[HN Gopher] You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproduc...
___________________________________________________________________
You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and
representative way
Author : youcould
Score : 218 points
Date : 2022-02-08 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| andrewdb wrote:
| Relevant: Brandolini's Law
|
| "The amount of energy needed to refute misinformation is an order
| of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
|
| It can take ~15 minutes to create a Twitter post containing
| misinformation, but a team of fact checkers can invest
| hours/days/weeks into the post. The fact checkers research the
| topic and write a refutation that's well-sourced and hopefully as
| objective as possible. Meanwhile, there are 1,000 more posts
| freshly minted with exciting new misinformation.
| esja wrote:
| But the fact-checkers don't spend that required time, because
| it's too expensive.
| belorn wrote:
| "Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to
| Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who
| been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor
| reproducible. You can vote on it, you can form a temporarily
| consensus, you can elect people to make a decision for the
| community, but at the end its about convincing people through
| discussions. Naturally there exist edge cases where the
| conclusion is close to 99.9% determined from the beginning, like
| with spam and malware, and at the other end there is the small
| sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about
| (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong).
|
| Remove the discussion and give the power to decide what is truth
| to a company and what you get is the consensus within that
| company. Naturally that won't be fair, reproducible or
| representative. Give the power to governments and you get similar
| results, just with more police and military, through with the
| slight bonus of people being at least being elected. Still a
| pretty pointless exercise unless discussion and transparency
| exist.
| pphysch wrote:
| Wikipedia is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to
| happen to (Western) epistemology. On one hand, it's a totally
| free and relatively up to date encyclopedia of incredible
| scope. On the other hand, it's a platform for political
| propaganda masquerading as Undeniable Truth.
|
| I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about
| Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about
| misinformation in an article that has value to special interest
| groups with media leverage.
| dools wrote:
| Where is this political propaganda masqureading as Undeniable
| Truth on Wikipedia?
| ratsmack wrote:
| They would have much more credibility if they were to have
| equal representation from both sides of the political
| spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views
| in articles for controversial subjects.
| brimble wrote:
| > They would have much more credibility if they were to
| have equal representation from both sides of the political
| spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing
| views in articles for controversial subjects.
|
| "Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth
| is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are
| wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Exactly, and demonstrated beautifully by John Oliver:
| https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg
|
| An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's
| not an aim at facts or truth.
|
| Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce
| maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer
| engagement'.
|
| Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves
| supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in
| counter-factual directions.
| Hakashiro wrote:
| Indeed, when one side argues for dialogue, human rights,
| cooperation, peace and maybe a bit of socialism, and the
| other side argues for kicking immigrants, building an
| ethno-state where anything manufactured on foreign soil
| is heavily taxed, and the poor are left to starve to
| death, the middle ground really isn't the right answer.
| Middle grounds are rarely conducive to any intellectually
| honest discussion and this can clearly be seen in
| American politics: where the GOP has been sliding more
| and more into the right, the Democrats have followed,
| trying to capture the moderate Republicans that don't
| agree with the new "extreme" GOP.
|
| Middle grounds are a slippery slope.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >They would have much more credibility if they were to have
| equal representation from both sides of the political
| spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing
| views in articles for controversial subjects.
|
| Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might
| be?
|
| In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the
| Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican
| Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal
| representation."
|
| In a broader context, "equal representation" would include
| the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left
| Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social
| Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the
| far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i
| Sprawiedliwosc , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz,
| actual Nazis, etc.)
|
| There are examples of parties from the broader political
| spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party,
| American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.).
| Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party
| system.
|
| Pretending that the major US political parties represent
| the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at
| best, and willful deception at worst.
| throwamon wrote:
| There aren't only "two sides", as much as American
| conditioning may have you believe. And if you want true
| representativity, you get problems like this:
| https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182
| seeEllArr wrote:
| freeflight wrote:
| _> They would have much more credibility if they were to
| have equal representation from both sides of the political
| spectrum_
|
| Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it
| like that is a very US-centric way of going about it.
|
| Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics
| should really take a stroll trough the self-declared
| conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which
| features some of the most delusional content I've seen on
| the web.
| pphysch wrote:
| I think the root problem is that Wikipedia was created by a
| couple of Objectivists and they projected that philosophy
| (belief in a universal Reason) onto its structure.
|
| Randians essentially believe there is only one correct
| opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal
| Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually)
| arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be
| misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make
| sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia.
|
| The real world doesn't work like that.
|
| Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in
| the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori
| claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is
| true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a
| so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly
| biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive
| topics.
|
| If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or
| NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's
| hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering)
| rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
| overgrownzygote wrote:
| I feel like the line between Wikipedia and Objectivism is
| a bit of a stretch.
|
| The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to
| Wikipedia -- realism and rationalism -- are hardly the
| controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover,
| they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an
| encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an
| encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects
| and events in the real world.
|
| I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing
| is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger
| problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge
| grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals
| to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of
| things that you or I can't easily go verify.
|
| I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just
| tighten up their definitions of "trusted sources" rather
| than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that
| would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe
| that's the best we can hope for, though?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > Randians essentially believe there is only one correct
| opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal
| Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually)
| arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be
| misguided by ideology or something.
|
| This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't
| you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with
| this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework
| is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.
| pphysch wrote:
| Sure, HN has particular implicit ideological biases. Many
| a good faith comment has been censored (i.e.
| [flagged]/[dead]) for challenging those biases.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| You have to revive a culture where truth is paramount.
| Unfortunately, I think a lot of cultures that value "truth" also
| tend to shoot down complexity in favor of simple, but wrong,
| "truths". For example, when it comes to complex topics like sex
| and gender, people tend to gravitate to either "There are only
| two sexes, a biological "fact" somewhere between, e.g. bimodal
| but overlapping distributions.
| [deleted]
| user249 wrote:
| A more accurate title would be "You cannot police Covid
| misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way"
| You can't because it's relatively new, still being researched and
| there are varieties of scientific opinion about various things.
| The debate is ongoing.
|
| You can police Holocaust misinformation in a fair, reproducible
| and representitive way
| dools wrote:
| We don't need to eliminate all misinformation. Just getting rid
| of the 5g/microchip/flat earth/vaccines cause autism zone would
| be enough.
|
| EDIT: We did this for ages. Remember in the 90s how the only
| place you read crackpot weirdo outlandish conspiracy theory
| garbage was Weekly World News and Nexus Magazine?
| duxup wrote:
| Right.
|
| But IMO that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
|
| It's not perfect, yup, mistakes will be made. I don't buy into
| the idea that you thus shouldn't do it.
| Jtype wrote:
| Right! Surely people will trust us more if we ban them for
| saying that Covid-19 might have come from the Wuhan Virus
| research center, or that vaccinated people can get and spread
| covid, or that cloth masks are ineffective. Once we ban
| misinformation then trust in media will return.
| duxup wrote:
| That just sounds like another strange all or nothing type
| measuring stick.
| Clubber wrote:
| >That just sounds like another strange all or nothing type
| measuring stick.
|
| But yet that's what's happening. Trained virologists are
| getting strikes for daring to talk about things that aren't
| strict CDC narrative.
|
| I think banning things like say ISIS recruitment and things
| that are dead pan, unarguably and immediately dangerous is
| tolerable censorship. Outside of that, it seems like a
| political tool.
| duxup wrote:
| I think I made it clear up the chain that I don't doubt
| folks will get it wrong.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I think I made it clear up the chain that I don't doubt
| folks will get it wrong.
|
| Right but I'm reading it like you don't seem to have a
| concern about accountability and how wrong these
| organizations are currently getting it. At what point do
| they get it so wrong so often, it's better for society
| that they stop trying. At what point does getting it so
| wrong so often turn from "curating misinformation" turn
| into "silencing political opposition."
|
| I know this is over the top, but if 20% of death penalty
| cases were, "oops we got it wrong," it's time for them to
| stop trying to implement the death penalty.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm all for accountability and improving.
|
| The death penalty has the convenience of having very good
| other options and generally resources dedicated to a few
| events. Personally I see no reason for the death penalty
| considering the alternatives.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I thought I had this figured out, and then you
| complicated it and messed me up.
|
| Nobody is actually targeting _misinformation_. (How much
| are flat-earthers censored?) What they 're actually
| targeting is _speech we don 't like_. We might say
| "harmful" instead of "don't like", but I'm not sure how
| sharply that division can be drawn; if you don't like
| certain speech, you can find reasons to claim it is
| harmful.
|
| And you could argue that the lab leak hypothesis was
| harmful. It was leading people to mistrust scientific
| experts at a time when they really needed to listen to
| experts, when not listening to experts was causing
| definite harm, including a lot of death. The lab leak
| hypothesis was also almost certainly false... until it
| wasn't, until it became at least reasonably plausible.
|
| So I was all ready to say that it's just speech we don't
| like, and censoring speech because we don't like it is
| not an acceptable thing to do... and then you mentioned
| ISIS recruitment videos. _That_ is speech I don 't like.
| It's speech that is harmful. It's speech that probably
| contains a number of statements that are provably false.
|
| So I'd _really_ like to draw the line where the lab leak
| hypothesis is OK (even when almost everyone thought it
| was false), and ISIS recruitment videos are clearly
| censorable. But at the moment, I don 't see how to do it,
| other than my intuition of what's OK and what's not. And
| my intuition doesn't work when someone other than me is
| doing the actual deciding.
|
| Can anyone state a clear standard here? (The more
| objective, the better.)
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| The examples shouldn't sound strange, as they all happened
| during the past two years. What is "misinformation" one day
| (complete with banning and shaming) is "fact" or "science"
| the next, and vice-versa.
| wonnage wrote:
| Moderation/censorship/whatever you want to call it is a heavy-
| handed solution to a societal problem. The fact is that science
| isn't a linear process and the general consensus will flip all
| the time and this is normal. Coordinating a public health
| response while the science is still being conducted in real time
| necessitates some educated guesses which might be wrong. An
| effective response also requires adaptation in the face of new
| evidence.
|
| All of this uncertainty is in direct opposition to how large
| groups of humans behave. There was a HN post recently using MSFT
| Azure as an example about why executive/C-level communication is
| so repetitive and basic; you simply can't announce something to a
| thousand people and expect them to understand context and nuance.
| The example there was that the execs zeroed in on new features
| above all else, resulting in tons of bugs. But trying to focus on
| both features _and_ bugs was a lose-lose, people would find
| excuses to not do things using whichever focus was more
| convenient.
|
| Executive Q&As at big companies are another example. I'm not sure
| why we still do them. It's simply not possible to have a deep
| dialogue in this environment. You wind up with disgruntled
| employees tossing up call-out questions, CEOs dodging any sort of
| concrete answer, and nobody walks away better informed. Let me be
| clear, I _loved_ these at a smaller company where the CEO
| actually knew me personally, but they are a colossally cringe
| waste of time at a 2k+ person company.
|
| The big platforms are also in direct opposition to one of the
| solutions to this problem, which is breaking down communication
| to small groups of people that actually know each other, and
| rationally discussing context and nuance _is_ possible. Twitter
| is built around having the entire internet respond to a tweet. Of
| course this results in chaos.
|
| Moderation is the only solution. It doesn't have to be balanced,
| as long as people stick around and keep using the service.
| lcall wrote:
| It may be true that we "cannot police misinformation" in a good
| way. I haven't figured out otherwise.
|
| BUT: I'd _really_ like to know what would happen if we required
| putting some words like this all over the place (FB, ...):
| "Please consider: are info sources accurate and reliable? How do
| we know that?--perhaps based on trustworthy behavior over time of
| the original eyewitness and all reporters in the chain to us; and
| corroboration by other such reliable sources? And/or of the
| organization that employs those people? Do you know who they are,
| exactly, and their history?"
|
| (I read about some study that I couldn't find later, which said
| something(?) like that had a useful impact.)
|
| I and my extended family have traveled, read a lot from a variety
| of sources, gravitate to plainness and honesty and personal
| growth/learning more than to entertainment, and know people who
| know people who travel extensively, have personal experience in a
| variety of fields, etc, and I think many of us are very careful
| about whom to believe, for what. I think most of us (?) would
| know, soon enough at least, if we were being duped by digital
| sources about important things.
|
| Edit: to aid my thinking, here are some interesting other
| thoughts I got from others' comments here: A significant % of
| humanity chooses what to believe not based on
| facts/reliability/truth/honesty/goodwhatevers, but based on
| things like: ego, group membership, repetition, and what they
| want to believe (I suppose because it feels more
| reassuring/familiar/comfortable/safe/simple/easy for them at the
| time, sometimes due to fears or the other reasons listed above
| like ego, group..). I suppose rampant addictions (including porn)
| are major contributing/distorting factors, as people try to self-
| medicate for their fears and hurts.
|
| Now, how might one best decide whether oneself is susceptible?
| Maybe we can consider, now and again, what we love the most --
| truth, kindness, improvement of self and others, etc, or
| pleasure/power/attention? I think the first 2 commandments as
| taught in Christianity are relevant: to love God w/ all our
| heart, might, mind, and strength (which I suppose is aided by
| understanding His true nature and the good he offers us); and to
| love our neighbor (every other human) as ourselves -- treating
| them the way we would want to be treated, helpfully for their
| specific situation.
| 8note wrote:
| Tooling for showing that breadcrumbing would be handy.
|
| Just a link to the written content doesn't give a lot of
| context to how reliable that content is.
|
| I think it's very profitable for social media sites to promote
| hard to verify information though, so it's unlikely to change
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| Policing misinformation is not a thing. This isn't a genuine
| term, it's only censorship. Censorship is never fairly applied.
| [deleted]
| lcall wrote:
| I upvoted you, even though "never" is a big word, because
| though I think about history a lot, no counter-examples readily
| come to mind, sadly. Except me, I'm usually right. Just ask me.
| Right? :)
| more_corn wrote:
| Bullshit. In the beginning there was the word. Next there was the
| lie.
|
| All throughout human history we've tried to figure out what
| actually is. The key component of that is figuring out what
| information we can trust.
|
| We can never simply throw our hands in the air and say "it can't
| be done" "it can't be fair" or any othe cop out. We all do it
| every minute of every day. We can do it better, we must!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Not to chicken and egg it, but I bet humans lied before we ever
| uttered words.
| retox wrote:
| >In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect
| brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend
| to exaggerate.
