somebody may be pulling a
| fast one on you.
| enaaem wrote:
| The issue of fact checking is the centralisation of truth.
| Errors of fact checking have a much higher impact on society
| than the influence of news sites. Secondly, we can't assume all
| fact checking will be honest mistakes forever. Someday someone
| will be down right corrupt and will abuse this power.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I think your "someday" is now.
| dkn775 wrote:
| I was always taught in political science courses that the think
| tanks did research favoring the right or the left. This was
| instilled in me long ago - That experts will be used by
| politicians to do research (on what is a choice) that has
| findings (again - another choice being made) - which the
| politicians can use (whether they do and how are choices).
|
| Choices abound in a scenario like this, each one are the
| typically hidden sources of bias.
|
| I just don't understand why the fact check thing is seen as
| credible, to me it's just a new age version of the think tank
| dynamic but for a different time.
|
| Note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be used, as I still will
| rely on think tank research here and there. But knowing the
| source of their incentives is important.
|
| "Follow the money"
| briffle wrote:
| Colion Noir has a similar tale [0] with fact checkers at
| politifact, and gives timelines of emails, etc that is pretty
| interesting. He is all about guns, and of course, the person that
| 'investigates' him is completely against guns. He was also doxed
| by politifact. The overall process seems disturbing.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ASAxY0Roo
| VikingCoder wrote:
| See if you can spot the difference in these two headlines:
|
| "A Study That the CDC Used To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is
| Junk Science."
|
| "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in
| Schools Is Junk Science."
|
| Which one makes it seem like some evidence used should be
| discarded?
|
| And which one makes it seem like Mask Mandates have been proven
| to be a Junk Science?
|
| See that word "The" in the headline the author used? That sure
| makes it sound like the single source of evidence was wrong, and
| so therefore the conclusion is wrong.
|
| If you want to be really safe, and not clickbaity, you could even
| go for,
|
| "Mask Mandates May Be Effective, But One Study the CDC Used Had
| Deeply Flawed Methodology."
|
| That's only four characters longer than the original one:
|
| "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in
| Schools Is Junk Science."
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Flagging content with is_clickbait actually sounds quite a lot
| nicer than is_false ... You might be onto something.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Facebook makes money by hosting click bait.
|
| Facebook is worried about public perception if they host
| false information.
|
| The financial incentives are all wrong, and people make money
| with click bait headlines, so we're going to watch companies
| like Facebook wrestle with this, and sometimes make what we
| consider to be "the wrong call."
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Many people on social media read only the headline, not the full
| article. (Including here on HN.)
|
| So, it's arguable that this should be taken into account by fact
| checking. A title that is misleading is a problem even if the
| article body itself is scrupulously accurate, since way more
| people will see the headline than read the article.
|
| This is known and weaponized. A site will intentionally publish
| an accurate article with an inaccurate or misleading headline. If
| it is flagged by fact-checking, they get several more cycles of
| engagement out of complaining about the "unfair" or "biased" fact
| check, and especially if they get it reversed, as in this case.
|
| In this case the original headline was "The Study That Convinced
| the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
| That is misleading because a) the CDC considered far more than
| one study, b) which study "convinced" them is impossible to prove
| and a matter of opinion, and c) "junk science" is an
| uninformative pejorative.
|
| If the headline had been "One Study the CDC Referenced When
| Considering Mask Recommendations Had Problems," it would have
| been more accurate and less likely to be flagged. But also less
| useful to Reason in attracting attention and advancing a
| narrative.
| nova22033 wrote:
| It's their platform. They have a right to decide what's
| misleading and what isn't. You'd expect the editor of the
| Libertarian magazine Reason to understand this.
| jquery wrote:
| This thread sure attracted the racists, no surprise. They're
| furious social media doesn't let them call people racial slurs
| online, or let them spread wild conspiracy theories.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Are the fact-checkers actually real people?
|
| I'd imagine if Facebook wanted to clamp down on Coronavirus-
| related "misinformation", they'd do a sentiment analysis on any
| phrase with CDC, FDA, etc. and if the sentiment was negative or
| "bad", then it'd automatically get flagged.
|
| If there is a human in the loop, I doubt they are reading the
| full article, or have any meaningful expertise. Probably just
| reading the headline, and clicking approve.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| If a fact-check is _ever_ found to be wrong, isn 't that proof
| that the fact-checker is claiming things to be fact, when they
| aren't?
|
| I'd support a licensing system for this, at the individual and
| company level. If Facebook fact checks are ever wrong, even once,
| they lose the ability to call anything they do a "fact check".
| Same reason certain ice creams are now "frozen dairy desserts".
| polote wrote:
| One of the biggest issue with fact checking, is that fact
| checkers don't try to see if something is true or false. But they
| guess what people are going to understand from a post and then
| says whether or not those understandings are true or false.
|
| For example if you say "There is no evidence that mask has helped
| reduce the spread of covid". You will probably be fact checked as
| false, because they think people will understand "Masks don't
| work".
| lostcolony wrote:
| Well, that would be a valid thing to note as false.
|
| Perhaps you meant "in this particular study, there is no
| evidence that mask use helped reduce the spread of COVID", in
| which case, yes; people will understand it as "this study
| showed that masks don't work" rather than "this was a poorly
| conducted study"
| tomohawk wrote:
| Internet fact checkers are merely enforcing their opinions over
| other opinions.
|
| Facebook, for example, makes the claim that their fact checks are
| just opinion in trying to defend themselves in a lawsuit.
|
| https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-...
| triceratops wrote:
| I don't get why that's contradictory or bad. It's FB's website,
| FB's property. They're quite free to say "In our opinion, this
| is factual and that is false". They're under no obligation to
| allow others to say whatever they want.
|
| We wouldn't say anything about a restaurant or bar owner
| kicking out patrons because they offend other patrons or staff.
| Why is FB any different?
| john_moscow wrote:
| Because it has become the only bar in town with free booze
| sponsored by the local hospital handling drunk driving
| accidents.
|
| Make the social media platforms interoperable, and force them
| to charge the costs directly to consumers (so that the
| platforms could compete on price/quality) and people will run
| away from it like rats from a sinking ship.
| triceratops wrote:
| So all this "censorship" talk is really an XY problem[1],
| then.
|
| My honest opinion is that most people who cry "censorship"
| don't care about truth or actual freedom. They just want
| their shit to go to the widest audience possible. I'll
| change my opinion when more of the "censorship" crowd
| acknowledges that while they strongly disagree, FB (or any
| other website) has every legal and moral right to "censor"
| them, because that's also what freedom is about. You can't
| be for freedom only when it favors you.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
| josephcsible wrote:
| Even if there is an XY problem, censorship is so
| inherently evil that it needs to be stopped even if
| there's a different problem that we should be solving
| too.
| triceratops wrote:
| Is it "censorship" if I throw you out of my Christmas
| party because you got drunk and insulted my wife? Is it
| "censorship" if I throw you out of my 2000-person seminar
| because you keep interrupting? Is it "censorship" if I
| kick you out for handing out flyers for a competitor on
| my premises? Are they all "inherently evil" acts?
|
| Keep in mind, I'm using the scare quoted version of
| censorship because all of my examples are censorship by
| definition. But no reasonable person would find anything
| objectionable in them, let alone "inherently evil".
|
| I can't (and won't) stop you from saying whatever you
| want. But I don't have to let you be on my property to
| say it. I respect your freedom to say what you want.
| Please respect my freedom to enforce codes of conduct on
| my property.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > my property
|
| This phrase is key. The public square is supposed to be
| 100% censorship free. Facebook stole the public square
| from us, and is now censoring it as if it were
| legitimately private property.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Facebook stole the public square from us
|
| How? Do they control the Internet or the Web somehow? You
| and I are talking on a non-FB property right now.
|
| And even if it were true, I point you back to my previous
| comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726412
|
| All of this "censorship" scare-mongering has the
| potential to turn into a slippery slope that could
| seriously erode property rights online. Fix the actual
| problem, rather than whatever's most convenient for you
| at the moment.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Well let's say you have a certain agenda as a government, to
| prioritize a risk/reward ratio over pure freedom, and decides
| that you can afford to make everyone unhappy but alive by
| maintaining very strict information control. Say like China
| does but not just for the party, for the country itself.
|
| You can then prioritize opinions by their reward if correct vs
| risk of being incorrect. Even if you're incorrect, it's better
| to be incorrect saying mask are useful, than being incorrect
| saying mask are useless. The probability of masks worsening the
| situation is lower (but not null) than the probability of masks
| improving it.
|
| I don't see the problem with that, it's like saying "veterans
| fought for our freedom and deserve our respect" instead of
| "veterans used tax money to oppress foreigners and enforce
| national policies abroad at the detriment of most people
| involved, and they did that for money not for the country".
| There are opinions better not shared by official message to
| lead the country towards some sort of coherent path no ?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Say like China does but not just for the party, for the
| country itself.
|
| > I don't see the problem with that
|
| You're unironically advocating for us to do one of the more
| evil things that China does.
| [deleted]
| jenkstom wrote:
| Reason.com has added way too much suffering to my life to have
| any positive opinion of. Lies like this are still available on
| their website https://reason.com/1996/06/01/sick-of-it-all/
| antattack wrote:
| "they ignored important factors like varying vaccination rates;
| and they counted outbreaks instead of cases."
|
| As masks are supposed to lower outbreaks - focusing on outbreaks
| makes sense to me.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Not the point of the posted article, since it specifically
| deals with the ridiculous reasons for Facebook censoring the
| post.
|
| However, you seem to have stopped reading the Atlantic article
| after sentence you took out of context. "The authors defined an
| outbreak as being two or more COVID-19 cases among students or
| staff members at a school within a 14-day period that are
| epidemiologically linked. "The measure of two cases in a school
| is problematic," Louise-Anne McNutt, a former Epidemic
| Intelligence Service officer for the CDC and an epidemiologist
| at the State University of New York at Albany, told me. "It
| doesn't tell us that transmission occurred in school." She
| pointed to the fact that, according to Maricopa County
| guidelines, students are considered "close contacts" of an
| infected student--and thus subject to potential testing and
| quarantine--only if they (or that infected student) were
| unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask
| mandates may have been less likely than students in schools
| without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure.
| This creates what's known as a detection bias, she said, which
| could grossly affect the study's findings. (Jehn and McCullough
| called it "highly speculative to make the assumption that
| identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than
| other students.") McNutt believes that masks are an important
| prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the
| Arizona study doesn't answer the specific question it purports
| to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread
| of SARS-CoV-2."
| antattack wrote:
| Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here.
| Anyway, text quoted points out incomplete identification of
| outbreaks, not that it was not right to track them. In fact,
| it would have made no difference tracking cases because of
| school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked'
| individuals.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| >Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here.
|
| No, it's in the Atlantic article specifically linked in the
| Reason.com article. I'd suggest reading that since the
| entire thing is based off of it.
|
| >In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases
| because of school district's policy of testing only
| 'unmasked' individuals.
|
| You may want to reread this part...
|
| This creates what's known as a detection bias, she said,
| which could grossly affect the study's findings. (Jehn and
| McCullough called it "highly speculative to make the
| assumption that identified close contacts are more likely
| to be tested than other students.") McNutt believes that
| masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but
| she maintained that the Arizona study doesn't answer the
| specific question it purports to answer: whether mask
| mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
| andybak wrote:
| Sigh. Comments in this thread are predictably polarized.
|
| I personally think that fact checking is potentially damaging to
| society but so is the ability of social media to spread
| misleading claims.
|
| It's difficult to predict which is going to be worse in the long
| run. As in many things we'll probably learn to tolerate a degree
| of both and aim to find a "least worse" outcome.
|
| Anyone claiming here either that no fact-checking would be the
| best outcome or it's inverse (I can't quite formulate what that
| would be right now) is probably wrong and the messy middle is
| probably correct.
| ljm wrote:
| I think part of the problem is the polarisation in and of
| itself. It leads one to think that there are only two sides to
| any story when, in fact, there are usually several.
|
| I believe that this push for fact checking lately is a symptom
| of a larger problem. How often is there genuinely a single,
| correct version of events, and then an incorrect one, at the
| scale of humanity we're talking about?
|
| And why is it hard to bridge that gap? If you take to social
| media, it can be really hard to have a conversation between two
| politically opposed groups of people without it immediately
| jumping to aggression.
|
| Flat Earth News is an old book now but it's a worthwhile read
| still.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Agreed! The chain:
|
| "Fact" checks > Polarization > Poor discussion > People
| retract to their own bubbles where discussion isn't hostile >
| Insular communities with groupthink 1> Sharing of content
| that is agreeable to the group, but factually incorrect 2>
| Not checking factual accuracy of content because it would be
| offensive to one's loyalty to the group
| ljm wrote:
| I think this is more or less how you get to beliefs like
| "Communism isn't bad, it just hasn't been done right yet,"
| or "Social media are pushing the narrative with fact
| checking," or "Vaccines and masks are a deep-state
| conspiracy."
|
| It would be too much of a shock to have your own beliefs
| challenged in such a fundamental way, so there has to be
| another way out where you can rationalise it instead. This
| provides some comfort but the trade-off is you take a step
| further into the rabbit hole.
| mindslight wrote:
| Yeah, keeping in mind both the well known problems of
| censorship and also our societal shitshow driven by
| disinformation campaigns and other outlandish groupthink, I've
| got to ponder synthesis here.
|
| I'd like to hope that most of the problem is engagement
| amplification - eg social media's "algorithmic"
| editorialization for which they're not even S.230 immune (yet
| no one has taken them to task). Would things be so polarized if
| these companies didn't create personalized filter bubbles to
| drive engagement? Traditionally one's professed opinions had to
| survive in the scrutiny of the larger social sphere. Now no
| matter what you say, you're immediately given a soapbox and a
| tiny receptive audience.
|
| In the long run, big social media like Facebook can only end up
| being _lame_ , exactly how the nightly news has been - "the
| revolution will not be televised". Mass media inherently caters
| to the status quo, because at the very least it's owned by
| people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
| Which points to increased routine filtering that keeps
| conversation within a nice small Overton window as it has
| traditionally been - that is to say, lame. In a way the rise of
| Zuck is an aberration indicating that when you get insanely
| powerful, there is no large mahogany table of stuffy old guys
| that sits you down and immediately brings you into their
| conspiracy "or else" - rather the overall dynamic happens
| slowly.
|
| I also hope there is a growing up process being done by non-
| internet-natives newly buffeted by raw unfiltered media, en
| masse. Twenty years ago I was exposed to chemtrails theories,
| NSA mass surveillance, 9/11 was an inside job, Austrian
| economics, sovereign citizens - ideas that put you directly at
| odds with society, with differing kernels of truth (or not). No
| matter how much some resonated with me I was never going to
| start steadfastly preaching back in the real world, because the
| impedance mismatch was too large. Eventually you gain a sense
| of wisdom about the implications of these various theories and
| the cost of acting on them (regardless of their validity).
|
| What I see missing today is any of this wisdom - sure
| vaccination _could_ be a government sterilization campaign, but
| since you 've made it through life so far generally trusting
| institutions including large corporations, perhaps following
| the actions implied by the conspiracy theory is imprudent.
| Maybe I'm being overly hopeful too, or this dynamic won't be
| reached because of a critical mass creating its own social
| proof, or it will take a few old generations to pass on and new
| generations steeped in the Internet's hostile noise to develop
| collective social wisdom.
|
| Or maybe global communication is just the Great Filter.
| bdhska wrote:
| > fact checking is potentially damaging to society
|
| Why do you think this? I am struggling to understand.
| andybak wrote:
| The argument would be along the lines of "It will stifle
| debate and silence voices on topics outside the orthodox
| view. A simple glance through the history of science shows
| many ideas now regarded as fact were initially heretical and
| outside the mainstream. Open discussion of controversial
| ideas is healthy."
|
| which is obviously reasonable. However it needs to be
| balanced against the other problem we face - widespread
| dissemination of inflammatory misinformation, in many cases
| by nation states deliberately sowing dissent.
| dundarious wrote:
| Fact checking as it is currently practiced is counter-
| productive: unknowable things are called "facts", and
| "pinocchios" are given even if you're factually correct just
| because (being charitable myself here) the checker things
| you're not being charitable enough to their political
| faction.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| I keep seeing allusions to this bias.
|
| Can you point to any mainstream fact checking organizations
| that are consistently biased and any specific fact checks
| that illustrate this?
| dundarious wrote:
| Please don't dismiss it just because of the source or its
| focus on Sanders.
| https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/washington-post-
| sanders-b...
