[HN Gopher] The "misinformation problem" seems like misinformation
___________________________________________________________________
The "misinformation problem" seems like misinformation
Author : dtjb
Score : 206 points
Date : 2022-02-15 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.slowboring.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.slowboring.com)
| aftbit wrote:
| >I think the only sensible thing to say about all this is that
| discerning the truth is hard, and it requires debate and dissent.
| Functional expert communities and well-run journalism
| institutions are open to new information, to changing their
| minds, and to correcting the record. But that process doesn't
| work if the fact-check squad slaps a "misinformation" label on
| you for saying the CDC is wrong about masks.
|
| I just wanted to highlight this part really quickly. IMO this is
| one of the most concerning things to come out of this epidemic of
| misinformation. We have allowed a handful of for-profit companies
| to build a system for determining what is true or false. I
| suppose this isn't meaningfully different than the world before
| the internet, but that's a huge wasted potential.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how
| misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then
| he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored
| with bias. This is funny and sad!
| softwarebeware wrote:
| IMO the author displays confirmation bias in the post. He doesn't
| think about the effects of a higher availability information with
| a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view.
| If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information,
| that's more convincing than outright lies. And this is often the
| situation we are in more often than not these days. Along with an
| inability to spot logical fallacies in lines of reasoning.
| dathinab wrote:
| we have higher ability to seek out contradicting views.
|
| just most humans nerver do so
|
| they at most look for badly done cintradicting arguments to
| confirm their few
| RIMR wrote:
| We are talking about Matthew Yglesias. Confirmation bias is
| basically his entire brand.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Not all contradicting points of view are created equal. Just
| because someone can make up a contradicting position doesn't
| mean it's got any relevance or merit. Couching a meritless
| position in pseudoscience doesn't make it any better.
|
| The problem we too often see is people, mass media especially,
| trying to appear "fair" by airing statistically
| unrepresentative positions just because they are contrary to
| some mainstream position. There's not two equal sides to all
| positions. Even when there _are_ two (multiple) sides not all
| of them have statistically significant representation or are
| equally rigorous.
|
| Just because I'm not seeking out arguments claiming COVID
| vaccines have 5G or the Earth is flat doesn't mean I have a
| lower ability to seek out contrary opinions. It just means I've
| got some basic scientific literacy and a bullshit filter.
| danans wrote:
| > If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information,
| that's more convincing than outright lies.
|
| I think it's exactly the opposite. It's far easier to convince
| with outright lies than with carefully chosen facts, because
| those lies are crafted to match what you _want_ to believe.
| That 's what false conspiracy theories are born of.
|
| Everyone is subject to that bias, even people that consider
| themselves highly logical.
|
| It starts becoming a problem when it is manipulated to channel
| broadly held but not expressed resentments.
|
| This is common in ethnically fractured developing societies,
| where a rumor about something someone in group x did to someone
| in group y could turn into a coup or war, but it seems that
| developed societies are no longer immune either.
| civilized wrote:
| > He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability
| information with a lower ability to seek out other
| contradicting points of view.
|
| This is a baffling claim. Why on earth would you believe that
| people now have a lower ability to seek out contradicting
| points of view?
| [deleted]
| mint2 wrote:
| most americans live insular suburban lives in their bubble
| and when they get doses of current events they are
| algorithmically fed confirmation bias and especially
| confirmation bid that arouses them to click/engage. I.e
| tabloidizing the cherry picked facts that then framed with
| the biases that poke the viewers buttons.
| civilized wrote:
| None of that changes the fact that it's easier than ever to
| seek out contradicting points of view. People just don't
| want to.
|
| The algorithms feed people stuff that confirms their
| beliefs because that's what they like.
|
| It's all about preferences and choices, not ability.
| mint2 wrote:
| We shouldn't try to fix obesity, smoking, enforce
| seatbelts, gangs, local pollution, etc because all those
| are personal choices to live near or partake in?
| civilized wrote:
| Try to help as you wish, but describe the problem
| accurately. And understand that the people you are trying
| to help may resist you because you are interfering in
| their choices.
|
| Some people passionately want to keep drugs like fentanyl
| out of the country. Others think it's impractical and
| efforts have done more harm than good. Still others say
| "hand them a clean needle".
|
| Messing with the choices people make that you think are
| bad for them isn't easy.
| mint2 wrote:
| I think you meant: > Messing with the choices people make
| that scientists, sociologists, and 9 out of 10 dentists
| think are bad for them and society as a whole isn't easy.
|
| I guess that my more appropriate and more relevant
| corrected version of the statement didnt sound like it
| supported the point so the original was phrased as if
| it's my own non expert opinion that smoking causes
| cancer.
|
| fentanyl? Are you saying that should be unregulated and
| freely purchasable at the local 7/11 or are you saying it
| should be regulated even although some people choose to
| do it?
|
| Either way I'm not really sure how that supports the
| older points about people technically but not practically
| having the option to avoid misinformation means society
| should ignore misinformation as it's "a personal choice"
| svachalek wrote:
| Which profit driven advertising based search engine or
| newsfeed is built around delivering contradicting points of
| view?
| [deleted]
| civilized wrote:
| Replace "profit driven such-and-such" with "print
| newspaper" and the rhetorical question works equally well.
|
| I think the worst you can say against social media is that
| it feeds you low-quality highly-partisan sources if you
| seem to like such sources. But your ability to seek out
| better or contradicting information is not diminished. If
| anything it is far greater than it has ever been. "Stuff
| that is against $my_favorite_belief" is a Google search
| away. Wikipedia alone will usually give you a fairly
| balanced treatment of a topic with extensive references to
| diverse perspectives and evidence.
| beecafe wrote:
| Misinformation is just due to people and organizations attempting
| to act optimally. If you don't embrace it, you'll be crushed by
| those who have.
| zwieback wrote:
| So true. Misinformation is a misnomer, it's not something that
| exists in opposition of information and shouldn't be compared.
| Like you say misinformation is something people use to achieve
| their goals.
| standardUser wrote:
| "...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the
| question. That's why it's a live debate."
|
| It's just rhetoric. Anything can become a debate, such as who won
| the 2020 presidential election, if one side is willing to make up
| facts and repeat them over and over. Proponents of the Big Lie
| are super-informed, insofar as they have a lot of lies they can
| say with a straight face that act as stand-ins for actual
| information. And if they keep asserting those lies, the other
| side is forced to respond, hence a debate. There is still no
| merit to the Big Lie, but now it must be discussed as if there
| was. THAT is why there is a live debate.
|
| And then there is this nonsense: "overall political climate was
| much more right-wing in the 1990s."
|
| That is so outrageously false I'm not sure why anyone is supposed
| to think this person is worth reading. Just think of how many
| mainstream politicians will swear up and down that the election
| was stolen in 2020. I guess if you pretend "right wing" is about
| policy you could craft a convoluted argument that today's
| Republicans are less conservative (as the author does), but
| that's not what the right wing is about. The right wing is about
| the Big Lie, it's about illiberalism, it's about demonizing the
| media and institutions and political opponents - all the policy
| stuff is just window dressing.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All
| the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved
| disgracefully after the election and that there is still no
| evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the
| election.
|
| Many still believe it's a major problem that states like
| Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which
| should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many
| also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so
| insecure and that we need more election security. That's
| separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the
| sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold,
| or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair.
| But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is
| attacking the free press, stifling public education, making
| voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending,
| loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen.
|
| Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did
| conservatives pass during the previous Republican
| administration when they had a trifecta? What was the
| Republican Party platform in 2020? And why is the RNC
| choosing not to allow a debate in 2024? This is not a party
| with lots of ideas ready to fight for the hearts and minds of
| voters.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Yes, and I'm asserting that 90+% of conservatives don't fit
| the mold you are casting. That was the point of my
| response. You can find crazies on both sides of the
| political aisle.
|
| One of trump's failures is that he isn't a good statesman
| and so failed to unite his own party, which caused a lot of
| failures in the legislative process as people like John
| McCain voted against him just because they hated him. I
| sincerely wish Trump doesn't run in 2024, not because I
| think he would do worse than Biden (he would have been 100x
| better than Biden), but because his greatest strengths are
| also his biggest flaws, and I don't think he can lead the
| country effectively.
|
| The general platform of conservatives is: "this is the
| greatest civilization in history we've inherited. Please
| stop screwing it up so badly!" That may be different from
| the RNC platform, but Republicans at least align with
| conservative values more closely than democrats, so we
| don't have much choice but to vote for them. Unfortunately,
| conservatives have rarely been dominant even within the
| Republican party, and many anti-conservative measures have
| been perpetrated by Republican presidents.
|
| I agree we need new and better ideas to go mainstream in
| the party, though not that these ideas don't exist. Among
| the weaknesses of the Republican party in the past decade
| have been the unwillingness of the party elites to sense
| the times and pay attention to their constituents or to the
| looming culture wars.
|
| As it is most of the time, the strongest argument to vote
| for a party is not that that party is great, but that the
| other party is worse. I have no solution for that.
| jamincan wrote:
| Doesn't a majority of Republican voters believe the 2021
| election was stolen?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
| bavell wrote:
| The poll you are citing looks like it asked if
| Republicans thought trump was the "true president". I
| could see a lot of republicans responding flippantly just
| to poke fun and see some feathers get ruffled.
|
| Also, N = ~750 Republicans polled over 2 days but they
| extrapolate the results to the entire country? Not
| exactly rigorous science here.
| standardUser wrote:
| Polling consistently shows that the _majority_ of
| Republican voters do not think Biden won the 2020
| election. In my mind, that proves your theory false. A
| recent UMass poll found that 71% of Republicans think
| Biden 's election was definitely (46%) or probably (25%)
| not legitimate. In an Ipsos poll last year, 53% of
| Republicans when asked who "the true President is right
| now" said Donald Trump. There are dozens of polls showing
| the exact same thing.
|
| You're also ignoring the 147 elected members of Congress
| that voted against certifying the election results, and
| the countless mainstream conservatives politicians and
| pundits who are constantly promoting provably false
| conspiracy theories, and not just the Big Lie, often it's
| even far more nonsensical garbage. This is _not_ a fringe
| movement, this is the mainstream Republican Party.
| JTrilogy wrote:
| I don't think the stats agree with you. A December 2021
| poll by UMass Amherst showed only 21% of Republicans
| thought Biden's election was legitimate[1] and 54% blamed
| the Jan6 violence on Democrats or the Capitol Police.[2]
|
| The numbers are almost the same when broken up by
| ideology (conservative/independant/liberal) instead of
| party affiliation.
|
| It's not an issue of "crazies on both sides" --
| mainstream conservative views of recent events are
| detached from reality. There's a pipeline of
| misinformation that starts with white nationalists, runs
| through InfoWars and their ilk, and eventually leads to
| OANN and Fox News. Keeping the audience's attention is
| the top priority, so facts matter less than feelings.
|
| [1]: https://polsci.umass.edu/toplines-and-crosstabs-
| december-202... [2]: https://polsci.umass.edu/sites/defau
| lt/files/Jan6thAnniversa... (page 5)
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| And the majority of young adults in 2016 thought Trump
| was illegitimate: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-
| news/majority-young-american...
|
| I don't, however, take either poll seriously. Also, the
| word "illegitimate" can be interpreted multiple ways. One
| meaning is "not genuine". Many Republicans are unhappy
| with, among other things:
|
| * the shameful lying and misinformation spread by
| corporate media outlets during election season. These
| organizations outright lied and just didn't care. The
| ends justified the means:
| https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-staffer-networks-trump-
| off...
|
| * Shameful outsized influence and suppression of stories
| by big tech. For instance, The Hunter Biden story got
| completely quashed by Twitter. It turns out the story is
| mostly true and could have affected the election. There
| is significant evidence that Joe Biden was involved in
| corrupt deals as well. In a more just world, Biden would
| probably be out of office and in jail:
| https://news.yahoo.com/might-not-hunter-biden-
| shenanigans-08....
|
| * Corrupt influence by wealthy democrats like Mark
| Zuckerburg, who spent millions to potentially influence
| the outcome of the election: https://bbc-
| edition.com/entertainment/the-2020-election-wasn...
|
| * States like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin breaking their
| own laws at election time.
|
| They are plenty of ways to justify using the word
| "illegitimate" without claiming anything overtly illegal
| was done to successfully change the results of the
| election.
|
| _It's not an issue of "crazies on both sides" --
| mainstream conservative views of recent events are
| detached from reality. There's a pipeline of
| misinformation that starts with white nationalists, runs
| through InfoWars and their ilk, and eventually leads to
| OANN and Fox News_
|
| I don't follow Fox News or Infowars, but I know of
| numerous examples of lies and misinformation coming from
| NYT, WaPo, CNN, NBC, NPR, and so on. Maybe both sides
| peddle in misinformation. Maybe one side peddles in it a
| lot more than the other. I'm going to need to see more
| than this UMass poll to convince me that it's the
| republican side that's the bigger problem.
| nickff wrote:
| Hillary Clinton thought Donald Trump's election was
| "illegitimate", does that mean she's a "crazy"? What is a
| "legitimate" election anyway? Does it require a certain
| level of participation, imply a certain bound on
| fraudulent voting, limits on intimidation, or perhaps
| propaganda, or maybe it just means that the winner of the
| popular vote carried the day?
|
| If you ask a vague question, the answer isn't meaningful.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-
| trum...