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081223091308.h.
| ..
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I can never find the Far Side that I want to find. There's
| one where one cave man is holding his hands up really far
| apart, and the other cave man is shaking his head in doubt,
| and it's captioned something like "Early fishermen"
| chris_va wrote:
| not quite the same, maybe "early plumbers"?
| sapsucker wrote:
| ravi-delia wrote:
| We as people can for sure. But there is no ruleset anyone could
| come up with that would be accurate or fair.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think the main question is:
|
| If we must, then why we must?
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think if you truly want to battle misinformation then you can't
| use the approach of dragging people kicking and screaming to The
| Truth. Rather, help people find it for themselves. Give people
| empowering tools to find the truth whatever it may be.
|
| Three examples: Formal logic, statistics, and how to detect
| deception. All of these are general purpose. Teach people about
| fallacies, what an appropriate sample size is and make them play
| Diplomacy. Teach about historic hoaxes and how they were
| disproven, as well as about conspiracies, ones that were
| successful and others that were uncovered and failed. Tell the
| stories of corruption and coups.
|
| For technology companies, build un-opinionated features that
| users love and work so well that people opt-in.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I agree that education plays an important role in this. It's
| not a coincidence that the political party whose leaders
| claimed that covid is a hoax is also the political party
| writing legislation to censor teachers and ban books.
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| > It's not a coincidence that the political party whose
| leaders claimed that covid is a hoax is also the political
| party writing legislation to censor teachers and ban books.
|
| Both of those are misleading half-truths, but that is better
| discussed in another thread.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Unrelated but how does one sign up "anonymously" to twitter these
| days? I tried one of my twilio phone numbers, one of which even
| worked with facebook but they're being rejected by twitter. Is
| there a way to sign up without a phone number?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I was able to do it via a Google Voice number a few years ago
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You can't police society in a fair, reproducible, and
| representative way either, but how many people want to get rid of
| police entirely? Only a tiny fringe.
|
| Sometimes the grossly imperfect solution is still an improvement
| on no solution at all.
|
| "Don't bother policing misinformation" can't have methodological
| flaws the way moderating can, because it's just the absence of
| something. But ultimately what I think most people care about
| isn't soundness of methodology, but the results, and so the
| question you have to answer is: is a popular platform that makes
| no effort to control misinformation healthier for society than
| ones that do make that effort?
| lmc wrote:
| It might be easier if we stopped considering twitter and
| instagram as suitable places to publish nuanced, serious stuff
| that was liable to misinterpretation and misrepresentation
| m12k wrote:
| Just like the last couple of years have turned us all into
| amateur epidemiologists, the last handful of years have turned us
| all into amateur epistemologists. The very foundations of how we
| as a society collectively decide on what reality is, have come
| under an adversarial attack. So now we're living through the
| societal equivalent of realizing that we've been storing
| passwords in plaintext and have been hacked. We're trying to
| minimize the damage and fallout, and stop the damage from
| happening further, all the while trying (and failing) to invent a
| set of best practices to prevent this from happening again.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > So now we're living through the societal equivalent of
| realizing that we've been storing passwords in plaintext and
| have been hacked.
|
| Or perhaps, we see everyone else around us has their passwords
| in plain text, but we haven't yet checked our own.
|
| It's easy to call out low hanging fruit like QAnon or
| /r/superstonk but harder to personally introspect which major,
| identity-defining beliefs that I have can be attributed to the
| global hive mind, and in which ways that made me subject to
| strange influence by motivated actors.
| Mezzie wrote:
| This is why I rotate my social media/news consumption habits
| every couple of months. I go from right to left, select a
| particular bubble to wade into for a while. Then I stop.
| Switching up your bubbles on purpose makes you more aware of
| them.
|
| It helps that my political beliefs are unorthodox enough that
| I can agree with most groups about _something_ , though.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Or perhaps that's why you can agree with most groups about
| _something_.
|
| Common ground is key to understanding.
| akulbe wrote:
| This is why censorship doesn't work to combat misinformation.
| People are going to make up their own minds, no matter what.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I don't think we have a misinformation problem in the US we have
| a trust problem and censorship is not a path to building trust.
| pphysch wrote:
| bell-cot wrote:
| Plausibly true...but on large social media platforms, you could
| at least get slightly sane about how much _scale_ matters. If I
| share videos / photos / captions of my great-grandsons enjoying
| a bubble bath with a few older in-laws...the Brain Police do NOT
| need to check what I say about COVID, or whether a 1-year-old
| boy's nipple can be seen through the bubbles. Vs. if some content
| is suddenly being viewed by thousands or millions of people -
| maybe that's where 99.9% of the fact-checkers and well-
| intentioned censors should be focusing.
|
| And maybe show some humor about it. Say, tag the COVID-fiction
| stuff with "This content is cool and getting really popular, but
| it seems pretty weak in the Facts Dept. If you enjoy it, you
| might also want to check out _Night of the Living Dead_ , _An
| American Werewolf in London_ , _Shadow of the Vampire_ , and _The
| Andromeda Strain_. Sign up for Horror Classics now, and get your
| first month _free_ with discount code 'COVID'..."
| sharmin123 wrote:
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You have to delete them all and let God sort them out.
| [deleted]
| babagabooj wrote:
| I have a theory that as long as transmitting a piece of
| information is profitable it will be transmitted, 99% of the
| time. You can change the percentage but you can't reduce it to 0.
| adamrezich wrote:
| interesting to see "5G" on the "outright misinformation" section
| of the graph in the illustration, because this is yet another
| example of just how muddy things are.
|
| John C. Dvorak was fired from his decades-long tenure at PC
| Magazine after he wrote a column _questioning_ 5G technology. the
| US was well on its way to integrate Chinese 5G technology into
| our telecommunications infrastructure, and then that got pulled
| (I think?). somewhere in there, people made all kinds of
| accusations about 5G, ranging from "there's potential for
| ongoing health issues due to exposure, maybe" to "5G gives you
| covid" to "no wait it triggers the microchips in the vaccines and
| controls your thoughts."
|
| the 5G rollout is fishy, not least because mild, reasonable
| criticism and/or asking "why do we really need this, we can
| already stream 1080p videos to smartphones via 4G, what else
| could possibly be achieved by increasing bandwidth, given that in
| order to do so, you need a much higher density of transmitters,
| maybe that's not the best idea" now lumps you in with "5G is
| turning the frogs gay" or whatever. you _have_ to be
| unquestioningly in support of 5G deployment or else you 're a
| Conspiracy Theorist who implicitly believes all the crazy things
| I said above.
|
| case in point: the image in this post that labels "5G" (broadly!!
| without even the nuance of addressing _any_ specific
| accusation!!!) as "outright misinformation". if you aren't the
| kind of person who thinks critically about these things, but
| agrees with the _content_ of the post, that we 're living in a
| deluge of misinformation and also agrees that it's impossible to
| police this misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and
| representative way... you may come away from reading this post
| and viewing the associated image thinking "every possible
| negative thing I've heard about 5G technology is definitely, 100%
| 'outright misinformation'".
|
| and this is exactly the point I'm making here: misinformation is
| easier than ever to produce because you don't have to poison the
| well, you can just dump a load of sewage right into it and then
| that well is forever tainted, critical thought is suppressed
| under a load of bullshit, then there's some new story the next
| day to move your attention onto the next thing.
|
| unless we outlaw smartphones, none of this is ever going away.
| this is the natural consequence of carrying the Internet in our
| pockets.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The Cochrane review that was removed agrees with the
| authoritative sources that Instagram uses. This seems to be a
| case of misapplication of policy and doesn't support the OP's
| thesis that the policy itself is bad.
|
| I would argue that the Cochrane Library itself should be
| considered an authoritative source, but again, that is a problem
| with application of policy rather than a problem with the policy
| itself.
| mfer wrote:
| misinformation is hard to characterize.
|
| This week I was reading about how cholesterol studies are funded
| by the egg industry 60% of the time. They have a financial
| interest in the studies going their way and those studies do.
| Yet, many studies not funded by them go a very different route.
|
| Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
|
| The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into
| the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
|
| The other day I was listening to an edge theory on something. I
| didn't know I would be hearing one when I first took the time to
| listen. The theory was based on evidence, the case was logical
| and well reasoned, and what was different was assumptions. The
| conclusion was not the majority. Is that misinformation?
|
| We don't tend to go deep anymore so how can we tell where
| misinformation really exists? Who decides what's a kind of hard
| that needs to be stopped?
|
| There is so much depth to this topic.
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| >This week I was reading about how cholesterol studies are
| funded by the egg industry 60% of the time. They have a
| financial interest in the studies going their way and those
| studies do. Yet, many studies not funded by them go a very
| different route.
|
| The lipid hypothesis used to be a theory. A significant portion
| of the 'science' has been revealed to be illegitimate.
| Cholesterol had a 'scientific consensus' that it was evil
| causing virtually all cardiovascular disease. Used to...
|
| So what happened? In 2005 you now have to declare your
| conflicts of interest. Dieticians suddenly started falling
| bigtime to conflicts of interest. Virtually all of them
| publishing that cholesterol was evil had conflicts. They were
| funded heavily by the cereal companies. Science started looking
| at the lipid theory and it's all fraud.
|
| Cholesterol is no longer a boogy man. The lipid hypothesis has
| been downgraded to an invalid hypothesis. If you're taking
| statins, go talk to your doc and get off them.
|
| >Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
|
| When the statin patents expired in 2016. It's not a surprise
| that the keto movement reformed in 2017. That cholesterol
| became a hypothesis and we found out what's really going on.
|
| Ancel Keys much later in life acknowledged that dietary
| cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with blood
| cholesterol.
|
| The even more interesting since the conflict of cinterest
| change. People have been trying to understand what the actual
| real data says. Cholesterol may be real problem, but why?
| You'll notice... this was also published in 2017.
|
| https://blogs.webmd.com/from-our-archives/20170710/how-sugar...
|
| Sugar in your diet damages cholesterol and makes your body
| struggle at cleaning it up. They found however, sugar isn't
| exactly the culprit. It's refined sugars and mostly candy and
| related high sugar things that are causing the problem.
|
| >The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into
| the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
|
| Censorship is hard. Anything being labelled misinformation is
| immediately considered something that must be evaluated.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Since about 2010 heart disease has been on the rise again
| after decades of decline, which seems to coincide with the
| craze in keto type diets. Sugar consumption has declined
| slightly over that same time period.
| mfer wrote:
| I've heard this before. There has been a large uptake in
| publications on cholesterol from the egg industry. But, you
| have to look beyond direct funding for a study. For example,
| I was looking at how one company give money to a non-profit
| they control. The non-profit funds the studies. Studies don't
| say they were funded by the company. Money was effectively
| laundered.
|
| Drug companies wanted to sell people on statins so they
| funded studies. Egg companies want people to eat eggs that
| are high in cholesterol so they fund studies. It's a mess of
| advertising.
|
| High cholesterol is know to lead to atherosclerosis[1]. It's
| one of the things that is involved in forming the plaques
| that build up in arteries which lead to forms of heart
| disease.
|
| What caught my attention was the long term studies around the
| people of loma lima. There are many vegans and vegetarians
| there who have been involved in long term studies. They have
| the same jobs as others in the area, live in the same area,
| and have many of the same habits of others with different
| diets. This has been great for looking at how diet affects
| things. Through those studies they've learned a lot about how
| diet affects cardiovascular disease.
|
| [1] https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/atherosclerosis
| 1415926535 wrote:
| >The lipid hypothesis used to be a theory
|
| >Science started looking at the lipid theory and it's all
| fraud.
|
| I'm sorry, but even the most cursory of google searches
| indicates that this is not at all correct.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis#Consensus
| mike00632 wrote:
| To be clear, you can study high cholesterol by simply having
| test subjects eat eggs. It reliably raises serum cholesterol
| in real time. It's also the reason why blood cholesterol
| tests have you fast before testing. Seeing what foods raise
| cholesterol isn't some mysterious science that we haven't
| cracked.
|
| All of the egg-industry funded studies which try to show that
| "dietary cholesterol doesn't affect serum cholesterol" are
| doing extreme mental and linguistic gymnastics. That
| statement, which can sometimes be shown to be true, only
| applies to dietary cholesterol _in isolation from any other
| food_ , including cholesterol in isolation from the rest of
| the egg. Dietary cholesterol with saturated fat, which is the
| most common way that dietary cholesterol is consumed, does
| more to raise serum cholesterol than any other food. Oh, and
| also high cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart
| disease.
| calumetregion wrote:
| This is well laid out, but it absolutely freaks me out that we
| even have to explain to very smart people why free expression of
| ideas is important. I know it's human nature to persecute, but I
| hate being reminded of it so often.
| dheera wrote:
| I find on Facebook these days I often have to use some substitute
| Unicode characters and obscure out words in pictures if I want my
| post to be seen by my own friends. Even if it's a scientific,
| reputable piece of content, all it takes is a word like "COVID"
| or "election" to trigger their censorship system and my post
| doesn't show up in their newsfeeds.
|
| I'm tired of this censorship bullshit where companies play
| gatekeeper between me and my own friends. Even WeChat in China
| doesn't censor this much. Almost always if I post something on
| WeChat my friends see it in their feeds within seconds. But on
| Facebook, nope. Their algo stands in-between and decides whether
| or not it should be censored from each friend.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| its about so much more than simple censorship, they also more
| heavily push certain information to certain people... this kind
| of thing can influence where you shop, who you're friends with,
| and who you vote for... and most people aren't even conscious
| of it... this kind of opaque algorithmic feed should be illegal
| wwweston wrote:
| > all it takes is a word like "COVID" or "election" to trigger
| their censorship system
|
| I can count multiple posts on my newsfeed in the last 48 hours
| on both topics, for better and worse.
|
| Whatever it takes to have something cross a threshold where it
| doesn't show in newsfeeds, it's definitely something more than
| words like "covid" or "election."