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| I take your point and, while there's some subjectivity
| there, that may well be an example of fact-checking done
| in bad faith.
|
| I'm just not sure that it is happening at scale though.
| But I do agree that, to the extent that it is happening,
| it is particularly egregious when done under the guise of
| fact-checking versus, say, your standard tilted article.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Yeah, the problem here is that there is so much disinformation
| that we need fact checking in the first place. Once you've
| gotten to that point, there will be no perfect solutions.
|
| But IMO, we're far better off having organizations at least
| attempt to fact check, even if they get it wrong from time to
| time. The alternative is an open fire hose of unchecked
| disinformation, and I'm not sure how we survive that.
| luckylion wrote:
| Do fact-checks work? That is, if they fact-check an article
| claiming that Bush did 9/11, are there significant amounts of
| people who say "oh, I thought he did. But I guess not,
| thanks, fact checkers"?
|
| The things that get fact checked tend to be more tribal, so
| most people either believe it or not, and tend to understand
| the fact-checkers as mostly biased against them if they don't
| agree with the result. Fact-checking is pretty useless in
| that situation, and people will start considering it as a
| biased tool ("they only fact-check what my side is saying and
| start splitting hairs, but they never fact-check what the
| other side is saying"). I don't think you can solve a tribal
| conflict by trying to present selected facts.
| andybak wrote:
| I think this ignores the fact that the "tribes" are
| dynamic. People join, leave, sub-groups form etc. Nobody
| was born believing in Pizzagate. People with more moderate
| views can become radicalized and leaving misinformation
| unchallenged must at least sometimes contribute to this.
| luckylion wrote:
| You'd have to step in super early though, wouldn't you?
| If you have people at the level where reading about
| Pizzagate will make them a believer, I reckon you've
| already lost them. What leads them to that kind of
| thinking? Will a generic "the elites just look after
| themselves" feed that kind of thinking? Should we fact-
| check it and say that it's false because of some counter-
| example?
|
| I have no idea when people get onto a slope that leads
| them to believing that reptilians are ruling the country,
| but I doubt that there's a right moment where you can
| hide content from them and not make them think "aha,
| they're trying to hide something from me ... I wonder
| what it is". At that level, I assume, there's a good
| chunk of paranoia involved, and paranoia doesn't really
| need a certain fuel.
| lovecg wrote:
| Fact checking is a fig leaf that allows you to apply
| further content decisions. You can't just stop promoting or
| ban a piece of content outright without some ground rules;
| a "fact check" acts as a filter that enables you to do so.
| It doesn't matter if the target audience believes the fact
| check or not if they never see the content as a result of
| it.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| They're definitely not perfect, and they will be
| ineffective at times.
|
| But there is a need for sources of factual information, so
| it is a worthwhile objective. And, I think there is a lot
| of usage for fact checks, wherein reasonable people who are
| not tribalists just want to sort through competing
| information.
|
| And remember, fact checks also include removal of
| disinformation (i.e. not just leaving in place and
| providing commentary). So at a minimum fact checks can slow
| the propagation of disinformation by simply making it
| unavailable.
| luckylion wrote:
| > reasonable people who are not tribalists just want to
| sort through competing information
|
| Hmm, maybe. I've always assumed that you go to reddit,
| twitter or facebook with your mind made up and a need for
| validation or the wish to tell everyone -- it's social
| media after all, not news media, and you'd go some news
| site to get your fix, or to Wikipedia if you want to
| learn about some topic de jour.
|
| The removal of (dis-)information is what I'm least
| comfortable with. We've pretty much always called it
| misinformation when we censored something, but it hasn't
| always stood up to the test of time. I have to admit
| however, that I've never personally come across a fact-
| checked link, so I don't have a good intuition where most
| of it is between "ban that opinion, I don't like it" and
| "this is insane and they have pitchforks, we better shut
| this down".
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _I 've always assumed that you go to reddit, twitter or
| facebook with your mind made up_
|
| Well, that definitely happens, and maybe I'm thinking
| more of independent fact-checking sites like Snopes,
| where people visit explicitly to verify the veracity of
| something.
|
| > _The removal of (dis-)information is what I 'm least
| comfortable with_
|
| I understand, but, unfortunately, we have an absolute
| explosion of explicit disinformation.
|
| The funny thing is that the notion of being uncomfortable
| with removing disinformation is itself partly the product
| of the idea that there are no objective facts. And, that
| is a function of how successful the firehose of disinfo
| has been at attacking the value of truth and the
| existence of objectivity.
|
| So, we kind of conflate removing disinfo with undertaking
| a subjective political act.
|
| But, not long ago, it wasn't so easy to argue base
| reality.
| luckylion wrote:
| I don't believe that there are no objective facts, but I
| do believe that we're generally pretty bad at observing
| objective reality and once we get above some level of
| complexity, "facts" isn't a good term. I don't think you
| need an attack on the value of truth and the existence of
| objectivity to have issues with "truths" about complex
| systems. We've had plenty of truths about the economy,
| and we've corrected them lots of times as well. If anyone
| asked you to fact-check some claim about the effects of
| raising the minimum wage to $25/hr, what objective truth
| do you look to? Do you ask 20 economists what their gut
| feeling is and say "that's it then"? Do you just reject
| the question?
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Largely true, but I think it's a matter of degree. That
| is, the set of facts that society generally agreed upon
| was once much larger and less tribally-driven.
|
| I think your example about the economy is perhaps not
| well-fitted to the argument I'm making. We've always
| allowed for the interpretation of facts in certain fields
| or areas of society. So, areas of subjectivity were well
| circumscribed and expected.
|
| Thus, for instance, it is well-known and accepted that
| people will offer different opinions on the impact of
| raising the minimum wage. And it is known that the answer
| depends on a complex set of variables that can earnestly
| be interpreted differently.
|
| I think this is qualitatively different from, say,
| suggesting that a person did or did not say something or
| that an event did or did not occur, or even offering up
| something like Qanon with no evidence.
|
| This latter paragraph is what I would describe as
| comprising objective facts/reality. And, that's what's
| changed most dramatically.
| defaultname wrote:
| "Fact checkers made a mistake" articles draw out a certain
| crowd, and their over the top rhetoric is always the same. The
| dominant narrative in here is unlikely to correspond with the
| public at large, or even the majority of HN users.
|
| This is a particularly weird submission because the article the
| person authored was basically blogspam. They took someone
| else's hard work, put a clickbait title on it intending for the
| sole value of pandering to a very specific audience, now
| getting to double down under the auspices of "my blogspam was
| suppressed" narratives.
|
| And I suspect that the article came under the attention of
| Facebook because it, exactly as intended by the author, fed
| directly to a certain crowd that absolutely consumes and
| propagates fake news (not like "it's open to debate", but just
| astonishingly nonsensical junk that just makes a wider and
| wider audience of the gullible and misled). Being embraced by
| that crowd is probably the biggest indicator to such systems,
| and 9 times out of 10 it's probably spot on.
| mavhc wrote:
| That's because facts have a well known liberal bias
| evv555 wrote:
| I think that's a false dichotomy. If social media is so
| disruptive to society then costs shouldn't be externalized onto
| citizens but the corporations.
|
| * Force transparency on the engagement metrics and the
| algorithms they drive.
|
| * Have C level executives face prison time.
|
| * Force data interoperability or break up the SM monopolies.
|
| All of these options are less extreme then restructuring
| society around social media corporations and their
| stakeholders.
| andybak wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand this part
|
| > costs shouldn't be externalized onto citizens but the
| corporations.
|
| what costs do you mean? Costs in the broadest sense? That's a
| very amorphous type of cost.
|
| > Force transparency on the engagement metrics and the
| algorithms they drive.
|
| We can mostly infer this already and that knowledge isn't
| helping much
|
| > Have C level executives face prison time.
|
| This will have hard-to-predict consequences that may or may
| not be better than the status quo. We're trying to find a
| balance between free speech and misinformation. Harsh
| punishments are a blunt weapon.
|
| > Force data interoperability or break up the SM monopolies.
|
| Not sure how this would solve the problem under discussion.
| It would merely spread it over a larger surface area.
| evv555 wrote:
| >what costs do you mean? Costs in the broadest sense?
| That's a very amorphous type of cost.
|
| It's clear facebook and twitter are primarily funnels
| towards polarizing content presented in disjointed snippets
| which makes real discourse impossible. This is a product of
| corporations chasing "engagement metric" at the cost of
| social corrosion and polarization.
|
| >We can mostly infer this already and that knowledge isn't
| helping much
|
| Who is "we" in this sentence? Not the average citizen.
|
| It's not just about inferring but really understanding and
| improving upon.
|
| >This will have hard-to-predict consequences that may or
| may not be better than the status quo. We're trying to find
| a balance between free speech and misinformation. Harsh
| punishments are a blunt weapon.
|
| We're already down the path of hard-to-predict
| consequences. The root cause of GROWING engagement with
| misinformation is the architecture of social media. Social
| media needs to find balance with free speech not the other
| way around.
|
| >Not sure how this would solve the problem under
| discussion. It would merely spread it over a larger surface
| area.
|
| Two reasons why it might help. Moderation makes more sense
| in the context of smaller communities. The corrosive nature
| of social media is in large degree how it's been executed.
| We need a diversity of examples to see what works and what
| doesn't.
| [deleted]
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I am 44 and if I had to sum up what I've learned in my life into
| one concept it would be this:
|
| The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain. Therefore,
| be open to new ideas, but slow to accept anything as absolute
| truth. Those in power push narratives. Conflicts of interest make
| data questionable. "Experts" are just people with their own
| inherent biases. And often we simply learn new things.
|
| Therefore, I can think of very few things more damaging to
| society and free speech than "fact checkers". Almost always I
| find that their "facts" are nothing more than the "opinions" of
| the most powerful and influential group at the time, and are
| usually entangled with politics. In short, "fact checkers" don't
| actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are
| quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of
| real, actual truth.
| steelstraw wrote:
| It's the same as the Ministry of Truth. Orwellian and arrogant
| to the extreme and will always be abused by those in power.
|
| Who fact checks the fact checkers?
| [deleted]
| tiahura wrote:
| I'm a bit older and concur.
|
| One issue driving it is the abandonment of personal
| responsibility for any aspect of our lives. Americans have it
| constantly drilled into them to expect authority figures to
| take the lead on providing our basic necessities, handling
| workplace disputes, obtaining medical care, etc., why should we
| be surprised that they've lost the ability to think for
| themselves?
| awb wrote:
| > The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain
|
| It's really challenging for me to speak in a way that's
| unarguable. For example, instead of saying "COVID is now...",
| saying "I read an article that says COVID is now...".
|
| The first sentence is arguable, the second is unarguable
| because it's my personal experience. How often do you read
| articles or reporting that state unarguable truths?
|
| Even a slight tweak from "COVID cases are spiking..." to "The
| NY Department of Health released data showing an X% increase in
| reported COVID cases statewide" makes a lot of difference in
| how I perceive the potential bias or truthiness of the content
| I'm reading.
| dkn775 wrote:
| Strongly agree. A lot of choices are made in the use of
| language.
|
| This happened a lot with the Jan 6th event. Some even proudly
| labeling it an insurrection when they made statements I
| noticed. It was like the language choice was used fearlessly.
|
| The Covid headlines as you mention are another huge one. Ive
| heard surge so many times and it's been completely remade
| into an indication of a massive spike no matter the real
| context.
|
| Even if the cases really surging, I've always hated the use
| of words that take the ability away from the reader to tell
| for themselves what happened.
|
| A similar issue is in finding raw video of events, like
| rittenhouse shooting. So much of the results were
| subjectively selected clips w the news anchors speaking over
| it. I don't want to be told what happened, I want the raw
| facts.
| xtracto wrote:
| The truth... the _real_ truth is sometimes even scientifically
| impossible to find, like it is parodied in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-WVg1SsA
| jhedwards wrote:
| > "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases
|
| I get where you're going here, and I don't totally disagree,
| but that's not "just" what experts are. Typically experts are
| people who have spent far more time than other people doing
| exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and
| cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources,
| and testing hypothesis.
|
| It's good to be skeptical, and it's important to understand
| that experts have bias too, but there's a difference between
| someone who has passively consumed information in a biased
| manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive
| at their viewpoint. Being able to consume and be critical of
| information from biased experts while still benefiting from and
| being enriched by their knowledge and expertise (instead of
| disregarding it because you disagree) is I think the crown
| jewel of "critical thinking".
| cogman10 wrote:
| It honestly makes me really nervous for the future. There is
| a LOT of distrust in experts that I see across the internet
| (and here in HN).
|
| While there are bad actors, consensus is generally going to
| guide you closer to the truth than fringe experts. What does
| the community of experts who have studied this say about it?
| Is it something generally accepted by the experts or is it
| something that most experts disagree with?
|
| It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will
| succumb to bias. Climate change is the poster child here.
| Where experts disagree isn't that it is happening and caused
| by man, they disagree about the degree that it will be a
| problem (With all of them agreeing it's a major issue). Yet,
| I've often seen it claimed that those experts are all biased
| and this fringe expert funded by Koch research is really the
| one to be trusted (which, shocker, finds we should be burning
| MORE fossil fuels!)
| fallingknife wrote:
| Then stop censoring. Look at what happened in this post.
| Experts said X, the author said Y, and Y was censored
| because it disagreed with the experts. Later the experts
| admitted that X was incorrect. Of course, the experts, who
| ended up being wrong faced no consequences, while the
| author who ended up being right was censored. The experts
| are essentially a privileged class whose opinions are
| considered to be true by default, and when they get things
| wrong, it is assumed that this is just a good faith
| mistake, and forgiven. Everybody else is assumed to be
| wrong by default, and spreading politically motivated
| misinformation. When they are right it is assumed to be a
| fluke and swept under the rug. In this environment the only
| logical response is to mistrust the appointed "experts." If
| they are what they say they are let them defend their point
| against all challengers.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > Then stop censoring.
|
| And stop dissembling. For instance, Fauci's early
| statements on mask-wearing were calculated to preserve
| the supply of N95 masks for medical personnel. However
| laudable the intent, it betrays what I imagine is an
| endemic world-view that the masses must be manipulated,
| rather than dealt with honestly.
|
| This morning, an NPR report about the new CDC quarantine
| guidelines acknowledged criticisms/allegations of
| corporate lobbying for the policy change and internal
| fears of staffing for critical services, which was
| followed-up by a "follow the science" platitude.
| sutuplesu wrote:
| Facebook's actions keep being cast as if there is a
| completely open, level, neutral field that the censorious
| fact checkers are now distorting. But that's _not_ the
| starting point. Facebook _already_ has its thumb -- if
| not both hands and an elbow! -- on the scale, as far as
| what content is dispersed. The view is distorted to begin
| with, by Facebook choosing what is promoted and what is
| not.
|
| They may not be doing a particularly good job un-
| distorting it, but it's not a choice between pure and
| free exchange of information and censorship. It is
| between whether Facebook is going to manipulate in both
| directions -- promoting _and_ taking down -- or just one.
|
| (Note that I don't think either of these choices are
| particularly good. I would prefer that Facebook did
| _neither_.)
| nradov wrote:
| Expert consensus has some value, but it's often too subject
| to inertia and fails to adjust fast enough to new evidence.
| Up until 1982 the medical experts told us that peptic
| ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Except that
| was totally wrong.
|
| https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-
| History.asp...
|
| What else could they be wrong about today? Often when you
| really dig into consensus statements you find that they're
| based on a handful of old studies which don't really meet
| modern evidence based medicine criteria.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The problem I have with statements like these is they
| focus on the misses while ignoring hits.
|
| Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the
| spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s.
| Has that consensus been wrong?
|
| What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an
| effective treatment against (most strains of)
| streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?
|
| You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times
| and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to
| change course. However, for every example of the experts
| "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you
| are better off following the consensus. Further, as time
| goes on, the process of developing consensus improves
| itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions
| and corrects for those faults in future studies.
|
| It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be
| wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong
| expert consensus says about something in that field of
| study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right.
| Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This
| expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the
| time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an
| expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of
| very strong research backing the claim, you've got no
| footing to really go against the consensus.
| nradov wrote:
| I agree that expert consensus is more often right than
| wrong. However you have no scientific basis for claiming
| that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up
| that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown,
| and indeed unknowable.
|
| My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates
| vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle
| physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%.
| Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%.
| Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
|
| Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping
| recommendations based on flawed or limited research
| rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust
| is lost it takes a generation to regain.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > However you have no scientific basis for claiming that
| they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that
| number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and
| indeed unknowable.
|
| > My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates
| vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle
| physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%.
| Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%.
| Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
|
| All fair points that I don't really disagree with.
|
| > Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping
| recommendations based on flawed or limited research
| rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust
| is lost it takes a generation to regain.
|
| I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should
| limit recommendations based on the data and be very open
| when "the data is limited and more information could
| change our recommendation".
|
| But I don't think that means they need to be silent when
| data is limited, just careful with communication.
|
| Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of
| thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be
| limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You
| can't just sit back and do nothing.
|
| But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank
| about why you are taking actions and how confident you
| are that the actions you are taking will be effective.
| COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but
| it could be worse.
|
| As for trust and credibility, I think a major social
| issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts
| over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for
| some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious
| leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree
| with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but
| I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong
| statement causes people to lose all trust in expert
| credibility. That's not something I could control
| anyways.
| nradov wrote:
| Actually action is not required. In the medical field if
| you aren't legitimately confident about the effects of a
| particular action, both positive and negative, then it's
| better to sit back and do nothing (while conducting
| additional research).
|
| "First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical
| ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment
| is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The
| default should always be to do nothing unless there is
| clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That
| applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.
|
| https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-
| building-a-...
|
| I understand that politicians might sometimes have to
| take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't
| deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions
| are supported by scientific consensus.
| clairity wrote:
| given that knowledge is practically infinite (bounded
| only by the expanse of the universe), you'd actually
| expect the correctness of scientific consensus to
| asymptotically approach 0. that is, we're waaaaaay more
| wrong than right, and waaaaay more often, before we get
| it right, especially as knowledge gets more fractally
| intricate and expansive.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That'd only be true if expert consensus covered all
| knowledge. It doesn't, nor does it opine on all possible
| knowledge.
|
| Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is
| effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to
| do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite
| amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct
| software is 0 because there are infinite possible
| programs.
| clairity wrote:
| no, those are not analogous at all. knowability is
| literally a subset of all knowledge, which pushes into a
| void that expands faster than we can enumerate. it's
| hubris to think otherwise.
| tiahura wrote:
| "Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the
| spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s.
| Has that consensus been wrong?"
|
| WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been
| abandoned as Covid isn't spread by surface transmission.
| rajin444 wrote:
| > The problem I have with statements like these is they
| focus on the misses while ignoring hits.
|
| That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.
|
| The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their
| stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is
| exactly how things should work.
|
| The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert
| opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies
| need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the
| situation changes when the data changes. Instead,
| politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled
| and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers,
| etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by
| politicians there would be no issue.
| seoaeu wrote:
| > That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose
| it.
|
| No, that's only how things work when you are looking for
| a pretense to ignore expert advice.
| rajin444 wrote:
| How am I supposed to judge expert advice if I lack the
| technical knowledge? Blind trust?
| cogman10 wrote:
| What else can you do? Really? How can you trust or
| distrust expert advice without the technical knowledge?
|
| Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically
| boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying"
| or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong
| about everything".