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > disgracefully
|
| Amazing all the words that some come up with to discount what
| was a violent attempt at staying in power after losing an
| election.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| It was just one word, actually. And, as we are learning
| now, Hillary Clinton's team paid to infiltrate into
| whitehouse servers as part of efforts to delegitimize
| Trump's election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-
| clinton-campaign-pa...
|
| We also know now that the russian collusion hoax was
| entirely fabricated by Hillary's team:
| https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-
| cre...
|
| I don't agree with what Trump did, but what he did was rile
| up a crowd of people that had zero capability of actually
| usurping the government, and then waited too long to ask
| them to leave after they went too far. Politicians on both
| sides do worse things than that all the time, including our
| friend Hillary. What she did was worse and far more
| diabolical, and helped undermine our democracy for four
| years. What Trump did was to just provide fodder for the
| democrat party to milk for 2 years in hopes of it saving
| them from a coming midterm election sweep.
|
| Our government was under zero actual threat on that day.
| Even the left's own polling shows that moderates aren't
| buying their narrative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-
| buries-poll-results-showi...
| cgriswald wrote:
| Your argument is that Trump attempted a coup and failed
| to interrupt it, but that is okay because it wasn't a
| _serious_ coup and other corruption exists.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| I am legitimately not convinced he was attempting a coup.
| I am willing to admit I am wrong on this. I've read
| accounts from leftwing media sources and from their
| wording it sounds like what Trump did was really bad.
| I've read accounts from rightwing sources and from their
| wording it doesn't sound bad at all. I have not done a
| great deal to try to reconcile the two and decide where
| the truth lies.
|
| Right now, I believe Trump legitimately thought the
| election was stolen and he wanted Pence to de-certify the
| election to give time for his lawsuits to go through the
| courts and show the evidence of the fraud. I absolutely
| do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to
| riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also
| believe that no such fraud was ever found. If I am wrong,
| let me see the evidence.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Does "more election security" mean less black people voting?
|
| I mean the Republican party has argued in court that it
| should be legal for them to prevent black democrats from
| voting as long as it targets them as Democrat voters, rather
| than by race, so it's not like this is a big secret
| conspiracy or anything.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-
| fact-...
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome
| means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were
| listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-
| Sow...
|
| In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to
| vote less than others, that doesn't make the law
| discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU
| article, I see nothing to convince me that voter ID laws
| are bad. Many of us here are programmers and understand
| there is a tradeoff between usability and security. Our
| current voting process errs far too heavily on the side of
| usability at the expense of security.
| standardUser wrote:
| This is just a weak attempt at re-framing the issue.
| There is a much simpler way to approach suffrage - are
| governments making it more difficult or less difficult
| for voters to lawfully cast a ballot in elections? If you
| apply that simple question to the scores of voter
| suppression laws being proposed and passed all over the
| country, it becomes painfully obvious that these laws are
| by and large making it more difficult for citizens to
| lawfully cast a vote. Which makes sense since that is the
| goal of these laws.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I don't really see how that applies to a well documented
| history of voter suppression?
|
| Yes, in theory, you could have a color blind system and
| some random change could have a negative impact on some
| group randomly.
|
| That's not what happened in reality though.
|
| "In theory, I might not have killed him" isn't a great
| argument for someone found standing over a body with a
| knife, you're generally looking for something a bit more
| concrete.
|
| Someone standing on top of a giant pile of bodies and
| saying "As I've said for decades, I theoretically might
| not have killed them" is even less convincing.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Similarly, I don't see how "a well documented history of
| voter suppression" applies to increasing election
| security. I don't see that phrase in your first link, but
| I found it here:
| https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-
| govern....
|
| From there I found a link to the evil Brian Kemp who
| dared to purge voter rolls!
| https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-
| relentless-s...
|
| Many believe that one of the greatest opportunities for
| fraud come from outdated voter rolls. We need more effort
| to purge them, not less. Again, I am not hearing a single
| thing from you that convinces me laws like voter ID laws
| are more harmful than beneficial. If this weren't a
| deeply partisan issue for an insanity-driven culture of
| divisiveness, there would be little argument against
| voter ID laws in this day and age.
|
| Lastly, it is very partisan to focus on efforts of
| republicans to suppress democrat votes while ignoring
| democrat efforts to continuously game the system in their
| favor, like:
|
| * Making Washington D.C. a state, which makes zero sense
| unless you just want to win.
|
| * Stacking the supreme court, which, again, makes zero
| sense unless you just want to win.
|
| * Abolishing the filibuster, which completely undermines
| the purpose of the senate. The founders of the
| constitution purposely did not set up a pure democracy
| and they had many good reasons for it.
|
| * Federalizing election laws, obviously in ways that
| favor democrats, even ignoring the complete
| unconstitutionality of the law. if anything is obvious
| about the democrats, they see the constitution as an
| obstacle more than as a founding document.
|
| * Purposely not enforcing existing immigration laws (this
| should be illegal and Biden should be in jail for it),
| and then fighting to allow non-citizens to vote (this is
| already legal in NYC), or to grant citizenship to illegal
| entrants. Fortunately, the Hispanic vote seems to be
| shifting right, so we can hope this evil strategy will
| backfire against the democrats.
|
| * Gerrymandering that rivals or exceeds republican
| gerrymandering efforts. But, when it's the democrats
| doing it, the corporate media like to call it
| "redistricting".
|
| The democrats have long ago made it clear that they will
| fight as dirty as possible to win. If anything,
| Republicans need to start fighting dirtier back.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > Similarly, I don't see how "a well documented history
| of voter suppression" applies to increasing election
| security
|
| Because "election security" - applied strategically and
| unequally (such as removing ballot boxes and voting
| stations in areas that are strongholds for your political
| opponents) is nothing but suppression tactics. Even voter
| ID laws, when applied only in places where gov ID is not
| common, can be weaponized.
|
| You know this.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Please point out one person in power who suggests
| selectively applying voter ID laws in a state. If this
| discussion weren't partisan, your concern would simply
| translate to: "voter ID laws make sense; let's make sure
| the laws are written and enforced fairly", and not, "we
| can't do voter ID laws because it's possible to be unfair
| with them!"
|
| It's possible to be unfair with every law, and every law
| will have disparate impact. What a silly argument to
| make!
| standardUser wrote:
| You must not follow these issues closely, because there
| are many examples of states picking and choosing which
| IDs "count", with student IDs usually not counting under
| many Republican-crafted laws, but other IDs, such as gun
| licenses, being permitted. Further examples include
| reducing the hours/days of the offices that issue IDs and
| shrinking voter registration windows.
|
| Roughly 11% of Americans don't have a valid government-
| issued ID and many of these individuals are lonely, ill,
| disabled, destitute, and are now being forced for the
| first time in their life to provide an ID to vote while
| at the same time their states are making it harder to get
| an ID. The Republican party is pushing these policies in
| almost every state, and prioritizing them over most other
| legislative concerns. This could not be less subtle.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| So I googled for 2 minutes ( actually I used a different
| search engine because I don't trust google much for
| politics anymore), and I found this:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-gun-license-accepted-as-a-
| vot...
|
| "Your university I.D. was issued by a university compared
| to a government issued one. The license to carry contains
| your verified address, dob and all that. What does your
| University one have? The LTC required compete
| fingerprints and a background check. Seeing some
| differences here?"
|
| Also:
|
| "I cannot be 100% certain but its because Texas requires
| Social Security Numbers, Background checks and proof of
| citizenship to obtain a license to carry. So its a valid
| form of state issue ID. Not unlike a drivers license.
| Anyone could get a University ID. so long as they're a
| student there. Including those on VISA's or non-us
| residents."
|
| At some point, I hope some of you all break out of your
| narrative bubble and start seeing that people on the
| other side aren't insane, racist, and power-hungry, and
| that we often have good reasons for what we do.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Anyone proposing it that doesn't also legislate for every
| voter to be issued with one is being selective.
|
| > The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as
| well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the
| streets, and to steal bread
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Yes, they are selecting for citizens with a valid ID.
| That's the point!
|
| And, no, the law doesn't need to ensure every citizen
| gets a voting ID. How would one even do that? The voter
| rolls are out of date and don't contain every citizen.
| Also, how would you ensure the right IDs get to the right
| people?
|
| You, as a citizen, do not have an inherent right to vote
| without having the ability to prove you are who you claim
| to be. You, as a citizen, may have to experience some
| inconvenience to get a valid ID if you don't have one
| already. As long as the inconvenience is reasonable, it
| should not prevent the creation of voter ID laws.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It appears we dont really have enough commonly accepted
| facts to have a fruitful conversation.
|
| The article you linked to talks about a lot of really
| horrible things, which I guess you agree with based on
| your linking to it and describing removing voters from
| the voters role for simply not voting in the previous
| election as no big deal?
|
| My big picture take is that democracy is good, and
| depriving people of votes is bad. If thats partisan then
| I'm glad I'm not in the party fighting to reduce
| democracy.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| _It appears we dont really have enough commonly accepted
| facts to have a fruitful conversation._
|
| Welcome to American politics. That you were willing to
| have a dialog at all with someone who disagrees with you
| might set you above the average.
|
| _My big picture take is that democracy is good, and
| depriving people of votes is bad._
|
| How about this big picture take? Democracy is good, and
| citizen votes deserve protection. Every fraudulent vote
| dilutes a legitimate vote. Even the appearance of
| insecurity undermines faith in the democracy.
|
| And yes, it's incredibly partisan for you to claim that
| republicans are trying to "reduce democracy." An attitude
| like that will both fail to convince anyone who disagrees
| with you, and also keep you in the dark about truths your
| party in general are unwilling to accept.
| dustyleary wrote:
| > And yes, it's incredibly partisan for you to claim that
| republicans are trying to "reduce democracy."
|
| Is it, though?
|
| My belief is that voter fraud is basically a non-issue,
| that it doesn't really happen very much at all, and that
| it is a bogus argument put forth by the Republicans to
| give an excuse for why they are so consistently fighting
| to not allow people to vote.
|
| Google search "does voter fraud really happen", and "how
| bad is voter fraud":
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=does+voter+fraud+really+h
| app...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=how+bad+is+voter+fraud
|
| I can't find any results that don't back up my belief.
| Can you?
|
| The Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank, has a
| page on voter fraud: https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
|
| But, in my opinion, it's kind of amazing that they leave
| the page up. The purpose of this page is to document and
| expose how bad voter fraud is, and they provide a
| searchable database on all the cases they have found and
| confirmed. Their database goes back to 1982, and they
| have found... 1340 cases of voter fraud.
|
| This is an embarrassingly low number, isn't it? A few
| thousand fraudulent votes over the last 40 years?
|
| Also, it's not like these cases are cases of people
| manufacturing thousands of votes. You can check for
| yourself, the entire list is here:
|
| https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search
|
| These are overwhelmingly on the order of "a single extra
| vote was cast" because someone voted in two districts, or
| mailed in an absentee ballot for a deceased relative.
|
| Meanwhile, do Republicans work to suppress votes? I think
| it's hard to argue otherwise in good faith:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=do+republicans+suppress+v
| ote...
|
| Why does Mitch McConnell say that the idea of making
| election day a national holiday is a "naked power grab"
| for Democrats? Shouldn't making it easier for people to
| vote be a "good idea that strengthens our democracy"?