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The fact that the policy is not fully disclosed is, in
| itself, not OK.
|
| And no, I don't care that disclosing specific moderation
| rules "helps the bad guys." That's another pernicious modern
| trope, and another example of online services confusing their
| problem with my problem.
| dheera wrote:
| For ads, businesses, and groups, that's fine.
|
| But for friends, if I mutually added someone as a friend, I
| want to see 100% of their content by default, with an option
| to mute their content if they get annoying.
|
| I don't want an algorithm deciding this for me.
|
| I have COVID experts in my friend circle and I most certainly
| want to see 100% of their posts, for example.
| wwweston wrote:
| I'm speaking of posts that I see from friends.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the problems of algorithms mediating
| what's seen; I'm often annoyed at the ways feeds are put
| together myself. I'm especially annoyed that the former
| feature enabling you to look at a feed of _specific lists
| of friends_ seems to have fallen by the wayside.
|
| That's distinct from the issue of whether FB is
| systematically demoting / hiding posts by keyword, and
| there's evidence that they're not doing it based off the
| keywords you specified.
| bmarquez wrote:
| I've also noticed some strange behavior based on those
| types of keywords on Facebook as well, but there is
| something more than just the keyword itself. I believe
| there there is some sort of user reputation rating or
| other algorithmic factor (or maybe even their own friends
| reporting the content) -- because certain people on my
| feed get demoted faster than others.
|
| Unfortunately unless the algorithm is disclosed to the
| public (IMO it should) nobody will know with certainty.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Find a service that provides this for you, or build that
| service yourself. At the very least, you'll discover why no
| existing service provides this.
|
| "I want" doesn't translate directly into value for
| everyone. Heck, it's fairly rare for you to even know what
| you actually want.
|
| I do grow weary of the constant, "But I _want_ it! "
| attitude that seems pervasive on the Internet. You aren't
| entitled to the perfect-for-you feed from Facebook.
| [deleted]
| 8note wrote:
| I used to have one in Facebook, and I used to have one in
| instagram.
|
| These platforms got users by providing that service, and
| only remove them later once they want to exploit us
| dheera wrote:
| > Find a service that provides this for you
|
| Sure, Twitter and Wechat do mostly what I want in terms
| of not censoring content between friends.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > But for friends, if I mutually added someone as a friend,
| I want to see 100% of their content by default, with an
| option to mute their content if they get annoying.
|
| Facebook very deliberately removed the option to get a raw
| feed, and a lot of people have never forgiven them for it.
| All sorts of totally mundane stuff you post won't get seen.
| 8note wrote:
| It doesn't even take that. If Facebook doesn't want you to see
| somebody's updates, you'll never see anything from them.
|
| It really likes to show covid stuff though, since that drives
| their engagement and advertising bits. You have to click an
| extra button to see the post in the end, but you're still
| notified that the post exists
| aaronchall wrote:
| Should we police flat-Earthers?
|
| They seem to so desperately want the world to be flat that they
| will come up with any argument that whatever conclusively
| disproving new evidence they just looked at to prove their idea
| was somehow manipulated or in some other way confounded.
|
| Surely when others hear their sincerely delivered explanations
| some will also conclude that the world is flat.
|
| Is there a cost-benefit analysis we should perform here?
|
| What are the costs and benefits of policing misinformation about
| other subjects?
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| If a person or organization truly believes the earth is flat
| then let them. It just makes it easier to avoid them.
| pelasaco wrote:
| From the comment section:
|
| https://twitter.com/dnunan79/status/1491073564447244288/phot...
|
| It is interesting, how the concept of misinformation is bound to
| time. Imagine 1 year ago, somebody would say:
|
| "if you are vaccinated, you are still able to catch covid and
| spread covid", or "cloth masks don't work", or even the first
| "misinformation" from the whole pandemic "covid was leaked from a
| Lab in Wuhan"
|
| All those 3 "misinformation" and many more were policed pretty
| hard until 2021.. Today 2022, they were either proved to be true
| or have high probability to be true.
| pelasaco wrote:
| getting down-voted because... ?
| memish wrote:
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Each community decides what is "fair" in that community. Each
| community "represents" a slice of people. People leave
| communities that don't seem fair to them, that don't make them
| feel represented.
|
| TL;DR: Tribal people have mores. That's how tribes, people, and
| mores work.
| beardedetim wrote:
| yes yes yes!
|
| It sucks that our Tribe can't be 7 billion people. It really
| does. But we should see it as a positive and a war of _benefit_
| instead of a war of _ideas_. What _benefit_ does believing in
| QAnon offer? What _benefit_ does being apart of Group A have
| over Group B?
|
| Each community is responsible for its own truths and policing
| them how they see fit. We should be arguing over how to make
| our _benefits_ better than theirs, not trying to force our
| ideologies onto them.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Yes, I agree, but...
|
| When that tribe has externalities to their behavior that harm
| members of my tribe, is when it gets rough. (I want you to
| stop putting mercury in my drinking water, endangering my
| drinking water with your oil pipeline, I want you to wear a
| mask to reduce my chance of infection, etc etc etc.)
| beardedetim wrote:
| 100% agree. There is conflict between tribes and that
| something that I am not clear on how to fix as nothing
| other than violence seems to help ensure _my_ tribe doesn't
| get killed off.
|
| In my perfect world, it is Mutually Assured Destruction
| between tribes that keeps us not putting mercury in any
| drinking water outside our own, etc. I know that isn't
| going to work but that is the most _fair_ to me.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| "Fair" to me is, we vote on representatives who enact
| regulations based on scientific evidence interpreted by
| experts.
|
| That's my hot take.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| My experience is new problems which look a lot like old
| problems are fairly common. And, in most cases, the
| solution to the new problem often ends up looking a lot
| like the solution to the old problem.
|
| Our current best-worst solution to tribalism has been a
| small number of sovereign nations with large populations
| and democratically elected governments. Everyone admits
| the emergent qualities are suboptimal but they are still
| better than all the other options we've tried so far, as
| the saying goes. The solution to online tribalism is
| likely to look very similar.
|
| Considering that the externalities of these internet-
| based tribes cross over into the physical world (such as
| the drinking water/oil pipeline examples above), I
| suspect this leads to a likely future where internet
| tribal communities end up overlapping with traditional
| national boundaries (eg, China's great firewall).
|
| To be clear, this isn't the future I want but it's
| starting to seem like the most likely outcome. I admit my
| past optimism for a truly "open" internet is being tested
| these days. I don't want a closed internet anymore than I
| used to - but it might simply be the only practical
| option if society wants to continue functioning.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> It sucks that our Tribe can 't be 7 billion people._
|
| We've barely gotten to a stage where that is even considered
| a viable and realistic idea, just because it's not instantly
| a smashing success does not translate to an ultimate failure.
|
| Particularly as many such big ideas had to go trough their
| "growing pains" before ultimately working out.
| beardedetim wrote:
| I don't have any data to back this up but my overall
| feeling/ideology is that we can't have groups larger than
| some number. I like Dunbar's number [1] as a rough guess
| but am more than happy to raise it to something like 100k
| if one were able to be convincing. But I do not see any
| path forward where we can get buy-in from 300 million
| people let alone 7 billion.
|
| If we were to have a Tribe of 7 billion people, we would
| need to come up with "facts" that can be agreed upon by 7
| billion people. We cannot get 7 billion people to agree
| that the earth is not flat. I don't have any hopes that we
| can get 7 billion people to agree on human rights or other
| things that can be described as "us vs them".
|
| This may be my anarchist/extreme leftist ideologies that I
| personally hold bleeding into what I think is
| possible/should be done. I have a very hard time separating
| those feelings from "facts" and I think that makes this
| point even more clear!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
| freeflight wrote:
| _> I don 't have any data to back this up but my overall
| feeling/ideology is that we can't have groups larger than
| some number._
|
| That goes contrary to my personal experience with a www
| that wasn't mainstream yet, but most certainly already
| had larger groups of people.
|
| As tired and lame as it might sound, imho the biggest
| culprit is social media and what kind incentives it has
| set.
|
| Social media does not thrive on facts and information, it
| thrives on _emotions_ , but dry boring non-sensational
| headlines and information don't make people emotional.
|
| What makes people emotional, and interact with your
| platform, are the crass headlines and claims, the
| dramatic stuff. So that's what gets pushed to people, and
| they react accordingly by liking it, and at that point
| it's already a self-reinforcing loop with increasingly
| more sensationalist and crass claims that constantly need
| to top each other to stay relevant.
|
| It also directly affects what kind of content people
| contribute and most importantly _how_ they do it; All the
| big "influencers" spend quite some time and effort in
| optimizing their content for that extra reach, along with
| that come certain behavior routines to sell the content,
| which then get normalized.
|
| And because traditional media struggles to keep up with
| that, and stay relevant, they also get colored by this,
| not only by having made social media their new source of
| reporting, but also by making their own reporting more in
| line with these trends.
|
| Too many just chasing the dopamine kicks from the "likes"
| and "karma", it feels like mass-hysteria that's steadily
| increasing in intensity.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Parachutes? The one RCT we have on parachutes failed to show any
| statistically significant benefit from using them when jumping
| out of plane. Hardly settled science.
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| I never expected someone teaching at my city to show up on
| HackerNews! I hope that he is liking Petropolis
| throw3838 wrote:
| ratsmack wrote:
| This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one side
| to silence the other, rather that debating the subject with
| definitive proof of their claims. With all of the unknowns of
| many of these current subjects, I would think open debate
| presenting theories from various sources would help find common
| ground.
| lordnacho wrote:
| That's the standard, "nice" answer to how to deal with BS.
|
| In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with
| outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining
| why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard?
| Brandolino's law comes to mind.
| ratsmack wrote:
| Was this "Misinformation"?
|
| https://twitter.com/JermaineLong93/status/149108386670644838.
| ..
| brimble wrote:
| Wow. I haven't kept up with pro-vaccine media (I got mine,
| seemed like a good idea, just haven't paid attention to the
| messaging very much aside from health official guidelines
| and such) but _damn_ that 's bad. No wonder BSABing this
| issue is so effective.
|
| _Some_ of that 's excusable by "the best information at
| the time was wrong" and _some_ of it 's not even wrong but
| the usual thing I've seen a lot of the last couple years,
| where some people take a limited statement as absolute or
| saying more than it is and then claim the original was
| wrong (when it wasn't) but a good deal of that compilation
| appears to be indefensible.
| pgrote wrote:
| I wouldn't consider that misinformation. At the time those
| statements were made it was thought the vaccine would
| prevent transmission. Not a medical expert, but I always
| thought the reason you got a vaccine was to prevent
| infection. Measles vaccine is somewhere near 97% effective
| at stopping infection. Heck, even when the vaccines for
| covid first came out it was big news if there was a
| breakthrough infection.
|
| Fast forward to today. The general consensus is the vaccine
| typically prevents serious illness and death in most cases
| for the common variants. It doesn't do a great job
| preventing infection.
|
| One of the mistakes those in charge made was never
| admitting something like the following when new, solid
| information was understood:
|
| 1) We were wrong. 2) This is something we've never seen. 3)
| We're learning as we go. 4) It doesn't do what we said or
| thought it would do, but it does this.
|
| No one in real power ever says anything remotely like it.
| They speak in absolutes and it has gotten so bad they are
| choosing to misrepresent studies to suggest following a
| path they think is best versus admitting the studies just
| suck.
|
| Misinformation flagging for something like covid was never
| going to be practical to implement as there was so much
| changing on a such a limited timeframe. Toss in politics
| and the governing structure of the USA and it was never
| going to work.
| ratsmack wrote:
| >... it was thought ...
|
| And therein lies the problem. They presented it as
| absolute undeniable fact, but there were no definitive
| studies to back up their claims at the time.
| nomel wrote:
| Yeah, these statements have uncertainty, but they're not
| being discussed. It seems that uncertainty is being
| intentionally omitted, and discussion of it is actively
| fought. This seems a terrible way to maintain trust!
| remarkEon wrote:
| >At the time those statements were made it was thought
| the vaccine would prevent transmission
|
| Okay. _How_ did they come to this conclusion? We 'll
| never know, because we're in this asymmetric war about
| information, where dunking on your political enemies is
| more important than just being transparent. Showing us
| how they came to that conclusion, and then going through
| your points 1-4 would go a long way to restoring that
| trust (partially), but alas they won't do it.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I feel like a more fundamental question is "Who is
| qualified to interpret the data?"
|
| Then you can ask, "Of the qualified people, what were they
| saying at the time?" And if you care to dive deeper, "What
| evidence were they using to support their opinion?" and
| "What is the earliest that credible information arrived
| that should have changed their position?" and "Did their
| position change, when enough new evidence came in?"