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Trust in scientists is too high when they keep pumping out
| studies that don't replicate, and don't publish the
| original data and methods used to reach conclusions.
|
| I _wholly_ trust science that independently replicates and
| the fact that it 's missing from the process means much of
| what we see is less than _wholly_ trustworthy.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Not all fields of science are created equal. Whether or
| not studies are replicated or data is available will
| depend entirely on the field of study.
|
| Certainly, a lot of the social sciences and "soft"
| sciences have a fair bit of replication/data problems.
| That said, the biomedical, environmental, geologic, and
| chemical sciences by and large have really solid data and
| repeats of that data. The areas of sciences we have a
| harder time controlling for are those where it'd be
| unethical to get better data and examples (nutritional
| science, for example).
|
| There are far too many fields of study to lump all
| science into the same bucket and call it all
| untrustworthy.
|
| A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats
| every study as being equal. When, in fact, some studies
| are far better than others and carry a much larger weight
| of truth.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Not all fields of science are created equal.
|
| But FB, and other platforms, treat them as if they are
| when making their decisions on what to censor. FB even
| trusts so called "independent fact checkers," who don't
| even claim to be scientists and write mostly on political
| topics, to act as arbiters of truth.
|
| > A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats
| every study as being equal.
|
| And it's these journalists that FB is relying on for its
| determination of fact, not the actual scientists.
| umvi wrote:
| > It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study
| will succumb to bias
|
| It's happened before, especially when a select few command
| the majority of the field's grants/publications. If you are
| interested in how this could happen, here's an example of
| where basically the entirety of the Alzheimer's disease
| research field of study succumbed to bias:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-
| thwarte...
|
| as well as the HN discussion on it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225
| autokad wrote:
| I worked first hand in a research group. the 'experts' are
| extremely political, and anything that doesn't fit their
| political agenda is ignored, and if the study/experiment
| doesn't fit their political agenda they keep trying or
| fudging the data until it does. I'll give you an example,
|
| I noticed a map of obesity overlaps very well with a map of
| diabetes. high alcohol consumption mapped very well with
| the areas the prior map didnt correlate. in other words, in
| areas where obesity was not correlated with diabetes, there
| was high alcohol consumption. paper worthy or worth looking
| into? no. I lied to a different section of the group and
| said these were areas of increased correlation, and it
| wasn't alcohol but soda consumption. They immediately
| wanted to seek grants to write papers.
|
| You can see how this leads to junk science. if you ignore
| things that dont fit your political agenda and only
| research things that fit your agenda, that's junk science.
| it gets worse because when the data doesnt suggest the
| political agenda pushed, they try to 'account' for other
| factors or re-run the study in a different way until it
| says what they wanted it to say. worse case, it doesnt get
| published.
|
| The experts are not to be trusted.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Is that related to the "reproduction crisis" science is
| going through right now?
| autokad wrote:
| yes because results are jelly beaned. If you keep
| changing what to measure for success criteria until you
| get what you want, you are more likely reject the null
| hypothesis even though you should not have OR if you dont
| publish results that doesnt fit your political bias, the
| 1/20 ones that do get published and also incorrectly
| rejected the null hypothesis
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. What most laypeople don't understand is that finding
| cracks in the work of experts has real rewards for other
| experts, because of the scientific method. Therefore, it is
| unlikely that a layperson will find those cracks first.
| umvi wrote:
| > Typically experts are people who have spent far more time
| than other people doing exactly what you're describing:
| slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking
| questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.
|
| One thing to note though is that the less mature a field is,
| the more gaps there will be an expert's knowledge/models.
| Doctors in the 1940s were regarded as medical experts, and
| yet many were actively promoting cigarettes. History is
| littered with "experts" whose expertise was outrageously
| wrong or misguided in hindsight.
|
| So I say people should judge experts by the maturity of their
| field and in the context they are providing expertise on.
|
| A civil engineer is giving expertise on whether a building
| will collapse or not? You'll likely get extremely reliable
| expertise you can count on.
|
| A doctor is promoting a glass of wine a day for health
| reasons? Take it with a grain of salt.
| deanCommie wrote:
| So, here's the challenge.
|
| A doctor is promoting vaccinating your child from COVID?.
| Should that also be taken with a grain of salt?
|
| What about measles?
|
| How do you draw the line?
|
| How do you help others - suspicious of authority, and being
| actively manipulated in a culture war to distrust anything
| a "progressive" tells them - to draw the line?
|
| I think it's impossible. The only way is to say that
| "Doctors are experts. They have been wrong before and they
| will be wrong again. Experts doesn't mean getting things
| 100% right. But it definitely means getting things more
| right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as
| new information develops, the advice will shift".
|
| By the way both sides in the culture war believe this. FOX
| News finds their own experts. They find the 0.1% scientists
| that don't believe in climate change and give them 60% of
| the airtime. But they still appeal to experts.
| rajin444 wrote:
| > But it definitely means getting things more right than
| you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new
| information develops, the advice will shift
|
| You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100%
| trust in a person. There are endless examples in human
| history as to why this is dangerous. There are very few
| as to why this is good. "Just trust me" is generally
| regarded as something said by a person you should not
| trust, and for good reason.
|
| > How do you draw the line?
|
| You do your best to evaluate the information on your own
| and find sources you trust. The latter is nearly
| impossible when an issue becomes political.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100%
| trust in a person.
|
| Not at all. Placing provisional trust in am expert about
| a specific opinion you are aware may change in the future
| is completely different from "giving up all agency" or
| "placing 100% trust in a person. Nothing in that advice
| tells you not to check the opinions of a few different
| experts to be sure you aren't being misled.
|
| > The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes
| political.
|
| It's not that hard. You find experts who seem to do a
| good job of acknowledging nuance and don't seem to be
| trying to make their facts fit a narrative.
|
| What you don't do is trust someone because what they say
| on completely different topics matches what you believe
| or trust someone because they consistently give you the
| answers you want to hear. Doing either of those is worse
| than just blindly trusting experts.
| sutuplesu wrote:
| > find sources you trust
|
| And those sources will consist of...who? Perhaps, people
| who have spent time and effort learning about the topic,
| a.k.a. "the experts"?
| rajin444 wrote:
| Spending a lot of time on one thing does not inherently
| make you trustworthy. I'm not sure what you're getting
| at.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It makes you knowledgeable. You should pick knowledgeble
| people to trust on complicated topics and you shouldn't
| base that trust on if those people tell you what you want
| yo hear but on their ability to acknowledge nuance and
| change their minds when they see new data.
| jstanley wrote:
| > being actively manipulated in a culture war
|
| People you disagree with aren't the only ones being
| manipulated.
| umvi wrote:
| > How do you draw the line?
|
| Again, maturity of the thing the expertise revolves
| around is important here.
|
| Since covid has been around less than 2 years and child-
| approved covid vaccines have been around for less than 1
| year, I'd take a recommendation to vaccinate my kid
| against covid with a grain of salt. Especially since
| covid itself does not appear to impact children the same
| way it does adults (<0.03% of covid deaths have been
| children, etc.). Since covid is a highly politicized
| topic at the moment it's hard to tell if the doctor is
| recommending the vaccine because he actually feels it's
| beneficial vs. recommending the vaccine because despite
| feeling like it's not terribly beneficial, he's feeling
| pressure from governments to push the vaccine because
| they want to get kids back into schools.
|
| Measles vaccines have been around over 50 years, have a
| proven utility and track record, and are not currently
| politicized. Plus measles is way more deadly to kids than
| covid, so in that case it's more cut and dry.
|
| So my philosophy is to take covid-related advice with a
| grain of salt until the expertise around it is more
| mature. I think in 5 years we will have a much better
| idea of how necessary child covid vaccines really are (as
| well as how necessary cloth masks really are, etc.).
|
| By the way, when I say "take with a grain of salt", I
| don't mean "don't give your kid the covid vaccine". I
| mean "Probably still give the kid covid vaccine but
| reserve the right to harbor doubts that it's actually
| necessary and quietly suspect the current political
| climate is putting pressure on hospitals to push the
| vaccine regardless of the actual merits of the vaccine"
| clairity wrote:
| 'field maturity' could perhaps say something about the
| likeliness of trustworthy information/advice overall, but
| says nothing about the trustworthiness of the expert
| themselves.
|
| in fact, the nominative 'expert' is a political injection,
| practically begging for appeal to authority to shut down
| critical thinking. expertise has little correlation to
| trustworthiness, given that it typically gets overwhelmed
| by the politically-interwined 'esteem'.
|
| there is no shortcut to doing the hard work of
| triangulating the best information out of many biased
| opinions, including so-called 'experts'[0]. this is true of
| news, reviews, and commentary of all sorts.
|
| [0]: similarly noted in a different context here, along
| with it's grandparent comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678221
| nradov wrote:
| Be careful: that salt will give you high blood pressure! Or
| not, depending on which medical "expert" turns out to be
| correct.
| rafaelero wrote:
| Are you implying that salt does not raise blood pressure?
| Because I am pretty sure you are wrong. But be free to
| share RCT's showing it is indeed a false association.
| nradov wrote:
| Your surety is misplaced and unfortunately you're not
| even asking the right question. The relationship between
| salt and blood pressure is a complex, multi-factorial
| issue which can't be adequately summarized in a comment
| here. The best explanation I've heard is this interview
| with Rick Johnson, MD who is one of the most prominent
| researchers in that field. It's long but worth a listen.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/
| zuminator wrote:
| I think you'd be hard pressed to find an actual expert
| who would make the general claim that salt consumption
| will cause high blood pressure, as opposed to a claim
| that some people are salt-sensitive, or that high salt
| diets are positively correlated with high blood pressure,
| or something else.
|
| Part of the problem is that non-experts tend to summarize
| expert information in ways that alter or omit crucial
| points, and then people are disappointed when the crib
| notes version tends to be inaccurate.
| nradov wrote:
| Yes I was being somewhat flippant. Besides genetic
| susceptibility, the current research indicates that the
| issue with salt is more due to _osmolality_ than
| quantity.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/
|
| And yet the medical experts still get it wrong by
| oversimplifying the issue and making dietary
| recommendations based on quantity.
|
| https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-
| pressure/c...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I had a discussion about this with a doctor. I asked them
| for their opinions on sodium to potassium ratios by age
| group and sodium loss through sweat. I got blank stares
| and the subject changed. I've had far more fascinating
| and informative discussions with nutritionists and
| fitness coaches, not to suggest they are a definitive
| source of knowledge. I find it ultimately best to
| research things on my own and take all scientific papers
| with a skeptical grain of salt.
| mindslight wrote:
| To be fair, an expert not answering a question that they
| don't know the answer to is a _good outcome_. The real
| expert for your question would be a researcher in the
| specific field, or perhaps the rare doctor who has taken
| an interest in following such research.
| rchowe wrote:
| A physician probably learns the physiology of sweat
| glands, mechanisms for how the human body regulates
| sodium and potassium, and diseases caused by regulatory
| mechanisms not working. Unless they had an interest or
| read a study, I'm not sure I would expect a physician to
| know that, and in my experience a lot of physicians are
| reluctant to speculate.
|
| Nutritionists and fitness coaches are much more willing
| to speculate in my experience, with the caveat that they
| may not have the same education as a scientist as a
| physician does.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I had been cutting caffeine out of my life for awhile.
| Ended on ER where they stuck an actual bag of caffeine to
| my IV. Felt like I was in a comic.
|
| Also that much caffeine really sucks.
| popcube wrote:
| but that the best advice we can get now
| theplumber wrote:
| One issue is the undisclosed interests. Something tells me
| that doctors who were promoting cigarettes were paid to do
| so. Just like we've seen experts saying that oil /CO2 has
| nothing to do with climate change or health issues. This
| kind of collusion should bring criminal charges both to the
| experts and to the ultimate party that funded the
| misleading research.
|
| The other issue is the lack of education and basic critical
| thinking among a high proportion of population so you find
| yourself in a world full of conspiracy theories and fake
| information. For some reasons I thought this issue can be
| found only in 3rd world countries but covid openned my
| eyes...
| davidw wrote:
| Right, and part of the problem with an "ah, who can know the
| truth" approach is that it absolutely will be weaponized by
| bad faith actors. It's really easy to be loud and persistent
| with a lie if no one calls it out because "who knows,
| really".
|
| A parallel to this is something I saw in Italy where a number
| of people complain that "all the politicians are corrupt".
| This provides cover for the really rotten politicians,
| because it puts the ones shoveling money to their cronies in
| the same category as the basically honest guy who's trying
| his best to actually do something positive for his
| constituents.
| tiahura wrote:
| "the problem with an "ah, who can know the truth" approach
| is that it absolutely will be weaponized by bad faith
| actors."
|
| So are pens. Do you have any idea of the magnitude of
| horrors that have been committed by the stroke of a pen?
| Should we ban pens?
| temp8964 wrote:
| But fact-checkers aren't experts. And experts don't claim
| their research conclusions as facts.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| I served as a juror on a criminal case, in which the
| prosecution seemed to want to make a big deal out of DNA
| evidence found on some clothing. In turn, the defense wanted
| to dispose of that evidence by having an expert say that DNA
| evidence was unreliable. The expert they brought in was
| someone who admitted their knowledge of the field was only
| based on an article they read.
|
| So the percentage of experts who spend real research on a
| question appears to be less than 100.
| nradov wrote:
| There is a long, sad history of trial courts improperly
| convicting defendants based on pseudoscience testimony by
| "expert" witnesses. We now know that forensic analysis of
| things like hair samples and bite marks is mostly bullshit.
| Even fingerprint and ballistic analysis has a high error
| rate. Unfortunately jurors often assign expert witnesses a
| level of credibility that they don't deserve.
| hogFeast wrote:
| But the problem is that expertise is used to shut down
| debate...that is the reason why it is controversial.
|
| People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are
| experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the
| argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you
| disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.
|
| What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other
| people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly
| common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim
| that they have expertise in another subject, and use that
| authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.
|
| It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation
| of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to
| use their authority to force through their view of what
| society should be like. If you want to see what the looks
| like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think
| Covid has brought this to the fore because you have
| scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues,
| not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc,
| experts and politicians are very clear to make this
| unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose
| them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who
| deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just
| have different political views which suggest different
| solutions to those problems...there are no experts in
| politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are
| attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would
| shut down voting if given the chance).
|
| Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves.
| I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts
| here have made predictions that were fairly consistently
| untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios
| - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start,
| they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the
| predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to
| justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one
| that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts"
| don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one
| can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a
| pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are
| saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the
| time...again, this is something totally different. Again,
| what has changed is the experts, not the people.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Have the spectator really not updated this page since
| October?
|
| Poor form fellows, very poor form.
| hogFeast wrote:
| No, the page was created for "freedom day" (and the
| consistent predictions that it would unleash an
| apocalypse).
| NullPrefix wrote:
| >Typically experts are people who have spent far more time
| than other people doing exactly what you're describing:
| slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking
| questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.
|
| Are we still talking about Facebook fact checking experts?
| huntertwo wrote:
| > there's a difference between someone who has passively
| consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has
| dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint.
|
| Which camp does the fact checker fall into?
| laserlight wrote:
| There are astrology "experts". The idea that someone is an
| expert is very difficult to establish. Many times I discover
| that "expert" doctors who give public health advice don't
| understand the difference between correlation and causation.
| Experts are made in a biased environment. Those who could get
| rid of their biases would probably be filtered out by that
| same environment.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Jamie Metzl lays out an incredible delusional narrative
| constructed by health experts about the Pangolin/intermediate
| host theory for Sars-COV-2 origins, 4 hours of in-depth
| discussion, highly recommend. Experts made a U-turn but not
| because of typical respectful scientific protocol of
| discovering new facts (and therefore changing their minds),
| but rather due to peer-pressure, politics and group-think:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think the broader lesson is: Do not fight authoritarians with
| more authoritarianism.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases.
|
| Experts are usually correct. I have no idea why you would think
| otherwise. Now, experts in one area often misapply that
| authority to others where they are not expert, but within their
| domain they are most often right. And I have yet to see that
| not be the case.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain.
| Therefore, be open to new ideas, but slow to accept anything as
| absolute truth._
|
| Talking about trying to find an "absolute truth" is
| disingenuous. Yeah, we absolutely know 1+1=2, but it's
| impossible to absolutely know how a stock will perform. Often
| times, a situation doesn't call for finding "the real" or
| "absolute" truth, but coming to a conclusion using only the
| best info you have on hand at the moment.
|
| In most cases, you can find the best info. You have to know how
| to find it though, how to weigh one source against another.
| It's like the old proverb about teaching a man to fish rather
| than giving them a fish. Learning "how to fish" is something
| you're taught in school, but then again, there are those in
| power that are making it harder to get a proper education.
| That's something to be wary of. They aren't just taking our
| fish, but _our ability to fish_.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I think what I'm trying to say is that because absolute truth
| is so hard to determine, it is imperative that people have
| the ability to decide for themselves from the data what they
| believe to be true, even if it is "wrong" (because sometimes
| what is "wrong" turns out to be true in the end).
