It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.
Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.
I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.
> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead....
> I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
It's worth noting that journalism in general has had its revenue streams decimated by Craigslist, clickbait, subscriber loss due to competing with free, etc. Except for very few prestige outlets, most media outlets have been forced to shrink their newsrooms, year after year, for a couple decades. Even though the prestige outlets are healthier, they're not so healthy as to be able to pick up all the slack.
It's easy to criticize someone for not doing as thorough a job as you'd like, but it's not very reasonable when that person is the last man standing from a team of ten, and the team's workload has increased in the meantime.
That's absolutely fair; I was overly harsh and blamed journalists instead of editors and owners. I'm sorry.
I also believe journalists, like a lot of middle class folks squeezed by changes in the economy, should be paid and funded better, and I try to spend or send some money towards that, even though I'm between jobs.
If that's not something whoever reads this does, $60 bucks is 5 dollars a month, and if you have a job or enough saved, you might invest in investigative reporting.
Here's a list of some non-profits that produce real journalism. Can't vouch for them all, but ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Reveal are great.
I think we are in a transitional period of journalism which is why it is so crazy right now.
Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.
In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.
But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.
Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.
Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect them from themselves" ideology we've been actively sowing since at least the 1990s.
> Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.
A few years back, I had a coworker who was working his way though a journalism major express this attitude explicitly and uncritically as authoritative information passed to him in a class.
It was an eye opening moment for me, and had significant impacts for how I consumed media, and regarded higher education.
Managers manage. Nobody nudges a McDonalds fry chef into making you a burger with subtle hints of approval. They either do it of they are fired.
Journalists also do as they are told with the resources and time they are granted by capital.
It just turns out that once print newspapers died out it wasnt very profitable to engage in deep, thoughtful or investigative journalism so journalists rarely get paid for it - no matter how valuable it would be for the public.
Your comparison is ignorant of the realities of managing creative output (be it engineering or writing). There are only a few ways to cook a McDonalds Burger to spec. There are many ways to write passable articles or design passable widgets. Stuff like "don't publish stuff that embarrasses our investors" is easy to validate. Stuff like "can we focus more on leading readers to conclusions we like" is far more nebulous and requires either substantial and continuous effort or actual buy-in from the staff to make much effect. Considering that the conspiracy theories about big media trying to lead us down a particular path have been more or less unfounded the only option we're left with is that the changes in journalism are a reflection of the thousands of individual actors in that profession.
Have you ever talked to a journalist? You cant do much investigative journalism when you're doing the same number of beats 3 people did before and are pressured to produce the same output.
The economics of writing have changed. This was something done to journalists not by them.
> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed.
I would argue that that is not their primary responsibility. That is, in fact, to put food on the table.
Journalists are not well paid and, more importantly, are easily replaceable. "Real journalism" is hard, but makes no money, while pop-journalism is very easy and profitable. So media companies demand and pay for pop-journalism. And that can be done by far too many people.
So blaming them for doing what they need to do to get paid when doing "real journalism" will get them fired is... pointless.
> but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed
It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".
This conversation isn't formal enough to be meaningful.
If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless.
In order to mislead with a "true" fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).
The essence of "lying by telling the truth" is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.
Fortunately, It's much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.
Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.
Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with "true" implications.
I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn't teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).
I'm not good at thinking of these in abstract terms but one fact which we keep have thrust down our throat is that the UK has the fastest growth in Europe post (strict lockdown) COVID. This is a fact but is negated quite fully by the fact that we also had the sharpest fall in the early stages of COVID so had the furthest to regain.
Similarly if I told you I lost 5lb in a week on some new diet it might sound impressive but if I didn't tell you I over-eat and over-hydrated the week before it's not nearly as impressive. Nor if my starting weight was 250lb.
Oh alright, but it's not really as interesting as all that. False implications in the logical context are commonly referred to as logical fallacies. Wikipedia has a (non-exhaustive) list of those. One of the more famous false implications is interesting in that it maps between types of implication.
A is correlated with B implies that A implies (causal) B or B implies (causal) A (note that this is false, with a plethora of different types of counter example). This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.
It is easy to leverage this false belief into new false beliefs with true facts. If I want to sell coffee for example, I must convince someone of the buying coffee implies (causal) utility fact. All I must convince them of is that coffee is correlated with a thing that implies (causal) utility. Say for instance, that people with heart conditions have those conditions exacerbated negatively by taking coffee or drinking stimulants, and therefore don't. It follows then that drinking coffee is probably correlated with much better heart health. I phrase my findings as "People who drink coffee tend to have much better cardiac calcium scores", and just watch as people draw the incorrect conclusion about the utility of coffee from this fact, plus their fallacy (plus the additional assumption that better cardiac calcium scores probably don't cause coffee consumption).
I should note that It could very well be that coffee does have utility to you. So as a fact it might still be "true". So it turns out that what really ends up mattering, is not the facts, but the chains of implications that lead you to them.
Do you know if there is a way to encode these reasoning chains so as to assess their validity automatically? Like a knowledge graph with propositions linked in some way?
I have been reading about knowledge graphs but haven't seen this kind of application yet, but I think it should exist.
It depends on the (and I will use the term loosely here) "category" of interest. ie which kinds of implications you are talking about. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for mathematical propositions (constructive), these things do exist, and almost certainly surprisingly, they tend to be implemented as libraries of functions over a particular type system (constituting a less loose use of the word category).
For more statistical propositions, such as those that occur in science. Those exist but they're very flawed, and it's a tremendous effort to get anything useful out of them, on account of them dying when we try to look inside. If you haven't caught on, I'm talking about humans. We have yet to replicate such things automatically. You're certainly welcome to try though :).
Symbolic logic. Learn:
Truth tables -> rules of implication and replacement -> first order predicate logic -> quantifiers -> second order predicate logic.
Chapter 5 or 6 through 8 of Hurley's intro to logic does a great job imo.
> A is correlated with B implies that A implies (causal) B or B implies (causal) A (note that this is false, with a plethora of different types of counter example).
I think it's even worse:
implies:
- strongly suggest the truth or existence of (something not expressly stated)
- (of a fact or occurrence) suggest (something) as a logical consequence.
Unless your "implies (causal)" is a reference to a domain specific variation of the word (which laymen won't know anyways), your false conclusion is actually incorrect.
>> In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means suggests rather than requires. However, in logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a sufficient condition for".[3] This is the meaning intended by statisticians when they say causation is not certain. Indeed, p implies q has the technical meaning of the material conditional: if p then q symbolized as p → q. That is "if circumstance p is true, then q follows." In this sense, it is always correct to say "Correlation does not imply causation."
> This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.
True, but then it's extremely easy to find large quantities of people on the internet who speak as if (I infer this from the surrounding text of their statement) correlation rules out the possibility of causation.
I would love to know the magnitude of confusion/harm the (typically unrealized) ambiguity and other issues of the English language causes in the world, especially considering how causality links so many things together (often in ways beyond our awareness).
I love the idea of this article, but it doesn't address the reason things are the way they are. Facts get checked for literal accuracy because that's what's easy to actually do in a reasonably unbiased way. We stop there not because that's all we want, but because everything after that is too messy to even come close to systematizing.
If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextualization, i'd love to hear about it, though.
As a stop-gap, it may help to aggressively denounce things taken out-of-context as being out-of-context.
In usual communication, we focus on fact-checking things in the context in which they're most valid, with the presumption that any contextual ambiguity'd be understood/resolved. In such scenarios, it can make sense to fact-check something literally, in the context in which it's claimed, then handle the contextual-migrations appropriately in discussing inter-related points.
But Twitter-like platforms destroy this -- short blurbs in a relatively context-free space make it difficult to be honest even for folks who'd want to be, and seems to be a playground for folks who'd want to lie under pretense of factuality.
The appropriate reaction to claims removed from context would seem to be to deny them. Not to say that the claim is false (at least, not in a context in which it'd be true), but to note that the claim isn't relevant to the current-context (at least, not without a basis for connecting it to the current-context).