|
| Is there some better set of questions you can think of than
| mine?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Stop caring that someone is wrong on the internet?
| ratsmack wrote:
| Being complacent and uncaring is probably worse than being
| wrong.
| vkou wrote:
| The ostrich defense of sticking one's head in the sand only
| works until it doesn't.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Bad analogy.
|
| If someone is making an argument from bad faith, that's
| intentional and it's a waste of time to correct them or
| engage them at all.
|
| All the "fact checking" links that are displayed now when
| you post about controversial subjects on social media
| platforms do very little to change minds and only
| reinforce the idea that there's some global narrative
| that's controlled by a cabal. They merely only serve to
| make people who already agree with the positions that are
| being linked to as fact checks better about spending time
| online.
| duxup wrote:
| What if it has real consequences?
| sharemywin wrote:
| people are making death threats to poll workers and local
| election officials.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Then those are direct and actionable threats and are
| covered by real life laws. We don't need moderators
| filling in for real police.
| caenorst wrote:
| This is so vague... Me breathing air has real
| consequences. You probably mean "societal" consequences,
| and it's also way too vague, moderating has real
| consequences as much as not moderating.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| This is one of those things that is easy to worry about,
| but the sheer amount of possible 'consequences' from any
| misinformed point of view is impossible to actually
| estimate the likelihood of. We can collectively conjure
| up all sorts of bad things someone _might_ do if they
| believe [xyz] but we should not give in to this kind of
| paranoia.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't buy into the idea that because estimation is hard
| thus it is "paranoia".
| ok123456 wrote:
| What do you estimate Free Speech is worth?
| duxup wrote:
| I don't understand what that has to do with my comment.
|
| Moderation on say twitter /= free speech violations
|
| I'm assuming your comments are just random from here on
| out. Sorry if they're not but I"m really not following
| what you're saying.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Then you're just being intentionally dense to wiggle out.
| duxup wrote:
| I would have to understand to know that I want to "wiggle
| out".
| ok123456 wrote:
| Move to China if you want inharmonious posts removed from
| the internet.
| duxup wrote:
| Are you under the impression that moderation is just a
| Chinese thing or something?
|
| I don't think that makes any sense.
| ok123456 wrote:
| No. But, moderation for the sake of the eventual societal
| consequences is the default in the Chinese (PRC) system.
| It's not necessarily a bad system. Their ideas have
| lifted a billion people out of poverty. But, it's not
| ours.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not at all sure what you're trying to say, one
| comment seems to conflict with the next.
| ok123456 wrote:
| I'm saying that censorship like this is incompatible with
| the western values as we know them. Yet this doesn't
| invalidate what the Chinese have accomplished. It's
| possible to have two conflicting ideas at the same time.
| brimble wrote:
| What's the likelihood of your spending a lifetime
| engaging with wrong people online having enough payoff to
| be worth it, even if it _does_ have real consequences?
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think I fully understand the question.
|
| I think I've gotten a lot from spending time online...
| often in situations where there was a moderation system
| in place.
| brimble wrote:
| It's a question of how different the actual real world
| would be if one were to "stop caring that someone is
| wrong on the internet" versus the alternative world in
| which one cared very much about this.
|
| I would suggest that most of the time, the likely answer
| is "little to no different". In light of that, how many
| hours of one's life should be devoted to it? Almost none,
| probably. If improving the world is the goal, arguing on
| forums or Twitter is _surely_ a terrible use of time and
| energy for most people (those with a massive audience,
| lots of money, fame, or any combination of those things,
| may be exceptions).
|
| It's similar to keeping up with day-to-day national news.
| How often is there something _actually important and
| actionable_ that one learns only by closely following
| non-local news, that wouldn 't have made its way through
| the grapevine (or down to local news) fast enough anyway?
| Barring people who need to trade on that information or
| otherwise need to be very plugged-in for their job, or
| what have you. Yet some people try to paint following
| such news closely as necessary for being a good citizen.
| _Is_ it, though? If I look at it honestly, the difference
| between checking in on what 's happening nationally (or
| internationally) every day, and checking in once a
| quarter, is practically indistinguishable, in terms of
| _what I do_ and _what I can realistically affect_. Even
| once a quarter is probably more frequent than necessary
| to achieve approximately the maximum actual real-world
| benefit it is likely to provide to me.
|
| Yet people follow pundits on Twitter or read news sites
| daily or watch 24/7 cable news and seem to genuinely
| think they're a better citizen for it, rather than that
| they're engaging in a low-value hobby like watching
| daytime soap operas or following e-sports as a spectator
| (which are fine diversions and people should absolutely
| do those things if they enjoy them, but practically no-
| one's under the illusion that those are laudible or
| improving activities)
| ok123456 wrote:
| Exactly. It just becomes a form a virtuous consumption
| that is slightly interactive in that you can report
| people who cross some line. This feedback loop is part of
| the design and keeps you consuming and interacting.
| brimble wrote:
| You see another funny effect like this in voting.
|
| A rough list of voting one can do, in order of likelihood
| of it affecting anything in the real world, most-to-
| least:
|
| 1. Voting in local party elections/primaries/et c.
|
| 2. Voting in local elections.
|
| 3. Voting in state-level party primaries.
|
| 4. Voting in state-level elections.
|
| 5. Voting in national-level primaries (that is, conducted
| at the state level but for national offices)
|
| 6. Voting in national elections.
|
| 7. (Largely as an effect of how US Presidential elections
| work) Voting for president, specifically.
|
| Note that this is damn near perfectly the _inverse_ of
| participation rates in and media attention given to these
| activities, and that people will shit all over you for
| failing to do #7 while they themselves mostly ignore the
| lower numbers. Meanwhile an hour a year working with /for
| your preferred local party _may very well_ be more
| effective than _all_ of that voting. But "you didn't
| vote for President, so you don't get to complain and are
| a bad citizen". Horse-shit.
| ok123456 wrote:
| National electoral politics is largely a busy-box: "There
| so much wrong in the country and it's always getting
| worse, but at least I have a say in it!" Every 8 years we
| 'throw the bums out' yet the policies never really
| change.
| gjs278 wrote:
| Clubber wrote:
| Like what?
| duxup wrote:
| Threats, misinformation about say a butterfly sanctuary?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/06/texas-
| butter...
|
| These seem to have real results.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Something about this story seems suspicious. You know
| that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right
| notes and confirms everything you thought to be true
| about the evil of the other side?
|
| It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few
| areas:
|
| > Trevino-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced
| personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the
| extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate
| Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month
| and demanded to see "'illegals crossing on rafts".
|
| What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.
|
| >In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard
| claiming baselessly that Trevino-Wright was "OK with
| children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered".
|
| This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some
| baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The
| Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore
| complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl
| clutching before?
|
| In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving
| into this old news story. I guess my point is that there
| is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a
| good justification for policing misinformation as
| strongly as some people want.
| ok123456 wrote:
| > You know that feeling you get when a news story hits
| all the right notes and confirms everything you thought
| to be true about the evil of the other side?
|
| Funny how that keeps happening! I keep getting news
| stories that confirm my per-existing biases that the
| world is mean and we need internet moderators to make it
| all better again.
| Xylakant wrote:
| > This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some
| baseless claim.
|
| That part of the story is comparatively easy to check -
| the audio is available if you follow the link in the
| article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes.
| The quote is "I'm sorry you're ok with children being
| raped."
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/pblodlr/status/148758898845411
| 328...
|
| That's not a rhetorical trick. It's an attempt to smear a
| person or organization by slinging dirt that has no
| grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless
| lines of reasoning is part of the problem.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I maintain that it is still a rhetorical trick. "If you
| oppose X, you must be okay with Y" is very common.
| Underhanded and unfair, but it happens all the time.
| duxup wrote:
| >You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all
| the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be
| true about the evil of the other side?
|
| Honestly your first line kinda describes your theory
| here...
|
| I don't have much reason to think that story is fake, but
| if a few sentences are enough for you to just write it
| off I'm not sure it matters what I say. There are other
| stories on that issue.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm not claiming the story is fake, or that none of what
| was reported actually transpired. But rather, I sense
| that the reporters are ideologically motivated and what
| they have presented here is not "the whole truth", to
| haphazardly borrow a term.
|
| One of the reasons why I say this is because there
| absolutely was a coordinated effort to stymie the
| construction of the border wall and one of the proposed
| tactics was to use the EPA and threatened species as a
| foil to prevent it's construction. Cards Against Humanity
| employed a similar strategy: "It was revealed that the
| creators had purchased vacant land along the wall and
| "retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to
| make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for
| the wall to get built." So in that sense, this isn't some
| unique stochastic attack on the noble butterfly center.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_Against_Humanity)
|
| But going back to my sense that something isn't quite
| right, the laundry list of associations is what stood
| out: Bringing up QAnon, bringing up Pizzagate, bringing
| up Steve Bannon, and bringing up anti-maskers. If I was a
| propagandist, I would end up writing a story just like
| this. Especially because you can report that wonderful
| institutions like National Butterfly Center and The
| Children's Museum of Denver are victims of all of the
| above groups. Again, not to dismiss the story _entirely_
| , but it seems to hit all the right notes.
| duxup wrote:
| >I'm not claiming the story is fake,
|
| I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual
| consequences of misinformation.
|
| >Bringing up QAnon....
|
| That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic
| where bringing them up is automatically discounted.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual
| consequences of misinformation."
|
| How so? I am skeptical, but what actual negative
| consequences have resulted from this?
|
| >"That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any
| topic where bringing them up is automatically
| discounted."
|
| Do you likewise feel the urge discount any story that
| brings up Antifa? I do. It is because in the minds of
| most partisans they loom larger than their real life
| impact. While QAnons and Antifa are completely different,
| they are utilized as boogeymen by ideologically motivated
| reporters. Still, the mention of these two groups only
| serve to raise my skepticism level rather than make me
| outright deny everything around their mention.
| vkou wrote:
| A collapse of basic medical care, an attempted coup, a
| third of the country no longer believing that an election
| where their side didn't win can be legitimate...
|
| ... But it's difficult to get a person to care about a
| subject that they believe themselves to be capable of
| buying their way out of/ignoring the consequences of.
| Nothing matters to a nihilist, and they will smugly point
| out that we're all wasting our breath over nothing.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yeah, you should probably spend less time online too.
| vkou wrote:
| Are you saying that these things haven't happened, or are
| you saying that I should not care whether my father can
| get an 'elective' surgery done sometime this decade? Or
| that the next election will be ran in a fair manner?
| Clubber wrote:
| I think our healthcare system sucks because it sucked
| before the pandemic, not because of misinformation. I
| remember thinking COVID would really show the gaping
| cracks in our healthcare system, but instead, the system
| blamed their deficiencies on the unvaccinated.
|
| Our healthcare system, for the population as a whole, was
| awful before COVID. Hospitals that weren't at peak
| operating (read financial) capacity were shut down all
| over the country, which forced their patients to go to
| already overcrowded hospitals. The costs are/were off the
| charts. I don't think misinformation was the cause of it.
|
| We've been dealing with this for over two years now, yet
| our healthcare system hasn't increased even temporary
| capacity in a meaningful way to account for it.
| adolph wrote:
| Duty calls: https://xkcd.com/386/
| DelightOne wrote:
| I feel like debates (especially on BS) are (or have to be?)
| repeated way too often, why is that anyway? Why can't it be
| one single tree, consisting of branches on multiple
| platforms, collecting, managing and curating?
| sharemywin wrote:
| but that would assume a system where people are concerned
| with facts and not they're own "personal opinions"
|
| where's the ego stroking in that solution?
| DelightOne wrote:
| - by helping others. Recording valuable talking points,
| refutations.
|
| - by understanding more and more deeply, instead of
| possibly less.
|
| - by having a jumpboard to learn more.
|
| - by seeing where you stand compared to the larger
| picture. Understanding the opposite side instead of just
| seeing them as enemy of ones' own opinion.
|
| - by seeing more people that argue similar to you.
| Requires categorization and grouping of votes.
|
| - by being able to share discussions more easily and not
| to be bound by a single group for answers.
| CountSessine wrote:
| _what do you do about sealioning_
|
| Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the
| "Gish Gallop".
|
| In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you
| because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And
| they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong,
| wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're
| wrong!
| brimble wrote:
| Sealioning is not at all the same thing as a Gish Gallop. A
| Gish Gallop is throwing out very weak arguments or evidence
| (so, bullshit) faster than a sincerely-engaging opponent
| can address them. Sealioning is a much more deniable
| tactic, relying on "just trying to have a conversation" and
| playing the victim when others disengage or tell you to
| fuck off.
|
| Simple Sealioning example:
|
| Sealioner: "Do you have anything to back up those figures
| for holocaust deaths? I see that thrown around a lot and
| I'm just not sure" (absolutely being a disengenuous piece
| of shit who's trying to slyly push holocaust denial, but
| indistinguishable from someone who is in fact curious,
| aside from that actually-curious people don't end up in
| these kinds of exchanges half as often as lying assholes
| do)
|
| Other person who knows exactly where this is going: "Fuck
| off out of here with that shit."
|
| Sealioner: "Oh my, I was just trying to ask a question. Now
| I'm _really_ not sure about your position. You seem very
| touchy about it for someone who has the truth on their
| side. Can anyone help me? "
|
| A Gish Gallop of the same thing would be throwing out
| "references" to holocaust denial stuff faster than they can
| be debunked (and dutifully ignoring the debunking).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also many sorts of discourse are normative but toxic. You
| could say that "fake news" is harmful not because it is
| "fake" but because it is "news".