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'd go a step further and add that many "truths" are also
| conditionally dependent on time and the current state of
| the world. It used to be true that aluminum was more
| valuable than gold, now that is no longer the case.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| So you want to censor fact checkers?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Limiting speech (of anyone) is a band-aid for poor critical
| thinking skills. No speech would be dangerous if people were
| smart enough. Unfortunately we just don't value intelligence
| or education in America, and that is the real problem.
| josephcsible wrote:
| No, don't censor them. They should be allowed to post "this
| is false" all they want in the comment box, just like
| everyone else is. They just shouldn't get special powers,
| like blurring out your article and putting their comment
| directly over it, instead of in the comment section.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| So you want to censor Facebook?
| josephcsible wrote:
| What in my comment led you to that conclusion?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| You're saying that Facebook should be compelled to host
| speech and that its employees may, at most, make a
| comment about that speech in the comment section.
|
| How would you feel if I told you that you must put a
| campaign placard in your front yard, and that if you
| don't like it you may always put a post-it note under the
| sign expressing your discontent?
| [deleted]
| xigoi wrote:
| Where did the comment say that Facebook "should be
| compelled" to do anything?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Where did the comment say that Facebook "should be
| compelled" to do anything?_
|
| Here:
|
| _> >> They should be allowed to post "this is false" all
| they want in the comment box, just like everyone else is.
| They just shouldn't get special powers, like blurring out
| your article and putting their comment directly over it,
| instead of in the comment section._
|
| The ability to decide which pixels to serve from a server
| you own isn't a "special power". It's free speech.
| xigoi wrote:
| The argument is that certain people (fact checkers) have
| special powers from the perspective of Facebook. I'm not
| arguing that it should be illegal for Facebook to do this
| (which they indeed have the right to), but that it's
| morally wrong.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Telling someone which pixels they can 't serve is
| censorship._"
|
| Ignoring the extreme irony of people supposedly on the
| left arguing to protect _corporate_ rights and personhood
| (of an absurdly wealthy megacorporation, no less), this
| is the same argument as " _Telling a shop owner which
| $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom
| of association._ " once used by bigots. In both cases,
| yes, it is but both are public accommodations and it
| serves the greater good to require that they serve
| everyone equally.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| The problems with Facebook can't be solved by censorship,
| either of Facebook users or of Facebook itself.
|
| To be blunt, your comment is presumptive,
| confrontational, and unpleasant for no reason. My point
| of view on this is obviously more nuanced than your lazy
| straw-man.
|
| In fact, I address this whole set of issues very
| explicitly in a sibling comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726829
|
| _> to protect corporate rights and personhood_
|
| In the comment I posted, had you bothered to read the
| whole thread instead of jumping down my throat, I say:
|
| _> > Should a company the size of Facebook get Section
| 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials
| be allowed to use social media sites for official
| business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws
| be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites
| subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be
| broken up? Yeah._
|
| _> > I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the
| interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook
| Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the
| company than "no more moderation"._
|
| Far from advocating protecting corporate rights, I'm
| arguing for the dissolution of legal protections which
| are much more valuable to Facebook than its free speech
| protections.
|
| Moving on to the rest of your comment, you say:
|
| _> this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner
| which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting
| freedom of association_
|
| Yawn. Who cares? This is not an instructive or insightful
| comment. It's a meme that has been repeated on every
| thread on this topic for close to a decade at this point.
| It doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of
| the problem.
|
| There are many ways to check corporate power. Compelling
| or restricting speech is not the right tool in the case
| of Facebook. Censoring Facebook as an intervention is too
| weak, too susceptible to abuse, and doesn't address the
| underlying problem.
|
| Go look at actual attempts to implement something like
| what you suggest. E.g., Hawley's legislation which would
| allow Facebook moderation powers (which is, frankly,
| necessary for any community with higher utility than
| 4chan). But which would also have a panel of political
| appointees decide, based on Facebook's moderation
| behavior, whether it should keep Section 230. Surely you
| see how that is ripe for abuse, right?
|
| Again. The problems with Facebook can't be solved by
| censorship, either of Facebook users or of Facebook
| itself. That is not a defense of Facebook. Quite the
| opposite.
|
| Speaking of irony... I'm literally the only person in
| this thread advocating for a solution to the Facebook
| problem that doesn't involve censoring someone/something.
| [deleted]
| IsThisYou wrote:
| finite_jest wrote:
| I am not the OP, but yes, I certainly do want to put
| pressure on the censors. It is a very reasonable thing to
| do.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| How?
| finite_jest wrote:
| I think we should bring back a version of fairness
| doctrine [1] or right of reply [2] targeted at platforms.
|
| There are other ways of pressuring them at different
| levels as well: demanding moderation transparency,
| regulating them as we do for utilities, supporting
| competitive alternatives which respect free expression,
| etc.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I still don't get it.
|
| "The Fact Checkers (TM)(R)"... what are they in this case?
| They are employees working at the behest of the owner of
| the property of which you are a guest.
|
| Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230
| protection? Probably not. Should government officials be
| allowed to use social media sites for official business? I
| don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be
| strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to
| much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up?
| Yeah.
|
| I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the
| interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook
| Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the
| company than "no more moderation".
|
| But compelling speech is also a violation of free speech.
| If you demanded that I post your article on my personal
| homepage, I'd politely tell you to bugger off. And if you
| insisted that I should _have_ to do so, I 'd consider you
| an enemy of free speech.
|
| Apparently you don't feel the same way about FB.
|
| But where does that line get drawn?
|
| And what, exactly, is FB allowed/not allowed to censor (and
| don't be glib, the answer "nothing" is functionally
| equivalent to "make FB 4chan" and I think you'll find fewer
| than 1% of the population that is radical enough to think
| that would improve things)?
|
| Who decides?
|
| We don't have good answers to those questions. They're
| fundamentally questions about who gets enormous amounts of
| political/economic power. Power corrupts. But even if we
| did have good answers to these impossible zero-sum
| questions, we still wouldn't really have a decent solution
| to the underlying problem.
|
| The problem with platforms like FB isn't primarily caused
| by the content of any particular speech and so can't be
| solved by censorship of FB users _or of FB itself_. The
| wariness about FB is reasonable, but the instinct to solve
| the problem by censoring FB itself is all wrong. It grounds
| out a massive political struggle and doesn 't even solve
| the underlying problem.
| [deleted]
| MrPatan wrote:
| Fact check: They never said they wanted to censor fact
| checkers.
| [deleted]
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| It'd be better if we didn't need them and journalists did
| their fucking jobs of checking their own facts instead of
| relying on others to do it for them.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Just because you claim to be a fact checker shouldn't allow
| you to censor others.
|
| The inability to censor others in a public forum isn't
| censorship. They can still post as much as the next person.
|
| The problem is that Facebook used fact checkers to censor
| others.
| kypro wrote:
| I honestly don't know how people navigate in society without
| this being plainly obvious to them. The number of people who
| believe most claims can be checked to any level of certainty is
| genuinely worrying and highlights a fundamental lack of
| critical thinking within our society, and therefore democratic
| process.
|
| As you say, most of the time these aren't "facts", but usually
| opinions or hypotheses based on a subject interruption of some
| data. The truth is even if 99% of the evidence we have today
| suggests masks work, this doesn't mean masks work, just that
| it's very likely they do assuming there isn't some bias in the
| research. The reason I mention bias is because it's simply true
| that in the past research on things like contentious subjects
| like climate change, smoking and various diets have been biased
| by corporate interest.
|
| I think the problem we have with misinformation today is less
| that people sometimes believe the wrong things, but they
| believe the wrong things with high levels of conviction and
| passion. The first step in the solution to misinformation in my
| opinion should be to promote an attitude similar to yours --
| one of general scepticism and an openness to new information
| and beliefs.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| There was a Stanford professor that argued that "We don't
| have _high quality_ evidence for masks "[0]. Just asking for
| more studies to be done. Note the emphasis on "high quality".
| He was cancelled, fired and smeared by the university and the
| media.
|
| Here are some studies that probably need to be done more
| carefully because they conclude "Although the difference
| observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are
| compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in
| infection."[1]. So what's wrong with questioning and asking
| for more to be done?
|
| [0] https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/15/stanford-faculty-
| smear-...
|
| [1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Who was fired by university? Certainly not the professor
| the article you quoted centers on, who, as of posting, is
| still employed by Stanford according to both Stanford: http
| s://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jay_bhattachary...
| and his own linked in profile:
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbhattacharya
|
| Kinda ironic, given the topic.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the
| definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them,
| and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth."
|
| I'd go a step further and assert that these "fact checkers"
| play fast and loose with the definition of words and the
| meaning of language. Here is the absolute best example I can
| think of:
|
| "Did a 'Convicted Terrorist' Sit on the Board of a BLM Funding
| Body?"[1]
|
| What's True: Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the
| board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that
| provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives
| Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of
| revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities
| included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed
| robberies.
|
| What's Undetermined: In the absence of a single, universally-
| agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective
| determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was
| convicted and imprisoned -- possession of weapons and hundreds
| of pounds of explosives -- should be described as acts of
| "domestic terrorism."
|
| [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
|
| Edit: I apologize for the unwieldy formatting of this post. But
| I keep finding more disturbing content from the snopes article
| that I must share.
|
| >"In her memoir, Rosenberg wrote of her 1984 arrest in New
| Jersey that "there was no immediate, specific plan to use the
| explosives" with which she and Blunk were caught. ..."
|
| >"Earlier in her book, Rosenberg indicated that she was
| comfortable, at least at one point in time, with bombing
| government buildings:"
|
| >"proven record of using bomb attacks to influence the wider
| American public and advance their cause. As such, a supportable
| (though not definitive) case exists for claiming that the
| crimes of which Rosenberg was convicted in 1985 were indeed
| acts of domestic terrorism."
|
| The author(s) are making every rhetorical excuse they can
| imagine. Yes, she admits in her book she was comfortable with
| using them. Yes, she did _technically_ get caught with them.
| But you must keep in mind that there were no _immediate plans_
| to use them.
|
| >"In any event, despite the existence of a definition of
| domestic terrorism in federal law, a discrete criminal offense
| of domestic terrorism does not exist, and did not exist in the
| 1980s. As a result, even if Rosenberg's activities perfectly
| met the definition of domestic terrorism currently set out in
| federal law, and even if that definition existed in the 1980s,
| she could not have been charged with, tried for and convicted
| of domestic terrorism as such."
|
| Look, dear reader, even if everything you learned about this
| situation is screaming "domestic terrorist", you HAVE to
| understand that _by definition_ , she can't be one because of
| all the technicalities I have shown you. Case closed.
| david422 wrote:
| During the presidential debate, Trump was talking about how
| wind mills kill "all the birds", indicating that there are in
| fact downsides to wind power.
|
| All the "fact checkers" were brought in to discuss how there
| are other, larger threats to birds, like cats and buildings
| etc.
|
| Clearly this wasn't a "truth finding fact check", but more of
| a "don't let Trump score any points" fact check.
| 8note wrote:
| I'm surprised they put mixture when a simple no would
| suffice.
|
| There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The people who destroyed the WTC on 9/11 died in the act.
| There was no trial that would convict them posthumously of
| terrorism, given that we do not judge the dead (well, not
| anymore: it used to be a thing, see [1]). So, their
| criminal records are clear of terrorism convictions.
|
| Does that mean that I will be labeled as a spreader of fake
| news if I call Mohamed Atta [2] a terrorist?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"a simple no would suffice. ..There is no conviction of
| terrorism on her criminal record"
|
| Can you see why people object to this kind of legalistic
| thinking? If you follow the reasoning that _only_ a
| conviction of terrorism qualifies one as a terrorist, what
| implications follow from that?
| allturtles wrote:
| The point is that only a conviction of terroism qualifies
| one as a convicted terrorist. Just like only a conviction
| of murder qualifies one as a convicted murderer. If
| someone killed someone else, was convicted of
| manslaughter, but you personally think it was murder, you
| might feel justified in calling them a murderer. But it
| would make no sense for you to call them a "convicted
| murderer."
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| At which point, I would say we have successfully
| deflected off of the word "terrorist" and allowed
| ourselves to get stuck in in the non-impactful rut of
| fixating on "convicted".
|
| Which circles back to my original point that the fact-
| checkers often resort to manipulating language in order
| to arrive at the verdicts they present. I find this kind
| of misdirection incredibly dishonest - both
| intellectually and ethically.
| allturtles wrote:
| I couldn't really disagree more. Convicted is the key
| point here. Anyone can throw around the word 'terrorist'
| to describe someone, but conviction is a concrete fact
| about the legal system. The people calling this woman a
| "convicted terrorist" are leaning on the convicted.
| Without it their claim would feel much less weighty.
|
| e.g. lots of people have called Kyle Rittenhouse a
| 'terrorist'. Say he had been convicted on one of the
| charges against him - would it be fair to call him a
| 'convicted terrorist' just because some people feel he is
| a terrorist, and he was convicted of something? Clearly
| not.
|
| "Rosenberg is a convicted criminal who planned terrorist
| acts" is a far more defensible claim, so why not just say
| that?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| By your definition, no successful suicide bomber would
| ever be a terrorist, because the dead do not go to
| trials.
| SkittyDog wrote:
| But there are plenty of people who are widely believed to
| have _committed_ terrorist acts without being convicted...
| Wouldn 't you call those people terrorists?
|
| What about pejorative adjectives describing conduct that
| isn't actually illegal, such as shouting at restaurant wait
| staff over perceived mistakes? Am I allowed to call that
| person a "jerk"?
|
| It would be plainly ridiculous to insist that we can only
| apply adjectives upon conviction by a criminal court.
| That's not how adjectives work.
| Zak wrote:
| This is where the distinction between fact and opinion is
| important.
|
| Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact.
| It's true or false. People can disagree about whether the
| trial was fair, the law was just, etc... but there is an
| objective truth as to whether the conviction occurred or it
| did not.
|
| The Snopes article lists the crimes Rosenberg was convicted
| of, which do not include "terrorism" or anything equivalent
| to that. She was convicted of multiple offenses involving
| weapons possession and identity fraud. The article goes on to
| list numerous other offenses involving a prison break,
| several armed robberies, and planting bombs for which she was
| charged, but not tried or convicted. It is therefore correct
| to say that she is not a convicted terrorist.
|
| The article provides more than enough background for a reader
| to form the opinion that her activities constituted
| terrorism, and indeed that is my opinion.
| Jensson wrote:
| The problem is that fact checkers doesn't have the same
| standards for every side. If this was about some right wing
| group that had a member with such a background in a
| leadership position they would absolutely have marked it as
| "true, this person is definitely a terrorist, just look at
| all this evidence!".
| Zak wrote:
| Can you provide a pair of examples in which Snopes,
| Politifact, or a similar mainstream US-based fact checker
| used clearly different standards for what constitutes a
| question of fact based on the political orientation of
| the subject?
| Jensson wrote:
| They wouldn't even write an article about anything like
| this if it was the other side. She did work directly with
| convicted terrorists, she was charged with terrorism but
| that charge was dropped as a plea deal with those
| convicted, she was convicted with helping those
| terrorists. And if they wrote one article because it
| became a big deal they wouldn't have picked the
| "convicted terrorist" phrase to fact check, rather they
| would have fact checked "was X a terrorist" or similar
| and it would have gotten a clear yes, everything points
| towards this person was a terrorist.
|
| Choosing what statements or what formulations of
| statements to fact check is also a part of the bias.
| People just read the headline, if they read "fact check,
| X was not a 'convicted terrorist'", they will read that
| as "X was not a terrorist", the fact checkers knows this
| and uses that to their advantage when picking the
| sentence to check and the verdict that will follow.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Yes, this is one of the most shameless examples of "fact-
| checkers" being partisan flak-catchers
| heartbreak wrote:
| And at the end of the day, the underlying issue is the intent
| of sharing this info on social media in the first place.
| Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of
| directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that BLM
| itself is a terrorist organization. No amount of fact
| checking is going to help in this scenario.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of
| directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that
| BLM itself is a terrorist organization.
|
| Or, much more reasonably, that it is an organization
| unconcerned with violence affecting innocent people.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization. No
| amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario."
|
| It seems to me the answer to this dilemma is to replace her
| on the board of directors. Scores of other CEO's and board
| members have been dismissed or asked to resign over far
| less. I'm no PR expert, but her background and connections
| are certainly eyebrow raising, despite all the attempts to
| hand-waive or dismiss them. Surely they have a large pool
| of talent from which to draw a replacement with a less
| problematic history?
