
America is facing an epistemic crisis - nerdponx
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/america-epistemic-crisis
======
ewzimm
This is a fascinating proof of its own conjecture. The author bashes "tribal
epistemology" while enthusiastically engaging in it. I think people
experiencing this kind of fear should consider reading Jonathan Haidt's "The
Righteous Mind" for more insight into why conservatives seem so obtuse. I
found one of the relevant sections in this blog, which also seems informative
in general:

>...it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s
expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans
on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most
accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or
conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who
described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study
came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending
to be conservatives.

[https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-
passages/haidt/conserva...](https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-
passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-
understand-conservatives/)

~~~
yedava
Where do the examples cited in Vox piece fit in Haidt's framework? Is
'Pizzagate' an accurate prediction? Was Obama really born outside the US? Did
protesters at Columbia University actually support pedophilia?

~~~
ewzimm
This is where tribal understanding comes in. “Pizzagate” has proven to be
accurate by the understanding of its proponents. The name is a joke, and it
really has nothing to do with pizza; the basic premise of it is that there are
pedophiles hiding in positions of power and privilege. Just about everyone
knew Comet Pizza was a stretch from the beginning. People tend not to look at
nuances and skepticism like this when faced with an opposing tribe’s position.

In regards to Obama, most people really don’t care. It’s kind of a silly law
about birth place anyway. As for the protestors, I think you will find that
most people know not to trust every picture, and everything along those lines
gets healthy skepticism from people on all sides of politics.

------
bostik
First of all, advance apologies for meta.

But this is rather interesting. I am not sure this article deserved to be
flagged. It's an opinion piece, so one can't expect too rigorous source
vetting. That said, the reference links weren't particularly shabby.

And it's political, which goes against the HN guidelines. _However:_ it does
make couple of very interesting points.

The first one: that partisan media is more insulated than before. That's
certainly a viewpoint that carries weight and has been discussed, in various
forms, on HN for quite some time.

And the second one? That in the current political climate there is no more
room for moderate and reasonable discussion. You either broadcast a polarised
and incendiary view or get no visibility nor acknowledgment - but when you do
submit to the attention economy, you get flooded and drowned out by the
professional wound-ups.[ß]

\---

[ß]: Modern Finnish has a term which I don't know how to translate properly:
"ammattinärkästyjä". It would fit really well here.

~~~
Oxitendwe
>And it's political, which goes against the HN guidelines.

People violate this "guideline" so much that I literally did not even know it
was a rule (and yes, I checked beforehand) until I was shadowbanned for it
without warning. Apparently the rule is that you can talk about politics if
you don't talk about too much, or exclusively, although I strongly suspect it
had more to do with having the wrong views than posting about them too
frequently (data on this would be welcome).

~~~
krapp
I believe politics is off topic if it's a mainstream news story - "If they'd
cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic," as the guidelines say, although
that's a bit vague. I think the guidelines allow for political articles with
intellectual merit and which demonstrate an "interesting new phenomenon" worth
discussing to potentially be on topic.

------
tlb
Will Self, in his wonderful novel _The Quantity Theory of Insanity_, proposes
that the total amount of insanity is fixed, and when someone becomes more sane
someone else has to become less sane.

As previous forms of unsubstantiated belief become harder to sustain due to
cameraphones (think Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Jesus working at a Burger King
in Wichita), perhaps that psychic energy has to go somewhere else.

Thus, maybe it'd be good for society to help restore people's belief in
harmless bullshit (the Loch Ness monster legend was at most responsible for a
few drownings) instead of the extremely harmful bullshit that we've seen so
much of recently.

Perhaps generative image models can solve our epistemic crisis by inserting
monsters, fairies, or gods into 0.001% of smartphone pictures.

------
orbifold
This article is based on a false premise: that „traditional“ media outlets are
the arbiters of truth and factual information. What is actually true is that
it used to be much more expensive to run a world wide media network and so it
was much easier to establish a “consensus”. The narrative in traditional news
media is also manufactured and far from an impartial or factual account.

„Manufacturing Consent“ gives plenty of historical examples of war crimes
committed or facilitated by the US and their coverage by the news media,
„collusion“ with Russia is a rather mild charge in comparison.

~~~
yedava
The article didn't say that traditional media is the arbiter of truth. It said
_journalism_ among other things which include science. I think you completely
misunderstood the premise.

~~~
becauaeqgen
It is implied. I think you misunderstood.

------
dovin
I wish that the author could have talked about the Harvard study and "tribal"
mindset without overstating his case.

> At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe
> anything.

No, they don't show that. From the Harvard study's conclusion:

> “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”

The undermining of the "neutral arbiters" like science and mainstream media is
something we should be talking about. But can we do it in a way that's not
just encouraging more insularity?

------
briholt
"This study shows my tribe is better than yours because my tribe doesn't think
tribally."