|
| For instance this subject got nonstop coverage on CNN
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370
|
| until Donald Trump came along and was better for ratings.
| Look at the subjects that constantly get flagged on Hacker
| News, such as: women just can't get ahead
| it's so awful that young people this day don't believe in
| free speech
|
| In both of these cases you can point to very real cases where
| a women was the victim of outrageous misbehavior or where a
| speaker came to a campus and was treated really rudely.
|
| The problem isn't with the facts of a particular incident but
| rather with the emotions that these topics evoke: in either
| case we all have our frustrations about the barriers we
| encounter in life and the ways we feel unheard and unsafe.
|
| Conversations like that rapidly deteriorate into people
| talking about their own personal pain and suffering but with
| the identifying information (usually) deleted so anything
| valuable is gone, you might feel compelled to get involved
| but any of the power that comes out of groundedness is gone
| when people are talking in generalities, about principles,
| either from the "liberal" viewpoint of "this situation is
| fundamentally unfair" or the "conservative" viewpoint that
| the moral accounting has to be done accurately down to three
| decimal places.
| Clubber wrote:
| >In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with
| outright lies? When does your patience run out with
| explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen
| is a lizard?
|
| Why do you care to police speech? Is it ego? It's a fool's
| errand.
| michael1999 wrote:
| What would you call someone printing and distributed flyers
| helpfully informing a neighbourhood that Election Day falls on
| May 5 when the actual Election Day is on May 4?
| pessimizer wrote:
| A country that doesn't adequately inform their citizens when
| it's holding an election, so they can easily be mislead by
| fliers.
|
| Maybe make it a holiday.
| mountainboy wrote:
| freedom of speech.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| a moron. if someone tells you the golden gate bridge has an
| emergency exit that goes straight to the water are you going
| to take it?
| DowsingSpoon wrote:
| Your argument doesn't make the point you think it does. If
| someone maliciously placed convincing fake road signs on
| the road then they could easily cause severe injury or
| death. This would be a serious problem, not to be taken
| lightly.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The vast majority of 'anti-disinformation' campaigns are not
| restricted to, or even concentrated around, the scenario you
| have given.
| [deleted]
| oceanplexian wrote:
| What would you call someone who distributes and prints "Get
| out the vote" flyers with polling locations to certain
| communities and demographics but not others? Or, let's say a
| social network like Facebook sends one group of voters
| reminders to vote but not others? Selectively spreading
| correct information can still be malicious.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Partisan participation in the election process.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| What would you call the president of the US saying "Let me
| repeat, if you are fully vaccinated you no longer need to
| wear a mask" in May of 2021?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SkzTa8HRDk
| depaya wrote:
| Are you trying to imply this was a lie or misinformation?
| Conditions continue to evolve, as do recommendations by
| experts. The President of the US is listening to experts.
| belltaco wrote:
| Omicron wasn't a thing back then.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I call it "Relying on the best information available at the
| time." When the Biden administration adopted that policy,
| the Delta variant had not yet emerged as a dominant strain.
| Once new information came to light, the policy was revised
| as necessary.
|
| Science offers you no guarantees. For that you need
| religion, or a substitute based on the same faulty
| reasoning. Good luck with your horse paste.
| ratsmack wrote:
| >Good luck with your horse paste.
|
| That contributed nothing to the conversation.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Neither did calling out Biden for doing the right thing
| based on the best info available to him.
|
| The person I responded to has clearly chosen his path.
| All too often, that path leads to abusing veterinary
| supplies... and telling the world how awesome it is to do
| so.
| bmarquez wrote:
| > All too often, that path leads to abusing veterinary
| supplies... and telling the world how awesome it is to do
| so.
|
| The grandparent poster listed an example of election day
| incorrect information, the person you responded to listed
| an example of a politician stating incorrect information.
| Whether it's a good example or not is highly debatable
| but ad hominem style attacks don't help your argument.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| > Good luck with your horse paste.
|
| Headline written by CamperBob about water: Pundit
| Recommends Consuming Chemical Commonly Used as Engine
| Coolant!
| btdmaster wrote:
| I was looking through
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_day and almost half of
| it had a [citation needed] tag, so I guess you could call it
| that?
| miss_info wrote:
| Xylakant wrote:
| The problem that I currently see rampant is that "definite
| proof" is hard to come by. There are a lot of people that use a
| set of alternate facts and call these definite proof. I'm
| afraid that with some people, I'm no longer arguing about how
| to interpret certain data, but we're on a level where we cannot
| even agree that we are observing the same universe. And I
| honestly don't have an answer to that problem.
|
| Second to that: Data can change as we gather more knowledge
| about something. Covid is a prime example - in the beginning,
| very little was known. Some theories turned out to be mostly
| true, others didn't hold up. Some advice was sound, other not.
| Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as
| argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn't do anything.
| clayg wrote:
| I have this theory that what-about-ism as a debate technique,
| elevated by more readily available un-helpful "facts" (e.g.
| single varient evaluation of complex system), hased cause
| people to forget the _utility_ of facts. When you and I have
| a REAL disagrement about something importand and complex the
| FACTS that we can both agree on and take for granted are what
| ENABLES us to find a new higher resolution understanding - we
| can get further because we can focus. I try to look out for
| what-about-ism disguised as refuting evidence, and approach
| people 's belief epistemologically.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _I'm afraid that with some people, I'm no longer arguing
| about how to interpret certain data, but we're on a level
| where we cannot even agree that we are observing the same
| universe._
|
| On the upside, this is one of the more respectful
| descriptions of the problem space in question that I've seen.
| It's common to act like "The other person is just a nutter,
| clearly."
|
| Maybe the human race will eventually sort it out.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| And then there were the theories that were "debunked" and
| marked as "conspiracy theories", often by people in powerful
| positions, against their better knowledge, because a
| narrative was to be held up. Masks are useless. There is no
| connection to the Wuhan virology lab which specifically
| worked on that exact class of virii and gain-of-function
| research...
|
| I used to be carefully trusty of official sources. I am no
| longer.
| RoddaWallPro wrote:
| This doesn't really move the conversation forward, but an
| important point to make (I think) is that we as a species
| have never agreed that we're observing the same universe.
| Think of all the wildly different beliefs that have co-
| existed (though certainly not peacefully!) at the same times
| throughout history. It's a feature of all reality, not a bug
| of the _current_ reality (I say this because some people seem
| to think we're in a new & novel time of history where no one
| agrees on anything because of "the internet" or
| "misinformation", but I don't think that's the case. Humans
| have always disagree on what reality is).
| [deleted]
| sharemywin wrote:
| And alot of the definite proof is obtuse and not readily
| readable.
| 0x7E3 wrote:
| > Still, some people point back and use the evolving
| knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we
| shouldn't do anything.
|
| And some people point back and use the censorship of people
| who turned out to be correct as an argument that we were way
| too quick to leverage the 'misinformation' label to suppress
| the truth.
| glial wrote:
| We've inherited this rationalist idea that people form opinions
| as the result of careful consideration and weighing of
| evidence. This is mostly false. Evidence suggests that people
| form ideas from (1) group-membership and (2) repetition. If
| this is true, imagine you were a person trying to influence
| public opinion and had access to social media. An obvious
| strategy would be to...
|
| 1. Create an account with clear political affiliations
| (american flags, laser eyes, pronouns, etc in the bio). This
| establishes group membership.
|
| 2. Repeat a basic message over and over and over.
|
| This is exactly what we're seeing.
|
| I'm 100% for allowing free and open debates. I'm _not_ for bot-
| or state-controlled accounts trying to sway public opinion.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one
| side to silence the other, rather that debating the subject
| with definitive proof of their claims_
|
| The problem here is that it takes far more effort to refute
| bullshit than it does to spread it.
|
| _With all of the unknowns of many of these current subjects, I
| would think open debate presenting theories from various
| sources would help find common ground._
|
| What happens in reality is that whoever asserts greater
| certainty has the upper hand, particularly in the absence of
| genuine authority. Science is (correctly) reluctant to make
| unconditional promises, while con artists have no such hangups.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Things which were at one point considered "dangerous
| misinformation":
|
| 1) Slavery is immoral
|
| 2) Black people should be allowed to vote
|
| 3) Women should be allowed to vote
|
| 4) Bacteria exists
|
| 5) The earth is round
|
| 6) You can question the church
|
| etc. Now that is not to say that "vaccines may carry more risk
| than is being reported" is correct, and should be placed next to
| "black people should be allowed to vote". However, if the anti-
| misinformation crowd is allowed to reach their conclusion, then
| we will never be able to challenge the orthodoxy again.
|
| As a side note; is this all the result of people not learning
| philosophy in school? It's legitimately horrifying to me that so
| many people have no concept of what it means for something to
| even _be_ true, or how we could reach consensus on that. What
| does it mean to "know" something, what is the purpose of dialog,
| etc.
| dboreham wrote:
| There's a long tradition of elites working to reduce the level
| of education received by the populace, in part exactly because
| it prevents them from determining what's true.
| [deleted]
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I was expecting a link to a paper that would be similar to
| results like in "On the impossibility of fairness" by Friedler et
| al.
|
| This twitter thread seems defeatist and hand-wavy. The thread
| does have good intuitions in focusing on uncertainty and nuance.
| For example, the difference between asking questions and
| sealioning is hard to tell
|
| Because of that, I agree that a perfect solution probably doesn't
| exist because of similar trade-offs like in the paper I
| mentioned, but doing more research at least lets us find out what
| we are trading-off and what we are willing to sacrifice.
| NHQ wrote:
| There is no such thing as misinformation. Whatever you want to
| call it, it is information all the same.
|
| One bot's info is another bot's entropy.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The same is true for gore, porn, or other types of undesirable
| content, yet hardly anyone wishes to post on platforms that make
| no effort to control those.
| biesnecker wrote:
| It's not though? Sure, there are edge cases (breastfeeding
| being labeled as porn, for example), but the vast majority of
| what is blocked as porn on major social networks is actually
| porn as understood by most people. That's not the case for most
| misinformation.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I'd argue against this. From the things that I see removed
| from those I follow on instagram, I would never label as
| porn. And then they loose their entire account based on
| extremely puritan value judgements.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| What the Twitter post asked for was doing things in a "fair,
| reproducible, and representative way", rather than just being
| correct most of the time.
|
| I suspect the vast majority of the time the misinformation
| removal is accurate as well. People tend to post the same
| dumb stuff over and over.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Even if that's true, you can still moderate in a fair,
| reproducible and "representative" way, because the goals are
| different. In the case of NSFW content, the filtering can be
| opt-in: "don't show me this stuff, because I'd rather not see
| it". The point of moderating "misinformation" is not to let
| anybody see it, because you don't want _them_ to see it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| That isn't true though - you _can_ police those in a fair,
| reproducible and representative way. Whether or how widely they
| ought to be policed or not is another question, but NSFW
| content filtering effectively never produces false negatives
| and really only produces false positives in rare cases.
| deeg wrote:
| I don't think we can. What is (or isn't) revenge porn? Are we
| policing that effectively? Do people get in trouble for
| posting cute pictures of their kids in the tub?
|
| We should get away from thinking that moderating perfectly is
| the goal. There is no way we could even decide what perfect
| moderation is, let alone carry it out. Our goal should be
| "mostly effective", or something like that.
| belorn wrote:
| platforms that has no content controls tend to give users the
| ability to perform content controls themselves. The Internet is
| a nice example where as a platform, undesirable content does
| not generally diminish the usefulness of the Internet. Few is
| leaving the Internet because there is too much gore and porn,
| nor is it desirable to have ISP censor the Internet in an
| effort to reduce gore and porn. If there is too much gore and
| porn, it better for the user to simply decide for themselves to
| not visit sites with gore and porn.
| mfer wrote:
| This is where things get more complicated.
|
| For example, things in the US have moving and TV ratings based
| on the type of content. People can opt-in to watching things at
| that rating level knowing the types of content in it. They can
| do it for themselves and their children. Some TV stations only
| have certain types of content and remove others.
|
| With social networks some will say that certain types of
| content isn't for that network. It's the same idea.
|
| What these channels and networks aren't doing is telling you
| what is misinformation or not. They aren't making truthy
| statements.
|
| Modern social media is making truthy statements. booleans. Not
| about what content is allowed in the network but about what is
| true and not as a whole. That's different.
| bduerst wrote:
| Yep. Many of the social or content websites advertising as
| being "moderation free" don't seem to thrive or last very long,
| even though that tends to attract a specific type of crowd.
| freeflight wrote:
| For the longest time they thrived and were considered the de-
| facto standard.
|
| But the politicization of that whole field, trough FUD about
| "social bots" and "fake news", made that very difficult to
| keep up.
|
| Case in point; Liveleak is now gone, with it at lot of
| content that's now hidden away in private archives of data
| hoarders.
|
| Now, one can handwave that away as just a bunch of snuff and
| gore porn, but there was so much more there than that;
| Controversial livestreams that were deleted from the original
| platform also serve as evidence, war footage, all the things
| authorities and governments often don't want people to see.
|
| Like footage from the Syrian civil war on YouTube; Google
| scrubbed massive amounts of that, possibly including evidence
| for war crimes [0]
|
| By now it's reached a point where even documentaries about
| certain wars get an automatic age-lock from YouTube, the only
| way to watch those is to confirm your real identity with
| Google.
|
| On that end the surface web has lost so much of its "bite",
| it hardly feels like the web anymore.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-
| rights...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You're telling me that companies publishing information have to
| take an editorial stance on what they publish? I'm _shocked_!
|
| More seriously, even though there's no "closed form" solution, it
| seems like each publisher can take a reasonable subset of what
| they can stomach. If "good information" is an amorphous, moving
| blob floating in a sea of "bad information" we can draw simple
| polygons that are more/less inclusive of "good information" while
| allowing more or less "bad information" to be included.
| mountainboy wrote:
| One cannot even define "misinformation" in a fair way. The entire
| concept is anathema to a sane, rational person.
|
| No one has a monopoly on the truth. No one is omniscient. No one
| actually knows how life works, or the fundamental nature of the
| universe.
|
| So how can any of us presume to define for everyone else what is
| true or not?
|
| The most we can do is have our personal understanding and
| beliefs. This makes all information subjective. In the eye of the
| beholder.
|
| To think otherwise is megalomaniac insanity.
| joelbondurant1 wrote:
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| "Misinformation" and "disinformation" are in the vocabulary of
| propagandists. Whenever I hear someone use either, I know to
| ignore them.
| wwweston wrote:
| This borders on epistemological nihilism. Of course few
| assertions about truth should be beyond challenge. Of course
| there are grades of confidence and properly conducted discourse
| (including venues/methods of challenge) can improve the quality
| of conclusions. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as
| poor-grade or even garbage assertions.
|
| And functional institutions not only have a responsibility to
| _try_ and establish some kind of reasonable consensus about the
| truth, they basically can 't operate without doing so.
|
| When courts make rulings, they can't do it without establishing
| facts of a case. That's not "presuming" so much as it is simply
| functioning. There's a process for arguing details out... and
| an end at which details are accepted as established.
| Potentially subject to review, but not arbitrarily.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| We can't have a perfect voting system due to Arrow's Theorem, but
| elections are still preferable to alternatives.
| tradesmanhelix wrote:
| It's also good to remember that ideas like the heliocentric
| theory, the germ theory of disease, etc. would have been labeled
| as "misinformation" at one point in time. Now, they're the
| theories believed by the majority of people because that's where
| the best evidence points, which just goes to show that sometimes
| it takes hundreds of years for the best ideas to win. So I say
| let them fight.