| notahacker wrote:
| This. Many other organizations are similar degrees of
| separation from individuals who could plausibly be labelled
| as terrorists or similar, but I doubt many of the people
| furious at labelling this claim as "mixed" would demand
| fact checkers also rate such articles as wholly true if the
| subject of the headline was an individual closely linked
| to, say, the Republican party, Fox News or the NRA. And
| yes, if you want to believe that BLM is a terrorist
| organisation then the Snopes article provides enough
| accurate detail about the bad stuff Rosenberg did for you
| not to change your mind, just as any self respecting fact
| checker has to acknowledge that however dubious certain
| insinuations might be, Oliver North et al exist.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't think "serves on the board of" counts as a degree
| of separation.
| notahacker wrote:
| "Serves on the board of an organisation that provides
| funding and administrative support to" sounds like a
| degree of separation. Unless you were talking about
| Oliver North...
| fallingknife wrote:
| Him too
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| In the spirit of the discussion.... just as a screen tap
| counts as a 'zero-length' swipe, serving on the board of
| directors is a zero-degree separation. But it is _still_
| a degree of separation. /s
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >No amount of fact checking is going to help in this
| scenario.
|
| Sure it will. You can flag it as false, and make sure
| nobody can see the posts.
| sewellstephens wrote:
| "In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the
| definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them,
| and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth."
|
| Fact checkers know exactly what a fact is rather they don't
| like people to know the truth, they instead want to push
| information that benefits them in some way.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases.
|
| This is an absurd and false statement, and is a perfect
| summation of why so much mis/disinformation floats around and
| is so popular in today's online world.
|
| Experts do indeed have their own inherent biases. This part is
| a glib truism because experts are people, and all people have
| biases which both consciously and unconsciously influence their
| decision making.
|
| But that is not "just" what experts are. Experts are people who
| have, by definition, expertise in a given subject matter.
| Unless you too are an equal expert in a given topic, experts--
| once again by definition--know more than you do in that field.
|
| It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to
| speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to
| 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied
| something for years and has made valued contributions to the
| field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal
| footing.
| trident5000 wrote:
| "Experts" are wrong all the time. I have doctor who didnt
| even order my mri with iodine last week, because hes a fool.
| He didnt even know that was an option. He also didnt know
| ultrasound to find an injury was an option. I know more than
| this doctor on ligament tears and how to treat them at this
| point and thats supposed to be his job. This is just one
| example but I find new ones every week where "experts" in all
| fields have no clue what they're doing.
|
| This obviously isnt to say all experts are not knowledgeable,
| but theres plenty who are not and often they are in charge.
| Thats why taking their opinion as ultimate truth without
| question is dangerous.
| patrick451 wrote:
| Ehh. When I was a kid we called this an appeal to authority.
| Experts are wrong all the time. Experts disagree all the
| time. Just like some random person on the internet.
| new_stranger wrote:
| You're over-complicating this.
|
| Facts come from studies that have been published which are
| disproven four years later when finally repeated.
|
| So for a couple years at least, it's always clear what the
| truth is.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| It gets harder to disprove things when you ban anything that
| goes against the temporary truth
| nu11ptr wrote:
| Truth, real truth, never changes - which is why it is so
| important to be slow to declare it. Our best collective
| understanding at a particular time is exactly that, but that
| is different than truth or fact, because often that
| understanding turns out to be wrong, which is why it is so
| crucial that dissenting opinions are heard.
| new_stranger wrote:
| Truth that never changes is not beneficial for planning. I
| recommend you find a more useful, relative truth.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's important you know the real truth,
| but that isn't often the one you gain much from promoting.
|
| Promoting actual truth can be rather damming at times.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is no such thing as relative truth.
|
| You mean belief, which causes major problems when
| conflated with truth.
|
| Belief is useful for planning, but needs a separate
| static truth to have predictive value.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| An actual unchanging truth is extremely beneficial for
| planning. But if you're planning with open eyes, you know
| that what you actually have are probabilities based on
| what you know when you make the plan, which I believe to
| be GP's point.
|
| Anyway, there's no other definition of "truth" that isn't
| a mockery of the word as used. In practice you work with
| the closest you can get at the moment, but you don't
| redefine your terms down to match.
| xondono wrote:
| Relative truth is more dangerous for planning.
|
| I don't plan to exit my apartment through the window
| because I know there's no relative truth of what will
| happen.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Quick relative truths are used because the alternative is
| getting burned alive.
| zaphar wrote:
| The absolute truth in your statement is the threat of
| getting burned alive. You make the decision to escape
| based on that absolute truth and then you choose the
| route based on relative probabilities to survive. But you
| wouldn't even be trying to escape at all if not for the
| absolute truth that a fire will kill or severely harm you
| if you stay.
| aficiomaquinas wrote:
| I think it would be interesting if you could share some
| examples of what you believe to be real truths that never
| change.
| moksly wrote:
| I don't think fact checkers are an enemy of free speech. The
| entire foundation of science is build upon the process of being
| able to fact check each other's findings.
|
| There has also never really been a period in western
| civilisation where the news media wasn't heavily controlled and
| fact checked by powerful editors.
|
| The real issue isn't fact checkers, it's that Facebook isn't
| held accountable.
|
| If we want a functioning democracy, we need to stop giving
| major corporations a pass because the manipulation that happens
| on their platforms is created and run by users. That's not how
| we treated News Papers and it's not how we should treat Social
| Networks. If Facebook has really been a knowing participant in
| genocides, then Mark Zuckerberg belongs in the Haag as far as I
| am concerned.
| nradov wrote:
| The scientific method does not presume to produce or check
| "facts". Real science is based on _probabilities_.
| Individuals have to set their own criteria as to when level
| of probability they want to classify as a fact.
| sewellstephens wrote:
| Fact checkers are totally an enemy of free speech. They flag
| posts saying that is so called "information" is inaccurate
| and that people shouldn't be able to see it.
|
| If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I mean
| yes it is false but as Americans we are suppost to have free
| speech when we don't.
| herbstein wrote:
| > If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I
| mean yes it is false but as Americans we are supposed to
| have free speech when we don't.
|
| Good thing nothing that happens on Facebook ever spills
| over into other countries.
|
| On a non-sarcastic note, I find it interesting that you
| didn't engage _at all_ with the comment about Facebook and
| genocides. It 's easy to sit in an ivory tower and play
| philosopher on topics of corporate censorship like this.
| What's less interesting, but far more useful, is evaluating
| whether Facebook should do more to moderate when their
| platform is actively used to orchestrate genocides in
| several separate places on earth.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I
| mean yes it is false but as Americans we are suppost to
| have free speech when we don't.
|
| Your first amendment right to free speech is a limited
| freedom from the _government_ stating that the government
| cannot stifle or compel your speech. Facebook is not (yet)
| the government, so the 1A protections do not apply to
| Facebook. After all, if Facebook were forced to host
| content they didn 't want to host, that would be considered
| compelled speech.
|
| I would argue that if a post is _verifiably, unequivocally
| false_ it is right to flag it as such. Maybe limit its
| reach in "discovery" platforms but still show it to
| followers/friends. This is a very, very small percentage of
| posts (think: "the earth is flat," not "do vaccines really
| work?"). These warnings should link to reputable, peer-
| reviewed research as a primary source and a reputable
| secondary source for those who don't want to read the
| research paper.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > I would argue that if a post is verifiably,
| unequivocally false it is right to flag it as such.
|
| The incentive to move the bar lower will lead to constant
| lowering of the bar until we're back to where we are
| today.
| mannanj wrote:
| My problem with these fact checkers is it feels too much like the
| ruling class/big corporations/government/big media becoming the
| sole arbiters of information truth again- and we know that
| doesn't end well.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| Fact checking just seems like another business we haven't hired
| to solve a problem generated by the platform itself. I find that
| the problem here isn't fact checking, it's just the control of
| these private social media platforms is too broad.
|
| This points to why there needs to be a clearer mechanism of
| rights for an individual's content. Meta owns a free license to
| not only repost your work, but also to modify and generate
| derivative works from it. What I don't understand is what they
| own when it comes to public content shared via links. Given the
| success of AMP, I suspect the answer is "you don't own much of
| anything on the internet".
|
| DRM so far has been successful at allowing content generators to
| counteract the control of content providers. I sometimes wonder
| if we need easier personal DRM. Then, if some provider decides to
| misrepresent you, you can just yank the license. Or at least,
| there should be some kind of contract between the license holder
| and the provider.
|
| Maybe web3 helps here? I'm still leery of putting all your eggs
| in a centralized blockchain system. But other than PDFs, I can't
| think of other approaches you can take.
| davidw wrote:
| Fact checking is imperfect, but what's the alternative? Social
| media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people firmly in
| control of Democrat party" type articles, and various and sundry
| other garbage. Combine that with Brandolini's law, and the whole
| thing is just a sewer. As we've seen during the pandemic with
| anti-vaccine nonsense, this has cost people their lives.
|
| It's easy to point out flaws, but like anything, it's trickier to
| build something better.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Social media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people
| firmly in control of Democrat party" type articles, and various
| and sundry other garbage.
|
| How do you feel about telephones, public spaces, or even
| private spaces that allow information like this to be spread?
| What about books?
|
| It's a lot easier to just go along with things that nobody
| asked you permission to do anyway than to point out flaws.
| Also, by "flaws," are you including the opinion that "fact-
| checking" as practiced is bad and shouldn't be done? That rings
| strangely; you wouldn't say that somebody telling you not to
| eat cyanide is pointing out a flaw in your eating of cyanide.
| davidw wrote:
| You're arguing in bad faith if you think that books or
| telephones have the same kinds of dynamics that social media
| does. And if you want to pick examples from those, no one
| forces local book stores to carry some racist screed calling
| for the extermination of a group of people. They can choose
| to not do that, the same as Facebook can choose to not
| publish something. The problem is that there are multiple,
| competing bookstores, so while it's unlikely that most of
| them are going to publish the racist screed, there certainly
| exist stores that will carry books with varying points of
| view. Facebook, on the other hand, benefits from positive
| network externalities to the point where for some people it
| becomes 'the internet'.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-.
| .. - this stuff has real world consequences. What's the best
| way to deal with that? I think we all agree that "quash all
| debate and dissent" is not good. But "just let people post
| whatever, wherever with no consequences" is not great either.
| I don't have all the answers.
| rytcio wrote:
| Back in the olden days, they were looked at as weirdos and
| ignored.
| davidw wrote:
| Right, back in the olden days, you'd have a couple of drunk
| guys at the end of the bar ranting about their BS, and at
| most, you'd just kind of give them some room. Maybe people
| might start avoiding the bar if it regularly filled up with
| angry loons. Now their rants get spread far and wide across
| the internet.
| golemotron wrote:
| When these platforms were just exercising editorial control it
| was enough to make them liable for defamation and libel. Now that
| they are representing points of view, it's time to consider
| breaking them up. A duopoly of FB and Twitter isn't enough
| diversity for a rich ecosystem.
| strenholme wrote:
| While I'm a moderate Democrat, and no libertarian, [1] I have a
| lot of respect for Robby Suave, the author of this piece.
|
| He has been very good about pointing out the abuses of the
| radical left destroying people's lives for things like wearing a
| costume at a 2018 Halloween party which the radical left woke mob
| decides is politically incorrect in 2020. [2] In addition, he has
| supported due process during the #MeToo "believe all women" moral
| panic when many on the radical left wanted to get rid of
| presumption of innocence and due process. [3]
|
| [1] Certain problems require big government to solve: Police,
| military, roads, and, yes, health care
|
| [2] https://reason.com/2020/06/18/washington-post-blackface-
| hall...
|
| [3] e.g. https://reason.com/2017/11/16/dear-prudence-meets-due-
| proces...
| xwolfi wrote:
| I don't know the guy but he looks very preoccupied with
| facebook drama, with inflammatory titles, and mounting scandal
| on top of a scandal. There are people who would rather see the
| liberal left burn alive than convince a few people not to vote
| for them for this boring reason 1, and this boring reason 2
| and...
|
| It's fun to troll online, but respect... I wouldn't ask for it,
| I don't think he should either :D
| strenholme wrote:
| _It's fun to troll online_
|
| Without more context, I have to assume you're talking about
| the articles he wrote which I linked to in the grandparent.
|
| I am not sure how pointing out it was unfair to get a woman
| in her mid-50s fired because she wore a costume in 2018 the
| Washington Post retroactively decided was politically
| incorrect in 2020 is "trolling". More like, standing up for
| fairness, compassion, and justice.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| Imagine you're having a conversation with a friend at a coffee
| shop, and an employee interrupts you by shouting "that's false!"
|
| "Fact checking" should be opt-in, at the very least. And
| blockable, like an uninvited troll
| djoldman wrote:
| I'm interested in the eventual outcome of this case:
|
| > "This case presents a simple question: do Facebook and its
| vendors defame a user who posts factually accurate content, when
| they publicly announce that the content failed a 'fact-check' and
| is 'partly false,' and by attributing to the user a false claim
| that he never made?" wrote Stossel's attorneys in the lawsuit.
| "The answer, of course, is yes."
|
| I hope there is no settlement if it proceeds.
| akersten wrote:
| The mental gymnastics to contort labelling of posts as
| defamation is so laughable. There's nothing defaming about "we
| had X group review this post and they found it was False." It
| doesn't matter if X group was incorrect in their assessment-
| what matters is that statement ("group reviewed and their
| finding was --") is purely true.
|
| That's not defamation of character (which would be "this poster
| is lying"), it's a true statement about an opinion that was
| reached ("fact checkers consider this article False
| information"). It's a subtle, but critical distinction. They
| don't have a case, IMO.
| djoldman wrote:
| The text generated and written by Facebook says:
|
| > False information
|
| next paragraph:
|
| > Checked by independent fact-checkers
|
| If you want to get to subtle and critical distinctions, a
| straightforward reading of the above is: "this is false
| information. the fact that it is false was checked by
| independent fact-checkers."
|
| A reasonable reading is that facebook labels the information
| as false and that that was *confirmed* by fact-checkers.
|
| If they mean to say: "fact checkers labeled this as false and
| so we are hiding this information" then they should say so
| plainly, no?
| [deleted]
| nathias wrote:
| As an epistemologist I can only say I never imagined things will
| get this retarded in my lifetime.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Questions for the guy would be:
|
| - did the title had to be THAT inflammatory (did it have to say
| "JUNK", did it have to make the link to the CDC reaction to it
| rather than the main point)
|
| - was Facebook the right place to share such important insight,
| rather than a research paper, or even a letter to the CDC
|
| - is it the right reaction, in a sensitive period with sensitive
| misinformation, to further inflame the whole thing saying that
| not only masks are junks for schools (at least his title makes
| you think so on facebook), that now it's even fact checkers that
| are wrong...
|
| I don't know why this guy can't solve problems and just create
| new ones, but damn he's wasting a lot of people's time and
| produce very little value outside of more anger, more doubt and
| more division :D
| mannanj wrote:
| Not the OP, but my reasoning for all your points.
|
| 1- All posts are competing for attention. You live in a society
| where if you don't get someones attention right away, you're
| speaking to a wall.
|
| 2- The CDC is overworked, behind on response, has a clear
| agenda, and would likely not do anything. Often making a public
| outcry or outrage is the best way to reach this bigger slower
| beaurocratic agencies. Unless you're saying you know someone on
| the inside and could actually contribute to having a discussion
| with the right person? Or are you just saying you're good at
| providing "solutions" without any ability to actually help?
|
| 3- Sounds like you are making an opinion that the OP made the
| wrong reaction, that is your opinion, not something based on
| fact. Opinions about right/wrong are by their definition
| opinions, not fact, to be paraded as talking points by "fact"
| checkers.
|
| His discussion did not waste my time. I for one like to be
| challenged. But if you don't like going to a place where you
| have your opinions challenged or strengthened, then maybe you
| should go to a place with opinions more like yours. I would
| argue you complaining about someone posting an opinion article
| online and calling it divisive, is the mere definition of an
| attack that is divisive. Your post reads divisive and passive-
| aggressive angry to me (you literally read the entire post and
| then complained about it wasting time).
| 323 wrote:
| People trusted media. But then media was exposed as partisan, and
| then as outright liers.
|
| So fact checkers were invented.
|
| Now fact-checkers are exposed as being partisan, and sometimes
| outright lying (see BMJ vs FB fact-checking fiasco).
|
| So we need to go deeper, we need to invent something new, above
| fact checkers, which will be trusted again.
|
| What could such a thing be?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Or, we can just educate our population with albeit dry, but
| acceptable methodology to identify what is and is not fact.
|
| Teach us to fish.
| mannanj wrote:
| > What could such a thing be?
|
| I think we need a fact checker for the fact checkers. I propose
| we let the fact checkers fact check themselves.
| baq wrote:
| slashdot did just that 15 years ago.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _So fact checkers were invented._
|
| No, fact checkers existed for decades before social media. Even
| before the internet.
|
| I've worked in newsrooms as recently as the 1990's where there
| were fact checkers. Usually nice people with many very large,
| expensive books to double-check things.
|
| But when the media companies became beholden to Wall Street
| instead of the public, the fact checking departments were the
| first people cut in the name of "maximizing shareholder value."
|
| That was followed by consultants ( * cough * Broadcast Image
| Group * cough * ) who constantly pushed for more and more
| "breaking news" hype and convinced news managers that it was
| more important to be first than to be right. The public ate it
| up and it became a feedback loop.
|
| I could go on, but this isn't the place for it.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not that i would trust Facebook with fact checking generally, but
| these people sound to me like antivaxxers who got away on a
| technicality.
| mannanj wrote:
| Your post is an Ad hominem style based of reasoning to shut
| down discussing any of the actual uncomfortable truths behind
| the post. You used antivaxxer as an ugly label to ignore
| discussing any of the points.