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=mitch+mcconnell+election+
| day...
|
| Another belief of mine is that it's common knowledge in
| politics that the more people who vote, the worse
| Republicans fare in elections.
|
| The Republican professional politicians are usually
| better at not openly admitting such things, but Trump
| gave us another example of "saying the quiet part out
| loud" with his usual eloquence: "They had levels of
| voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a
| Republican elected in this country again"
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=They+had+levels+of+voting
| %2C...
|
| Why would Trump say that?
|
| The Republicans _are_ trying to reduce democracy. They
| lost the support of the people. They have only won the
| popular vote once in the past 30 years. Rather than
| changing their platform to try to appeal to more voters,
| they 've decided that the people are their enemy.
| bavell wrote:
| This sounds like a pretty dismissive response, I thought
| the parent raised some good points and I was hoping for a
| substantive discussion.
|
| I've never understood why discussion around voting laws /
| election integrity is always either somehow racist or
| harmful. Seems like a lazy rebuttal against a strawman
| but I'm open to having my mind changed. Gonna need more
| than "democracy good, laws bad" though.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'd suggest reading the article that they linked to, it
| says it in much more depth and detail than I could.
| epgui wrote:
| I don't know how things work in the US, but what you
| describe would be legally considered "indirect
| discrimination" in Canada, and it would be treated
| exactly the same way as "direct discrimination". In fact
| many scholars argue that indirect discrimination can be
| just as problematic, if not more, than direct
| discrimination. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2019CanLIIDo
| cs1747
| guelo wrote:
| By what metric is there not enough security? If we go by
| documented fraud then there's no problem. If we go by the
| ability of powerful sore losers to bend the system to
| their will then, again, things seem fine.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| ~50% of US voters are wrong about the basic facts of the federal
| 2020 election. Doesn't matter which ~50% for this statement to be
| true. Misinformation hasn't been this bad in 300 years, even
| counting 1939 Germany. Expect similar consequences.
| archhn wrote:
| If people trusted the establishment and their institutions,
| "misinformation" wouldn't be a problem. People would just shrug
| off the rhetoric coming from the fringe. The pervasive mistrust
| of institutions and the establishment, foretold as the fourth
| turning, is what is causing people to turn to fringe sources for
| their information. What we are seeing here is a battle for
| authority underwritten by decades of establishment failure. It's
| going to get very ugly.
| Tycho wrote:
| "Misinformation" appears to be a term used by people who don't
| want to take on the burden of proof when accusing someone of
| lying.
| hobomatic wrote:
| To me it seems like they are a pot calling the kettle brown so
| as to divert attention from the fact that their own blackness
| is the larger offense.
|
| 'these guys are just stupid' as they engage in overt deception
| and manipulation to even make such an accusation.
| ebiester wrote:
| How do you take on the burden of proof to prove that high
| ranking US officials were not involved in an organized child-
| sex ring involving various pizza restaurants?
|
| Or any of the various other QAnon work.
| adolph wrote:
| > How do you take on the burden of proof to prove that high
| ranking US officials were not involved in an organized child-
| sex ring involving various pizza restaurants?
|
| Especially after Epstein. Why would they bother with the
| pizza business? I guess to add some theory to the conspiracy?
| gorwell wrote:
| When you hear the word `misinformation`, you can generally
| substitute with `wrongthink`. It makes much more sense that
| way.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I dunno about that. Thought experiment:
|
| The Earth is a flat disc.
|
| Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
|
| To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously
| online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning
| "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation
| being spread specifically about objective measurable facts.
| It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being
| mislabeled as misinformation.
| [deleted]
| Karunamon wrote:
| I find that most complaints about 'misinformation' are
| rooted in ideological conformity rather than truth. Like
| most buzzwords, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or have
| an objective definition, but it does mean you should
| closely examine the motivations of those who are loudest
| about it.
| lmm wrote:
| > The Earth is a flat disc.
|
| > Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
|
| You missed the fourth option: it's neither. No-one would
| call it misinformation or wrongthink; rather it's false, or
| a lie if you're feeling judgemental. I think the person you
| replied to has made a good point.
| lariati wrote:
| Noise?
| SquareWheel wrote:
| What if I show you a heavily biased paper in a quack
| journal with impressive-looking graphs that shows the
| earth is a flat disc? Is this misinformation?
|
| Most people will not have the experience to discern
| things like p-hacking and massaged numbers. Having
| experts call these things out as misinformation seems
| quite useful to me.
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| The firehose of falsehoods relies on this.
|
| The liar can produce 10 lies and demands you disprove them
| or they are somehow true. The burden of the liar proving
| their reasoning is missing.
|
| The goal is that their opinion and your fact be treated
| with equal weight or the opinion has greater weight simply
| because they can produce more "opinions" more often than
| you can facts.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yes, this. John Green mentioned in his vlog several
| months ago that he was not going to be answering antivax
| objections anymore because doing so was becoming a
| fulltime job and he has other work to do. This is the
| burden that deliberate misinformation is trying to
| impose: flood the zone with factual-seeming counter
| information, provide "data" (generally cherry-picked or
| out of context) to back it up and demand that it must be
| addressed. This is the antivax playbook. At it's worst
| flooding the zone with misinformation is designed to
| cause the populace to tire of the debate and give up
| trying to determine what the actual truth is.
| adolph wrote:
| > The Earth is a flat disc.
|
| > Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
|
| Neither. It is an assertion based on a frame of reference.
| The mapping systems used on my phone don't often describe
| geographic topography and so assert a flatness to the
| surface of this planet. Likewise this planet viewed from
| its moon would have the visual appearance of a disk. Is
| "The Earth is a flat disc" a helpful explanation for
| operating in the world? Not if you are a rocket scientist
| but it isn't a terrible model if you live an entire life
| within the vicinity of your family farm.
|
| "All models are wrong, but some are useful". George E. P.
| Box
|
| https://www.lacan.upc.edu/admoreWeb/2018/05/all-models-
| are-w...
| twa999 wrote:
| "missing context, misleading"
|
| you just got fact checked
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| That seems like a dangerous generalization that someone can use
| to hand-wave away any actual misinformation, which as the blog
| mentions, does exist and is spread (albeit by a small
| percentage of very prolific posters).
|
| Misinformation exists, and it is a problem. At this point we've
| seen some evidence that state actors put some of it out there
| during the 2016/2020 elections, and it can be spread
| organically.
|
| That said, it's not nearly as widespread or problematic as it's
| made to be by much of popular media.
| lariati wrote:
| If we follow the science then what does "misinformation" mean
| in an information theory context?
|
| It has no meaning at all. Since it basically has no meaning it
| does make it quite a good word in a propaganda context. We can
| make this word mean whatever we want.
|
| It is a shame we don't use the concept of noise or a noisy
| channel in a wider context.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| Some people refuse to look at the truth. Then again, it should
| be assumed that a random person, more often than not, actually
| cared and spent some time thinking or learning what most people
| take to be true. Throwing conspiracy theories to see what
| sticks is a lazy form of destructive behavior. Pointing fingers
| at people who don't explicitly disprove your claims, whether or
| not you know them to be true, is just a continuation of the
| same.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I think it is more useful to describe the situations where:
|
| - accusing someone of lying has no restraining impact on the
| person or the lie, and indeed where it might have a magnifying
| effect
|
| or
|
| - the lie is being shared by someone who has been lied to and
| does not know it; they aren't a liar but they are misinformers.
|
| Calling the "Covid hasn't even been isolated" misinformation a
| lie, for example, requires knowing that the teller is aware
| they are lying. They could simply be credulous.
| brigandish wrote:
| > accusing someone of lying has no restraining impact on the
| person or the lie
|
| Should an accusation _alone_ have that effect?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| No -- but I take your point. I meant "with evidence" here.
|
| The point is, many lies are a particular kind of bad faith.
| You can point out to the guy who, say, believes Antoine
| Bechamp is the last word in medicine, that he is
| misrepresenting Bechamp in the past, let alone
| misrepresenting science in the present, and that guy will
| argue that it is the very predictable pattern of your fact-
| based attempt to disprove him that is evidence of your
| perfidy.
|
| When you know that person is making that argument knowing
| it to be false, there is no point in accusing them.
|
| The only thing you can do is tackle the "alternative facts"
| as _misinformation_ rather than as an attempt to deceive.
|
| Because those who argue in bad faith claim injury in bad
| faith too. "Misinformation" is a more dispassionate
| approach.
| helen___keller wrote:
| The author is correct that in any debate, the prominent skeptics
| are often extremely well informed (joe Rogan on vaccines, in his
| example).
|
| I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the
| likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for
| misinformation.
|
| My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I'm not talking
| simple anti vax, I'm talking "trump will raid the Vatican for
| stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since
| the 19th century" misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff.
|
| Once, when I was still trying to convince her to get a vaccine, I
| told her that after Israel's early vaccine efforts, both cases
| and deaths are down heavily. Her response was to pull up a
| screenshot of a fox headline from a YouTube video that simply
| stated something like "cases up 60% after vaccination in Israel"
|
| I don't know the context of the headline. I'm sure in whatever
| context, it was accurate and not misinformation. But the actual
| spreaders of misinformation use skeptical talking points as
| weapons to spread misinformation, like the vaccine being a weapon
| to kill off the population for the great reset.
|
| Anyways I don't think it's wrong to be a skeptic. But skeptic
| talking points being mass weaponized on social media is
| absolutely new and uniquely enabled by modern technology.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I'm not
| talking simple anti vax, I'm talking "trump will raid the
| Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the
| first time since the 19th century" misinformation, like QAnon
| tier stuff.
|
| This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is
| definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are
| specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and
| not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and
| anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
| helen___keller wrote:
| She was pretty normal until around 2018 on the contrary. I'm
| sure losing her job in 2008 and ending up socially isolated
| because she doesn't speak fluent English didn't help.
|
| I'm not claiming ordinary and well adjusted people easily
| fall prey to misinformation if that's what you're trying to
| refute here.
|
| It's simply an observational fact that conspiracy groups
| wield skeptic talking points as weapons and that modern
| technology allows efficient dissemination of this discourse
| (as with any discourse).
|
| Whether or not there's a "misinformation problem", per the
| title, is actually an empirical question that neither the
| author nor I have the tools to answer
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| There is a bit of a catch 22 here. I think you're right.
| Most of the garbage floating about our public discourse
| (and I would submit most of it is garbage) is rooted in
| some legitimate facts. So your MIL will get some of these
| skeptical headlines, perhaps with some of these more
| conspiratorial groups capitalizing on and embellishing the
| these things. I think what you say is happening is....
|
| ... but on the other side, the same thing happens. Stories
| such as yours get posted about and even reported on and
| then different organized movements build these up into
| narratives and use these narratives to push for the
| silencing of skeptical points. In the end it's really the
| exact same behavior: get a few facts (in context or not),
| build your own narrative, add a substantial amount of
| emotionalism so it's less about the facts anyway, and you
| have a ready population of true believers that for the most
| part won't change their views.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Indeed, it's an emergent behavior in highly connected
| information systems.
|
| I've written about this in a different context here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172467#30178198
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's new, but it's not obvious that it actually changes what
| people believe, because those trying to argue against
| misinformation also have a much better toolkit. If someone came
| to you 20 years ago claiming that the chickenpox vaccine
| doesn't work because cases were up 60% after the rollout in
| Israel, how would you even begin to find contrary evidence?
| (How would you prove that jet fuel can compromise the integrity
| of steel beams?)
| helen___keller wrote:
| > those trying to argue against misinformation also have a
| much better toolkit.
|
| The point of the OP is that skeptics have powerful and robust
| toolkits and my point is that conspiracists use these
| toolkits
|
| Example: the question is whether Dr Fauci knowingly conspired
| to let hundreds of thousands die because he is colluding with
| the Chinese on enacting the great reset
|
| The conclusion seems obviously bogus, yet you can pick a ton
| of arguments in favor from any skeptic of US Covid response.
| These tend to be very robust.
|
| I've seen tons of convincing arguments on this very site
| about issues with US Covid response, eg that we had strong
| information about the risks of Covid and should have had
| lockdowns much earlier, that we should have advised to wear
| masks from the beginning, etc.
|
| In the context of the conspiracy, each argument that US
| response was bungled also becomes a weapon to argue that
| Fauci intentionally bungled US Covid response to enact an
| evil agenda of widespread death.