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| Yeah I'm going to have to categorically disagree with that. You
| can totally police misinformation in a fair means by requiring
| that it presents credible evidence of weight commensurate with
| the impact of what it argues, and explain to those who are
| policed in a transparent manner why and how they can appeal it.
|
| There is no one on earth who can form a credible argument that 5G
| spreads SARS because it's fucking lunacy. The evidence for
| ivermectin improving severe covid outcomes also clearly showed it
| was only noticeable in regions where untreated parasitic worm
| infections are common, so yeah, getting rid of multiple other
| infections led to better outcomes. Various counter-arguments
| against anthropogenic global warming (even the honest ones) have
| been thoroughly invalidated for decades.
|
| It's like raising the required work to send spam or spray malware
| at random internet hosts. It doesn't fix everything, but it evens
| the playing field between trolls and agents of discord vs people
| having real discussions. We know this works because high-value
| discussion forums like the heavily moderated science subreddits
| do it and there is no mass hysteria -- and reddit should probably
| be compensating those mods, but that's another issue.
|
| If your commercial platform does not put in the bare minimum
| content moderation to keep dangerous horseshit out of the common
| discourse where gullible and naive people with no ability to
| serious discern credible statements from well-practiced lies,
| there should be penalties scaled to the revenue of the business.
|
| Just because Facebook or whomever clearly didn't give a damn and
| phoned in some half-assed keyword flagging system doesn't mean
| it's impossible. It means Facebook doesn't care and needs to get
| fined until they do. If you can't link some credible evidence
| because of stupid limits on Twitter, maybe Twitter is just a
| terrible discussion platform.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << You can totally police misinformation in a fair means by
| requiring that it presents credible evidence of weight
| commensurate with the impact of what it argues, and explain to
| those who are policed in a transparent manner why and how they
| can appeal it.
|
| If, and I do mean if, you can consistently define
| misinformation. The issue is that, not unlike porn, 'i know it,
| when i see it' approach to identification is not a great way to
| gather trust of people you want to impose that upon.
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| > by requiring that it presents credible evidence of weight
| commensurate with the impact of what it argues
|
| The people saying various vaccines result in significantly
| better outcomes and shorter infections from SARS have
| millions of man-hours of testing and evidence backing that
| up. Anyone can watch a boat come up over the horizon with the
| top visible and reproducibly verify the earth is, at the very
| least, curved. That's the opposite of "I know it when I see
| it."
|
| Arguing over favorite colors has no material impact on
| anyone. Loudly proclaiming incendiary medical statements on
| public forums very obviously has had massive impact, and if
| you can't back it up, that's misinformation even if by
| astronomical luck it's accidentally correct.
|
| This is exactly why professionals and other serious people
| give measured, complex answers to questions that don't
| translate well to in-group signaling grifter gear, and
| exactly why we need some sort of brakes on the countervailing
| screeching of slogans on the other side because that train
| zooms out of the station and picks up idiot passengers left
| and right before the people who know what they're talking
| about can finish a sentence. This isn't hypothetical. We've
| been watching it happen for decades.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| This is really a crisis of modernity.
|
| People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities
| time and time again have misled them.
|
| That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to
| falsify evidence using technology that was never before available
| in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and
| desktop publishing software.
|
| Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine
| people's trust in what they hear and read.
|
| At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when
| they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they
| double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their
| most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It
| might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so
| they can pretend it must be true if anything is.
|
| Moderation isn't going to change any of this.
| fredgrott wrote:
| No it's a crisis of COMMONS, if we have enough commons this
| would not be a problem.
|
| When you monopolize commons into private things you get this..
|
| Yes this is a rehash of a former Presidential candidates own
| arguments, some of you may remember his law works such as the
| CC mark.
| [deleted]
| ska wrote:
| > Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine
| people's trust in what they
|
| Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not
| secondary.
|
| Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems
| likely many people aren't learning the lesson about
| institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging
| for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this
| seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the
| institutions themselves.
| 62951413 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more like a crisis of post-modernity? They say
| high modernism and all that 20th century stuff is behind us.
|
| People never trusted authorities outside of the first world.
| The Western governments were hiding their true nature much
| better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world
| previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit
| the same problems people living outside of it are used to.
| Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to
| America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy
| for a century.
|
| Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists
| are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth
| in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people
| against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong
| to and support them. Typically your government is your worst
| enemy, not some foreign dictator.
|
| Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you
| are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers
| that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive
| you to extinction.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| There is no such thing as "more good" more "more evil",
| simply "existing to survive" - but there is an absolute
| binary of freedom vs. non-freedom? There is no such thing as
| moderation(pragmatism) in policy? There is no
| power(government?) except those _trying_ to demoralize and
| exploit you to extinction?
|
| Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this
| post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal
| attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for
| the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this
| post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a
| personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the
| terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
|
| Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are
| absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone,
| since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it
| impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we
| really have no idea what they are blathering on about.
|
| Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what
| I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able]
| assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well.
|
| To quote a _terrible_ movie[0], in the case of the comment
| you 're replying to "the only winning move is not to play."
| IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc.
|
| As such, I recommend backing away slowly.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
| clairity wrote:
| you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is
| scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified
| amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another
| person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not,
| etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information
| scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have
| to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications,
| titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other.
|
| that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities,
| which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer
| direct consequences. that is, authorities become more
| disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as
| corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the
| populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority
| because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then
| we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim
| authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no
| deep knowledge/experience about.
|
| that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what
| we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and
| should be disregarded _en masse_. we even have terms like
| 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general
| problem.
| nocturnial wrote:
| I would also like to add to your point that there's a
| delusion that tech can moderate a couple billion people.
|
| In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems
| everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a
| single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they
| aren't working.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Perhaps, we should quit trying and only build "small"
| communities that can self moderate.
| defaultprimate wrote:
| It's almost like the anti federalists knew what they were
| talking about when they predicted the consequences of
| expanding federalism.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > People just don't trust authorities anymore, because
| authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| No, that's wrong model.
|
| Authorities have _always_ misled us. There was no time in the
| past when authorities would be truthful.
|
| What changed is us, our access to information and our ability
| to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the
| other side of the world.
|
| > That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to
| falsify evidence using technology
|
| Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue.
| With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to
| completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake
| somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure
| there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some
| other way.
|
| You say you can fake photo. You had _NO_ photos back in the
| past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were
| not recorded or the records were not easily available.
|
| There was only a very, very short time where data was easily
| available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale
| were not yet usable.
|
| What happened is that there is more information noise that
| completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to
| sort true from false". In the past you would have other people
| sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic
| Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there
| were not too many of those organisations. If those
| organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough
| people to remember that.
| crmd wrote:
| My concern is that western leaders agree with your
| assessment, have studied the strict information controls that
| governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the
| past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy
| for western governments to move forward as well.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about
| propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we
| immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of
| their work.
|
| The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the
| past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as
| an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as
| a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the
| internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to
| spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech
| censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback
| on.
| crmd wrote:
| I'm talking about the government banning unapproved
| narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These
| controls exist currently in China but not in the United
| States.
| richiebful1 wrote:
| What's the evidence that the Clinton/Bush administrations
| wanted to censor internet content, but decided it was too
| expensive?
| aksss wrote:
| > The only thing special that the Chinese have done
|
| I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had
| an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a
| _ton_ of people out of poverty, while maintaining
| totalitarian control of the nation. _That 's_ what's
| unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was
| widely predicted that economic prosperity would
| inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically.
| While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I
| think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the
| democratization of China. What China has done is shown
| that economic success can come in a locked down nation.
| The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-
| Cold War have also given the Chinese government a
| narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with
| politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on
| the right side of the government, which most Chinese
| citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in
| line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to
| manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree.
|
| This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world
| that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The
| Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One
| need only go back so far to find successful European
| autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people
| about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of
| the Western empires. The social contract people have with
| their governments gets devalued when said governments
| think they can press on the people more, or in fact _need
| to_ , in order to stay competitive or dominant on the
| world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like
| China" are more frequent in the press than I'm
| comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial
| distinction between systems...was no longer ideological.
| The main political difference was between those who did,
| and those who did not, believe that the citizen could --
| or should -- be the property of the state."
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| >> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because
| authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| > No, that's wrong model.
|
| > Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the
| past when authorities would be truthful.
|
| > What changed is us, our access to information and our
| ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another
| person on the other side of the world.
|
| I think actually both are true. Authorities have always
| misled, _and_ people have a deteriorating trust in
| (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the
| _frequency_ of lying to the public increases with an
| authority 's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and
| the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders
| to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly
| because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and
| are susceptible to frenzy.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What's changed is our ability to _detect_ authorities are
| lying to us. It 's higher than it's ever been. That erodes
| trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to
| us.
|
| Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes
| incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look
| like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more
| perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think so too.
|
| With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at
| least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a
| click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from
| public view.
|
| Our levels of trust are approaching the level that
| actually matches the dishonesty of the political and
| managerial class.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Our levels of trust are approaching the level that
| actually matches the dishonesty of the political and
| managerial class.
|
| Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in
| a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)
| avgcorrection wrote:
| How naive. Why would any lowly person have ever trusted
| what their lords told them?
| derbOac wrote:
| Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think
| this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials
| are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that
| uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed
| perspectives are under weighted.
|
| Information access might be related in that credentials
| probably mean less in reality if the information is more
| widely distributed.
|
| Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where
| literacy wasn't common.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I
| think this is a problem in many domains of society, but
| credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result
| of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid
| uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.
|
| Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos
| about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I
| trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more
| than someone with _useless_ credentials like a an MD or
| board certification[1].
|
| Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school
| and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than
| folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. _Anyone_
| who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD
| articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform
| such procedures without all this regulation about
| "training" and "licensure." /s
|
| [0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-
| bypass-...
|
| [1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
|
| N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my
| comment, but given the current environment, it's important
| to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something
| like this. More's the pity.
| derbOac wrote:
| It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's
| a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and
| when they find they live in a world where nothing can be
| trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to
| them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they
| deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them
| feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything
| is.
|
| Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > People just don't trust authorities anymore
|
| I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per
| se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To
| wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist
| is:
|
| People just don't trust authorities with different political
| leanings than them.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority
| per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority.
| To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the
| zeitgeist is:
|
| > People just don't trust authorities with different
| political leanings than them.
|
| This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make
| a personal decision on an issue, they search out some
| authority that appeals to them and follow that.
|
| In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where
| people were guided into trusting certain common authorities.
| I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons
| (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of
| individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that
| fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them,
| etc.), and the result is what you describe.
|
| Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way
| it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of
| technopoly [1].
|
| The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well
| known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet
| Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up
| being the example of the failures of _too-decentralized /too-
| fragmented_ authority.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
| thephyber wrote:
| >> People just don't trust authorities with different
| political leanings than them.
|
| > This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to
| make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some
| authority that appeals to them and follow that.
|
| Never have people always gone to first principles on all of
| the evidence. They have always looked towards people they
| trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts
| were that trusted authority.
|
| Sadly it's more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is
| now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities
| are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a
| personal decision on an issue, they search out some
| authority that appeals to them and follow that."
|
| Far more complicated than this, sorry. I agree with that
| observation if you gleen your evidence from portrayals in
| the media...and to some extent this is true but the
| populist power base in aggregate is far smarter and more
| purposed than this. What you described in the above quote
| could also be attributed to flatly thumbing their noses at
| the evidence because they want a certain outcome and they
| know they can get it by chaos. You create chaos by
| appearing to believe outrageous bullshit and acting on it
| within an approved political arena. It's protected chaotic
| behavior that serves the populist agenda.
| echelon wrote:
| > People just don't trust authorities with different
| political leanings than them.
|
| This. The CDC could do well to hire some conservatives to
| help with their outreach. Put them in positions of power.
|
| Both political parties should do this rather than engage in
| destructive and polarizing brinkmanship.
|
| I'm afraid focus on the short term and on "winning" makes
| this impossible, though.
| thephyber wrote:
| This seems like accelerationism, not a solution to CDC's
| issues.
|
| No, hiring more "conservatives" in a bureaucracy doesn't
| balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust
| problems aren't fixed by political stance (eg. Trump
| advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There
| is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government,
| anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not
| exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks
| the left in these characteristics. And pro-
| conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts
| simply won't break through to some people.
|
| The problems the CDC had aren't related to politics. It:
| - failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first
| weeks, - failed to allow many US labs to import and
| work with COVID samples, and - has continuously given
| dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple.
|
| They didn't trust Americans to say that "masks might work,
| but we want to reserve the best masks for medical workers
| and those at highest risk of death". Michael Lewis had a
| book which describes how the CDC and FDA are simply too
| risk averse as the pandemic started (and before). They were
| unable and unwilling to change.
|
| Also, the problem I see isn't that the CDC doesn't hire
| conservatives. It's more that conservatives don't enter
| lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism,
| science, art are dominated by liberals because
| conservatives don't encourage their kids into those fields
| because modern conservatives don't value these jobs. That
| and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of
| several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It's hard to
| be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a
| Young Earth Creationist).
| foolinaround wrote:
| Take the Supreme Court judges and how their rulings, and take
| issues that you can assume.
|
| For atleast some of the judges, one can clearly have
| predicted how they would have voted. The justices might have
| just taken a vacation on the beach and just call in the
| vote...