---
To note it, a problem with allowing folks to declare claims as being out-of-context (if they're not required to support it) is that it gives everyone a free-pass to weasel out of acknowledging anything that they dislike. So, it's unsuitable for adversarial contexts or otherwise unreliable exchanges.
Which is what I think makes debates, politics, etc. on platforms like Twitter basically garbage: it's too easy to lie if context isn't observed, and it's too easy to dodge stuff if it is.
So while Twitter-like platforms might workable for non-adversarial exchanges (like sharing pictures, announcements, etc.), adversarial exchanges on such platforms would seem structurally predisposed toward undesirable behavior.
At least there is the chance that someone providing context on Twitter/etc. will have that context seen by the recipients of the out-of-context info.
When someone on, say, Fox News, InfoWars, OANN, etc. does this, there is basically zero chance those people will see context provided on MSNBC/CNN/whatever because they just don't watch those channels.
> As a stop-gap, it may help to aggressively denounce things taken out-of-context as being out-of-context.
People already try to do this on Twitter and it's always rejected (sometimes with hostility.) I think you're underestimating how bad it is on there. Almost everyone one there is engaging in bad faith, many knowingly, and I'm not really sure how much that specifically even has to do with the platform (other than maybe it encourages tribalism.)
Well, if we talk about the big issue of the past couple of years, we can certainly contextualize in the context of that because we have an end goal for the communication, which is to attempt to convince an individual to take action A over action B.
So you can easily show high quality contextualisation - it's showing that the case against is less preferable, e.g. arguing against yourself.
For example, Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, an y% chance of passing that on to someone, who then has a z% chance of being seriously disabled or dying, and they have an a% chance of not obtaining that disease via some other mechanism".
You take the opposing viewpoint and try to dismantle it. This is the role of the media, to inform, not to latch onto micro-facts like "lockdown saves lives" and push them because they're easy wins.
>"Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, [...]" //
Couple of problems with this. People suck at maths. They also such at comparative risk analysis.
Also, you fight pandemics at the country/region level. Like some people will vote for whoever reduces their tax bill regardless of the actual outcome, some people will go out and mix with others in a pandemic if their own personal risk is low (or appears to them to be low).
Then you have the problem of trusting government. For example, here in the UK evidence suggests ministers in the Tory party used mask buying to funnel > £8Billion extra to friends and associates by having them pretend to be PPE suppliers and then sending them money for orders that were either simply not fulfilled or were fulfilled with unusable product (did they send it back, no, because it achieved the goal!). Now, you want us to trust those same people bit to lie on posters that modify human behaviour at a country-level?
Epidemiological responders only hope is to simplify and be cautious, try to prevent the government perverting the message to their own ends too much.
All the "fact checking" sites I am aware of are heavily biased. It seems very unlikely that they actually try to be unbiased in their checking. It already starts with selecting the facts they check (cherry picking).
Fact checking has poisoned discourse because it has an underlying assumption that preferences of one sort or another can be proven true, when in fact they cannot because they are by definition preferences.
People would hope to just recognize that they have different preferences about how others should behave, some of those preferences get condensed into laws and some are argued about indefinitely.
This is it but then then they cant wield the sledgehammer of "objectivity" and normativity over the other side. Whichever side gives that up first probably loses out, so I predict neither will.
I don't entirely disagree. I suppose I should have said "less biased". Imagine how biased "context checking" sites would be. Facts at least sort of have an appeal to an objective reality outside of politics.
I mostly encounter the ones in Germany, so I doubt it would be much use to you. For example correctiv.org or even https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/ which is from the public TV network (government funding).
I remember trying to verify the claims about "Trump lied x zillion times" at some US fact checking portal (I think from some major newspaper, maybe NYT or Washington Post), and all the supposed "lies" were also bullshit, like taken out of context, misinterpreted in extreme ways and so on in typical "fact checker" fashion.
Really it doesn't matter what sites I list, because they are all shit. The very act of calling themselves "fact checkers" should give it away. Just pick any of them and read their "checks" with a critical mind. Anybody can call themselves a "fact checker", it is a fake claim to authority.
Isn't Snopes also a renowned "fact checker"? I think some scandals regarding their founders came to light recently, but I don't remember the details.
> Isn't Snopes also a renowned "fact checker"? I think some scandals regarding their founders came to light recently, but I don't remember the details.
Yes, and despite this, snopes is still one of the better ones. Their articles are well sourced and easy to verify. I'm sure they've made some mistakes, and there've been a few cases where I disagreed with their conclusion or approach, but overall they do a good job.
I expect bias in all sources (including myself), but the key thing is to be prepared to be wrong in one's assumptions, as well as being able to update one's understanding of things as new data arrives.
I agree, and that's one of the reasons that I respect Snopes. Even the few times that I've disagreed with them, the article was well sourced enough to use the article to reach contrary opinions.
I guess a system of enemies trying to debunk each other might work better than sources trying to be neutral. Enemies might work harder at finding flaws and errors.
And your research let you come to the conclusion that Donald Trump wasn't, even by politician standards, a liar?
Possibly you've commuted in from a parallel dimension, and that's why you are suspicious of these fact checkers claiming "the sky is blue" and other obvious lies.
It seems unlikely to me that those claims of thousands of lies and the "firehose of lies" have much merit.
Wikipedia does not really have any bearing on it, as it only cites other sources.
Maybe instead of claiming thousands of lies, his enemies should focus on a couple of especially severe lies and scandals and make a good case about it.
However, most of the times when I looked into such stories, they turned out to be bullshit. So what am I supposed to believe? Obviously I can't fact check 30000 claimed lies. If I read Anti-Trump stories, I would expect his enemies to bring up the worst they have. If those turn out to be bullshit, what is left?
How is the Russian collusion accusation coming along, anyway?
You're 100% right. An unbiased perspective would call the arms, pharma, media, agricultural and oil industries out far more.
The bias is so widespread many people don't see it, like fish not realizing they're wet.
Whole shelves of books get written about the illegal wars media cheerleads; and about the unconscionable and unimaginable atrocities regularly committed by big agriculture and fossil fuel.
Yet we drown in pure distraction; "debating" whatever clown shit Ben Shapiro or Trump or Biden just said, or tilting at such windmills as trying to cancel Joe Rogan for having conversations with people.
"We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system." - Adam Curtis
There's no such thing as an unbiased perspective. That's what perspective means. It's a report from a certain point of view. If you tried to be an "unbiased perspective" you'd have to include all details of every part of everything, because the mere act of choosing what to include and what not to include is a result of a perspective, and a perspective is the result of telos. Action towards a purpose.
Have you ever been friends with someone who includes too many details in their story and they lose track of what they were saying? That's what happens when someone tries to be "unbiased". They include too much and it starts to lose purpose. You won't read a book written this way. Perspective and narrative structures are what engage our attention and help us understand the purpose of the story.
You may benefit from looking up the term "enlightened centrism". Or "pedant".
If you think pro-war corporate media's constant military cheer-leading is as valid a perspective as independent media, I have nothing polite to say to you.
I was intentionally drawing attention to phrases that we, as a society, use frequently, but are taken for granted as being valuable, or even attainable. This "detached perspective" of being disembodied and floating somewhere above everything and "including everything" is a myth of modernism and a myth of "scientific objectivity".
I have no problem with trying to be balanced or nuanced, but that's very different than feigned "objectivity" that basically just tries to use handwaving and gaslighting to distract you from considering that every perspective comes from a structure of presuppositions.
If you want to call me a "pedant" for making a distinction between implied, but impossible "objectivity" and balance/nuance, I'm fine with that label, because it's still a point worth making.
The very fact of being unbiased, or claiming to be, is quite a big claim and the burden of proof of being unbiased should lie on the side that claims being so.
Because the normal, expected state of things is that humans and the organizations that humans create are biased like hell.
> The very fact of being unbiased, or claiming to be, is quite a big claim and the burden of proof of being unbiased should lie on the side that claims being so.
This is a ridiculous claim. You can't prove a negative. If they are being biased, it's on the person making that claim to provide examples/proof.