| upofadown wrote:
| Why would you want to fact check a social media site like
| Facebook anyway? The vast majority of the communications there
| are ultimately expressions of feelings. There is no way you can
| fact check such a medium into a source of objective fact.
|
| It makes as much sense as having fact checkers in pubs and
| restaurants. Sure, there is going to be misinformation spread in
| those places but ultimately the people involved understand that
| things spread by random people might not actually be true.
| paul7986 wrote:
| What to believe nothing just live by my intuition which says
| ignore all for profit biased media and only believe in long term
| science..years and years of data.. cause an example the CDC in
| December recommending against the Johnson and Johnson shot which
| they previously recommended in early 2021 ..omg ..they are still
| trying to figure this all out out. My intuition says China knows
| a lot to all and Covid will further accelerate them to becoming
| the super power of the world... the world just sits by and let's
| it happen..has helped them get there too. Ughh
| JPKab wrote:
| >"Climate Feedback, a subgroup within Science Feedback, labeled
| two of his climate change-related videos as "misleading" and
| "partly false." Stossel's situation is similar to mine in that
| the fact-checker attributed to him a claim--"forest fires are
| caused by poor management, not by climate change," in this case--
| that his video never actually made." ......
|
| >"Stossel eventually succeeded in getting two Climate Feedback
| editors to admit that they had not watched his video--and after
| they had watched the video, they agreed with him that it was not
| misleading, having noted that both government mismanagement and
| climate change have contributed to forest fires. But Climate
| Feedback still did not "correct their smear," according to
| Stossel."
|
| This is the new regime we have created for ourselves. Many of you
| folks reading this are extremely high IQ, and yet you have
| supported this system that delegates the responsibility for the
| ideas you are allowed to consume to knuckle-dragging morons.
|
| Somebody should stop and think about the kind of people that a
| job like "fact-checking" will attract. It's not high-paying, is
| inherently boring, and reminds me of a security guard kind of
| position. I can think of two categories:
|
| 1.) Hardcore ideologue hall-monitors who passionately believe in
| a "cause" and, based on my extensive interactions with activists
| and religious fundamentalists as a kid, have thinking patterns
| based in tribal, overly-emotional narratives and tend to be
| quantitatively illiterate. (You will not find many people who
| ever took calculus/statistics in either a Pentecostal church OR a
| social justice protest.) My father is one of these activists, has
| surrounded himself (and by proxy, me) with these people for
| decades. The ends always justify the means, and the only
| information they accrete from the digital firehose is content
| designed to monetize their confirmation biases.
|
| 2.) ne'er do well types, often from privileged backgrounds. You
| know the type: That person who has travelled to all sorts of very
| interesting places all over the world (on their parent's dime),
| provided they had a beaches, nightclubs, and hordes of other
| western hedonists. They kind of fall into these relatively
| unsupervised, non-demanding, low-paid but not low-status jobs at
| non-profits. (I used to do pro-bono work for various DC non-
| profits, and more often than not my work would be wasted because
| teaching one of these trustafarian idiots how to use the web apps
| I built for them was harder than writing the goddammed app ever
| was.)
|
| We can't trust these people to be in charge of what is true. We
| can't trust ANYONE, and that's the entire point of the
| Enlightenment era philosophy from hundreds of years ago. We're
| just relearning these lessons now.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Somebody should stop and think about the kind of people that
| a job like "fact-checking" will attract. It's not high-paying,
| is inherently boring, and reminds me of a security guard kind
| of position.
|
| Yea, that sounds inevitable (due to economic constraints).
|
| If I wanted "fact checkers", I would prefer them to be either
| experts in the subject matter _or_ people with relevant
| education and enough time to read studies. The result of their
| work should not be "this is false/misleading", but an "expert
| opinion" response where they can point exactly what is false
| and offer references (literature, studies) that contradict the
| supposed false claim.
|
| Of course we all know that this doesn't scale, nobody's going
| to pay experts to spend hours reading studies to prove someone
| wrong on the internet. They've got better things to do.
| davidw wrote:
| I wish comments like yours were what we were discussing. This
| gets to the heart of the matter:
|
| * It is expensive for credible experts, or anyone, really, to
| meticulously go through and provide the best information
| available about a subject.
|
| * It is incredibly cheap, easy and fast to spread outright
| lies.
|
| This imbalance creates a real problem. Social media has made
| the problem much worse, because it is so quick and easy to
| spread lies.
|
| This is a tricky problem and simplistic solutions like "there
| should be no fact checking and no limits" can lead to grave
| real world consequences.
| JPKab wrote:
| >"This is a tricky problem and simplistic solutions like
| "there should be no fact checking and no limits" can lead
| to grave real world consequences."
|
| This exact statement has been uttered by every ruler in
| history since the invention of the printing press. (the
| most popular printed books of the day, other than the
| bible, were books on identifying witches) If you insist
| that there be a regulation on what information can be
| distributed, you have no choice but to put certain people
| in charge of making these decisions. Sure, you can make
| them into committees, and have them follow processes, but
| at the end of the day somebody is paying them, and
| therefore they are subject to corrupting forces.
|
| The consequence of free dissemination of information isn't
| heaven, or perfect. It can lead to horrible things. But the
| consequences of controlling and limiting information by
| some central arbiter has always led to hell. When in
| history can you point to a censorship regime and say "yeah,
| those were the good guys."???
|
| No matter how benevolent the intention, censorship
| infrastructure has always been hijacked by the powerful for
| their own interests.
| davidw wrote:
| Facebook is a private company. The 1st amendment in the
| US does not prevent private companies from deciding what
| they won't publish.
|
| Is it worrisome that so much power is in the hands of a
| large private organization? Certainly!
| nova22033 wrote:
| _Stossel, it should be noted, is currently suing Facebook,
| Science Feedback, and Climate Feedback. He acknowledges that a
| private company has the right to ban, take down, or deprioritize
| content as it sees fit. Moreover, different individuals and
| organizations can disagree about basic factual questions like the
| science of climate change. But he says that in attributing to him
| a direct quotation that he never uttered, the fact-checkers
| committed defamation._
|
| Seriously?...Stossel is a contributor to Reason.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| If you arent thinking and talking about Operation Mockingbird and
| its inevitable successors we dont know the name of you will be
| missing the plot on this topic.
| persona wrote:
| These are early symptoms of a Truth-Market-Fit approach[1] where
| "fact-checking" is defined by the financial benefits in keeping a
| following or customer base. The "Fact checkers" have become Trust
| Providers. Different groups of people will choose to 'believe'
| different Trust Providers according to their own views.
|
| [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-market-fit-
| unbundling-t...
| destitude wrote:
| This is my biggest problem with the response to Covid in the
| USA.. the very "loose" information provided/parroted by officials
| that are designed to manipulate public perception without simply
| providing the facts for people to make their own judgments. One
| of the current ones is how you keep hearing how hospitals are
| "overwhelmed" and we are running out of beds.. they neglect to
| tell you the impact of all health care providers that had quit
| because they refused to take the vaccine. So in affect it was the
| hospitals own policies that caused this issue. This is why
| Minnesota has called on the National Guard to help replace all
| the nurses that quit. There are plenty of beds/ICUs just not
| enough employees to cover them.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Are you saying that people who don't believe in medicine and
| can put patients at risk should remain employed?
| mannanj wrote:
| Are you Straw Manning and Ad Hominem attacking the author in
| the same post?
|
| Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine?
| In fact, being a Doctor or Nurse by definition means
| believing in medicine and protecting the patient is your job.
| More so than some random hacker news stranger.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Where did he say that these people don't believe in
| medicine?
|
| Refusing to take a vaccine that appears to be safe and
| reasonably effective despite being in a pandemic _and_ in a
| field of work that both increases your risk of exposure and
| increases the potential damage caused by said exposure
| (spreading the disease around people who might be already
| weakened by other medical conditions) suggests they don 't.
|
| > Ad Hominem attacking the author
|
| Could you elaborate? I don't see anything in my comment
| that's attacking the author directly rather than their
| claims which I totally disagree with.
| [deleted]
| mannanj wrote:
| The problem is fact checks would do the damage on a post like
| yours above, and by the time they're proven "wrong" have done
| the damage and moved on.
|
| it really is just information parroting/parading, and anyone
| defending it, is OK with it because its supporting their own
| "interpretation of the facts". It's wild how polarized we are,
| but not really, because these things are just further
| supporting the echo chamber of opinions one side already had.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Hi, I have friends and family who are doctors in Minnesota.
| They were overwhelmed even before the hospitals decided to fire
| the health care workers who don't listen to health care advice.
|
| Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.
| mannanj wrote:
| Your local hospitals in Minnesota are not hospitals
| nationwide. I have many hospitals in Northern Virginia, DC,
| and even LA that have been nothing close to "full" for many
| months of the last year, the media portrayed them as full.
|
| Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| The person I was responding to specifically cited
| Minnesota.
|
| You said "have been nothing close to 'full' for many months
| of the last year."
|
| A reasonable interpretation of your words is that there was
| at least one month last year where the hospitals in your
| area were "close to 'full'."
|
| How long does a hospital need to be "close to 'full'" for
| the people who work there to feel "overwhelmed"?
| jwolfe wrote:
| The news frequently talks about short staff at hospitals, in my
| own observations.
|
| Is there any evidence supporting vaccine requirements being a
| larger source of nurse attrition than burnout?
| mannanj wrote:
| If you ask a fact checker that, no. Years later when they
| change their tune, then yes. So the answer is no: because we
| live in a fact checker society now.
| Zak wrote:
| The underlying problem in the case this article describes is one
| of classification.
|
| Fact checking every claim is a lot of work, so fact checkers find
| a widely-circulating claim to check and generalize it from
| whatever various specific claims are in circulation. In this
| case, it was generalized to "there's no science behind masks on
| kids". That claim is easy to check, and it's false; there are
| multiple scientific studies showing that requiring masks in
| schools reduce covid rates among students.
|
| The author's article did not make that claim or anything that
| could be reasonably reduced to "there's no science behind masks
| on kids". Instead, his claim was that the CDC made a
| recommendation based on a specific study, and that the study in
| question has serious methodological flaws (the headline phrase
| "junk science" is a bit sensational). That's a more narrow claim,
| most of which probably falls into the category of opinion or
| analysis rather than fact-checking.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| These "fact checkers" are nothing more than a means for big tech
| and big media to push their increasingly authoritarian
| "progressive" narrative. Until more people realize this and just
| walk away from FB and other platforms it's going to continue.
| There's hope though, look at the relative readership / viewership
| of independent journalists and podcasts relative to mainstream
| media. When CNN has a clip of a reporter standing in front of a
| bunch of burning buildings with a chyron that reads "fiery but
| mostly peaceful protests" even the dimmest among us has to see
| that they are not a news organization. There are plenty of
| examples for every other mainstream media outlet as well.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Ah yes, the complaint of "progressive big media".
|
| You know the first time I decided a media outlet was pushing an
| agenda? When Fox News famously asked its audience as it went to
| break if Obama's fist bump was "a terrorist fist jab".
|
| This isn't a "progressive" narrative; it's whatever narrative
| fits the interests of the company. Sometimes it's progressive,
| such as when it comes to social issues. Oftentimes it's
| conservative. I've yet to see CNN etc laud unions, higher taxes
| on the rich, universal healthcare, etc, even in stories they
| were reporting on where it would make sense (such as the high
| cost of private healthcare, or times it didn't cover something
| ludicrously expensive for someone because reasons, etc)
| finite_jest wrote:
| The "complaint" is on point. Most of the major US mainstream
| media outlets are indeed biased in a particular direction.
| See for yourself: find a list of major news outlets [2] and
| check their political leanings [3][4]. Fox is mostly an
| outlier.
|
| You could perhaps argue that they are more "woke" than
| "progressive".
|
| [1]: And many other institutions, see
| https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-
| libe...
|
| [2] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=News_medi
| a_in_the...
|
| [3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
|
| [4]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I anticipated the typical "But fox news but fox news but fox
| news" which is exactly why I added the last sentence to my
| comment.
| mannanj wrote:
| Who fact checks the fact checkers? Why we fact checked ourselves
| and found nothing wrong.
|
| Let's not forget the fact that those teams are also severely
| understaffed.
| maxdo wrote:
| This all stuff reminds of two kids fighting in front of teacher.
| What's your opinion on how a person should crack an egg :)
|
| So much drama about such a basic concept. Yes it helps in general
| to stop the spread, maybe in some cases it's less effective, or
| not needed at all.
|
| Why on earth people dedicate so much energy to discuss a tiny
| subset of mask application?
|
| How's that a big deal?
| jquery wrote:
| The fact checkers didn't admit they were wrong, they merely
| unflagged the article. If this is what the author think passes
| for logic no wonder they flagged him. Article was garbage
| clickbait for anti-maskers anyway.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning. It is
| inherently biased. The heavy political leanings of those in
| direct control of the organizations' verdicts are brought up time
| and time again, and even memes are being made about sites like
| Snopes. My favorite meme goes something like:
|
| Did x member of y political organization get arrested for hitting
| some in the head with a baseball bat?
|
| FALSE.
|
| [big block of text]
|
| X member of y political organization was arrested for hitting
| someone in the head with a _cricket_ bat.
|
| [big block of text]
| aimor wrote:
| People ask for examples. This is an interesting one where
| Snopes admits they were wrong, and honorably changes their
| rating from MOSTLY FALSE to.. Mixture?
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separ...
|
| https://archive.fo/UKPBQ
|
| Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback
| Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder
| David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a
| result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives
| (reversing Mikkelson's policy).
| dundarious wrote:
| Snopes has never really been credible beyond their original
| domain of looking into urban legends and chain mail forwarded
| by your aunt and uncle.
|
| They are also guilty of massive plagiarism, and heavy revision
| of articles without any notice.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-pla...
|
| But the other fact checkers aren't much better. The Washington
| Post (in particular Kessler himself) are some of the worst in
| my opinion.
| tiahura wrote:
| Why anyone ever took Snopes seriously for anything more
| important than wether Paul from the Wonder Years was Marilyn
| Manson defies comprehension.
| jquery wrote:
| Snopes was infinitely more credible than Trump, the whole
| reason online fact checking became so necessary.
| playguardin wrote:
| steelstraw wrote:
| And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing.
| Basically this media bias cartoon:
|
| https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b9376...
|
| Russell Conjugation is also a powerful tool they often use.
|
| I am firm. [Positive empathy]
|
| You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]
|
| He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy]
|
| https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
| edoceo wrote:
| My framing: What's the difference between persistence and a
| stubborn asshole? I'm one, you're the other.
|
| Mostly gets folk to double-think that it's their perspective
| that chooses their description.
| Permit wrote:
| > And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing.
|
| Can we see some examples of this actually happening? Have you
| seen this before?
| steelstraw wrote:
| The Trump fish-feeding story:
| https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/358983-media-
| shows-w...
|
| They use these tactics even with something as trivial as
| fish feeding.
| umvi wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown
|
| When it first happened the media framed it with the
| racially inflammatory headline:
|
| "White cop shoots and kills unarmed black teen"
|
| All technically true information. But what really happened
| (according to forensic evidence and credible testimony)
| could also be framed as "Convenience store robber attacks
| police officer and was killed in the process". It's hard to
| tell exactly what happened since we only have a few facts
| and the rest is witness testimony, but it seems the media
| definitely pre-determined that the framing of the story
| should be that the cop was the "bad guy" and the victim was
| the "good guy" and that the whole thing should have a
| racism angle.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| This reminds me of a recent comment (from another post)
| about borderline personality disorder and abusive parents
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29718798):
|
| > I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get
| through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting
| themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts
| to distort reality... Here's an example with details
| changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a
| car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and
| the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them.
| On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
| markdown wrote:
| How about "Murderous cop kills convenience store robber
| who tried to punch him"?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| *tried to get his gun
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Yes, that's another example of squeezing a complicated
| situation into a soundbite that can be easily understood
| by those who are terrified by the complexity of the real
| world.
| garbagetime wrote:
| Reminds me of this legendary clip of comedian Sam Hyde
| bombing massively
|
| https://youtu.be/YkiQwVT8ij8
| uoaei wrote:
| Your framing implies the normative claim that convenience
| store robbers should be shot and killed. This is hotly
| contested on moral grounds, but on purely material
| grounds it is hard to justify that claim at all.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If the teen attacked the cop there is a self defense
| claim, albeit that doesn't stand if the use of force is
| greater than the threat (eg shooting someone if you think
| they're unarmed)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Reagan was asked during the Presidential Debates whether he
| was too old to be President. His reply:
|
| "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not
| going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's
| youth and inexperience"
|
| The reframe sank Mondale's campaign.
| bitwize wrote:
| I think going up against Reagan, who had enormous popular
| support due to being thought to have presided over a
| strong economy and progress in foreign policy vs. the
| USSR, did most of the work in sinking Mondale's campaign.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Reagan wasn't popular by default. He was popular because
| he was a master at debate, charming people, and framing
| himself as President.
|
| For example, Jimmy Carter never looked Presidential. For
| one, he encouraged people to call him "Jimmy" rather than
| "James". For another, he'd wear a sweater when giving
| speeches to the public.
|
| People liked that Reagan wore a sharp suit and acted
| (yes, acted) the role of President.
| WalterBright wrote:
| BTW, Obama, Trump, and Biden all were very careful to
| present themselves while campaigning as Presidential.
| They all wore sharp, well tailored suits, and took pains
| to stand up straight. I bet they all got coaching in body
| language.
| jessaustin wrote:
| I was young, but even at the time I recognized this as a
| joke. Did Mondale really not have any argument other than
| "Reagan is too old"?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Mondale was unable to respond to Reagan's quip.
|
| BTW, Reagan was a master at reframing difficult questions
| into a joke, thereby disarming their payload. I remember
| the Democrats at the time complaining in bitter
| frustration at how adroitly the "Teflon President" did
| this.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Maybe not 180 degrees, but the major court cases lately:
|
| The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd
| being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able
| to breathe before that happened.
|
| The Kenosha stuff was quite obviously at least possibly
| self defense when the whole incident was shown.
|
| Both of those may or may not have affected the court cases,
| but the riots that happened? People's opinion on them?
|
| Oh, just thought of a better one - Nicholas Sandmann.
| There's a full 180.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| All in one direction, too. Curious.
| Blahah wrote:
| > The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd
| being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able
| to breathe before that happened.
|
| Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by
| kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person
| was already complaining of breathing difficulty?