|
| At that point you can either argue with very well reasoned
| skeptic talking points, or you can dive down the ideological
| rabbit hole of "ok he bungled it but it wasn't intentional /
| malicious".
|
| This is what I mean by weaponizing skeptic talking points
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _How would you prove that jet fuel can compromise the
| integrity of steel beams?_
|
| 1. Acquire some jet fuel, burn it, and measure its burning
| temperature.
|
| 2. Acquire a steel beam, hit it with a hammer, heat it up to
| the burning temperature of jet fuel, then hit it with a
| hammer again.
|
| 3. Wonder why I just wasted $1000 and a hammer on something
| that the conspiracy theorists will label "doctored footage".
| rhino369 wrote:
| You should be careful about placing the blame on skeptics for
| misuse of their opinions by nutbags. Because the nutbags would
| have likely just latched onto something else. They didn't
| reason themselves into their crazy beliefs. So removing
| reasonable opinions isn't going to change their beliefs one
| bit.
|
| The conspiracy theorists often latch onto proponent's factual
| claims and misinterpret them as supporting the conspiracy
| theory. A lot of conspiracy theories re vaccines will quote
| CDC, WHO, research papers, etc. that aren't skeptical.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I'm only trying to describe, not assign blame.
|
| To be clear, I'll repeat myself:
|
| > I don't think it's wrong to be a skeptic
| godshatter wrote:
| In my opinion, the "misinformation problem" breaks down into a
| couple of separate causes. Mainly the odd inability of people not
| being able to view a comment that they disagree with and not try
| to "correct" that person (highly related to the inability people
| have to let the other person have the last word) and simple
| tribalism.
|
| I don't know what to do about the "inability not to respond"
| issue, I suffer from that myself. On the tribalism issue, I
| strongly suggest becoming the equivalent of a nomadic wanderer.
| When someone posts something about a topic I strongly agree with,
| I don't assume I will agree with everything else they might say.
| The same goes for posts about something I strongly disagree with.
| Being too caught up in tribalism leads to inoffensive posts from
| the other tribe causing a knee-jerk reaction to say something,
| anything, to put them in their place even if the person
| completely agree with what the other person just posted. Hence,
| the rise of "whataboutism".
|
| I try to take on a view of comments posted in which I don't care
| who the other person is, what other beliefs they might have good
| or bad, and just reply to the comment at hand. If the comment is
| full of insults I just ignore them and pick out the pieces of
| their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those.
| This would seem to be a good way to have less conflict in
| conversations on the internet but in my experience you need very
| thick skin to go this route because you are an outsider to all
| groups, meaning you are a target for everyone. There are people
| who will stop insulting you when you calmly reply to their points
| and ignore their jibes, but not as many as a younger more naive
| version of myself would have expected, unfortunately.
|
| This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as
| everyone else, so I slip at times.
| RangerScience wrote:
| > pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion
| topic and reply to those
|
| 100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal
| debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address
| everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you _don
| 't have to do that_. You can pick up _just_ the parts you want
| to reply to.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It is important to remember that the media seems to only call out
| "misinformation" when it is from sources that threaten their
| market, Have you seen _any apology_ for their failure to uncover
| the lies that got us into needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
|
| I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want
| to be lead into collective insanity any more.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This seems to be redefining what misinformed means, but I'm not
| sure what they intend to achieve by that.
|
| > "They don't have crank opinions because they are misinformed,
| they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information
| because they're cranks"
|
| Having a section about how conspiracy theorists are very
| knowledgeable about their subjects and then immediately saying
| that a right wing economist is really well informed about
| arguments against minimum wage regulations seemed a little on the
| nose, but I think it was just a coincidence.
|
| Basically, people are allowed to be wrong about stuff but only if
| they are right-wing, because right-wing people have traditionally
| been wrong. Is that what we are saying?
|
| > "So people vote Republican, I think, not because of
| "misinformation" but because they perceive that the GOP position
| on many policy topics has moderated while the Democratic Party's
| has gotten more left-wing"
|
| So they aren't misinformed, they just realised 10 years late that
| what the "left-wing" opinion 10 years ago was, was what they
| wanted after all? So how do we know they won't do the same in ten
| more years, which in fact he pretty openly states they will.
| thxCronyCap wrote:
| legitster wrote:
| The biggest change is how aware we are of others' views. The
| internet thrives on showing you people who are "wrong".
|
| I wish we would do away with public opinion polling as news. It
| does nothing to actually inform or help people, but it makes us
| obsessed with culture wars.
|
| Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings
| were real the year they happened. Imagine if someone flashed on
| the screen to tell you "40% of Americans don't believe this
| happened, and here are all of their political views". That's what
| modern journalism feels like.
| [deleted]
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon
| landings were real the year they happened._
|
| What is your basis for this? Were you alive then? I was. I
| watched the first Moon landing on television. Nobody was
| talking about how it was faked.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Same here, I was 7. Nobody was saying "did you see that fake
| moon landing?". It was only years later that I became aware
| that there were people on the fringe who thought it was
| faked, but I never personally met anyone with that opinion.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" It was only years later that I became aware that there
| were people on the fringe who thought it was faked..."_
|
| Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of
| conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more
| effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).
| jandrese wrote:
| "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the
| truth is putting on its shoes."
|
| Conspiracy theories have an incredible ability to self
| sustain, it is entirely possible the "moon landings were
| faked" theory is an old bit of Soviet propaganda that
| refused to die.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I sm skeptical on that number as well. I looked for the
| source. In the 10 minutes that I was willing to spend on it,
| I only found this:
|
| "A July1970 poll found 30% of Americans declaring Apollo 11
| to be a fake."
|
| https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_millions-still-
| believe-1969-mo...
|
| Couldn't find the original source.
|
| It looks to be something like US 6% of the population at the
| moment (Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/Landing-Man-
| Moon-Publics-V... )
| rhino369 wrote:
| Another issue is that polling is often fucked around with
| by the respondents, especially if the poll wasn't well
| written.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| On average, about 4%.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-
| and...
| civilized wrote:
| A lot of commenters here seem to want to define "misinformation"
| to mean something like "selectively presented information to
| promote a perspective at odds with what I think is a balanced and
| informed perspective".
|
| With this inherently subjective definition, I'm not sure we'll be
| able to agree on much about the existence or nature of a
| misinformation epidemic.
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| Misinformation is misinformation. I am certain I am misinformed
| about many things. The correct response to when I post
| misinformation is to inform.
|
| What happened recently with the move to yellow journalism is not
| misinformation but rather censorship. Fact checkers end up
| labelling things in order to censor them.
|
| The interesting thing on my mind in regards to Canada. Trudeau
| has changed. He would take on people head on at town halls and
| challenging questions: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-
| takes-questions-about-...
|
| Today he refuses to even consider talking to these ongoing
| protests and is going to insane extremes to shut these peaceful
| protests down. The only way to look at it from his point of view.
| He must see these people as national security threats. He
| genuinely believes they are racists and white supremacists. He
| genuinely believes they are there to overthrow the government.
|
| Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being
| misinformed.
| gorwell wrote:
| I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would
| explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis. If you're
| convinced that's what they are.
|
| This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a
| misinformation bubble as well.
|
| Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal
| trap.
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| >I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would
| explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis after
| all.
|
| The question though, are these protests really what he has
| called them? Are they really a military occupation?
|
| >This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a
| misinformation bubble as well.
|
| 100% true. You will find even republican ideologues have
| called him out on many of his bullshit things. Hell his
| rhetoric was toxic. Tons of improvement could happen over
| Trump.
|
| >Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal
| trap.
|
| It's built into our psychology, but not something out of
| control. Harper was in power for 9 years and never called in
| the military. He never demonized his political opponents. He
| never falsely labelled a peaceful protest as a military
| occupation. He never smeared political opponents as 'racists
| and white nationalists with unacceptable views'. He never
| declared a state of emergency to crush dissent.
|
| Trudeau doesn't need the military. He gave himself to power
| to seize your bank account because you're a protester. No
| court orders. No due process.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385
|
| Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at Monday's news
| conference that banks would be able freeze personal accounts
| of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a
| court order.
| gorwell wrote:
| > The question though, are these protests really what he
| has called them? Are they really a military occupation?
|
| Definitely not. Every large scale protest has its
| provocateurs and outliers. Using the outliers to frame the
| 99% is dishonest to say the least.
|
| To any neutral observer they are overwhelmingly peaceful
| and represent the working class.
| krapp wrote:
| >To any neutral observer they are overwhelmingly peaceful
| and represent normal working class people.
|
| This isn't a neutral observation. "overwhelmingly
| peaceful and represent normal working class people"
| exposes a politically-motivated bias.
| gorwell wrote:
| Does it?
|
| To a neutral observer the BLM protests were
| overwhelmingly peaceful and represent the administrative
| class.
|
| To a neutral observer the trucker protests were
| overwhelmingly peaceful and represent the working class.
| krapp wrote:
| Setting aside that no one would attempt to use the term
| "overwhelmingly peaceful" in a politically neutral matter
| nowadays unless they were completely naive (it would be
| like saying "think of the children" in the context of
| _actually_ arguing for considering childrens ' welfare)
| the word you omitted from the last sentence ("normal") is
| where the bias comes into play. "Normal" in that case
| carries the implication that working class people _as a
| whole_ agree (or should agree) with the protestors, or
| that anyone who disagrees with them isn 't legitimately a
| member of the working class.
|
| More accurately, the protests (both of the truckers and
| BLM) represent more narrowly defined set of political
| prinicples than the beliefs of more general classes,
| which tend not to be as homogeneous in their views as is
| often portrayed.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't think that Trump was in a misinformation bubble.
| Trump was in the bubble of his own narcissistic ego. Things
| were "true" or "false" based on how they made Trump look.
| Anything that threw any kind of a negative light on him was
| "false".
|
| The same was true of people. People were either "the
| greatest" or "losers" depending on whether the last thing
| they said made Trump look good or not.
|
| Trump was _creating_ a lot of misinformation, but it wasn 't
| because he was misinformed (at least not primarily). It was
| because he cared more for his image (and, I suspect, his own
| image of himself) rather than reality. Facts didn't matter,
| only image did.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't quite get where the author is coming from.
|
| >And on the basics of civic life, that doesn't seem to be the
| case. A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that
| in 2006, only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the
| three branches of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent.
| That's way higher than 33 percent!
|
| Is that really what anyone means about misinformation? I don't
| think so...
|
| As for say the Joe Rogan examples, are knowing factoids that
| someone thinks support their other opinions really knowledge, or
| are they things they just like to gather to support public
| statements?
|
| Often I get those factoids tossed at me on the internet and even
| links to pages that someone thinks supports their opinions but if
| you read 3 paragraphs in clearly doesn't.
|
| That's not being knowledgeable...
|
| In fact celebrating those little factoids seem right up the alley
| of misinformation where someone announces that "5 men were
| discovered to be impotent after getting the vaccine!" where that
| might be true, but the intent of the misinformation is obviously
| to push something else.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| And factoids don't mean that there is analysis being done on
| those facts. I can state partial facts or misleading facts all
| day long that might get upvotes/retweets. That doesn't mean
| that it is properly conveying information that is needed to
| analyze the subject.
|
| The Covid19 vaccine discussion isn't: "There are side effects
| that are worse than you think". There are hundreds if not
| thousands of data points that have to be analyzed together to
| understand the negatives or benefits of something as complex as
| this. Cherry-picking on factoid to back up your bias does not
| make you smart.
| president wrote:
| Have you noticed that people that label a position or argument
| misinformation never want to have a discussion about it? The
| pattern always seems to be:
|
| 1. Call something misinformation 2. Ignore any counter claims (so
| they cannot be proven wrong on the record) 3. Call for others to
| "cancel" it (use power in numbers to perpetuate misinfo claim)
| User23 wrote:
| The only rational position that fits the observables is
| defaulting to the assumption that everything one sees in the
| "news" that one can't personally verify is misinformation to some
| greater or lesser extent. This means that, for instance, I
| generally believe that local weather and traffic reports are
| accurate.
|
| Sadly, the Gell-Man amnesia effect means that most people will
| continue to believe whatever nonsense it is that they're
| currently being told.