Analogue: "Prove you're not hitting your wife", etc.
Your point is very poignant. Perhaps people should drop the pretense of unbias and wear their bias on their sleeves? It’s not like that’s too far from the current meta. Everyone is biased to all hell while saying on the tin “fair”, “unbiased”, “balanced”, or other weasel words
That's not my point. Everyone is unbiased until pointed out where/how they are biased. Maybe that is every action of every person on the planet, but in my biased opinion some are clearly less biased than others, and it's not that hard to compare.
This sounds like presumption of innocence in criminal court, but being biased isn't a guilt (and certainly shouldn't carry any penalty), it is, at least in my view, similar to being a left-handed or a right-handed person.
You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased.
This is not the same as "not beating your wife". Vast majority of people are indeed innocent of such crimes, so there is no problem treating them as innocent by default.
I would personally be happy if the medium didn't try to prove its absence of bias, which would indeed be hard, but at least tried to prove that it gives platform to sufficiently different views.
Note that we speak about "real world" proofs (preponderance of evidence etc.), not pure abstract mathematical logic which cannot be applied fully in real, messy human society.
> You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased.
Again, it's not about being default, it's about not being possible to prove, which you asked for in your original post. The number of people or publications being 1% or 99% is irrelevant. If someone is biased, it's trivial to point out how, and if they're not, it's impossible to prove so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
> Note that we speak about "real world" proofs (preponderance of evidence etc.), not pure abstract mathematical logic which cannot be applied fully in real, messy human society.
This I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. Logic is basically a flow chart where things either follow or don't. It's absolutely applicable to real world messy human society.
It's closely related if it's not your actual point. Some people actively try to minimize their bias, some lean into it. Also, not all bias is harmful. At some level, it's also an essential component of human existence.
Quite so! The reasoning (or excuse) with some folks seems to be "As I'm likely to be biased anyway, I may just as well be a bald-facedly lying propagandist", which is an even bigger problem!
The best you can hope for is a source that wears its biases on its sleeve. Then you can judge how those biases might have influenced information from that source.
The least-reliable sources tend to proclaim their "neutrality", i.e. they deliberately conceal their biases.
The best sources I've encountered are the ones where they source their information to some form of verifiable data (not blog/youtube/rag), lay out their reasoning, fix/own mistakes, have clear information about who they are, and their information checks out outside their sphere. Neither of these involve their stating any biases.
Rittenhouse carried a gun. Left wing sources said it was illegal and he was charged with it. Right wing sources (e.g. Viva & Barnes) said it was actually legal because of how the law was written and predicted it would be dismissed by the judge.
Politifact factchecked the claim that it was legal as false.
The judge dismissed the charge.
Politifact updated their page, not to admit they were wrong, but to double down that they were in fact right, not the judge. [1]
In many cases, fact checking websites strawman the claims to dismiss everything. In this case instead of factchecking "Rittenhouse was legally carrying" they fact checked "Rittenhouse was PERFECTLY legally carrying" so that when it turns out it was legal they can say "Yes, but not PERFECTLY legal".
A judge dismissing a charge doesn't mean that the gun was legal, though: There are a lot of different reasons to dismiss. Technicalities and not having enough strong evidence for that particular charge are two that come to mind.
The judge dismissed because the statute is unclear, and a general legal principle says that unclear rules must be read to favor whoever they're being applied against. This principle is a basic protection against tyranny by arbitrary application of muddled rules.
In other words, the legislature may have tried to make what Rittenhouse did illegal, but they failed to do so clearly enough, and that means it is legal.
Even if we allow for a gray area of "legal but not perfectly legal", it's not the legitimate province of media fact-checkers to arbitrate the boundaries of that -- for the same reason it's not legitimate for the state to arbitrate the boundaries of its own vague laws. Media fact checks are, in part, a tool for the media to discredit and damage the reputations of people it doesn't like. So the media doesn't get to write the rules of what is a fact, and gray areas should be construed in favor of the person being criticized.
How many "fact checkers" broke the artificial consensus view on the lab leak theory being "impossible"? None that I saw. The facts were pretty clear from the start if you actually read Daszak's bullshit, as eventually became clear despite the removal of millions of posts.
I recently saw USAToday "fact check" the claim that Fauci once said masks provided no protection from Corona. This was classed as misleading and lacking context - despite the fact Fauci said this on primetime national TV. There's video for it easily findable (thought certainly a little hard to find thanks to search engine fuckery). - https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/03/fact...
Did any fact check sites cover America's lies to go into Iraq?
How many of them looked into the promotion of a known torturer and destroyer of congressional evidence to a top US position?
How did your favorite fact check site cover the Deepwater Horizon spill? Are they talking about Stephen Donziger?
We could go on all day, but it's farcical that anyone still believes these people.
Answered like a typical "fact checker". I guess you solidly "debunked" my claims.
And yes, I only stated my opinion. If I would do a more thorough analysis, maybe I wouldn't waste it on HN, but try to sell it to some major newspaper for $$$.
This inevitably makes me think of a video about how meat consumption is not as bad by "things I've learned" on youtube. Search for that name and "meat" and you will inevitably find it. I thiught the claims in the video sounded too good to be true, so I read the study most of the claims in the video were based on.
They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans had to eat it. Which meant no actual land gains, only a modest reduction in co2 emissions, and that people would become unhealthy by eating 4500kcal/day, mostly from corn.
Even worse than the 3.1mn views is that the study in question was covered positively on TV and in newspapers.
Thats an unfair summary. The video also cleared up some simple facts that are often missreported and unjustly simplified in favor of a feel good frame.
Same with what types of calories are fed to cows especially. As in for humans indigestible byproducts of industrial agriculture. For example, this is the "corn" we speak about in this context. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissilage Used in both cow and pig feed. Here a picture
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Sonsbeck...
Its the shredded plant. The stuff that gets also used in biogas plants.
Calling these lies by omission out is not something that needs stricter "factchecks" that are less focused on facts to protect people from unwanted conclusions.
I know the video you're talking about (I also watched multiple rebuttals of the video which pointed out the issues you mentioned among others). It's been a while since I watched it though, I may be misremembering. I found it very useful as a steel-man of the pro-meat side and even after watching the rebuttals I came out with a more complexed, nuanced, and less certain opinion than I went in with.
You have a statement, like "meat agriculture uses more water than plant agriculture." Then you have a fact checker that says "yup, if you look at the amount of water to raise a cow vs to water a grain field with equivalent weight, calories, or whatever other metric you're using, it takes far more water to raise a cow". This truth gets copied around the internet and used to support claims and policies -- "meat uses more water. We have a water shortage in California. Therefore we should ban cows in California because of the water shortage." The logic makes perfect sense, and all the underlying facts are true.
The video then gave the context, which is that cows are often raised on otherwise unproductive grasslands that aren't used for crops anyways, and those that aren't being raised on unproductive land are usually eating corn from places that don't have as much of a water problem (e.g. the Midwest). This doesn't debunk the fact that a calorie of cow uses more water than a calorie of potato, or corn, or soybean -- you can still find those facts on any fact checker on the internet and they're still just as true -- but it does weaken the claim of "we should ban cows in California to help with the water shortage".
In the context of the linked article, this is both "Decontextualizing and recontextualizing" and "Reinterpreting and pre-framing meaning". The claim "meat uses more water than plants" is decontextualized from the world where corn is grown in places without water problems and meat is often raised in situations where water use is minimal, and reinterpreted and reframed in the context of local environmental problems to support a predetermined conclusion. Of course there are probably examples in the video where it makes the same mistake the other way around -- but by watching both that video, the rebuttals, and the discussion, you can come to a better, more complex understanding of the issue, which can't be a bad thing.
Well the conclusion that "cows use a lot of water. We have a water shortage. Ban cows" hold today. Because most cows are not pasture-raised on un-irrigated pastures (yes. That's a thing).
And cows eat a lot of imported corn and therefore the the numbers are wrong? Well. At least not completely. The crop using the largest percentage of water in CA is alfaalfa. Feed. Either used locally as feed, or exported as feed.