------
becauaeqgen
What does this have to do with tech? Nothing.

~~~
becauaeqgen
Thank you for the downvote for my pointing out that this (now flagged) article
is a violation of the guidelines.

------
junkscience2017
The "right" propagandizes by inserting false data.

The "left" propagandizes by redacting true data.

~~~
sremani
I have to agree with you, one of the reasons could be the "left" propaganda
machine were traditional gate-keepers, so withholding data would be easier way
to lie, and the "right" propaganda machine is disruptive and attention-seeking
given its untraditional foundation, needs "sensationalist red meat".

~~~
denom
The traditional post Eisenhower media infrastructure _was_ essentially
conservative.

I think your dichotomy here is not left/right but populist/non-populist (aka
liberal[1]).

[1] the term liberal has been overloaded for some time now. But it’s important
to understand the distinctions. The gist is that most of the deeply
conservative thinkers in our post WW2 history believed in a liberal socio-
economic order:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism)

------
beeforpork
I tried hard, but I cannot fathom how hard scientific evidence fails to
convince people. It is good that philosophy has a categorisation for this
phenomenon, but I find it scary as hell. Because it means that I am totally
displaced in a society like that, and that I will be unable to do anything
about that, because the only thing I know for convincing people is trying to
lay out the facts for them.

Scary!

~~~
Oxitendwe
Science only tells you what is, it can never tell you what should be. The
value systems possessed by most people revolve mostly around what should be,
and aren't affected so much by what is (except insofar as it can tell you what
can't be, even if you really want it to).

Basically, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is", and science can only give
you an "is".

~~~
danielam
> Basically, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is", and science can only
> give you an "is".

While empirical science does not deal with matters of moral concern as such,
the fact-value dichotomy you refer to is grounded in confusion and shoddy
philosophy. Indeed, it arguably contributes to the moral skepticism that has
placed morality outside the domain of facts and made it a matter of
ideological preference. Bring back moral facts and you stand a chance of
staving off the smog of sophistry across the political spectrum.

~~~
Oxitendwe
>moral facts

Could you perhaps list a few of these "moral facts"?

~~~
danielam
I could, but that's not a terribly meaningful or productive question. Take
anything you take to be a statement of moral significance (e.g., a moral
judgement). If it's true, then it is a moral fact.

A better question might be about why the fact-value distinction is false, or
something about the nature and basis of moral facts. In the former case, we
find the distinction to originate in Hume and that his account of what
constitutes a "fact" to be highly problematic, if not incoherent as he is
elsewhere (e.g., Hume's fork). (Furthermore, we find that everything is
pervaded by value. Science itself is conducted because, in the best case, it
is done because truth is valued. Pragmatists, on the other hand, would be
doing it because some form of utility is valued.) In the latter case, you
might find the literature about moral realism interesting (e.g., Oderberg's
introductory text "Moral Theory"). Ultimately, the ground for morality is
teleological, and on that understanding, moral facts are not controversial.

------
weberc2
This article misses or understates a few important points.

1\. The left has a growing (in power or quantity, I can't tell which) anti-
science/anti-objectivity fringe and it _includes university faculty_. We have
university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently
racist/sexist. Social scientist professors describe their field as one of
activism, not truth seeking. These are among the more egregious absurdities
that come out of some university departments, but there is a long tail of
lesser absurdities.

2\. Journalists haven't been "committed to objectivity, but sometimes erring"
for the last twenty years or more. They consistently report the news through
their political lens (consciously or unconsciously). We assume that tech is
susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of
races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to
this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially
when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias).
Granted, the New York Times is far better than Breitbart, but it's hardly a
paragon of objectivity.

3\. These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust
for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social
justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then
again by a 90:10 newsroom? How can we hope to fix our epistemic rift without
making these institutions trustworthy to the objective person?

~~~
Oxitendwe
>We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as
inherently racist/sexist.

I agree with you completely on this, but do you have some sources for it? I'd
be really interested to see how widespread the problem is, exactly.

>We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for
lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and
sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10
liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much
stronger than racial or gender bias).

This is a feature, not a bug. If you're a leftist, at least - this is the true
purpose of the "diversity" push to remove white men from positions of power
and replace them with left-leaning white women[0] and non-white minorities[1].
It is happening in tech specifically (and not any other male-dominated
profession like truck driving, or female-oriented profession like nursing and
kindergarten teaching) because tech companies have a vast amount of power and
influence, and leftists want to stuff positions of power within those
companies with people who will support them.

>These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for
these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice
when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a
90:10 newsroom?

"Social justice" is a fancy word for radical leftism. Again, it mostly seems
to revolve around removing white men from positions of power, and replacing
them with people of a more left-leaning demographic.

[0] [http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-
Re...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Regardless-
Age.aspx)

[1] [http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/](http://brilliantmaps.com/if-
only-x-voted/)