| aaron695 wrote:
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| Once misinformation becomes accepted as truth, or a valid mindset
| even, it doesn't stand out as blatant falsehood. Questioning
| whether 1 + 2 is actually 3 or a secret way to hide the true
| meaning of pi is akin to a dog chasing its tail to excercise his
| brain.
| water8 wrote:
| Nobody feels the need to label you as misinformation when you
| go around saying 1+1=3. They will simply know you're a cuckoo
| and ignore you. The misinformation label seems to only get
| applied to information that could be harmful to a political
| party
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Take the "flat earth" people. What they say is factually
| wrong. But there isn't a flat-earthist political party that
| wants to change our military deployments because our current
| deployments are based on a false topology of the planet, or
| change our immigration policy because Central America doesn't
| actually connect to Mexico, or something like that. There's
| no political agenda that flows out of the flat earth
| nonsense. That's what makes it "nonsense" rather than
| "misinformation".
|
| On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation".
| That's where someone is deliberately and systematically
| trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for
| them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a
| disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On
| both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the
| political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say
| that both major political parties in the US are also running
| disinformation campaigns.
|
| "Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's
| not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but
| it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So
| people care about misinformation in a way that they don't
| care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can
| cause more harm.
|
| But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the
| damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation
| campaigns can cause (and, in fact, _are_ causing).
| t0bia_s wrote:
| At the end, it is a matter of believe. We choose what information
| should we believe or not. But we should always be able to
| confront that information with real life around us and look in
| specific topics from multiple sources. And keep asking questions.
|
| I hope people will look more and more for information about topic
| as vaccination. Because right know we come to era that we are
| really able to get access to information that was hidden for
| decades.
|
| I recommend book from German medical doctor "Gerhard Buchwald -
| Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear". Book was released in
| 1994 and observe the development of diseases and vaccination in
| Germany.
|
| Yes, it is easy to say that someone is anti-vax, but if you
| really inform yourself in this topic, you'll start ask questions
| that are valid and should be debated more.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| One of the worst example that I bring (unfortunately) in my mind,
| was from like mid-pandemic, when people around was complaining
| due to newspapers (in that occasion, the BBC in particular), for
| spreading misinformation.. and you know why they were spreading
| misinformation? Because they were supporting the right of
| chronicles by reporting about protests against coronavirus
| lockdown protests... this was the spreading of misinformation,
| newspaper should not report things that are happening but are
| wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like,
| even if what they don't like happened and makes news
| feurio wrote:
| > things that are happening but are wrong for wokes
|
| I'll admit that I found parsing the whole comment rather
| difficult so I may have missed something, but what are "wokes"?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am not sure, english is not my mother tongue so I might
| have written something in a non-understandable way, if
| there's something that I might have written better let me
| know if you want. As for wokes ->
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
| feurio wrote:
| OK, thank you for clarifying.
|
| So "wokes" are people who are 'alert to racial prejudice
| and discrimination'.
|
| > newspaper should not report things that are happening but
| are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that
| they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes
| news
|
| So what have "wokes" got to do with anything? They are just
| people who aren't racist, right?
|
| Again, maybe I have misunderstood.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yeah that was the starting point of the culture, and I
| think it's a start in order to get more documented about
| what they've grown into and how, so yeah they're those
| against racism and the likes but are also those who went
| against newspapers reporting news that they didn't like
| as written in my post
| feurio wrote:
| OK, I'm still a little unclear - can you give me a
| concrete example of a such a news story?
|
| And, perhaps to clarify further, do you consider yourself
| woke, or anti-woke?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am an anti-woke, but also gave you a starting point
| which explains what woke is (or was?), but I'm afraid
| what I wrote is not something I can link, as I wrote it
| was middle pandemic and going back to find posts from
| back then is a bit time consuming for me, then you can
| believe it or not, that's your choice, but I am not sure
| what should I do here, I guess for in depth research you
| can also go around the web yourself and find posts about
| them, last suggestion would be to look for "Woke regime"
| feurio wrote:
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| You can also fight noble cause in a wrong way, you go
| with the alert against racial prejudice and
| discrimination in a way that causes other issues, I am
| against woke because they want people banned or muted or
| offended from platform for saying things that they don't
| agree with
|
| I think you're oversimplifying serious issues there, it's
| not being against or pro racial prejudice, it's being
| against racial prejudice but also pro freedom of speech,
| against moderation and censorship and pro conversation
|
| Woke culture has alienated whoever was racist, and
| whoever had racist idea was removed from Twitter, the
| result? They just created their own societies on 4chan
| and other QAnon channels, away from conversation and from
| anyone who could tell them why their ideas were wrong,
| the result? Racist grew their support to the point where
| Trump was elected president, now that Trump is banned
| from Twitter, he is still growing his user base, away,
| unmoderated, and without the opportunity to discuss
|
| so yeah I am against wokes
| feurio wrote:
| I don't think that I am oversimplifying anything.
|
| Why are you conflating freedom of speech, moderation and
| censorship?
|
| Freedom of speech means the government won't come and
| arrest you for saying something. That's got nothing to do
| with wokeness or Twitter.
|
| Twitter (et al) are commercial businesses. They have
| terms of service and if you don't abide to them you get
| kicked. It's very simple. You're not paying for it -
| you're not the customer.
|
| If a pig farm discovers that some pigs have started tail-
| biting and annoyng the other pigs then they'll take 'em
| out back. Letting a minority annoy the other pigs,
| resulting in a less valuable product doesn't benefit
| them. Twitter users are the pigs, not the supermarket.
| it's just good business.
|
| I'll defend to the death your right to your freedom of
| speech even though don't agree with it, but I'm damned if
| I'm going to lend you a megaphone to express it.
| Particularly if you're going to, say, deny the holocaust
| and my granparents were exterminated in it.
|
| And as for the idea that racists are going to stop being
| racists if theyre not on Twitter for people tell them
| that they are wrong, well bless your heart.
|
| > now that Trump is banned from Twitter, he is still
| growing his user base, away, unmoderated, and without the
| opportunity to discuss
|
| I thought that you were against moderation?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| If someone is denying the holocaust you don't give him a
| megaphone to express it, but you also talk to him and
| show him proof and surely you don't kill him or censor
| him or incarcerate him
| feurio wrote:
| I don't have to talk to anyone - hey have their freedom
| of speech, and I have the freedom not to listen to their
| nonsense. Would you force me to
|
| Has a "woke" person killed someone now? Incarcerated
| them? Examples, please! I mean, I know that in Germany
| you might get in trouble for holocaust denial, but they
| kind of have had some major problems with that whole
| area, so I have some sympathy.
| [deleted]
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Just come forward and say that you're a trolling woke
| this thing about freedom of speech and governments is
| like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares?
| Governments are people elected by people, not coffee
| machines elected by coffee machine so I can also be a
| supporter of freedom of speech within people and their
| neighbours outside of the boundaries of the law, also
| yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a
| mainstream platform which helped alienating people
| towards their circle
| feurio wrote:
| > this thing about freedom of speech and governments is
| like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares?
|
| Anyone who cares about reality? Because that's all
| freedom of speech is. If you break ToS, tough.
|
| I don't follow the coffee machine bit, sorry.
|
| > also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a
| mainstream platform which helped alienating people
| towards their circle
|
| Glad you agree that Twitter can do whatever it wants.
| Maybe it sucks, but that's a free market for you!
|
| Can I take it that you were banned from Twitter? If so,
| why?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I was not on Twitter before the explosion of woke
| culture, but every now and then I go to read without an
| account and there's a lot of verbal violence
|
| The coffee machine bit: Governments have regulations that
| protect freedom of speech, and government are made of
| people and elected by people, if we let woke culture go
| ahead in their ideas that freedom of speech is ok to be
| limited when some ideas are expressed, how long since a
| enough number of politicians get elected and put that
| into law/change the law? So yeah freedom of speech as-is,
| is from the government, but it has to be protected also
| between people as people have the power to form ideas
| that change laws, because we don't elect machines
| feurio wrote:
| > I was not on Twitter before the explosion of woke
| culture, but every now and then I go to read without an
| account and there's a lot of verbal violence
|
| Wait, what?! "verbal violence" - I thought you were the
| defender of freedom of speech? Have we switched and
| you're now the woke-ist snowflake who is scared of words?
|
| I'm sure you're aware that the next bit is practically
| the defintion of the slippery-slope fallacy. Given that
| we have:
|
| * Brazil - Bolsonaro (not woke) * USA - Trump (not woke)
| until recently and the house likely to turn to the GoP
| (not woke) soon * UK - Boris Johnson (about as woke as
| Rip Van Winkle) * Russia - Putin (about as woke as Trump)
|
| I dont think that we're in dange of falling into some
| Woke World Order anytime soon!
|
| Can you give one soitary example (preferably your best)
| of a "woke" law being passed, please?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Going by the accepted definition what you pointed me to
|
| The article you were pointed to contained far more
| information than that.
|
| Choosing to treat that one sentence as a strict
| definition doesn't really hold up.
|
| Your last sentence sound like a personal attack, which
| makes me think you aren't arguing in good faith.
| feurio wrote:
| OK, the actual definition on that page is:
|
| Woke (/'woUk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning
| 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that
| originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).
|
| Google says: adjective: woke; comparative adjective:
| woker; superlative adjective: wokest
| alert to injustice in society, especially racism.
| "we need to stay angry, and stay woke"
|
| Merriam Webster: chiefly US slang : aware of and actively
| attentive to important facts and issues (especially
| issues of racial and social justice)
|
| So, that seems to be the accepted defintion. I can't
| really copypasta the whole Wikipedia page now, can I.
|
| The last sentence was not a personal attack, it was
| merely the logical conclusion his own appraisal of
| himself; "I am an anti-woke"
|
| If you have an alterative defintion that would refute the
| conclusion then I'm all ears.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| But still you're here getting only the definition that
| you want to take and ignoring all the other stuff about
| wokes fighting for their ideals by trying to censor, ban,
| fire those who have different ideas, instead of
| discussing... I already told you that their attention to
| those things is not the problem but is the attitude no?
|
| Let's say that I am a guy, attentive to social justice,
| noble. Then I am that same guy who reads about someone
| trying to talk bad about social justice, I converse with
| him (good), I start calling him names, want his head,
| want him banned and alienated (bad)
|
| So this is an invite to go further than the definition
| and that point that you egregiously understood
| feurio wrote:
| I've invited you to give me an alternative definition -
| can you just tack on an extra sentence to the Wikipedia,
| Merriam-Webster or Goole definitions please? Once you
| have defined what woke is then you can talk about what
| they do. Wanting people banned, censored, fired are
| actions that can be carried out by anyone. Vladimir Putin
| has people banned, censored, fired (and worse), but he's
| not woke, is he?
|
| We're having a converstion, but for you to make a valid
| point that people are doing these thing then you need to
| present examples.
|
| You couldn't/wouldn't present an example of the newspaper
| wokeness that you suggest is happening.
|
| Give me just one (your best) concrete example of this
| woke culture in action and you'll have made a point,
| otherwise this is all just angels dancing on the head of
| pin territory.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It isn't just that they're alert to it, they're _hyper_
| alert to it. They even see it where it doesn 't exist,
| and they "white knight" for it, trying to prevent people
| from giving offense even if nobody is actually offended.
|
| They take "being a good person" so far that they make
| life hard for others instead.
|
| The root of their beliefs is good: All people are worthy
| of respect and shouldn't be judged based on things out of
| their control.
|
| But the lengths they go for that is just too much. They
| often refuse to even consider that there may be other
| factors that need to be taken into account as well and
| shout down everything that doesn't align with their view.
|
| That makes it hard to fight against them. They've set
| themselves up to be seen as always being in the right,
| but because they refuse to have nuance, they often
| aren't.
| feurio wrote:
| Can you give an example, please? ("They take "being a
| good person" so far that they make life hard for others
| instead.", for example is a bit vague - that could apply
| to pious Christians, you're not against Christians, are
| you?)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Not the OP, but "holier than thou" is not a positive
| human type.
| feurio wrote:
| Neither is it exclusive to the woke, or anyone else.
|
| What I would really like to see is a concrete example,
| which so far everyone has declined to give. It's
| customary to provide some actual evidence to back up
| claims.
|
| "Your honor, the defendant killed the victim in cold
| blood"
|
| "I see, proceed with your evidence"
|
| "Meh, go find it for yourself."