It is grows all year round and takes the crown of being the crop that uses the most water in CA (out of a percentage of the total).
You may be correct about that (I eventually decided the topic was too complicated for most people to figure out and disengaged with it). But the argument you present is slightly different and more nuanced than "cows drink a lot of water, we should use that water to grow soybeans instead". There are other solutions if you accept those conditions like "figure out how to get incentivize importing feed from places without drought conditions instead of growing alfalfa during a water shortage" and "figure out how to encourage more pasture-raised cattle farming on un-irrigated pastures". The point is that the extra facts (feed can be imported, cattle farming is possible in some place using minimal irrigation, not everywhere has droughts, water is used in alfalfa farming) change the initial A->B->C logic to A->D->E->C, and maybe there's an A->D->E->F argument that you miss if you don't know that D and E exists (and maybe F is more sound than C, or even directly challenges it). That's kind of the point of the original article.
Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.
It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
> It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality.
No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that.
> In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
> Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
The biggest marketeers of "Propaganda" are those that claim they have access to the capital-T truth. If it feels like you have access to capital-T truth, you're almost certainly trapped inside an ideological construct.
That said, ideological constructs aren't necessarily bad things, since society simply could not function without the shared "truth" they allow for.
Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certain individuals in certain epoch of history.
You are making very big assumptions here. Think about it, what if the universe is a dynamical system? There would never be any truth only systems which work or are broken according to some set of criteria. Moreover, which systems work would also be a function of their context/environment. Nothing would ever be revealed because dynamical systems can always change (also see problem of induction). Things just work or don‘t work according to your interpretation. I would recommend to look up Pragmatism as a philosophy that elaborates on this line of thinking. It‘s quite enlightening and puts a lot of things we are talking about today into perspective.
> Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certain individuals in certain epoch of history.
This seems like a fairly ambitious claim, is it a formal idea in philosophy or some other field, and does it happens always/usually or only sometimes?
Adversarial wielding of facts could be the basis for a new model of public knowledge, one that corrects the shortcomings of current news media and social networks.
Causal mapping [1] websites can aggregate the back and forth of heated discussions, eliminating emotional responses and distilling the core ideas of each opposing position. Such compilation of facts an argument in a readable, neutral format (e.g. see Kialo)[2] could work like the academic debates of old, allowing facts to be analysed in context and the validity of arguments to be tested on their own merits, not on their emotional appeal.
It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.
Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.
I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions.
> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.
US National Security, and the groups moving within it, are not monolithic. Different groups and agencies have very different policies regarding how to deal with journalists specifically.
DoD has been very up front - it's pay to play, as you noted. Stay in the lines, do what we want, keep your eyes on the narrative we're interested in, and opportunities and access with magically open up for you. Step outside the dotted line and whoops, you're in a warzone buddy and you need to leave now, base commander said so, sorry.
Whereas US foreign correspondents were, and as far as I can tell still are, entirely off limits for intelligence agencies to recruit from, work with, or even really interact with. State has put down as US policy that we respect the institution of (US) journalism, so no co-opting them. It's kind of a point of pride. Now, that doesn't mean avoid lying to them, no selling them, or just doing any of the various government tricks to throw a journalist onto a particular path, it just means none of the very obvious "you're going to drink the Kool aid" that DoD does.
Of course this is in abstract, I'm sure there are exceptions and people who broke the rule, but compared to the British intelligence services, who absolutely co-opted any and all foreign correspondent they could get their hands on, both as intelligence sources and to plant stories, or the Soviet/Russian Fed groups, the US has been relatively principled... relatively being the key word
>I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment.
This is easy to prove. What do the intelligence agencies / government do to a person who leaks? Snowden, Assange, Winner, Manning. We know what they do. Why are there so many articles coming from "anonymous national security sources," where there is no attempt to punish the leaker? It's because it's an intentional plant/leak by said agency.
Any time you read an article sourced by "national security anonymous insider," or something to that effect, it's what the government wants you to think. There's a lot of this regarding ramping up military intervention support, among other things.
In case anyone is curious, one can read the following front page article from March 8, 2003 to see how the NYT discussed reports from Blix and ElBaradei: https://archive.is/EdUCX
Misrepresenting facts in this way is still a form of lying. Speaking technical truths doesn't change that. Most lies aren't complete fabrications, honestly, even when they do contain a few.
The most effective form of lying is lying by omission. It's harder to detect, easier to defend as just ignorance, and is perhaps more effective than outright false claims.
Far far more effective is lying by implication. This happens almost all the time. The article is written in such a way as to imply something is true; for example talking in such a way that said thing is obviously true and everyone knows it, when in fact it isn't true at all. This allows them to make the reader think something is true without lying, and often without even having the reader question it, and it allows the media to not even have to try to supply evidence at all.
Why don't we make a law around it? I'm tired of politicians weaseling themselves out of difficult situations by saying "oh, I forgot about that". It's your job to bring important, relevant information to the table, damn it.
A law to do what, exactly? Criminalize the omission of facts from a statement? Criminalize ignorance?
Who decides when a fact was omitted? Was the fact pertinent (note: there's a lot of wiggle room here)? How much investigation has to be done to uncover whether there was a lie by omission or actual ignorance?
What would the penalty be?
Thinking you can legislate your way out of this is hopeless idealism.
It is physically impossible for anyone to express all facts in finite time. Every expression is, at best, a selection among the facts of that which is adjudged relevant. Legislating what would be relevant in every situation is likewise impossible.
Demonstrating that a fact is omitted with dishonest intent is tricky business. That doesn't mean we can't guess, but the law does not go by guesses.
i was told growing up that this was the difference between being honest and being truthful: honesty is about telling allcomers everything you know (or believe, with appropriate caveats) to be true, whereas being truthful is simply not advancing as truth things you know (or believe) to be false.
in any case, i've watched npr and nyt, two of my mostly former news sources, wrench from simply being biased to being outright hysterically partisan and dishonest. covid (over-)coverage being the most blatant, but it's been a long disintegration of truth and trust.
this is just a little part of the overall movement toward captured capital and centralized power, sweeping up news media along the way (note that these are editorial decisions, with editors seeking favor from the powerful). we're in for a rocky ride.
p.s. - a little tremor hit LA while writing this...
YMMV but every time I happened to be tuned into NPR (world) news I get an unhealthy dose of State Dept-curated misinformation on topics like Russia, China, Iran, etc.
If anything changed in the post-Collateral Murder world, its that the Washington's content filtering and propaganda subtly intensified.
Picard: You've already given an answer to the inquiry, and that answer was a lie.
Wesley: I said the accident occurred after the loop. It did.
Picard: What you neglected to mention was that following the loop your team attempted a maneuver that was the direct cause of the crash. You told the truth up to a point. But a lie of omission is still a lie.
[....]
Picard: The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based. If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened you don't deserve to wear that uniform.
It's always interesting to me, the mental gymnastics people will do to convince themselves that they're not doing something they believe to be morally wrong. Like, if your intent is to mislead, what do you care if you're technically telling the truth?
It isn't mental gymnastics, the media has two very good and intentional reasons for doing this. Number one is to avoid being sued while still being able to get away with misleading their audience. Number two is that it gives the zealots following their cause to clear their conscience by saying "see this article was factually correct" when, on the rare occasion, someone bothers to call them out on the lie.
"Number two is that it gives the zealots following their cause to clear their conscience by saying "see this article was factually correct" when, on the rare occasion, someone bothers to call them out on the lie."
This is literally mental gymnastics, why would it clear their conscience if they intended to mislead? It only clears their conscience because they're doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they're not technically lying.
I agree. The problem isn't just cherry-picked truths either. It is the use of non-sequitur arguments by "fact-checkers" like Politifact, WT.Social, Snopes, etc. to draw false conclusions from various things that are indeed true.
For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."
Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.
This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.
I have a friend who used to work for Snopes. The organization absolutely engages in what you describe. The sad thing is, it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s what humans do naturally and subconsciously to shore up their cognitive dissonance… particularly when faced with uncomfortable facts pertaining to establishment systems, organizations and identity politicians they supported.