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Capital Hill riot vs insurrection
|
| BLM "mostly peaceful" protest vs riot
| zionic wrote:
| Or that one politician who called the capital hill
| autonomous zone a "summer of love".
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning
|
| This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most
| people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a
| deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to
| squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which
| experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio
| disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world,
| simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture
| and heresy is 0% a coincidence).
|
| The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own
| foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on
| clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-
| generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance,
| uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand
| reality.
|
| The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are
| always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those
| with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of
| certainty we do have in societal knowledge_.
|
| It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a
| centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already
| revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm
| probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow
| through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for
| communication has a content filter on it that boils down to
| "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would
| find 'weird' " .
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| My personal favorite was something like "No, Trump was not
| telling the Truth, Clinton did not submerge her servers in
| acid." prior to the 2016 election. That is when I knew the guy
| would never get a fair shake, no matter what he did.
| tzs wrote:
| He said she "acid washed 33000 emails". BTW, he was still
| saying that years later. From a May 2019 Tweet of his [1].
|
| > Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked
| Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a
| most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitte
| r.c...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| NBC gave it a big "NOPE" in their fact check:
|
| "The Claim Trump says Clinton 'acid washed' her email
| server.
|
| The Truth Clinton's team used an app called BleachBit; she
| did not use a corrosive chemical."
|
| https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465
|
| This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but
| like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair
| about him. Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical!
| SHEESH!
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him
|
| Never forget:
|
| https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-
| magaz...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Watching grown adults freak out about that was just ... I
| know that history is full of otherwise reasonable people
| working themselves into a froth about something, and
| going from there to do whatever terrible things, but to
| watch it happen over such _trivial_ items was chilling.
| tzs wrote:
| What do you think would be a fair way for the media to
| handle the "acid wash" claims?
|
| He doesn't seem to have been talking about BleachBit,
| because he said in his ABC interview on 2016-09-05
|
| > I mean, she had her emails -- 33,000 emails -- acid
| washed. The most sophisticated person never heard about
| acid washing. Acid washing is a very expensive process
| and that's to really get rid of them.
|
| and at a couple campaign events the next day
|
| > But why do you acid wash, or bleach, the emails? Nobody
| even heard of it before. Very expensive
|
| and
|
| > How about the 33,000 missing e-mails that were acid
| washed -- acid washed. And Rudy was telling me, nobody
| does it because it's such an expensive process.
|
| BeachBit is free software. There is nothing "expensive"
| about obtaining it, installing it, or using it. So what
| the heck was he trying to get at?
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Trump's a moron, famous for his verbal diarrhea, this is
| nothing new. He seemed to have heard the name BleachBit,
| conflated it with bleach, which in his mind was a harsh
| chemical like acid, which then became acid wash. There
| are many such examples of his meandering thought
| patterns, it's definitely in character.
|
| The Clinton camp and their supporters in the media were
| the ones being disingenuous, and seizing on the chemical
| angle to deny malfeasance. Versions of "she didn't wash
| the server with acid", or the infamous "wipe, like with a
| cloth?" comments do not debunk the core claim, that data
| was deleted, and the Clinton political machine are savvy
| and cynical enough operators to know this.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that Trump thought that Clinton
| or her proxies had subjected hardware or "emails" to
| bleach, acid, or any kind of corrosive or oxidizing
| agent?
|
| That is my question. Do you sincerely believe he thought
| that was what had happened?
| jquery wrote:
| The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by
| swallowing bleach? The same guy who was convinced he won
| the 2020 election on the logic that "it's impossible
| Biden would get more votes than me". Yes, I sincerely do
| believe Trump is that stupid.
| missblit wrote:
| Snopes would usually list that as mostly true or true right?
|
| That said I stopped following them when the websaite was taken
| over by ads and whitespace.
| ravar wrote:
| Depends if they like the person that did it or not.
| yaomtc wrote:
| Whenever I see a Snopes article where the claim is similar to
| the facts, but some parts are off, they use "Mixed", not
| "False".
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > baseball bat? [...] cricket bat.
|
| In my experience, Snopes would have rated that "Mostly true" or
| "Mixture". Do you have examples where they've given a clearly
| misleading rating?
| hereforphone wrote:
| Are you questioning the veracity of memes sir?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| No, just checking facts.
| syshum wrote:
| I am not sure about Snopes, but Politifact sure has several
| like the OP's example
| _dain_ wrote:
| For example, this whole article just should not exist:
|
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p.
| ..
|
| There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:
|
| "X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say
| that's wrong."
|
| i.e. "fact-checking" a _prediction_ about something that will
| happen _in the future_. Unless you 're clairvoyant, that
| isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't
| happened yet! So any rating _at all_ is misleading.
|
| I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be
| predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse
| will happen. But they do it for economic and social and
| political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.
|
| "Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-
| journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some
| category that has magically different standards or incentives
| than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart,
| skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow
| free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and
| motivations of every other news outlet.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| When you say that "this whole article just should not
| exist", are you stating that predictions should never be
| investigated, validated, measured against the statements of
| experts? Or are you just quibbling that it shouldn't count
| as "fact checking"? The former seems silly and the latter
| gets a shrug from me (who cares if there's a better phrase
| than "fact checking").
| _dain_ wrote:
| Of course the predictions should be investigated and
| validated, but only after the events have come to pass.
| If you're going to write something beforehand (e.g.
| contrasting the predictions of various experts), don't
| call it a fact-check, because it's not about facts, it's
| about opinions. Informed, educated opinions yes, but
| still fundamentally opinions.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's fairly absurd on its face.
|
| There are many important predictions to be made about
| medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range).
|
| If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy
| storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable
| energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to
| investigate and (in)validate this claim.
|
| If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15
| years because today's cows are farting less", we do no
| thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate
| this.
|
| If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the
| earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait
| until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim.
|
| If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20%
| over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal
| are more difficult to access than historical ones and
| when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not
| need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate
| this.
| _dain_ wrote:
| the first two things you said are preposterous strawmen,
| the third I already mentioned, the fourth is wrong. you
| don't know what will happen in 10 years, maybe some new
| coal extraction technology will be invented, maybe new
| sources will be discovered, maybe it becomes possible to
| economically extract the CO2 from the smokestacks and
| coal becomes green and gets tons of subsidies. yeah it's
| unlikely, but it's not something you can "fact-check". it
| does violence to the meaning of the term.
|
| imagine telling someone ten years ago that oil prices
| would go negative, which they did last year.
|
| and apart from all of this, for every example you can
| give me of an obvious black-and-white issue where you
| really could fact-check it 10 years in advance, there
| will be 99 others where it's really not so clear-cut, but
| partisans _want_ there to be fact-checker approved
| talking points for their side. and the market will fill
| this demand. for subjects outside your domain-expertise,
| good luck telling the difference.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > yeah it's unlikely, but it's not something you can
| "fact-check". it does violence to the meaning of the
| term.
|
| One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to _"
| yeah, it's unlikely"_ to people who would not otherwise
| know.
|
| Lots of claims are made about stuff, in particular
| climate change and energy supplies, that completely fall
| into the _" yeah, it's unlikely"_ zone, and yet most
| ordinary readers and viewers would not know this.
|
| It's always going to be in the interest of _someone_ to
| say "this might happen by the year XXXX". There's
| generally no shortage of black-swan boosterism. Having
| someone step who actually knows the field step in and
| point out that yes, it might happen but it almost
| certainly will not is of incredible value.
|
| Your response reminds me of the situation in the current
| satirical movie "Don't Look Up", where because the
| probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only
| 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's
| OK to "sit tight and assess". I mean, sure it could miss,
| and *"yeah, it's unlikely but...."
| pdonis wrote:
| _> One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to
| "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise
| know._
|
| Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be
| correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point.
| Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't
| false facts. They're unlikely predictions.
|
| _> because the probability of an asteroid colliding with
| earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president
| decides it 's OK to "sit tight and assess"._
|
| Saying that it is a good idea to act on predictions that
| are overwhelmingly likely is not the same as saying that
| those predictions are facts.
|
| If you want to improve other people's critical thinking
| skills, you need to make sure yours are good. Calling
| predictions facts and acting as if they're the same thing
| is not good critical thinking.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to
| be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point.
| Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't
| false facts. They're unlikely predictions.
|
| Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of
| noise in which people who frequently don't know what they
| are talking about make predictions about the future. I
| don't really care what you want to call a counter-
| balancing trend to that - I would agree that "fact-
| checking" for things that are clearly predictions is
| likely not the best term, but it's not the worst either,
| since frequently the process of pointing out just how
| ridiculous the predictions are will involve using actual
| facts. So in that context, "fact checking" does not mean
| "check that the _facts_ claimed are correct ", it means
| "check the facts underlying the prediction".
|
| But call it what it should be called or not, it's still a
| valuable act.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of
| noise in which people who frequently don 't know what
| they are talking about make predictions about the
| future._
|
| Focusing on "fact-checking" in general, let alone
| expanding it to include "prediction checking", _worsens_
| the huge amount of noise in our culture of supposedly
| authoritative pronouncements being made that turn out to
| be wrong. The Facebook "fact check" that is the subject
| of the article we are discussing is a case in point. If
| Facebook weren't so fixated on trying to remove "noise"
| through "fact checking", they wouldn't be going overboard
| all the time and removing things that aren't noise at
| all, but useful dissent.
|
| Also, the very term "fact checking", as it is being used
| in our culture now, is a Russell conjugation (someone
| else brought up Russell conjugations elsewhere in this
| thread). Facebook is "fact checking" (actually their
| outsourced third parties who remain anonymous and
| unaccountable are doing it, but let that pass); those who
| support Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "helping
| to spread authoritative information"; those who question
| Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "questioning
| authority" (even if they cite actual facts).
|
| In short, while I agree that our culture is filled with
| noise, I don't think all the noise is from individuals
| who don't know what they're talking about; I think a lot
| of it is from organizations who don't like to have their
| power and authority questioned.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I am a fact checker, you are a journalist, he is
| spreading harmful disinformation.
| zenron wrote:
| Hey, you know you are right.
|
| Every time a prediction is made in connection to a fact-
| check, the prediction should be falsified 100%
| immediately. You are right, we don't have to wait.
| scotty79 wrote:
| They should have called it bullshit check and all claims
| about the future not backed by data and scientific
| modelling should be automatically marked as BS.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people
| with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost
| everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being
| undoubtedly true. This is a big part of the widening
| divide between right and left, which is a major issue.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people
| with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost
| everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being
| undoubtedly true.
|
| People with poor critical reading skills will probably
| just accept (or, if it conflicts with the preexisting
| world view, reject) the original claim as true without
| referencing a "fact check" at all.
| markdown wrote:
| > Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people
| with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost
| everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being
| undoubtedly true.
|
| In my experience, people with poor critical reading
| skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what
| they heard on FOX, which is that fact check websites are
| a liberal scam.
| timr wrote:
| > In my experience, people with poor critical reading
| skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what
| they heard on FOX
|
| The same thing happens on the left with the New York
| Times. Laziness is a trait orthogonal to political party.
| jquery wrote:
| False equivalence. Fox went to court to call themselves
| entertainment because of all the verifiable lies they
| were pushing. In court, Tucker Carlson said "no
| reasonable person" would believe him.
|
| New York Times standards are much higher than Fox. Are
| they perfect? No. But generally they are far less likely
| to lie to you.
| jessaustin wrote:
| You're trolling us, right? Maddow won a nearly identical
| court case using a nearly identical defense.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-
| maddow...
| [deleted]
| scotty79 wrote:
| Predictions shouldn't exist because noone is clairvoyant.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Clearly people can and do make predictions and sometimes
| those predictions are quite right - and sometimes wrong.
| Even a really really good predictor like Nate Silver gets
| things wrong.
|
| Future predictions are not fact checkable. You can argue
| likelihoods, present contrary evidence or whatnot but
| predictions are not facts, they are predictions.
|
| A good predictor gives odds to every outcome. That is not
| something a fact checker can respond to well.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Your setup was WRT political bias, but your meme example was
| WRT the tedious manner in which they report conclusions.
|
| I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some
| examples?
|
| We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience,
| Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more
| good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present
| the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually
| helps to mitigate any perception of bias.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Here is an example of identical claims made by a conservative
| and democrat politician.
|
| https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-
| qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e531...
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Well that's not Snopes.
|
| But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and
| they are not necessarily), I still don't think that
| necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two
| separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly
| differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by
| two different organizations, and also likely performed by
| different people.
|
| That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half
| true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like
| any kind of egregious bias.
| [deleted]
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Those aren't identical claims; "Canadian homes set
| thermostats to 0 in the winter of 1800" and "Canadian homes
| had no heating in the winter of 1800" are not saying the
| same thing.
|
| One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax
| income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax
| income whether or not it was desired.
| lenkite wrote:
| "The unreliable 'facts' of a fact-checking site"
| https://archive.is/t6sDN
| [deleted]
| junon wrote:
| This is not at all my experience with snopes. They've been
| pretty transparent from what I've seen.
| johncena33 wrote:
| Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab
| leak. Reality is the whole Acitvist Industrial Complex and
| many elites, who have financial ties w/ China including HN
| favorites like Apple and Amazon [3][4], are trying to regain
| control of the narrative they lost because of internet.
|
| [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/
|
| [2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
|
| [3] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-
| secr...
|
| [4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-
| with-ch...
| hereforphone wrote:
| The issue in my opinion is that there are various, almost-
| equally "true" perspectives that can be reenforced with facts
| and presented. That there is no single objective truth to all
| matters means that biases (political, religious, etc.) act as
| a lens and the "truth" presented on fact-checking sites (and
| elsewhere) is shaped by this lens. This is why you can have
| news organizations with different political slants painting a
| story two entirely different ways, without directly lying.
| junon wrote:
| I disagree. There are definitely some things that are
| completely and entirely false, not left up to speculation.
|
| My point was more that Snopes tends to indicate when
| something isn't clear-cut.
| nradov wrote:
| Except for the time that Snopes fact checked this article as
| "disputed": "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine
| To Spin News Before Publication". (The article was very
| clearly labeled as satire.)
|
| https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
| junon wrote:
| 1 is a very small sample set.
| missedthecue wrote:
| did you really expect someone to have published a peer-
| reviewed study in a high quality journal about how many
| times snopes was misleading?
|
| The claim was that fact checkers write misleading
| verdicts with political biases, one example is sufficient
| enough to verify that claim.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I liked it better when the internet had a sense of humor.
| bjourne wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-washing-machine/
|
| It has the rating "Labeled Satire" not "disputed".
| nradov wrote:
| Snopes edited their page after reasonable people pointed
| out how stupid they looked for fact checking a joke.
| junon wrote:
| Snopes exists in large part because idiots can't discern
| joke/fake from fact. This isn't really Snope's fault.
| Some people genuinely don't understand satire. We hear
| about people sharing Onion articles legitimately still.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Do you think they look less "stupid" for having to point
| out that there is no evidence for a cannibalistic, baby-
| eating cabal of pedophilic Democrat sex-traffickers?
|
| Seems like a pretty thin line between satire and reality
| these days.
| missedthecue wrote:
| They only retroactively changed this later. Web Archive
| didn't archive that page for a whole 3 years
| unfortunately, but you can see in this article that
| Snopes initially issued the verdict of "false".
|
| https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_ca49020f-5d05-5649-
| b1c...
| bjourne wrote:
| So it was labelled "false" and not "disputed" as claimed
| by nradov? Then it is hard for me to see how this is an
| example of the phenomenon that hereforphone discusses.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Haha.
|
| Remember that time with Donald Trump quoted "The Babylon
| Bee"?(BTW, The Bee is CLEARLY Christian Satire) That was
| pretty good stuff.
|
| A day later, The Bee had an article "Trump declares Babylon
| Bee the most trusted news in America"
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| To be fair, in the age of Q, it is kind of hard to find the
| line.
| [deleted]
| dymk wrote:
| Link an example please
| Supermancho wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-
| chil...
|
| She chuckled, but she didn't laugh. False?
|
| https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/
|
| Well she did laugh. True?
|
| Binary opposites for this detail, depending on which you are
| citing.
| tzs wrote:
| They both say the same thing. She laughed at some points
| during the interview, but not about the outcome of the
| case.
|
| A chuckle is a quiet or inward laugh. All chuckles are
| laughs but not all laughs are chuckles.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > They both say the same thing.
|
| They say some of the same things. The conclusions are
| different, despite the material to the fact. This is an
| example, as requested.