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| But the judge, the prosecutor and the lawyers are all
| paid to give the judge stuff, we're here having a
| conversation, but I am not sure what kind of proof do you
| want and what should we do, like it's not that newspapers
| write article about wokes being wokes, just maybe go
| around on twitter or go on twitter and write something
| controversial like "#FuckBLM" and see what comes at you,
| not sure what do you want
|
| or I mean I know what do you want, but don't know how
| long do you want me to reply to you, or others, like I am
| very patient in conversations, but I feel like don
| quixote and as a non native speaker I feel like you're
| misunderstanding what I say, genuinely or not, I guess
| someone here thinks not, but I think I am done, its been
| a few hours, you've been told things, you've been given
| links, and now I think it's time for you to go to explore
| the world by yourself... fly free
| feurio wrote:
| But why would I go onto Twitter and say that, unless I
| was a massive racist?
|
| And why, as a doughty protector of free speech would I
| not be perfectly fine with anyone using their own right
| of freedom of speech to reply to me? Robustly.
|
| Is it just that you want freedom without consequences?
| Because you're a racist? No accusing - just "asking
| questions".
|
| You gave me _one_ link - to Wikipedia, which you then
| seem to have an issue with the definition provided
| therein. And no examples. Still no examples.
|
| Here's a link for you - about the most sensible thing I
| can find about woke from Oliver Dowden, Chairman of the
| UK Conservative party who has been talking to right wing
| "think tanks" (lobbying groups) in the US this week.
| Well, actually not him, but it might as well be. I
| particularly like the bit where he refuses to define what
| woke is - seems to be all the range. Enjoy:
|
| https://twitter.com/mattgreencomedy/status/14936111188996
| 956...
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite. Google "Grievance studies affair". It
| provides a chilling look into how wokes are corrupting
| science in order to advance their political agenda. Is
| this example sufficient for you?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is not exclusive to the woke, no.
|
| "I am a better parent / patriot / Christian / anti-racist
| / Aryan / communist / whatever than you." seems to be
| remarkably universal. Some people just love to create
| ladders of virtue and vice.
|
| But at certain times, one of those prevails. IDK if you
| were alive immediately after 9/11. That was a period of
| unabashed jingoism. Now, 20 years later, this fever has
| long subsided, but there is a wave of wokism now. In
| 2042, there will be something different, but people
| generally react to contemporary trends.
| feurio wrote:
| Indeed. And alive immmediately before 9/11. And in the
| 90s, and the 80s. And the 70s.
|
| Jingoism subsided? Really? MAGA, America First, The BNP,
| Britain First. Its really not gone away.
|
| And surely an increase in empathy, tolerance and
| understanding is to be welcomed. Unless your definition
| of woke is something else - no-one who is "anti-woke"
| will actually tell me what they think it means, just
| vague insinuations that "they do x" with no concrete
| examples.
| kbelder wrote:
| It feels like you're being disingenuous. If you've spent
| time on HN and other forums, I have a hard time believing
| you don't understand the terminology he's using. It's
| especially pernicious, because the OP is not a native
| English speaker, and so he may believe he's actually
| being difficult to understand, when he's really not.
| feurio wrote:
| I don't think so. I'm just stuggling to see why being
| alert to racial prejudice and discrimination is bad
| thing. If you would like to explain why it is, please do.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| This disingenuous line of argument is reminiscent of
| Antifa greenwashing that was common a few years ago.
| Feign ignorance, pretend you have no idea what kind of
| people identify as Antifa, and then ask "Isn't fascism
| bad? So why is it bad to be anti-fascist?"
|
| ...while Antifa is literally burning down cars and shops
| indiscriminately...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I've also noticed that the term "willful ignorance" gets thrown
| around a lot more nowadays. There is a sizeable contingent of
| people who are so convinced that what they believe is the
| absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore
| be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm pretty convinced the Earth is round (or an oblate spheroid
| if you want to be pedantic about it), and I don't care if flat
| earthers are malicious or deluded; I'm not going to waste my
| time arguing with them either way.
| RIMR wrote:
| I think there's some nuance to this terminology, but overall I
| prefer to use the term "bad faith" when people are saying
| things that they know are untrue. In general, most people I
| hear using the term "willful ignorance" are referring to the
| same phenomenon of people lying to push their own narrative.
|
| Actual ignorance is never willful, by definition of ignorance.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| Willful ignorance doesn't just include lying to push a
| narrative. It's also an ailment of probably the majority in
| modern society to both be uninformed about the issues of the
| day and to have no interest in becoming informed. And no
| wonder. Being informed is hard work! For any given issue, you
| have to research a lot, and do it from multiple perspectives
| and view points, including those you don't agree with. Then
| you have to sort out which information you trust versus
| distrust, and finally synthesize your own educated opinion.
| Actually, you aren't even done then. You have to be willing
| to continue to consider opposing ideas and be willing to
| update your views given new information.
|
| Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It
| took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics
| and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake
| me up.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Yes, and I think there are two things worth considering.
|
| First, people put their _identities_ into their beliefs.
| Everything is a lifestyle choice anymore. _What non-mainstream
| belief defines me as a person?_ When you make believing in the
| flat earth part of your identity, you get a fight or flight
| response when someone attacks the idea of the flat earth,
| because in a way, they are attacking _you_.
|
| Second, it's easy to confirm your misinformation with more
| misinformation! I don't think people hear something once, like
| "the earth is flat" and just believe it. They hear it, look it
| up, see multiple sources saying the same things (weren't we
| taught to confirm stuff like this?), sprinkle in the smallest
| amount of plausibility - maybe a source that otherwise prints
| stuff you know to be true (sports scores, natural disasters,
| whatever) also prints something about the flat earth, and there
| you have it. You've done your homework. At this point admitting
| you're wrong means you must admit you are ignorant and were so
| easily duped, or that your entire education was a waste of
| time. It takes a very big person to do that.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| It's always a little frustrating to me to see this framed as
| some very recent thing to do with Twitter or whatever.
|
| People have always folded beliefs into their identities and
| felt embarrassed or defensive when they are challenged. Most
| high-profile since forever is religion.
|
| Which brings me to another frustration, when it's presumed
| that there is something wrong with beliefs being involved
| with identity. I'm not even sure what capital-I Identity is
| supposed to be if not a system of beliefs about yourself and
| the world and how they relate.
|
| I don't think any of this is as new as it is often assumed to
| be. There appears to have been a rise in "identity politics"
| but even this is wrong; politics has always been about
| identity, it's just that nationalism or socialism or other
| principles can be part of someone's identity. Or in other
| words, they are beliefs.
|
| So maybe we are more individualistic in our politics, and
| maybe that is bad. Or maybe it isn't... It's probably a mixed
| bag!
| bobthechef wrote:
| HPsquared wrote:
| Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical
| deduction. Where people differ is the fundamental "beliefs"
| which are treated axiomatically (taken on faith) on which the
| logical superstructure is built.
|
| Edit: people also assign different "comparative value" to
| different things. Most value judgements involve comparing
| apples and oranges, but one person might have a preference for
| oranges and someone else might prefer the apples. Not for any
| "rational" reason.
| analog31 wrote:
| I don't think we follow rigorous logic. Rather, we follow
| chains of inferences that are plausible to us.
| Tuckerism wrote:
| I've always used the terms "lens" or "worldview" to describe
| that starting point, and I think the most fruitful
| conversations with people I don't agree with usually stem
| around understanding that we do our personal calculus
| differently, and that doesn't make them a terrible human
| being. We both certainly believe that we have the correct
| view (or we wouldn't hold it), we're not diminishing that
| there is a reality where one of us is likely correct and the
| other is wrong, but that we don't have all of the information
| to say that someone is being willfully ignorant, as other
| replies have stated.
| daenz wrote:
| To be fair, there are a lot of logical hiccups in people's
| reasoning too. But when you boil those away, often there is
| still a different value system underneath, as you suggest.
| dkarl wrote:
| > Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical
| deduction.
|
| "Some kind" is doing a lot of work there, but I think there's
| some truth to what you're saying. My father-in-law will pop
| out with some bizarro story about how global warming was
| invented to cover up government collaboration with aliens, or
| Covid-19 was created in a lab using Vince Foster's stem
| cells, and when my wife asks where he heard it, it'll be from
| some guy he met last week and talked to for a total of half
| an hour while he was buying a motorcycle from him. Or maybe
| he didn't buy the motorcycle because he didn't totally trust
| the guy, but he believed him about the aliens. If you or me
| repeated information from a source like that, we'd be doing
| it in bad faith, but my father-in-law does it with a kind of
| innocent sincerity.
|
| There are a lot of people like my father-in-law, but there
| are also a lot of people who are aware that what they're
| saying isn't literally true, but it's a way of supporting a
| system that they believe is wholesome for society, or at
| wholesome to their own interests. So there's a spectrum much
| like religion, with true believers on one end, and complete
| unbelievers on the other end who outwardly speak and behave
| as if they believe, because they think it's a good story for
| little kids to grow up with and because they think it's an
| effective shared fiction to structure society around.
|
| In a sense you could say that both my father-in-law and the
| college-educated conspiracy theorists are willfully ignorant.
| My father-in-law sincerely believes a lot of sketchy things
| about politics and the government, but his lack of skepticism
| is not completely symmetrical. He is nominally in the
| "they're all crooks" camp, but he is not as quick to believe
| really crazy stuff about Republicans as about Democrats.
| Against Republicans, he'll believe that they invent reasons
| to use military hardware because they have a cozy
| relationship with defense contractors. Against Democrats,
| he'll believe that the military invented and perfect flying
| saucers in the 1950s, and then Barbara Bush and Anton Levay
| opened a portal to hell by having butt sex in a church and we
| gave the flying saucers to the demons so if they crash people
| will just think they're aliens. (Barbara Bush was a secret
| Demoncrat, of course -- she was pro-abortion!)
|
| There's a lot about my father-in-law's internal mental state
| that I can't figure out from the outside. When he "believes"
| something crazy about Democrats, he's aware that he enjoys
| believing and repeating it, he seems to be aware that there's
| a certain kind of scrutiny that it won't hold up under, but
| he also regards it as actionable information in the sense
| that he votes based on his distaste for the Democrats and he
| cites crazy conspiracy stuff as supporting his distaste for
| the Democrats.
|
| tl;dr Most people's conclusions are based on "some kind of
| logical deduction" in the sense that almost any cognitive
| process can be described as "some kind of logical deduction."
| User23 wrote:
| > Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical
| deduction. Where people differ is the fundamental "beliefs"
| which are treated axiomatically (taken on faith) on which the
| logical superstructure is built.
|
| This doesn't align very well with my observations. I can't
| read minds so I don't truly know anyone else's beliefs.
| However, to the extent that I can infer possible beliefs from
| behavior, deductive or any other form of dialectic reasoning
| doesn't appear to play much of a role. Social proof and other
| such phenomena appear to dominate belief formation.
|
| I've found that an honest and rigorous examination of one's
| own beliefs reveals that they are predominantly held for
| emotional reasons. Often it's as simple as avoiding the
| emotional discomfort of being shunned for deviating from
| whatever your group's particular dogma is.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced
| that what they believe is the absolute truth that any
| disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather
| than genuine disagreement.
|
| I think they are less confident in their own ideas (politicians
| aren't even required to state what policies they stand for
| anymore!) than they are confident that the other side (or at
| least the cartoonish version of it presented to them via allied
| media) is wrong/evil.
| president wrote:
| Most people are not willing to have a Socratic style debate let
| alone admit they could ever be wrong. That is the root of the
| problem in our society today.
| dang wrote:
| Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying.
|
| Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and
| Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I
| meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous',
| like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| It reminds me of the House of Commons where it's permissible
| to lie but under no circumstances can your opponent respond
| by calling that lie out as a lie because that would be un-
| Parliamentary language. As a result, people twist themselves
| into all kinds of rhetorical contortions to imply someone is
| a liar without actually making the accusation.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think "lying" as more of a "your claim is outright false"
| while "disingenuous" lends itself to more subjective forms of
| misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as
| "violent" on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or
| hundreds of thousands) were violent, I'm not really _lying_
| but I'm certainly misleading people by way of my
| characterization.