The Snopes article that made me take notice of this bias was the one letting Clinton off the hook for equating millennials to "basement dwellers" while speaking to wealthy donors during the 2016 election.
Clinton never used the exact sequence of words “basement dwellers”. Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision. The cherry picked position of asserting that "basement dweller" specifically wasn't used... is fundamentally meaningless, and is exactly the same sort of straw-man you were describing above.
She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):
“And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”
There is no way to read that statement without it dripping with condescension. Without full context, what Snopes advanced was patent misrepresentation… and then on top of that to call the “basement dweller” accusation untrue…? Bullshit. It’s “mixed” at best. Any intellectually honest person with full context would recognize her statements for what they were.
Yes, exactly! I read that article on Snopes and know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for offering another example of it.
My hope is that we'll all wake up to these tactics and stop letting politicians and media organizations lie and manipulate us for their own gain. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything anymore, regardless of who says it, unless I see a full, in-context video of the event. Even then it can be iffy due to editing that isn't obvious.
>Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision.
I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).
>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):
Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.
IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.
> She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be
That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.
Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.
CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.
> Why should it be?
Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.
And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.
>Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.
So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.
Bernie's support of Clinton is something that a non-trivial number of his supporters did not agree with him on, I include myself in that number. Regardless, droves of Bernie supporters showed up at the polls to vote for Clinton, at a rate greater than prior Obama voters.
Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.
You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.
Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.
>You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.
It's not contextual. It was an entirely separate answer to another question on a matter that has nothing to do with whether Hilary called Bernie supporters basement dwellers. At this rate, you might as well include the entire corpus of everything Hilary ever said.
No matter how you put it, this is a cut and dry fact. Again, the question wasn't whether Hilary is condescending. It was whether she used those particular words which she did not.
I do. The NYT is chock full of partisans who seem to have little to no apprehension about framing "the facts" in whatever way helps to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. All the while presenting themselves as some beacon of objective truth and journalistic integrity.
And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?
Apparently, you see no difference in the goals of "shaping public opinion" and misleading people (with or without facts).
I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top.
And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?
I concur that the term "shaping public opinion" is more accurate in many cases, but not in others. There are enough stories where the author clearly understood something about the story and attempted to convey something else to the reader for political/cultural effect. For example, not reporting on the race of a black perpetrator but always reporting on the race of a black victim.
There is a less activist way of presenting the news that doesn't attempt to "shape public opinion". I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite. I've read (some of) Manufacturing Consent. Today's media in America (almost all of it, NYT being no exception) heavily shapes public opinion, turning news reporting into a political battleground.
The most noticeable example of activism at work is the difference in coverage (and condemnation) between January 6th and the CHAZ/CHOP event. While both events included the occupation of a government building, one is seen as an insurrection and the other is more of a protest. I don't want to start a tangent comparing every aspect of the two, but needless to say, there are some big commonalities that are covered in a very different light depending on one's partisan outlook.
> I don't want to start a tangent comparing every aspect of the two, but needless to say, there are some big commonalities that are covered in a very different light depending on one's partisan outlook.
The idea that there are "big commonalities" between these two is a claim that only makes sense given a fairly specific worldview.
While I can understand the worldview that identifies the commonalities and thus finds inconsistencies in the way the NYT covered them both, I also happen to have a worldview in which the two incidents are not fundamentally related at all other than under an extremely broad category, so broad that it's not particularly meaningful. Armed with that worldview, I don't find anything inconsistent in the coverage.
Anyway, I'm a European by birth. I don't buy into the nominal American dream of objective news coverage, not in any way shape or form. Journalistic integrity to me has almost nothing to do with whether one's journalism is free from bias. You can argue that the only meaningful definition is the one claimed by a journalism outlet about its own work, and I think that's fair. But I don't really see anywhere that the NYT claims to to have no worldview that informs and structures its work.
I sense debating my choice of the words "shaping public opinion" is going to be tangential. While what you said "If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?" is true, that isn't the heart of what I was getting at.
If the NYT is going to brand itself as some paragon of journalistic integrity, I would expect them to be dramatically more consistent with how they choose to cover and editorialize things.
I find the NYT to be extremely consistent in how they choose to cover and editorialize things. But by that I mean internally self-consistent, not that they behave as if they do not have a worldview that informs and shapes their work.
Bari Weiss' resignation letter is primarily about the NYT no longer publishing op-eds that she thinks they should (and would have) published. If you want to interpret that as "misleading people", be my guest.
Weiss has her own problems with misleading people too, and I for one was glad to see her leave the NYT and make her positions clearer than they had been in a number of her op-eds for the paper.
> And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?
What do you mean? All they were going to do was mention his name, which is a very normal thing to do.
The obtuse bit was actually the expectation of Alexander and various SSC fans that they could impose idiosyncratic rules on others that they were in no position to enforce.
Their best method is hiding editorial and misinformation with references to earlier stories where the opinion or falsehood is in a (sometimes unattributed) quote, but in the later story is stated as a well-known fact. That's why they're in court with Palin right now.
There are more sophisticated techniques I’ve seen in local TV. Put two pieces of unrelated news one before another. Make sure the transition that nobody notices. This usually shed some bad impressions for the first news when done intentionally.
Oddly enough, I see no mention of any specific source in the article, yet the top comment here is bashing the NYT. Is there some reason for this? Does the NYT represent the entire industry? Are they alone in deciding what is news, or its priority? (One would be forgiven for thinking this is, in fact, the primary purpose of a news room).
Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?
If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.
I get the feeling this article was written by very smart people with noble intentions coming from backgrounds quite similar to mine.
I found it tremendously unsatisfying.
This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)
If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.
My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as "love thy neighbor as thyself."
There's a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.
For example, in a court of law, where you have a handful of jurors, some witnesses, a carefully curated set of rules, and highly trained professionals guiding the process. Errors are made.
The truth is not always found and an innocent person gets locked up or a guilty one walks free.
Epistemology is an ancient practice. In the western tradition this was first pointed out over 2,000 years ago.
Then there is the problem that human beings are not rational actors and it gets a whole lot messier.
One big reason for the rise in both far right and far left extremists is that mainstream media has mastered this practice a long time ago. This is why people don't inherently fully trust mainstream news that is mostly bought and paid for aka submarine PR. Catch & kill and China buying articles in the MSM weren't revelations, they were just confirming everyone's suspicions.
If everyone is bought and paid for, I might as well become an extremist. I’m probably screwed either way, but at least the nuts offer some sense of hope.
> What if we really wanted to understand what was going on in a way that accounted for all the facts and their various frames and interpretations?
Then we are demonstrating a level of good faith and interest that seems missing in most discourse.
I like the drive behind this - to really get to the bottom of things and promote rational comprehension rather than have people simply sniping at each other with misunderstood datapoints - but I'm not sure a lot of the people who are engaging in such behaviour are really that interested. As mentioned in the article, what they are really after is ammunition.
Still, I welcome this, as it's far better than just throwing up our collective hands and deciding any attempt to improve the quality of public discussion is necessarily censorship.
Tinkerbell School of Progress. Clap louder and surely Tinkerbell will fly. Like the evergreen advice to teach critical thinking. Certain to work. Next time.
There's no profit in pursuing "truth" in the face of tenacious anti-truth. Truthiness is an outgrowth of identity. And identity is impervious to logic, reason, facts.
The best we can do is help ourselves navigate the chaos.
It's a real simple checklist:
- Share your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Sign your name.
And then you can start productive analysis, fact checking, verification. Anything less should be treated as gossip, propaganda, or trolling (distraction).
Identity isn't entirely impervious to logic. But if you can create the impression that your identity is under threat - by setting up an either/or scenario - it means, to your amygdala at least, your survival is at stake. Very straightforward way to shortcut rational thinking.
The problem is that journalism stokes the formation of camps by a) conflating ideas and identities, b) bothsidesing everything, and so creating artificial identities to be perceived as neutral, and c) knowingly exploiting that "fear sells" and targeting the identities they manufacture.