| jevoten wrote:
| I think the more salient factor is _which_ facts they choose to
| check. Better to leave some stories un-checked, so they can be
| dismissed as only reported by right-wing sources.
|
| In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a
| chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the
| implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied
| within the _14 hour_ window given, proving their claims true,
| PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster 's claim
| was proven true.
|
| https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...
| JPKab wrote:
| You're being downvoted for no reason I can tell, other than
| the fact that NewsBuster is a source popular with right-wing
| audiences. There are people on HN who basically will downvote
| anything they perceive as being supportive of their political
| enemies, with no regard to the content of the message.
| Message to those downvoting this:
|
| If your position on free speech changes depending on who is
| doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free
| speech.
| bobjordan wrote:
| I had the oddest experience in trying to upvote his
| comment. I'm on mobile so it may just be be that. But, when
| I upvoted, there was a small delay but it seemed to
| register a downvote. So I unvoted and tried again. Same
| thing. Anyway, assuming HN mods do not have some switch
| that turns every vote into a downvote on particular
| comments. I think it's fine to space out the
| upvote/downvote buttons. Users shouldn't be losing minutes
| of their life trying to convince themselves that their vote
| was properly registered.
| chroem- wrote:
| If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion,
| then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have
| spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm.
| Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus".
| There will always be a contrived justification.
| hkon wrote:
| what?
| yesenadam wrote:
| > If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion,
| then your votes get disabled and/or inverted.
|
| Um, what? I don't believe that for a second - that sounds
| crazy. Is there evidence for this? I'm willing to be
| educated. Er, fact-check please. (And the strange
| phrasing "I have spoken with Dang about this multiple
| times to confirm" sounds like Dang didn't 'confirm' it.)
| chroem- wrote:
| Use the email link at the bottom of the page.
| yesenadam wrote:
| So, that's a "no" - there's no evidence. (I looked at
| your recent comment history, came across this[0] which I
| consider completely deranged, so I'm not too interested
| in doing what you say. Chomsky & Herman's seeing no
| atrocities in Cambodia, and you seeing them everywhere in
| Australia, seem some kind of dual.)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28834724
| chroem- wrote:
| I deliberately post against the consensus on HN, and what
| you see is the result. I invite you to email Dang as I
| have, but I will not post the transcript of what began as
| a private conversation.
| zo1 wrote:
| It's a war for mindshare and the culture we live in. And
| the way that's done is with marketing and appearances.
| Seeing something down voted has a very clear effect, like
| seeing a product rated with bad reviews.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sure, but give examples and you often start to find that the
| topics are so far afield from reality that they don't merit
| the cost of a fact-check.
|
| Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth
| is flat (false) but not whether Earth _is_ flat, and they won
| 't fact-check that any time soon.
| luckylion wrote:
| They won't fact-check that if Donald Trump claimed it?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| No, they won't fact-check "Earth is flat" because it
| would be a waste of resources; the evidence Earth is a
| globe is overwhelming.
| [deleted]
| Permit wrote:
| Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be
| much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this
| happening rather than imagined examples.
|
| Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but
| none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't
| already hold this position. Are there any _real_ examples of
| poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere
| similar to this cricket /baseball example you've given, or are
| they far less egregious?
| lenkite wrote:
| Huh, one can fill pages of this.
|
| How 'fact-checking' can be used as censorship https://www.ft.
| com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0... - covers how
| Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how
| the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily
| censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers
| were 'fact-checked' as false.
|
| Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone
| could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...
|
| https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-
| example-...
|
| https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-
| the-f...
| Permit wrote:
| This article is a very good demonstration of the problem
| with fact checking, thanks for sharing.
|
| > Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone
| could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of
| searching...
|
| I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it
| probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we
| focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I
| was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.
| lenkite wrote:
| Personally, I think its fine if so-called "fact checkers"
| exist as long as their fact-checking isn't used to flag
| and censor people.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| One of my favorites:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-
| debates/...
|
| "Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server.
| She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive
| chemical."
| slothtrop wrote:
| And we know she didn't because of: fact-checking.
|
| Media follies ought not be conflated with fact-checking in
| abstract.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of
| the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already
| hold this position.
|
| There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are
| attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of
| information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact
| checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate
| whether the totality of output from that individual /
| organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer
| is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think
| we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones,
| which they often are), but the need to educate rational
| thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust
| summarized and often opinionated information.
|
| > Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that
| people can point to?
|
| Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the
| conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the
| authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of
| fact checking, considering there could be others that more
| often communicate the nuance of the situation.
|
| (There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are
| _applied_ into other contexts of course..)
| jscipione wrote:
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Speaking of fact checks, that's literally not what the page
| you linked says. Instead, they are rating the claim that
| "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter
| fraud."
| jscipione wrote:
| Correct, the claim that Joe Biden admitted to
| perpetrating voter fraud is verifiably true based on the
| words of Joe Biden, not false. Thus Snopes' fact check is
| a deliberate attempt to deceive, in-other-words a lie
| unless Snopes can read the mind of Joe Biden to know
| otherwise as they claim, which of course they cannot.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| But you're absolutely wrong. As in my other comment, a
| "voter fraud organization" "perpetrates" voter fraud as
| much as a "breast cancer organization" "perpetrates"
| breast cancer.
|
| This is the in-your-face, obvious, and common meaning of
| what he said. Why are you pretending otherwise?
| WD-42 wrote:
| What they debunked was a twitter post that claimed Biden
| admitted to voter fraud. They didn't claim that he did not
| say that sentence. They even posted a full transcript. Did
| you actually read this before posting it?
| jscipione wrote:
| I don't understand, Senator Biden literally did admit to
| running the "most extensive and inclusive voter fraud
| organization in the history of American politics." You're
| right that Snopes didn't deny that Biden said those
| words, just that they know he didn't mean them which is
| clearly an opinion, not a fact.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| While Snopes could take on the mantle of hyperliteralism,
| this would be a pretty paralyzing extension of scope.
| Would they need to fact-check articles that referenced a
| PD's "homicide divisions", clarifying that their charter
| is to investigate homicide instead of perpetrate it?
| Would they be able to countenance references to a
| supermarket without clarifying that Safeway has not
| invented a type of market that can fly and has X-ray
| vision?
|
| There are undoubtedly people whose language skills are
| poor enough to think that "voter fraud organization" here
| means "organization to commit voter fraud" instead of
| "organization to combat voter fraud". I'm not a fan of
| Snopes at all, but I don't think it's unreasonable that
| they exclude the tiny segment of the population in need
| of remedial literacy classes from their target audience.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Can we agree to be adults here? It's clear to any
| reasonable person what he meant. It is bad faith
| arguments like the one you are making that has made
| political discourse so toxic in this country.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| It's so obvious to me that the quote means "an organization
| that combats voter fraud" that I honestly can't believe
| you're arguing in good faith. And I don't even like Biden.
|
| If he had said instead "breast cancer organization", would
| you start claiming that he's trying to cause more breast
| cancer in the world? Obviously not, because that's absurd.
| jscipione wrote:
| It is interesting that you bring up the example of a
| breast cancer organization because Joe Biden founded The
| Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 which has been embroiled
| in scandal for allegedly misappropriating donations on
| salaries instead of using the money to do cancer
| research.
|
| Given that context if Joe Biden were to to claim that he
| was running the most extensive and inclusive breast
| cancer fraud organization in the history of American
| medicine I would take him to mean literally perpetuating
| breast cancer.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| That's incredible mental gymnastics. This is like a straw
| man version of what leftists say the average fox news
| viewer is like. If this is parody, then congratulations
| on fooling me.
| Permit wrote:
| > Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we
| have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive
| voter fraud organization in the history of American
| politics." as false,
|
| Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted
| to perpetrating voter fraud." as false.
|
| These are different claims, aren't they?
| torstenvl wrote:
| A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And
| he did make such an admission.
|
| I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would
| believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did
| not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be
| given very little weight. But it remains an admission
| nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim
| otherwise.
| 8note wrote:
| Its an admission to having an organization focussed on
| voter fraud. It's not an admission that that organization
| promotes or organizes voting fraudulently
|
| You're ascribing more precision to the statement than is
| there
| torstenvl wrote:
| I'm ascribing no precision to it whatsoever. You're
| putting the cart before the horse. Before you can argue
| about what a piece of evidence means, it first has to be
| evidence. An admission is a type of evidence, given by an
| individual against their own interest.
|
| The fact that there are all kinds of arguments about this
| evidence not meaning what it is claimed to mean -
| arguments I wholeheartedly agree with - does not change
| the fact that it is a statement Joe Biden made that is
| negative for Joe Biden. This particular admission is
| extremely weak, clearly ambiguous, and frankly
| demonstrates that his opponents are grasping at straws.
| But there's still no getting around the very basic fact
| _that it is an admission_.
| soneil wrote:
| Surely this is like claiming the Fire Dept are obviously
| arsonists, otherwise it would have been named the
| Extinguishing Dept? Or that the 9/11 Commission obviously
| commissioned 9/11. We have a "Serious Organised Crime
| Agency" which is more akin to the FBI than the Mafia.
|
| What you're describing as a gaffe is a very intentional
| misrepresentation.
| [deleted]
| jodrellblank wrote:
| " _admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid,
| or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess
| (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge._
| "
|
| It can't be both an admission of something real, and a
| gaffe.
|
| If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an
| admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't).
| Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud
| organisation is either correct and an admission of a
| coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of
| anything.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I wouldn't even call it a gaffe, merely poorly worded.
|
| An X organization can be an organization to accomplish X,
| or it can be an organization to combat the problem of X.
| A reasonable person will look at whether X is generally
| considered positive or negative to decide between these,
| but a quote-miner won't care.
| torstenvl wrote:
| No. A statement can relate to truth-or-falsity
| independent of its own truth or falsity.
|
| Example: You falsely accuse me of robbing a bank. I admit
| I robbed the bank, due to a threat against my family.
| Later, my defense counsel discovers evidence of the
| threat.
|
| The admission _is still an admission_. It grants that the
| accusation is true, _even though it isn 't_. The evidence
| pertaining to _why_ the admission is false is also fair
| game to explain why not to give any weight to the
| admission, but it nonetheless remains an admission.
|
| Same here. The public discourse should absolutely correct
| the record and establish what the President meant. He
| should probably issue a clarifying statement. But it
| doesn't change the fact that he made a statement that, by
| its own words if not by its probable intent, conceded the
| truth of an accusation.
| mavhc wrote:
| Snopes rated the claim: "Does context matter?" as True!
|
| This is obviously just bias on their part
| WD-42 wrote:
| Still no actual examples provided in regard to snopes.
| nootropicat wrote:
| Claim: Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat
| on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an
| organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives
| Matter Global Network.
|
| Verdict: mixture
|
| What's Undetermined
|
| In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of
| "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to
| whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and
| imprisoned -- possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of
| explosives -- should be described as acts of "domestic
| terrorism."
|
| (she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton
| after serving 16)
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Fact-checking is absurd. It's a phenomenon that hints at
| greater problems, solving none. It's offloading critical
| judgment skills and knowledge (as informed as ony may be, and
| as broad and shallow one needs to distinguish most misleading
| or false argumentations, it's been a long time since the "last
| person to know everything"!), and offloading it to people that
| don't know better, and may be subject to mass-producing them to
| satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they
| may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or
| philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this
| ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization.
| Snopes got made fun of a lot in the past, some of their
| conclusions are abstract and get down to semantics instead of
| actual facts. At some point the average person should know
| better. It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and
| investments they get into teaching rational thinking and
| information validation to people of all ages.
|
| I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I
| found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought.
|
| https://archive.is/KrSEn
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments
| they get into teaching rational thinking and information
| validation to people of all ages.
|
| So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become
| experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more
| education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| All because this new generation of journalists are utterly
| incapable of doing their jobs.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| That's a scary prospect, but not what I meant. If they went
| away, or weren't plastered on any controversial news piece,
| it's not as if one's judgment and trust of sources would be
| worthless. What are the qualifications for the average
| fact-check reporter? I know it's hard to say these things
| when one of the most profitable and fundamental abilities
| since the beginning of propaganda has been manipulating the
| populace and its judgment, but we ought to do better!
| chrononaut wrote:
| > .. solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills
| and knowledge .. and offloading it to people that don't know
| better
|
| Are fact checkers any different than people who contribute to
| Wikipedia? It serves a purpose, but does come with a lot of
| disadvantages.
|
| > .. and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the
| massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be
| voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies
| that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with
| a tendency to extremism and marginalization.
|
| Isn't this the case already? Without "fact checkers" you
| still have the current population of people spinning stories
| and framing them in their own desired ways. I don't see how
| fact checkers are necessarily making the situation worse in
| that manner.
|
| > It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments
| they get into teaching rational thinking and information
| validation to people of all ages.
|
| You still have the problem of scale that you need to solve.
| There are a lot of controversies now-a-days. I imagine this
| proposed individual (or even a current, motivated individual)
| does not have time to investigate some of the more nuanced
| disputes.
| vmception wrote:
| Twitter is the worst! I dont even know what the original viral
| article/post even looked like, they just decide to promote the
| fact-checking response
|
| I'm always thinking "tune in at 11, where we find out who
| asked!"
| fortran77 wrote:
| The "actionable" part is that Facebook is mis-attributing
| statements to some sources like "Reason" and John Stossel that
| they never made.
|
| > But [Stossel] says that in attributing to him a direct
| quotation that he never uttered, the fact-checkers committed
| defamation.
|
| I think someone may be able to get a judgement against Facebook
| if the "fact-checkers" err in this manner.
| foverzar wrote:
| The whole concept of corporate censorship is such a BS. How can
| you possibly build a system that could dissect truth from lies on
| such a scale?
|
| And yet for some reason people demand more and more censorship
| and blame Facebook for "not doing enough". How come?
| baq wrote:
| it isn't a question if it can be built. we know it can't. the
| question is whether it can result in a better outcome than no
| moderation whatsoever.
| cletus wrote:
| When I first heard about this plan to "face check" articles on
| Facebook, I was actually floored because it's just such an
| obviously bad idea. There is always going to be a point where
| reasonable people disagree about what is correct and what isn't
| or what should be fact-checked and what shouldn't.
|
| And you're not even dealing with reasonable people.
|
| Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts
| the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?
|
| I actually believe it was well-intentioned. Just... completely
| misguided. You know what they say: the road to Hell is paved with
| good intentions.
|
| Second thought: it's weird to me how many conservatives and
| conspiracy theorists (it's interesting that there's so much
| crossover between these two groups) are so keen to dismantle
| Section 230 when they benefit the most. In an effort for
| platforms to remain neutral, this nonsense is allowed to exist.
| If platforms were responsible for this "content", it'd be shut
| down so fast.
|
| But here's a good thing to keep in mind: from a narcissist an
| accusation is actually a confession. Trump is a textbook
| narcissist. Go back and look at his accusations through that
| filter.
| alboy wrote:
| >Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just
| shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?
|
| It implicitly shifts the undertone of everything that isn't
| fact-checked on the platform from neutral to true. This is not
| a bug but a feature, as it provides the plausible deniability
| by blurring the line between "no tag since we can't fact-check
| everything, duh" and "no tag because we tacitly agree with the
| narrative presented here even if it is untrue".
| VanceGian wrote:
| newsbinator wrote:
| I think it can be implemented well: there will always be a
| point where reasonable people _agree_ about what is correct.
|
| That point is obviously very, very conservative (lower case
| 'c'). Reasonable people can all agree that Covid is a thing
| that exists, for example.
|
| I don't mind Facebook fact-checking against flat-earthers,
| "it's just a flu bro", or "Bill Gates put 5g microchips in
| vaccines". Reasonable people from any place would agree those
| are counter-factual.
|
| But I tend to get banned from subreddits as an anti-vaxxer
| because, for example, I say my first 2 shots were Pfizer and I
| refuse to get Moderna for my third one (Moderna is the only one
| my government currently permits my age group to get). There are
| facts for and against this position for reasonable people to
| weigh. It's still often a ban on social-media for spreading
| anti-vax misinformation though.
| mannanj wrote:
| There are always casualties to policies of "fact checking".
| You have witnessed yourself being one. I think it would have
| been nice to have some better policy or conversation in place
| for what happens when you become the one erroneously fact-
| checked, because instead what's happening now is it just
| happens in the shadows and by the time it happens to you it's
| too late and you're stuck with this system that actually just
| works counter-intuitively to the issues that are the most
| important to you.
|
| It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition
| to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect
| us against COVID" which we're all fine with it until that
| policy is flipped on them and happens to impact them.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and
| transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with
| because "protect us against COVID"
|
| Oh, come the heck on. I don't know how a reasonable person
| should be expected to take this seriously. We've been
| forcing people to vaccinate for a good long time now and I
| don't think I'm living in a fascist dystopia. Correct me if
| I'm wrong! Should I buy some jackboots so I can fit into my
| new reality?
| newsbinator wrote:
| That is the point I'm making: if we're conservative about
| what facts go into fact-checking, then fact-checking can be
| valuable.
|
| We are not conservative about fact checking and I gave an
| example of how I have been a casualty of this.
| xigoi wrote:
| Making platforms responsible for their content is ridiculous.
| Are you also going to make pubs responsible for what people say
| there?
| maxdo wrote:
| The most funny that whatever you call a media bias... Media is
| catered towards what people want to discuss. Sadly that's what's
| people think is important.
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