| pvg wrote:
| Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a
| kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is
| intentionally misleading when they might simply be
| disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed,
| etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not
| 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is
| probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree
| with online.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If you _call someone_ disingenuous, then yeah, you 're
| being offensive. But if you call the _idea_ disingenuous,
| then it 's much less offensive. If you phrase it like,
| "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less
| offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off
| a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and
| words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common
| ground or at least identifying the locus of disagreement.
|
| But of course someone who is set on causing offense can
| probably manage with any word.
| dang wrote:
| Ideas can't be disingenuous because they don't have
| intent to begin with. Therefore, if an internet comment
| calls an idea or an argument disingenuous, it's calling
| the idea-holder or argument-maker disingenuous. It may be
| a little more indirect, but it's still an attack.
|
| In my observation, that word has the opposite effect of
| 'finding common ground', so I'm surprised to hear you say
| that. If finding common ground is what you want to do
| (which is great), there are other words that should give
| you even better results.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Ideas can't be disingenuous because they don't have
| intent to begin with.
|
| I don't think that's required. If I call an idea
| "disingenuous" (or "misleading" for that matter), it
| doesn't imply that the arguer intended to mislead, but
| only that the idea lends itself to misinterpretation ("it
| seems disingenuous to suggest that the protest was
| violent on the basis of the actions of one or two out of
| tens of thousands" <- this seems about as polite as
| anything IMHO). But any way of suggesting that an idea is
| incorrect or inaccurate risks causing offense--it's a
| perilous enterprise and no matter which word you use,
| ultimately you have to lay a lot of groundwork to
| demonstrate good faith, common ground, etc.
|
| That's my $0.02, anyway.
| dang wrote:
| Dictionaries define the word in terms of human qualities
| (dishonesty, insincerity, etc.), so I don't think this
| argument is on solid ground lexicographically :)
|
| The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant
| noble, which is also only something that would be said
| about a person
| (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ingenuous).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't know man. I've spoken English my whole life and
| I've never heard of anyone being confused about referring
| to an idea as 'disingenuous' or similar. :) Certainly no
| one (except you) has corrected me that it can only apply
| to people. Indeed, dictionary.com offers examples of
| "disingenuous" referring to ideas:
|
| > The move has no political chance in a Democratic House,
| but sends a clear, though disingenuous, message about
| punishing supposed "extremism."
|
| > He would rather endorse someone with genuine doubts
| than someone with disingenuous beliefs.
|
| And there are many examples in which "disingenous" refers
| to things other than people.
|
| > The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally
| meant noble, which is also only something that would be
| said about a person
|
| I wouldn't be surprised at all if "(dis)ingenuous"
| originally referred only to people but came to take on a
| broader meaning. This happens all the time--words are
| fluid on even very short timespans. Consider the verb
| form of impact:
|
| > Sense of "strike forcefully against something" first
| recorded 1916. Figurative sense of "have a forceful
| effect on" is from 1935.
|
| In only 18 years the word acquired a figurative sense
| (and I strongly suspect linguistic velocity--the rate of
| change of language--has much increased in the Internet
| era--although not uniformly across the lexicon).
| Considering your Etymonline link dates "disingenuous" to
| the 1650s, it would be surprising if this figurative
| sense _hadn 't_ developed in the intervening ~370 years.
|
| Anyway, while I do enjoy discussing and learning about
| language, I have to get back to work. Thanks for the
| conversation, and enjoy your day! :)
| dang wrote:
| Yes--there are subtle distinctions between these words
| ("dissimulation" is another, but that one hasn't become
| internet-popular). The aspect they have in common, as pvg
| points out, is that they all imply intent to deceive.
|
| Since internet commenters basically can't ever know that
| about each other, they're not allowed to direct those words
| at each other here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
| xyzzyz wrote:
| That's not quite true. Lying is typically understood as
| actively saying something untrue. What is more typical,
| especially in media, is selectively sharing true information,
| but obscuring other true information, which would present the
| narrative in completely different light. This way, one can
| manipulate people to have misconception about the reality,
| without actively saying a single lie. It is still
| disingenuous, though, if done deliberately.
| dang wrote:
| I agree, and should have known better than to post
| something so brief about a somewhat subtle point. More at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350820.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I wouldn't equate them.
|
| I would label a statement that is _technically_ true but
| highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement
| "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is
| _technically_ true, because you can still get COVID despite
| being vaccinated. However, it 's misleading because the
| statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is
| worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly
| reduces your chances of getting it, while also significantly
| reducing likelihood of hospitalization and death. The
| statement isn't a lie, but it's certainly disingenuous.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Ever since a high school current events class, I have questioned
| the motives of the media. This was circa 2008 after the stock
| market crash. The common question of "why is significantly more
| negative news highlighted than happy news?"
|
| What matters to me is the truth. In times of FUD(fear,
| uncertainty, doubt), the information dials are all set to 11.
| It's an absolute firehose of all the above. It's less
| misinformation to me, but rather too much information.
|
| The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more
| informed when I read books or scientific articles from credible
| authors, not opinion columnists. The internet makes me confused.
| Confusion gives me FUD. FUD makes the truth hard to decipher.
|
| Although debate and dissent may help get to the truth earlier,
| only time will be the judge. It's unfortunate that we live in the
| present and can't have the truth earlier, but that's just life
| for ya.
| RangerScience wrote:
| > The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel
| more informed when I read books or..
|
| 100% this, excellent observation.
|
| > FUD makes the truth hard to decipher
|
| One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm
| succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so
| maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look
| at what's left.
|
| To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is
| pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But,
| when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the
| anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Would love to learn how you filter out the FUD!
| verisimi wrote:
| "I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has
| become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is
| due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the
| political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything,
| people seem to be better-informed than in the past"
|
| I agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither?
|
| What has become worse is the centralised control of information.
| Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and
| publicising of the issue.
|
| On the other side, you have governance structures that require
| the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the
| populace.
|
| Both work hand in hand - one provides the message the other the
| megaphone. In the past 2 years, the government has bankrolled the
| largest campaign in history, and the media have been willing
| recipients.
|
| Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties
| - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions.
|
| Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do
| with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.
| phreeza wrote:
| > What has become worse is the centralised control of
| information. Which then leads to those centralised sources
| complaining and publicising of the issue.
|
| It seems to me like the opposite is the case, there is much
| less centralization than there used to be. There does seem to
| be some emergent synchronization of opinions but that is not
| the same.
| baronswindle wrote:
| I think that's what the GP means by centralized control
| becoming worse. That is, information is less centralized now,
| and the sources that used to be at the center are now
| complaining about the issue.
| phreeza wrote:
| Oh ok yea that would make sense. Worse in the sense of less
| efficient.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| To be honest, in Italy this issue was solved during ww-2 time,
| a bunch of commercial newspapers from far-left to right (we
| couldn't have far-right back then, of course :D, we still can't
| but people has forgot and so we have now, but they can't really
| read and write), created a cooperative called ANSA
| (https://www.ansa.it), that is no opionion, no controlling
| point of view, just facts as they happen (https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Assoc...)
|
| If you force Fox, CNBC, CNN to create an agency of news
| reporting where each one oversee the content created, in order
| to be as objective as possible, then I think the society in US
| would benefit
|
| In Italy those newspapers do money by selling copies containing
| the premium content, which is like reports, opinion articles,
| more in depth opinion articles etc, which people is still
| interested in, but for news and facts then ANSA is the source
| of truth
| baronswindle wrote:
| We do have the Associated Press (AP), which seems similar to
| what you describe. That said, even such sources can be guilty
| of ideological bias if they choose to report certain facts
| and not others. In practice, I think AP is pretty even-
| handed, but I think that is as much a result of their
| editorial process as it is of their focus on factual
| reporting over opinion/analysis.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Ah yeah I forgot that AP is American, it's my go-to place
| for non-italian news, yeah ok nevermind my reply then..
| interesting the point you make about their bias, not being
| there and following the scenarios in person I can only read
| it from across the ocean so I didn't know that...
| kurthr wrote:
| But Berlusconi's (finivest/mediaset) ownership of Il Giornale
| and 3 of 7 TV channels makes that all a little less relevant
| due to political manipulation, doesn't it?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silv.
| ..
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016344370936116.
| ..
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yes and no, I would divide the news consumer between TV and
| written/paper/internet, Berlusconi is an issue because he
| controls a big chunk of TV easily accessible news content,
| but I am not sure how would you solve that, if a person
| wants to go to see news that match its point of view, then
| you can't force him not to, and if a TV has a lot of
| reality shows and entertainment and it mixes all of that
| with "news" program, then yeah he can kind of decide the
| weather, but yeah if you want un-opinionated news source
| you can at least have that, for what it's worth
|
| But the scope of my reply was about "who owns the truth?"
| and yeah you need a place where people can go and check
| facts that are checked by peers of other point of view
|
| I would tell you about my literature professor, he would
| walk around with multiple newspapers under his armpit and
| suggest that "If you want to try to get the truth you need
| to get the same fact from multiple point of view and try to
| get it in the middle"
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| I am genuinely surprised at the comments in this thread. This
| article starts "That said, I do not think there is much evidence
| that misinformation has become more widespread, that this
| increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or
| that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most
| angry about", which is immediately making this a partisan issue.
|
| Secondly: "The internet makes me better informed". This is his
| perspective. Many people are not actively looking for information
| outside of their own biases. Thirdly: "Cranks often know a
| lot"... Should be titled "Cranks often think they know a lot".
| Just because someone can state a fact does not mean they are
| sufficiently educated to analyze that fact. Saying that there are
| "vaccine side-effects" (stated in the article) does not mean that
| Joe Rogan is able to weight the information in totality with
| other information from the studies. After this, the article got
| into a bunch of "whataboutism" and doesn't really compel me to
| believe that misinformation is not a problem. I agree with
| polarization getting worse, but could that be a symptom/signal of
| misinformation, is there a cause/effect relationship?
|
| My thoughts:
|
| There are multiple categories of false information spreading on
| the internet right now. I honestly believe that there is
| manipulation of the public happening on all sides of this
| problem, the thing that is still unclear is whether there is a
| coordinated source of this manipulation or if it is organic.
|
| I disagree pretty strongly with the "misinformation problem"
| being misinformation. Anecdotally (yes, I know it's not
| scientific but it is the same information the author is giving)
| the amount of things shared on social media that are demonstrably
| wrong has increased over the past couple of years. There are
| people who truly believe that Trump was going to rally the
| military on January 20th or whatever date to "take back the white
| house". This got shared to numerous social media sites and was
| reposted that the "true president" was coming back. This is one
| explicit example, but similar things have been popping up for the
| past couple of years and spreading like wildfire. 5G vaccines,
| QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE
| misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are.
|
| If you claim that misinformation is just "information that is
| partisan" or "wrongthink" I would urge you to dig further into
| some real, damaging examples. I think there are times when the
| term is weaponized, but there is a serious increase in how easy
| it is to spread words in this day and age. The internet, social
| media upvotes and shares, and other technological tooling has
| made the problem worse by letting people feel validated by
| opinions and "likeableness" of something versus things based in
| facts.
|
| Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on
| social media and "news" outlets. Yes I understand that
| "individualism" should let them decide whether to make that
| choice, but there is a public health issue here when people are
| basing that choice off of Facebook memes and shared content that
| has no basis and gets 100k shares because it sounds cool.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| "Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on
| social media and "news" outlets."
|
| You mean those about covid or vaccines? What exactly is wrong
| to let people choose? Why you think that what is best for you
| should be best for others?