Which then becomes ripe pickings for any sociopath out for their own interests.
The only way I'm aware of that can overcome this at scale is forming a larger group identity that's more inclusive. But that only seems to work if there's a large outgroup you can unite against, as far as I can tell.
It depends on what you encourage people to identify as. I predict better results from someone who identifies primarily as a "human truth-seeker" than from a "$immutable_characteristic $ideology world-improver".
Tangentially, some years ago I recall reading a few articles about the problem with 'misconception busting' articles [I may try to find such an article later]. Apparently, content formatted like...
> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content
> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content
... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.
This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.
I first heard this on the Sam Harris podcast. If I remember correctly he explained it as a function of our memory saving the myth and _then_ the "fact". It is easier to recite the 1st part of the memory so some people forget the "fact" and thus beleive the myth more strongly.
Scientific method tries to get as close as possible to facts.
The issue is that popular press and "influencers" ignore limitations in studies and always tell just their interpretations while pointing to "the science".
Tries to, but it too is flawed; misinterpretation of numbers, falsifying of numbers, publishing papers as a means to inflate one's own ego / CV, not publishing studies that don't look positive, and of course, companies and industries funding studies into the positive parts of their 'thing', see for example the campaign against 'fat' in the eighties (funded by the grain and sugar industries), being replaced with the campaign against sugar and carbs in the past two or so decades.
I'm sure all of those studies had merit, had adequate numbers, were peer reviewed and everything... but they were still made with an Agenda, and worse, picked up by the mainstream media so that they could push lifestyle advice, diets, and promote one category of products over another.
The "Truth" is in the middle, of course, and to make a completely opinion based and unscientific statement, too much of anything / overconsumption is a bad thing, but that's too vague a statement or advice; people like being told "avoid doing / eating this" and "do / eat that instead", sticking to simple rules as a lifestyle choice.
It's not even limitations. It's studies that are non-peer reviewed, or non-replicated (not failed to replicate sometimes, just hasn't yet been replicated).
Especially certain subjects where poor, biased, studies seem rife. They take a study and run with it because a scientific study is "science", even if a study is just one step one the way to an accepted truth.
Sometimes is more explicit, cherry-picking certain studies over others; possibly even dismissing those with the "bad" result as biased (or *-ist).
Not all science is equal, either. A paper published in an evolutionary psychology journal is not as valid as the theory of evolution itself. Yet, we tend to lump everything in under "Science".
Aside from interpretation, a major issue is the press and "influencers" selecting to promote studies that affirm their preconceived notions, and simply ignoring other studies that contradict them.
He is exactly right. The universe as it is and how we humans perceive it are two different worlds. Many words that we consider "abstract" are made up and have no equivalent in the physical universe, but we still use them because it fulfills some purpose for us.
> Many words that we consider "abstract" are made up
What have you been smoking? All words are made up. But that isn't related to the question fact vs interpretation at all. The word "Earth" is made up, your name is made up, "human" is made up, the air that you breathe is made up, yet you are (most likely) a human on Earth, and you'd hate it if that air suddenly disappeared.
Anyway, the quote contradicts itself/reduces itself to ravings of a lunatic, so isn't worth taking seriously.
"Earth", "Air" and "Human" are not abstract nouns because they have physical things we can match those words to.
Contrast that to abstract nouns like "truth", "danger" or "happiness", which are actually interpretations of something other. Statements using these tend to be opinions or non-verifiable. Fact-Checking doesn't work for them.
I was more arguing his post. In hindsight, i think he interpreted the "have no physical equivalent" part differently. I meant it more like, that what the words are referring to, the concepts behind it. Not the words itself.
I'm still saying Nietzsche is right with the quote. That he is right does not forbid to mentally work with the concept of objectivity. See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of everything.
> That he is right does not forbid to mentally work with the concept of objectivity.
Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. The quote taken directly makes it wrong as it conflicts with objectivity, any other interpretation makes it edgy, fanciful, and pointless, as GP pointed out.
> See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of everything.
That's what everyone already does when they reason through something objective. The quote is un-profound in that interpretation (which imo is reaching)
Besides being flamebait and against the site guidelines, that's a painfully shallow dismissal, and we don't want those here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.
> Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.
No, I don't think it's that simple. Take the classic culture war issue: abortion. There's genuine, widespread, and deep opposition to it. The "covert interests" didn't manufacture that opposition, but they have latched onto it to help make unpopular policies (e.g. laissez faire economics, tax cuts for the rich) electorally viable.
I'm afraid I don't follow your reasoning. In your example, isn't the "covert interests" simply: A group of people who is "interested" in having abortions, and a group who's "interested" in preventing abortions?
Abortion is a can of worms which combines many underlying power issues, from the obvious issue of personal freedom that usually gets discussed, to the need of capitalism to be able to double the work force[1], to eugenics and demographic control [2], to the most fundamental power issue that is who gets to decide what it means to be human and when does human life start.
Thats an interesting way to look at it. Picking a specific culture war, I’d like to examine gay conversion therapy. Who would you say are the covert interests pulling strings on either side?
The issue is whether christian communities get to choose how to run their own communities or if they need to be told what to do from more progressive states.
Not saying they shouldn't be told what to do. Maybe they should.
But the power issue is very clear. They are either too dumb or immoral and need to be told what to do, or they are grown ups and can run their communities however they see fit.
I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information. Anyone who wants to stick to their priors, can. Anyone who wants to delegate has an array of choices to choose from. And those who want (and have the time) to chase deeper comprehension themselves can do so (still delegating some here and there, recursively).
This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have full disclosure from the author.
> I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information.
"Information" is not "knowledge". Information can consist of many falsehoods, knowledge should contain few if any falsehoods. We want a decent signal to noise ratio in our information, which requires some base of reliable knowledge.
So I think there's a place for fact checking. This used to be the domain of good reporters, but many of them have shit the bed hard on that for a couple of decades now, and lost most of their credibility. Now is the age of "fact checkers", which aren't doing much better frankly.
I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this:
population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.
And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.
When people talk about "lying with statistics", this is what they mean.
Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.
Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?
To be honest I don't find that sort of claim overly deceptive. % of infected that are vaccinated is an important metric because it helps describe the further reduction in infection that is possible through further vaccination. That's an obviously different metric than infection rate, and should be understood as such. The root problem is widespread statistical illiteracy.
One example: people who simply state “women make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes” to imply the advantage of being a man vs a woman.
The reality of how this number is calculated (eg averages across professions, even though men and women tend to work different professions, part time vs full time is not taken into account) suggests the conclusions that come from this 82 cents number is more nuanced than the initial statement.
And then you can take another step and ask why professions dominated by women in general are less well paid than similar ones dominated by men, and why it is mostly women who reduce their work hours while the kids are small and why not more men do the same.
The jobs are viewed less valuable once women start working them. As in, a profession that was male-dominated starts paying less once it becomes the opposite [1}. It isn't really fair to use doctors as and example since it is still a male-dominated profession, with over 60% being male [2]. I'd also mention that obviously, teachers aren't that easily replaced, considering the shortage that has only gotten worse during covid [3]. A lot of states in the US will basically let anyone be a substitute: I know of at least one person that is teaching high school without a teaching license, but they might be technically a long-term substitute.
Are doctors being paid less? Isn't this about supply and demand? If you flood the market with women that used to be housewives, the salaries will go down. But high demans fields stay highly paid, even increase.
Obviously, the job market doesn't respond to demand in that way. Otherwise, more places would be paying more right now with the current shortages. Teachers, for example, should be getting raises.
I was responding to the fact that doctors aren't female-dominated right now, a point you missed. Which they aren't. We haven't flooded it with a bunch of women: We have a limited capacity to train doctors. Nor are we getting folks in the market that used to be housewives: That time period has long since moved, though in many places, women still carry household responsibilities in addition to work. Rather than a flood, women are replacing men, mostly. Which is generally how it goes: Women replace men in some fields, and then pay goes down.