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's pretty much all the same to the unwashed "Trump
| Supporter." There is a populist movement in America that is
| somehow being missed for what it is. The populists will use
| and discard politicians on a whim. Whoever is perceived to
| piss on the establishment the most will curry favor and be
| elected at that moment.
|
| This is what Roger Stone and Steve Bannon we're looking to do
| with Trump. Slam dunk.
|
| This all arises from deep, deep mistrust and a perceived lack
| of representation on the part of the establishment toward the
| unwashed.
|
| The establishment is on the ropes right now.
| uberman wrote:
| This 110%
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Where there is power there is politics. The implication that
| authority can be depoliticized is ludicrous.
|
| Or perhaps by politics you really mean culture war leanings.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| I am not at all saying that authority can be depoliticized,
| I am simply pointing out that the underlying politics are
| what guides adherence to or rejection of a particular
| authority, depending on whether the authority's politics
| are in alignment with the recipient's or not. So I feel
| that statement that 'people just don't trust authority
| anymore' is not accurate, as people seem perfectly willing,
| in fact sometimes overly-willing to trust authority, with
| the caveat being that that authority must align with them
| politically.
|
| To clarify: I am talking about the _reception_ of
| authority, not the innate linkage of authority itself to
| the authority figure 's politics, but the linkage of the
| authority figure's politics to the politics of the people
| deciding whether to be receptive or not to that authority.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I think the problem is that literally everything seems to
| have a political leaning these days.
| antihero wrote:
| It's terrifying, the only thing that can combat this is to win
| at a critical thinking cat and mouse, that will become ever
| more in the favour of propagandists.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think
| is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that
| had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt
| to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise
| to have a theory or an educated guess.
|
| That's in an environment where people demand simple and
| concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for
| something and receive a full service for it has become the
| norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of
| everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and
| even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a
| result, services and the information on cutting edge are not
| spotless.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I
| think is communication issue because most of the "misleading"
| that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an
| attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep
| expertise to have a theory or an educated guess.
|
| the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always
| correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and
| always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on
| pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy
| masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks
| actually do anything or not, this was deliberate
| misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask
| supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals
| early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen
| people on this very website admit that they are aware of this
| fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although
| they _were_ deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So
| With Righteous Intentions, So It 's Okay.
|
| once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has
| lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best
| Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the
| Authority says going forward is the Truth?
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't talk about authority at all, that doesn't interests
| me. Just to be sure, by authority I mean people who hold
| authority over something due to their appointment.
|
| For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people
| who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our
| right wingers often import American propaganda and it's
| death giveaway when they start talking about something that
| some American politician like dr. Fauci said.
|
| In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what
| they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the
| authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We
| trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we
| always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In
| fact, the health ministry showed better than the average
| competence and just as they start building some trust, they
| were exposed to be lying shamelessly.
|
| Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I
| thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and
| people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely
| quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the
| most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere.
|
| Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation
| happens when people try to digest very complex information
| beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person
| who is actually in control of the complex information tries
| to simplify things to the layman.
|
| If physics were more mainstream, we would have people
| misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those.
| It's just that those people are not marching on the
| streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum
| mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build
| around layman misunderstanding things and building
| alternative realities over oversimplified scientific
| topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people
| say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and
| when they speak publicly they commit the sin of
| oversimplifications and best guesses presented as
| clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the
| universe.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says?
| I thought that ship sailed long ago?"_
|
| All the major religions are alive and well, and have
| billions of believers who care very, very much about what
| their authorities say.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't think so, they usually follow local spiritual
| leaders. That's why no issue is ever resolved by their
| authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the
| time.
| thephyber wrote:
| There are some glaring counter examples to your
| assertion.
|
| The Catholic Church is the largest sect of Christianity,
| the largest religion. Protestantism (typically a smaller,
| more local organization) is actually a smaller branch,
| but has many megachurches.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" they usually follow local spiritual leaders"_
|
| Whoever they follow, those are their authorities.
|
| _" That's why no issue is ever resolved by their
| authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the
| time."_
|
| They fight because their authorities tell them to.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Authority is a synonym for a leader.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > People just don't trust authorities anymore, because
| authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the
| perception that the "authorities" have a different set of
| values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through
| orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the
| times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream
| activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.
| rayiner wrote:
| That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke
| their expertise or science for a position, but are really
| making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| > _People just don 't trust authorities anymore, because
| authorities time and time again have misled them._
|
| It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many
| that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a
| paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning.
|
| See:
|
| "Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes
| towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-
| sectional study"
|
| https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Should have fallen in line like all the intelligent kids.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| > because authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation.
|
| When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah,"
| you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is
| unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly
| reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another
| station.
|
| When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and
| I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong,
| that we're just talking about likelihoods.
|
| When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning,
| you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't
| wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting
| those polls probably impacted the outcome.
|
| The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage
| because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting
| research, science, polls...
|
| Which erodes trust in authorities.
|
| And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the
| Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra.
| Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.
| causi wrote:
| _you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren 't
| wrong_
|
| I mean, sure, if you don't think pollsters have any
| responsibility for due diligence. The polls were an accurate
| representation of what people were willing to admit to
| planning and doing, but a lot of people weren't willing to
| say they were voting for Trump. Popular culture and media
| spent months telling those people they were isolated
| deplorables who had no chance, but in the voting booth nobody
| can shame you. Asking people over the phone whether they were
| going to vote for Trump was like asking them if they liked
| being spanked in bed.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| One thing to think about here is that US electoral system
| practically counts different peoples votes differently. A
| voter in Georgia mattered a lot more than a voter in
| California or Wyoming. Small polling errors in either state
| are inconsequential, but hugely consequential in Arizona,
| Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Lots of polls are national
| polls, not state polls too. As it happens, the average of
| national polls predicted the vote totals overall very well.
| But that doesn't matter. Because it still came down to a
| few thousands of voters in a handful of states.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Right now the press is fuelling a frenzy over Russian troops,
| trumpeting "eminent war!!" daily. It is rediculius,
| completely unfounded, incendiary, false, and just plain
| dumb...but clicks matter.
| mr_overalls wrote:
| Russia has has something 130,000 troops positioned just
| outside Ukraine's borders and in Belarus. They have tanks,
| missile systems, amphibious landing ships, medical units,
| established supply lines, etc.
|
| They actually invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea.
|
| I mean, the possibility of an invasion is not exactly far-
| fetched.
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I feel obliged to point out that reputable poles predicted
| Clinton's chances at significantly lower than 99%.
| gilleain wrote:
| Not to distract from your point ... this page : https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_...
| suggests the value was always between 40-50%
|
| ... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not
| Polish people :)
| lelandfe wrote:
| > the value was always between 40-50%
|
| Those are the raw data from polls (an estimate of the
| popular vote), not the predictions from them ("who will
| win" - which is what the original commenter refers to).
|
| Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out
| from election day:
| https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
| forecast/...
| mbesto wrote:
| > Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month
| out from election day
|
| And the way statistics work, a 90% forecast is truly a
| 90% forecast - they weren't wrong with this. It's just
| people think 99% chance of winning basically means "they
| won". But that's not how it works. So the idea that these
| numbers are misinformation is incorrect, it's that media
| is using a metric that the average person has trouble
| comprehending.
| double_nan wrote:
| > it's that media is using a metric that the average
| person has trouble comprehending.
|
| Isn't that a clear case of disinformation?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The public being too ignorant to interpret analysis isn't
| disinformation.
| mbesto wrote:
| We're talking about metrics with objective definitions
| that are taught in schools around the country, not
| headlines like "The President is cancelling his trip to
| Africa because he hates black people". I don't know,
| seems like a huge difference to me...
| quesera wrote:
| > Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month
| out
|
| I.e. a couple weeks before James Comey announced a
| reopening of the investigation into the email issue?
|
| I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data,
| but I think this is a bad example because the "facts" on
| the ground changed significantly in the time period.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I generally put a very high stake of credibility in
| fivethirty eight. They ended on 71%.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their
| data
|
| I did not say this.
|
| I'm illustrating the original poster's comment about
| these forecasts being guesses of likelihood.
|
| Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey
| reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is
| not an indictment of the model itself.
|
| Yet I'm sure all of us knew folks who had opinions riding
| on the 85%+ forecasts, and then losing faith in the
| predictions as they wildly changed over the course of
| weeks.
| quesera wrote:
| I missed your point in the original.
|
| As you say, "88% chance of winning" is not "expected to
| receive 88% of the vote".
|
| The 538 model attempted to weigh the reliability
| (recency, reputation, magic pixie dust) of polling data
| and project a range of outcomes.
|
| And even with a "perfect" model, it can take a while to
| absorb exogenous events like the Comey surprise.
|
| The causes of 538's prediction error might be unknowable.
| Or, to be fair, if it was even an error! Would we expect
| probability to approach 100% in the moments before
| polling opens? Maybe in some fields, but 538 did not
| attempt this. IIRC they ended at ~70/30 Clinton. A single
| roll of a die (1d6) will frequently come up 1 or 2.
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Polling numbers are different than predicted chance of
| winning. A five point difference in polling numbers is
| likely to be a 90%+ chance of winning.
| josephh wrote:
| You're comparing apple and oranges. The 99% prediction[1]
| was based on the statistical significance calculated
| against the polling results, and was not the actual
| polling numbers suggested in the wiki that you linked.
|
| 1. https://archive.is/enzvh
| bduerst wrote:
| Also there was undo foreign influence on the election that
| didn't become evident until afterwards: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
| 0xy wrote:
| >you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't
| wrong
|
| They were wrong though, multiple key polls in battleground
| states were far outside their margin of error, indicating
| methodology failures or bias. As an example, the national
| ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton
| result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment
| of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver
| who weights them as an "A+" pollster.
|
| I also don't think anyone needs to misrepresent research and
| science, since huge swathes of it are fraudulent anyway. From
| the reproducibility crisis to outright fraud and lies,
| trusted institutions have been desecrating their reputation
| for years.
|
| The CDC now enjoys a trust rating around 50%, because of
| incompetence and lies. News media is worse, because they lie
| more than they tell the truth.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| fix/wp/2016/11/07/po...
| slg wrote:
| That poll has it 47% to 43% Clinton when the actual results
| were 48.2% to 46.1% Clinton. The only real discrepancy is
| they overestimated the vote totals for 3rd party
| candidates. The numbers they had when excluding 3rd parties
| was 49% to 46% Clinton. Do some blending of those two and
| they basically nailed it. Is this really the poll you want
| to call out as fundamentally flawed?
| belltaco wrote:
| >As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6,
| 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of
| error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and
| it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an
| "A+" pollster.
|
| Your link says 2.5% margin of error and not statistically
| significant. What am I missing? Ironically the comment
| appears to be misinformation.
|
| >Clinton's edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach
| statistical significance given the poll's 2.5 percentage-
| point margin in sampling error around each candidate's
| support
| InitialLastName wrote:
| >As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6,
| 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of
| error
|
| The end result was roughly Clinton: 48%, Trump: 46%, which
| is right at the margin, not "far outside".
| ALittleLight wrote:
| My own trust in authorities is eroded by more recent and
| basic things than your list of horrific things.
|
| For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of
| American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear
| purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have
| been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge
| of the country and there was never any accountability for the
| policy and military failures.
|
| Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out
| of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking
| things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our
| intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was
| just to run him down in the press for several years? If they
| didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for
| years?
|
| Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe
| our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change -
| we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear
| reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity
| billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom
| will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to
| create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing
| rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too
| much to talk about stuff going wrong.
|
| I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in
| charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a
| degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?
| saurik wrote:
| I'd even add basic things like the TSA to the list: the
| government says this is required for everyone to be safe,
| but every single study or analysis shows it is ineffective
| and security experts universally deride it; and yet, the
| "authority"--which might literally be the agent at the
| scanner with a smug attitude about the whole thing--is
| _adamant_ this is important and that maybe _you_ are a
| terrorist for nothing other than making a sarcastic joke
| about the situation.