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| Nothing is wrong with letting people choose, forcing
| incorrect information to people... that is wrong.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| If you didn't buy that Iraq had WMDs and that there was a
| BinLaden to Saddam connection, you were on the side of
| misinformation. The entire media and political establishment was
| at odds with your take.
|
| If you clamp down on misinformation, you're doing nothing more
| than allowing the establishment to be wrong without consequence,
| and creating consequence when the average person is wrong.
|
| No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when
| it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War.
|
| Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
|
| No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything
| else works in favor of power.
|
| This isn't about who's right and who wrong.
|
| Its about power. It's about who's allowed the freedom to be wrong
| and who isn't. Who has the ability to manipulate the public and
| who doesn't.
|
| And the power to dictate that is the power to win every public
| debate no matter how much merit you do or don't have.
| dboreham wrote:
| I find it odd that nobody seems to mention the similarities
| between all this and religion. Widespread belief in things that
| can't possibly be true. Adherents can't be persuaded otherwise
| despite incontrovertible evidence. Sounds familiar? Perhaps it's
| baked into the firmware.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That would be odd, if nobody mentioned it.
| [deleted]
| standardUser wrote:
| There have been endless comparisons of Trumpism to a cult,
| which at first seemed a bit extreme until we saw tens of
| millions of Americans believe more and more fantastical lies
| over the course of the last 5 years. Now, I can't imagine how
| we can describe it as anything other than a cult.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _> That said, I do not think there is much evidence that
| misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in
| misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at
| the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about._
|
| I don't know if misinformation is _at the root of the political
| trends liberals are most angry about_ , not least because it
| really depends on the author's definition of "liberal", a word
| that appears to have only pejorative meaning for most people now.
|
| But it definitely is interesting to consider whether for example
| QAnon has spread more quickly than the conspiracy theories that
| led to the First World War, not least because QAnon hasn't yet
| started a war. Give it time.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's interesting to consider, but the article references
| multiple political scientists who've studied conspiracy
| theories and concluded that they don't spread faster today. Is
| there a reason to believe they're wrong?
| lariati wrote:
| I think this partially a myopic view from young people.
|
| I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show
| about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks
| or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't
| even know how you would track it 30 years ago.
|
| Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy
| conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically
| nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell
| show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even
| more insane than Alex Jones.
|
| It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this
| concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot
| researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of
| giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that
| doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had.
|
| The whole process is so transparent.
|
| We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their
| is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK
| assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time
| decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the
| conspiracy so that no longer matters.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this
| concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at
| Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the
| idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course,
| that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be
| had.
|
| There's no political gain to be had on either side of the
| Bigfoot-in-the-forest argument, in fact. Or financial gain,
| or notoriety, or kudos. Which is why it's really _not_
| particularly telling.
|
| It's just a fringe belief.
|
| Misinformation matters when its intent is to undermine
| democracy or governance in the public good, undermine civic
| or civil society, create an "other" that can be attacked,
| create a pretext for war or social unrest or vigilantism
| etc.
|
| I don't think people who believe in Bigfoot really fit the
| pattern. Nor do Flat-Earthers. Though this kind of belief
| _is_ an indicator of the kind of credulity that led to the
| huge traction gained by the Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate story
| and the current omniconspiracy of antivax /QAnon/stolen
| election/5G/Great Reset/Schwab/Soros/Gates Foundation etc.
| cryptoboy2283 wrote:
| Jones was not a problem for all these platforms for many
| years, until recent events.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I think he's always been a problem (his Sandy Hook crisis
| actor lies got him into at least a little difficulty with
| the platforms) but his problematic nature has always fit
| within free speech, because he generally knows how to
| dial it back just inside those boundaries.
|
| Likewise with David Icke or the more self-limiting lunacy
| of Kate Shemirani; these people it's better not to worry
| about.
|
| Rudy Giuliani or MTG? Maybe worth worrying about because
| they can tip things over into riots.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| No (and it wasn't my intent to suggest that).
|
| My initial instinct was in fact to say "yes, things are
| faster".
|
| But then thinking about it, what struck me as interesting is
| that things that feel recent, in my head, like QAnon, are
| rooted in manufactured falsehoods that are already six and a
| half years old. So it's not necessarily the case.
|
| It might be more interesting in some ways that QAnon _hasn
| 't_ already started a war. Though I genuinely see no
| particular reason why a conspiracy theory of its type could
| not; it's not that difficult to imagine in the context of
| human history.
| joelbondurant2 wrote:
| epgui wrote:
| > I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has
| become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is
| due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the
| political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything,
| people seem to be better-informed than in the past -- which is
| what you would expect because our information technology has
| gotten better [...]
|
| This kind of framing makes me feel very weary. There is plenty of
| evidence, but I'm not interested in going on a hunt.
|
| Rather, let's think for just one second about how to model this:
|
| - The number of "bad actors" probably has not changed
| significantly over time
|
| - The cost of producing documents has gone down significantly
|
| - The cost of diffusing documents, or information, per audience
| headcount, has gone down significantly
|
| - Overall, the total volume of sketchy information produced
| yearly has been dramatically increasing as a result of these
| lowering barriers.
|
| - Conversely, the total volume of quality information has clearly
| increased as well.
|
| - The technological tools at our disposal, as consumers of
| content, have become more and more sophisticated, such that we
| now have access to more quality information than ever before in
| History.
|
| - However, consuming quality content requires constant deliberate
| effort and prudence, and it is much easier to stumble upon crappy
| information, than it is to find quality information.
|
| - The less expert you are at a subject, the more energy is
| required to sift through the crap.
|
| - Most people are either not expert at anything, or are expert in
| a narrow field of interest.
|
| - Information no longer flows in the same way it once did: it now
| diffuses through a social graph which is prone to significant
| network effects. Non-experts can have a bigger influence than
| experts, even when the information they share is entirely
| meritless. Echo-chambers form naturally and require a lot of
| deliberate and conscious effort to get out from. It is very
| difficult to reach certain pockets of the graph.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the
| past
|
| [citation needed]
|
| more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from
| a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking
| slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website
| called "slowboring.com"
| bcrl wrote:
| I would suggest that a slightly better firehose analogy is
| that you're drinking from a firehose that includes multiple
| streams of good drinking water, urine and poison all combined
| together. When you drink from that firehose, what do you
| think the odds are that you'll just get the drinking water
| part of the stream?
| brianfitz wrote:
| I believe he was using the source article. One example was a
| leap in public polling around how our government functions
| (33% jump in being able to identify the three branches of the
| US federal government).
| epgui wrote:
| Hehe I really love the firehose visual, and I think it's
| quite apt... Except that there's also a "pollution" aspect to
| information.
|
| If you consume enough misinformation, it doesn't matter who
| you are or how smart you are, it's going to affect the way
| you think. Just as in terms of physical fitness, "you are
| what you eat", in terms of mental fitness, "you are what you
| read/hear/consume".
| aaroninsf wrote:
| I wish I could upvote this 10x though I see atm that is not
| necessarily.
|
| A very nice summary of priors and predicates that need to be
| grokked!
|
| To these I myself often add several aspects looking more
| specifically what "social graph" means and what the so-called
| algorithm means, with lemmas about "engagement" and its
| industry...
|
| ...and the underbelly of how the algorithm works, the
| constellation of surveillance tracking entity resolution and
| targeting that make up the actual functioning of "teh
| algorithm."
|
| These regularly lead me back to trying to find pithy summations
| of specific paths through this mire, such as "deplatforming is
| not censorship, it is failure to provide or sell a megaphone,"
| and, "we need to reason about 1A the way we do about 2A," (ie
| in terms of understood liberty vs aggregate societal harms).
|
| Another such summation is simply to observe that the subset of
| "the information out there" that any individual sees, and which
| is amplified within their own social circles online and off-,
| is the most hotly contested property in the market today. In
| many markets.
|
| Against this individual integrity and good faith often appears
| to be but a reed in the wind.
| bcrl wrote:
| Exactly. The fundamental difference in advertising today
| compared to 30 years ago is that for the entire of history
| until the last 2 decades, it was _expensive_ to target
| individuals. Ads on TV and newspapers have to adhere to
| standards established by organizations like the Advertising
| Standards Council. Malicious ads or propaganda that target
| individuals with misinformation or malware or phishing can be
| bought on modern platforms for pennies or mere fractions of a
| penny. Nobody is being held to account for the damage they
| are doing to our society. In the past at least the cost of
| postage was a barrier to entry, but today? This desperately
| needs to be fixed.
| dathinab wrote:
| The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements
| like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing
| groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook
| Whatsapp and their recently target telegram.
|
| I don't think that's right.
|
| Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information,
| including manipulative information but that's mostly it.
|
| In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had
| such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread
| in their social circle.
|
| The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until
| they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of
| pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected
| you or made you personally angry/offended.
|
| Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government
| as "just a few crazy people" for years even when it wasn't just a
| few people anymore (e.g. Reichsburger).
|
| Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine)
| have even gotten support from major political parties for years
| (e.g. green party).
|
| And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they
| felt threatened and insecure.
|
| But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that
| worse due to incompetence especially around media competence.
|
| The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where
| communicated.
|
| And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right
| where often converted as scientific fact.
|
| This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to
| push people further down in the wrong direction.
|
| And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple,
| distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and
| pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason.
|
| Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting
| with honest open communication they decided they needed to be
| even more manipulative to protect society.
|
| Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince
| more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through
| manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human
| fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the
| believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2).
|
| (2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to
| one manipulation
|
| (1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to
| do with skin color.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories
|
| I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the
| only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and
| TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and
| thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees
| with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that,
| logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything,
| at least _one_ of them would be writing for _some_ mainstream
| media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and
| believe the same things and agree with each other on almost
| everything.
|
| I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that
| I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the
| internet came along.
|
| The internet of the mid-90's was almost _entirely_ populated by
| people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought,
| "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people
| who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on
| the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they
| all been this whole time?"
|
| In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear
| though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010
| (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions
| I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the
| 80's.
| calibas wrote:
| In my opinion, the campaigns against "misinformation" are largely
| attempts by big corporations and politicians to deplatform their
| competition.
|
| Gotta make sure people only see trusted news sources that say the
| right things.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| And IMO they're largely attempts to keep Coca Cola Inc (et al)
| from pulling their ads because Coke doesn't want their brand on
| sites posting QAnon/GOP talking points.
| guelo wrote:
| As someone that works on moderation of an online platform I can
| tell you that lots and lots of misinformation exists and is read
| by millions of people. On vaccines many people actually believe
| the microchip, 5G, magnetic, secret ingredients, fetal tissue,
| vaccines shedding, Bill Gates stuff. Misinformation affects real
| people's actions in dangerous ways, I don't know what downplaying
| its existence accomplishes.
| civilized wrote:
| Of course, the author doesn't downplay its existence, only its
| impact. But to know that we'd have to read the post.
| twa999 wrote:
| this piece encapsulates the mindset of mainstream libs like
| Matty, 1 billion stupid takes, Yglesias perfectly and can be
| summarized as "yeah maybe these normal people were right on some
| things and I dismissed that without knowing anything, but I was
| still right to dismiss that because they're stupid".
|
| it's now safe for Bari Weiss to ask some questions on TV that
| "normal people" have been asking for quite some time now and were
| called all sorts of things by the same people.
|
| We will see more articles like this.
| johnNumen wrote:
| Exactly. I loved how even in this piece he managed to sneak in
| some jabs at the people he doesn't like--he just didn't call
| them "misinformed." Progress!
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is
| more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it.
|
| If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.
| yehosef wrote:
| An important measure of "misinformation" is who benefits if the
| information is actually true or false. Also valuable to identify
| who has the financial capacity to influence the sources of
| "truth".
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Misinformation has always existed.
|
| I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a
| scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the
| Republic.
|
| The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people
| isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no,
| democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes,
| how do we LIVE with that?
| truffdog wrote:
| Is it even scaled up, or is it just more legible to elites
| because they can see what the masses are saying?
| scsilver wrote:
| Isn't modern hedonism just freedom to pursuit happiness without
| necessitating context of religious frameworks. I don't see what
| makes you think hedonism isn't sustainable or stable.
|
| Democracy has been the biggest boost to science and rationality
| than any of the other government structures.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I mean if hedonism is what you are concerned about the only
| difference is democracy brings hedonism to the common man
| instead of just the elites. And even then the elites can afford
| to be more hedonistic than than the common man anyway. Anyone
| with power has always been a hedonist in any form of
| government.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about
| "misinformation" is driven by the erroneous belief that more
| factual information would resolve political disputes.
|
| The key thing that journalism should do is take factual
| information and provide context. If 99.999% of scientists claim
| the earth is a ball and 0.001% claim the earth is flat, _for
| fucks sake don 't present these two things as equal_. With
| vaccines it's the same. Just how much airtime was given to people
| blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old
| debunked fraud? Way too much.
|
| And the result of that lack of providing context in media (or,
| worse, outright and willing deception of the Alex Jones class) is
| what is the problem. When media or government institutions prove
| that they are not willing to do their job, people end up not
| trusting them - which then leads to the disconnect between wide
| swaths of the population and factual truth we're seeing.
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