> It isn't really fair to use doctors as and example since it is still a male-dominated profession, with over 60% being male
from the second link:
One of the steadiest movements has been the rise in women as a percentage of the physician workforce: It rose from 28.3% in 2007 to 36.3% last year, according to the AAMC’s Physician Specialty Data Reports from 2008 to 2020:
It isn't female dominated, though: Only 36.3% of the workforce are women. I don't know how that is female dominated if 63.7% - nearly 2/3 - of doctors are male. Just because the percentage of women in the professioin is growing doesn't mean it is dominated by females. Compare this to teachers: 76% of teachers are female [1]
Do you have some alternative version of "dominated" that I'm not privy to?
Being paid less doesn’t necessarily mean your job is less “valuable”! I wish this was the case and everyone would get paid based value of their work but, sadly, this isn’t the reality of the world we live in.
Even bad teachers have to meet the standards, which are usually set by law. A preschool teacher, who often gets paid just over minimum wage, usually requires a 2 year degree (for head start-like programs). A teacher? 4 year degree, with a preference for a masters and in many places, absolutely no pay during the summer months.
It isn't like any other industry hires only "good" people, though, so calling out teaching for that - especially if your area has a shortage - seems a bit unfair.
But those standards doesn't mean anything if they are still bad teachers. Would you hire a software engineer with a 4 year degree who can't code? No, of course not. But would you hire a teacher with a 4 year degree who can't teach? Of course you would! You just need them to tick a box, their skill as a teacher isn't relevant, if they have a piece of paper they meet the bar and are hired.
I suspect that perhaps you are not a teacher, and have never applied for teaching work. Or maybe you live somewhere where school hiring practices are very irresponsible.
My daughter is a teacher who has just changed jobs. The process was something like this:
* Apply (CV, plus extensive covering letter)
* Prospective new head knows old head (they all know one another) so they talk
* Candidate gets an interview, and has to prepare a class
* Interview day: candidate delivers prepared class, observed by head and head-of-year
* Candidate is interviewed at length by a panel of three teachers, including head
* Decision made subject to references
* References taken up; award position
What you've described is a process that isn't even appropriate for a supermarket checkout clerk.
In general, teachers start out with a bit of experience as most schools require teachers to, you know, teach as part of their schooling. In other words, you simply aren't hiring someone that doesn't know how to teach and has demonstrated it in the classroom.
Companies also fire a lot of bad software engineer and have technical interviews so there is pressure to perform. You never see teachers fired for being bad at teaching. They only get fired when they do something illegal like harass their students or when they refuse to go to work. If companies hired every person with a CS degree from any school to work as a software engineer and never fired anyone for bad performance you'd see software engineering salaries sink like a rock as well.
> They only get fired when they do something illegal
Here in the UK, people have employment rights, including the right not to be dismissed without process. That involves warning the employee twice verbally, putting in place measures to help them improve their performance, and then a final written warning. Teachers here are unionised; they can take their employer to an employment tribunal, which is a kind of court, for the offence of Unfair Dismissal. It takes time and money to fire someone for underperformance.
Consequently recruitment is done rather carefully - more carefully than in many software companies, judging by the calibre of some of the colleagues I've worked with.
FTR I used to be a school governor in a state-run primary school.
> Because the jobs are less valuable, not due to who's doing them but due to the market (i.e. all of us) seeing them as less valuable.
It is a rather sad and naive view of the value of work if you think that it is decided by market value. My work as a developer has a high market value because what I do is generating revenue for my employer. The work of the teacher who shapes the future of our children or the work of nurse that take care of our dying parents don't generate any revenue, and thus has a lower market value, but I, and I think we as a society should, value it much more.
Good teachers and good nannies aren't easier to replace than good carpenters or construction workers. But since many men who are in charge of setting salaries don't understand that they aren't as well paid.
> Have salaries gone down now that women make up a significant percent of the number of doctors?
Yes. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone down when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women.
> The work of the teacher who shapes the future of our children or the work of nurse that take care of our dying parents don't generate any revenue, and thus has a lower market value, but I, and I think we as a society should, value it much more.
Teachers are glorified babysitters in the vast majority of instances due to many countries making truancy illegal. Yes, a great teacher is extremely valuable, but the vast majority of teachers are not great because there is not a high demand for great teachers. It’s even worse that we’re ruining the environment for both great teachers and great students by forcing students who have no interest in learning to be there.
(good) teachers generate great value and positive externalities into the future, but are simply unable to capture that value generation because of the time factor. many teachers accept pride and esteem in lieu of economic gain, but they should get paid accordingly as well if we had a fair politicoeconomic system.
economics in general has no answer for this differential temporal factor in value creation vs value capture. it's all predicated on immediate, atomic transactions, although the concept of externalities at least acknowledges the issue.
When parents can freely choose who schools their children, the ones that place a premium on how well they are schooled are free to invest relatively more than those who do not. This gap between value creation and value capture can be bridged by foresight.
>Yes. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone down when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women.
No. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone up when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women.
> Good teachers and good nannies aren't easier to replace than good carpenters or construction workers. But since many men who are in charge of setting salaries don't understand that they aren't as well paid.
I'm not sure teachers and nannies are good examples. Public school teachers are largely unionized which would eliminate differences in pay between men and women. And many nannies are effectively small business people who set their own rates.
Being unionized doesn't mean that pay is non-negotiable or anything of the sort. Yes, the union typically establishes a baseline pay based on experience, but individuals can still negotiate their own wages.
> why it is mostly women who reduce their work hours while the kids are small and why not more men do the same.
Because evolution did this decision for us. Woman stays with children, while man risk their lives, because those, which did the opposite, lose evolutionary competition.
No, it didn’t. You may choose to follow old traditions that don’t make sense any more, but that is something you choose. There are very few jobs today where physical strength make a difference, and before the industrial revolution the fathers were mostly at home and played important parts in raising the children.
I would say there are A LOT of jobs today where physical strength makes a difference. And a lot of them are high paid jobs too: oil rigs, ships, linemen, construction, mechanics etc. There are a lot of these examples. Sure, there are women in all of these fields, but because of the strength difference, the balance is tilting the other way. This can at least in part explain some of the pay gap: there are 7 million construction workers alone.
Compare a similar education man and woman: one does construction, the other is a cleaner.
If you look at birth and death rates, you will see that more boys are born, but mortality for boys is higher[0]. Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference. Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.
Your link says that infant mortality rate is slightly higher for boys. How is that supposed to help your argument?
> Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference.
Is your argument that since there seem to be a correlation between mortality rate for boys and higher salary for men, that there is some kind of causation that make it good? You really have to expand on that if you want to make it comprehensible.
> Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.
Here you reveal that you don't understand natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for what is beneficial for society at all. Often what is good for the gene is bad for society, and the other way around.
Natural selection works on time scale much longer than the industrial revolution, and most factors are probably older than agriculture. It would be rather stupid to let what was useful behaviour 100k years ago control our lives today. We live in very different environments, in very different societies, and faces very different dangers.
Men in general value money and status more highly and therefore sacrifice more in their pursuit. An observer who concentrates solely on the monetary outcome sees only half of the picture.
I thought the generalized examples here[1] were objectively adequate.
Using real world examples in this context strikes me as dancing into a mine field and a dismissal of the nuanced exercise towards understanding that the author suggests[2].
Imagine papers with conflicting results. One side cites one subset of papers. The other side cites the other subset. Both feel the other are are disingenuous.
Both sides are citing true facts (“these papers exist”), both sides are wrong (the data is in fact inconclusive)
That may be a strategic decision. The minute they provide examples, they start losing anyone in their audience who is pre-committed politically to that example.
I have established a way of dealing with and taking from 'facts' by following these steps:
1. What is said? Do I understand it? Where does it come from?
2. How is it to be understood? How to interpret it?
3. What does it signify? Can it be classified and/or compared with other known things?
4. What can be taken from it? What implications does it have?
Looking at news in this way, it is clearly visible, how most things that are communicated answer 3. and 4., omitting its foundations 1. and 2. Sometimes the bias is created by changing 2.