| zdragnar wrote:
| My elderly parents were both submitted to full body pat
| downs and my dad had to pull up his pant leg to
| demonstrate that yes, his leg brace was a medical device.
|
| Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my
| preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.
|
| So much theater for so little security.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| No one wants to sign a bill pulling back TSA, and then
| see the headline "TSA would have stopped this terrorist."
|
| Voters are not reasonable, and the media fans those
| flames.
| saurik wrote:
| Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? ;P I
| _will_ say that if everyone (including the agent at the
| gate who doesn 't seem to want to admit this to even
| themselves) said that out loud--instead of claiming it
| was a critical security measure--it would make me feel a
| lot better about the whole thing and I might not even be
| upset about it anymore (though at that point you might
| also see the public opinion holding it together change).
| dboreham wrote:
| Note that leaving known agents in place is a recognized
| approach. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Blunt
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't think the approach is applicable if the agent is
| in position to do serious harm.
| adamrezich wrote:
| do they usually let them be President for a full term of
| four years with no consequence aside from relentless
| media assault?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Not even the ballsiest, most scheming intelligence
| officer would let a known agent have the nuclear
| suitcase, though.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| Governments are incentivized to do everything wrong at
| every level.
|
| * Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from
| providing services that people want. They earn revenue
| through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how
| well they govern.
|
| * Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the
| game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as
| reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly
| generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state
| several decades in the future, the politician will suffer
| no consequences whatsoever.
|
| * Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its
| land, or its resources. They merely get to control the
| state for a short period of time. That means they are
| incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the
| state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I'm not convinced you understand how representative
| democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for
| establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?
|
| > They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to
| collect regardless of how well they govern.
|
| Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well
| they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the
| governing? These definitions are important. What are you
| actually complaining about here?
|
| > If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan
| that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the
| future, the politician will suffer no consequences
| whatsoever
|
| Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every
| corporate executive ever.
|
| > That means they are incentivized to extract as much
| personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible
| during their short tenure.
|
| Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every
| corporate executive ever.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > I'm not convinced you understand how representative
| democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for
| establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?
|
| Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play
| between the two systems.
|
| > Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well
| they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the
| governing? These definitions are important. What are you
| actually complaining about here?
|
| I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they"
| meaning the government). The government earns money by
| demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-
| profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that
| people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff
| people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you
| disagree?
|
| > Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every
| corporate executive ever. > Really. Gosh, that also
| sounds very different from every corporate executive
| ever.
|
| I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate
| executive is generally compensated with shares in the
| company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep
| the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such
| incentive whatsoever.
| roenxi wrote:
| > ...the people in charge, the government and the media,
| seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief.
|
| Not exactly true, two important things intersect:
|
| 1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The
| machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more
| diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being
| lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I
| struggle to get across to people as a small-government
| proponent, but the people in power _physically cannot_
| understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the
| pulling achieves. Most of them aren 't even numerate and
| the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're
| flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad
| incentives.
|
| 2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing
| voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a
| different and much simpler creature from anything that
| turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to
| deal with that swing voter rather than do what the
| politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a
| good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible
| results).
| causi wrote:
| _I 'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian
| agent?"_
|
| The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was
| easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia
| than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could
| to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration
| necessary.
| tlear wrote:
| And yet Crimea and east Ukraine happened on Obama's watch
| and Kyiv will fall on Biden's watch. Cool eh?
| zaphar wrote:
| All the stage setting for them Kyiv on Trump's watch. If
| Trump had won a second term it would still have happened.
| We ascribe entirely too much power to the office of the
| President sometimes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It is clear Russia is taking advantage of Biden's fear of
| military action. China, North Korea, Iran all have been
| more aggressive. The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone
| the impression America will back down. Trump kept
| everyone off balance.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| You missed the subplot where the Hillary Campaign via
| intermediaries paid a foreign national to 'develop' the
| Trump Russia Conspiracy.
|
| It's not your fault it was poorly edited and paced.
|
| Looking like there may be a sequel and probably a spin-off.
| datavirtue wrote:
| A note on Afghanistan, the military started the war paying
| farmers to stop growing poppy in an attempt to defund the
| Taliban. The next season farmers planted more, expecting to
| be paid to burn thier crops again. No dice. Crop production
| ramped up, flooding the market with Heroine and
| subsequently rounding out the pain pill opiate crisis in
| the US with a swell of Afghanny (circuitously routed
| through south American drug Lords) heroine. And the Taliban
| got funding for decades. Now the media is aghast at how
| much regular people hate the government now. Trump support
| is just a big fat middle finger to an inept establishment
| that currently has it's pants down around it's ankles.
| guelo wrote:
| Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have
| the power to take out a democratically elected president.
| To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no
| basis.
| kansface wrote:
| My recollection is probably a bit off, but IIRC, the FBI
| knowingly and repeatedly lied to the FISA court
| ("material misstatements") in order to obtain secret
| search warrants to spy on the Tump campaign based on
| opposition research which was directly funded by the
| Clinton campaign, who had hired a former MI6 spook to
| find or make up dirt who also happened to be working for
| the bureau and was secretly leaking everything to the
| press! There were basically no consequences for anyone
| involved, including the FBI. I wouldn't believe that
| story line in a movie.
|
| The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists
| or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then
| arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little
| further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the
| role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and
| Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the
| civil rights movement.
| guelo wrote:
| That's certainly the Republican narrative of that FISA
| warrant. The inspector general report that found
| "material misstatements" found no evidence of
| politically-motivated or intentional abuse. It was
| basically technical sloppiness.
|
| The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White
| House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI
| you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the
| Church Committee in the 70s.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Have you read the key judgements from the 2002 NIE on
| Iraq?
|
| > High Confidence:
|
| > - Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its
| chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs
| contrary to UN resolutions.
|
| > - We are not detecting portions of these weapons
| programs.
|
| > - Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological
| weapons and missiles.
|
| > - Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year
| once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile
| material.
|
| https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Iraq_NIE_Excerpts_200
| 3.p...
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Both of those are certainly wrong.
|
| The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they
| violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment,
| and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't
| control the intelligence services, the legislative branch
| doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's
| plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence
| services have their own secret courts. There is no sense
| in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how
| they spend their budgets
|
| They also have the power to take out a democratically
| elected president. For instance, they could've published
| the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They
| could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or
| Trump's cabinet to remove him.
|
| The intelligence services are a perfect example of the
| unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are
| evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who
| violate American rights and ignore the law. They are
| incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular
| and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they
| outmatch on paper.
| guelo wrote:
| Intelligent services have been abused by presidents many
| times but there is no credible evidence that they act in
| opposition to a sitting president. Obama's FBI issued the
| Trump campaign FISA warrants but Trump installed his own
| people at the CIA/DOJ/FBI etc. The closest rogue agents
| against Trump were the whistleblowers like Colonel
| Vindman that were mostly rooted out and attacked
| relentlessly to discredit them.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I think you and I blame different people for that.
|
| I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY
| attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in
| good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame
| everyone else for their problems, demand instant results,
| get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about
| style over substance...
|
| Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking
| heads.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| > When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton
| winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls
| weren't wrong.
|
| A bit of a tangent, but polls don't make predictions, people
| make predictions based on the polling data. Some people
| predicted Hillary with 99% chance, and 538 predicted Hillary
| with 66% chance. When dealing with probabilities it's not as
| simple as "wrong" or "not", but if people were betting then
| those that bet 99% would have lost a _lot_ of money, and 538
| only a little. As a result I trust 538 a lot more now; that
| 's the nice thing about people making specific predictions,
| you can over time learn who to trust.
|
| Anyhow this tangent ultimately agrees with your point, as you
| and I know that if a talking head makes a "99%" prediction,
| it's got at best an 80% chance of actually happening.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| And if 538 were consistently wrong, say wrong 80% of the
| time, then ~538's prediction gets you right 80% of the
| time. Win!
| thetallstick wrote:
| Doesn't this only works if an election has two possible
| outcomes? Revotes and voids are possible as well in most
| cases. In 2022 these things somehow feel like they're
| much more likely than before...
| mannerheim wrote:
| I don't think any polls themselves gave odds, but I would say
| any aggregator that gave 99% odds was definitely wrong. Nate
| Silver gave about 70% odds, as did prediction markets - that
| is much more reasonable.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| >because authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| I think because people are more comfortable believing what they
| want to believe.
| ratsmack wrote:
| That may be true in a non-general sense. There are many
| people that take the time to research and learn the truth,
| and there are probably a number of people that prefer to just
| go with the flow of their peers. I really couldn't tell you
| what the split is, but I would hope most here on HN would
| fall into the former group.
| uberman wrote:
| I'm not sure many or even a handful of people really
| research. I feel the many go to youtube to be told by their
| favorite talking head how to feel or rationalize a subject.
| That is not "research".
|
| I did not make a decision about masking or not because I
| conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical
| papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I
| don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust.
|
| That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source
| has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo
| chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll
| most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even
| knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding
| me.
|
| People used to trust subject matter experts and now they
| trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of
| newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to
| propagandist.
|
| I think the largest disservices were done by unethical
| scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military
| sponsored clandestine medical experimenters.
|
| Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a
| phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
| duxup wrote:
| > There are many people that take the time to research
|
| Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I
| think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's
| "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what
| they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out.
|
| Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore.
|
| And honestly even I don't research much, most research I
| last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that
| wasn't a lot.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Let's take this even farther. Let's say I'm going to do
| "research" correctly (at least how I would interpret it)
|
| So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and
| Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I
| cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm
| stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust
| someone else to tell me which studies were done
| correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically
| flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired
| outcome etc.
|
| At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone
| else. In my parent's generation, I think most people
| trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people,
| but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking
| Joe Rogan for health advice.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > , but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the
| former group.
|
| Of course. That's what allows us to talk about the foibles
| of People in this thread as if we were Martians.
| thephyber wrote:
| I think it's a little more complicated than your wording.
|
| We don't go all the way to first principles on every topic,
| so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We
| tend to trust people like us. When there were still
| gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe
| paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things
| are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by
| engagement-focused algorithms.
|
| Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have
| an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities.
| Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly
| trusted in recent years.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I don't agree, unless your definition of modernity is the set
| of unfounded and unvalidated beliefs that have been largely
| imposed on people against their will for the last 100 or so
| years.
|
| I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of
| this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a
| transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy,
| whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic
| and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on
| power and control... and reality for that matter. They reject
| reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so
| long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all
| of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural
| order and life, and it will always fail eventually.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > This is really a crisis of modernity.
|
| Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like
| Marcuse and Derrida.
|
| "As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the
| circumference of the shadows surrounding it. That is not an
| endorsement of ignorance, but a warning that our philosophy and
| socio-politics must expand in proportion to our technologies."
| psychlops wrote:
| > Moderation isn't going to change any of this.
|
| Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls
| the information.
|
| Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want
| to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously
| agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument
| is simply over who gets the power to do it.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| Authorities, moderation, and the mistrust of both are nothing
| new. The modernity crisis is that we can't trust our instincts
| any more about what's a centralized authority, what's an
| individual, what's a moderated environment, and what's a public
| square. There were always battle lines to contemplate, but now
| the front line is everywhere.
| lunatuna wrote:
| >People just don't trust authorities anymore, because
| authorities time and time again have misled them.
|
| In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in
| experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily
| ignore the truth.
|
| I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible"
| [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how
| information jamming is working. Though this is about the
| Russian experience it is a global issue.
|
| >Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine
| people's trust in what they hear and read.
|
| One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition
| groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed
| to create a credibility crisis.
|
| [0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-
| true...
| m0llusk wrote:
| Always striving to collect and share the best and most compelling
| observations and evidence can go a long way.
| [deleted]
| laserbeam wrote:
| In my experience, there's only one way out of the misinformation
| hole. Read a lot of competing views and keep as emotionally
| neutral a stance as possible. Learn why people love religion,
| science, alternative medicine, math, psychology, meditation,
| fighting, cars, guns, sailing, skiing and politics.
|
| What's the fraction of a % of people willing to spend that kind
| of effort. To learn for the sake of learning, not to prove a
| point or show others they are right :(.
| brg wrote:
| There is another way that I have found myself more comfortable
| with as I get older. That is to simply not have an opinion, and
| at times actively ignore, things that are either irrelevant to
| my life or outside of my control.
|
| On many topics people rebel against this attitude, because they
| see it as a moral imperative to be an activist. But that's not
| how I choose to live, and I find it is easier to be happy this
| way.
| lcall wrote:
| One of my siblings comes to mind as someone who is good at
| this. This seems like another way of saying we have to choose
| our battles (priorities).
|
| I believe working (as wisely as we can) in the service of
| others is important. But we have to prioritize, and being
| peaceful, & kind & responsible to those nearest us are high
| priorities.
| Kapura wrote:
| This should be fairly obvious? There have been myriad occasions
| where we have collectively discovered that certain "facts" are
| not, in fact, facts at all.
|
| Given that the reality of reality is beyond the grasp of
| certainty, a platform owner still is able to make choices about
| what is and is not acceptable within their community. This is
| well understood in indie game community management; nurturing
| nurturing communities involves removing bad actors, and making
| _subjective_ calls about whether people are acting in good or bad
| faith.
| sakopov wrote:
| Misinformation is really a side-effect of mass manipulation of
| truth by authority. Yet most of the safe-guards for
| misinformation in social media have been built to police the
| wrong group of people.
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