(The fine-definition of the steps is still in the works. So far, I am very happy with this method. It helps me a lot to understand things and what things are really about. Suggestions?)
They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.
The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don't really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying "well, you can prove anything with facts" which feels like it's going in the wrong direction.
Reading all the other comments, there's a strong vibe of "see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers".
Faster heustistic is to check not whether the facts are true, but if the implied conflict that connects them is real.
The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.
Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.
Hi - where is that "dog bits capitalist oppressor" from btw? Google only has this comment. While I've been developing "news/internet literacy" for decades, I found it insightful to focus not just on facts but the spin and intent of fact presentation. Would love to read more if you've got some thoughts/links :)
Thanks! All of my comments are original content, unless I have plagerized them from much smarter people who tolerate my company.
It's more than spin, the basic unit of a story is a conflict, and you decorate it with facts. The question is whether the conflict is real, or produced by the logic of a presupposed idea (an ideo-logy). Instead of marxism in the example above, let's take the idea that the world is under the influence or control of evil forces, and you have been selected by God to thwart them, which seems bonkers from the outside, but it's also the theological basis of Christianity.
(this is friendly fire) In that view, "dog bites man," becomes, "God smites man," because it has told the story using a conflict that originated in the logic of that idea. This premise that ideology can manufacture conflict that gets decorated with facts to produce stories probably scales pretty well. The decorative facts remain true and even legitimately associated, but the conflict that yields the story might have been fabricated.
Most of us believe that our ideologies are some version of the substrate of reality or the most encompassing set of intellectual abstractions. As I get older, I think the only reliable source of qualitative truth may be laughter because it's involuntary, but even then, that's mostly sentiment. Anyway, thanks for the prompt. Fun thoughts.
It seems to me lying with facts boils down to two techniques:
1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.
2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers are representative and pre-empt the listener's getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.
Specific facts when a reader doesn’t know the entire story can frame the story however the author wants. Without existing knowledge of the details, a reader has no way of discerning the difference.
If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.
Good faith is part of the problem; you trust that a headline, an article, a summary etc acts in good faith, that you can trust journalists and the like. But they often have an Agenda, pushing a certain narrative or a certain political goal.
I mean, even when an article ticks all the boxes for being well researched, factually correct, neutral in language, even then it can be misleading for not having a counter-point (for example), or its hosting platform to de-emphasize the article.
What has more impact, a headline saying "tinfoil hats cause headaches" prominently posted on the front page of a newspaper in big impact font, or a byline four pages in?
The PR teams create perceptions and narratives by misleading with facts on social media, in ways mentioned in this article. But I think people get it after a while and it can't be used for long term perceptions and narratives.
Would be great if the author included some actual real life examples. This is why I find Chomsky so convincing. He usually presents his argument with lots of evidence.
This increasingly common use of the word "weaponize" (as a dysphemism for "utilize") bothers me, as does the article's use of the phrase "information war."
As horrible as it is to spread disinformation and propaganda, it seems unnecessarily extreme to describe that as analogous or comparable to warfare or physical violence.
How about they apply their own theory to the framing of ‘information warfare’ that they simply assume as a factual part of what is happening but make no attempt to investigate?
Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.
But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.
Looks like a wonderful project! Society'd seem to do well to focus on how we can have real, honest dialogs. Current forums for stuff like political debates have malicious, deceptive strategies that may work better than honest ones, which just seems like a bad thing for society as a whole.
The solution'd seem to be to have cultural dialogs, e.g. on politics, occur on platforms where optimal strategies are constructive. This is, where deceptive strategies would lose out to honest ones.
Slightly different perspective: facts are completely unimportant, because:
- what seems like a fact may not be a "fact" at all, it may be a misunderstanding
- knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don't know the facts you don't know
If certain truths are probable, the facts known today (or perceived as knowable today) should not get in the way of exploring them.
Do not let any fact or a collection of facts get in the way of your exploration of the truth.
If one is extremely conservative, it may seem like a good idea to only stick to what is already known (i.e. the "facts") but even then, because of the fact that you can never be sure that everything there is to know is known at this time, one should still keep an open mind.
I doubt I'll read it because I think it will bore me to death... knowing the fact what George Soros' "Open Society" comes from his work and judging from their actions, the whole doctrine seems to be against exploring potential truths in different ways and having a new form of monotheism which is strictly imposed on the entire world. I believe that is not only extremely dumb but also extremely dangerous. If it succeeds, I believe it will set back humanity by thousands of years, if not more. In the past, monotheistic religions have had limited control over the masses. They were limited to certain geo-political boundries, so the people outside of those could rescue the people tied too much into them (or they could rescue themselves by learning from what happens outside). If the entire world is held hostage to one central ideology, even if it is the "best" of our time, we may never recover from the "local maxima" that it will create.
We need a healthy plurality of world views and the freedom to live them. That is the correct point of view, both from a moral and a consequentialist perspective. If we have a global monoculture then any flaw in that might doom the whole of humanity, instead of just a part of it.
The entirety of the scientific method's pursuit of truth is built on Popper's philosophy of science and inquiry and has been highly effective at establishing objective truth.
It's kinda funny because you're making conjectures that are explicitly addressed in the book.
Imagine two friends, Alice and Bob. Alice thinks COVID is not a problem. Doesn't mask, hasn't had a single shot, all the rest. Bob is terrified of COVID. Masks up at home, space bubble helmet outside, all the rest.
The only outcome that works is Alice and Bob agreeing that they have different risk preferences. That they each should live their lives in accordance, but that they have no right to force each other to adopt the same behaviors. Bob gets used to doing a lot of stuff over Zoom, and Alice gets used to doing a lot more Zoom calls than she did before.
What if, instead, Bob tries to force the entire world to wear masks all the time, and undergo an endless stream of boosters, all in order to satisfy his risk preference? Alice will respond in-kind, and now we're in a tit-for-tat situation. Endless retaliation.
Now, imagine that Bob has political power, and can mandate his desires into law. Bob has now used deadly force -- the police -- to coerce Alice into doing what he wants.
Alice, being a big fan of consent, is having none of it... and that's where we are today.
What if Bob is afraid of other people firing their guns in their backyard because he doesn't want to get killed by stray bullets. It just doesn't work anymore because the risk Alice and Bob are taking depends more on what other people do than what they themselves do. After all Bob isn't gonna kill himself with a stray bullet. Bob not shooting guns but Alice shooting guns while pointing in Bob's house direction doesn't solve the problem.
Anybody unable to grasp the difference between "virus with a sub-1% mortality rate for healthy working-age adults" and "inbound suppressive fire" does not get a seat at the risk-discussion table.
Thank you for your example of how to mislead with non-factual strawmen. This example might be connected to reality if:
1. There actually was a law requiring individuals "wear masks all the time".
2. There actually was a law requiring individuals to get an "endless stream of boosters".
3. Alice respected the boundaries of private businesses that made wearing respiratory protection or vaccination a requirement of associating with them.
4. Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection, rather than violating their personal space or perhaps even assaulting them.
5. Alice paid the costs of her own healthcare, and/or her "insurance" company were efficient enough to charge for her expected increased costs.
6. Healthcare providers were able to freely disassociate with Alice as to not have an undue burden on their resources due to the results of Alice's choices.
7. Alice displayed rational recognition of the scientific and legal realities she was dealing with, rather that irrational rejection of such.
8. Alice displayed some understanding of historical precedents, as pandemics are infrequent events that only appear novel.
I'm a libertarian, so if you want to discuss practical ways of making it so that different value judgements can coexist, I'm all for it. It starts with acknowledging the existing non-independence like the points I listed, and will generally be about nuanced corrections to the medical consensus rather than wholesale rejection. But really, it's fallacious to frame the larger situation as being about individual freedom when the overriding characteristic is political herd behavior. What has really happened is an abrupt change in prevailing conditions, combined with professional political machines preaching simplistic easy answers that play to peoples' biases.
>Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection,
I've found that a lot of people think of the masks like a gas mask - supposed to keep everything bad out. They are more like the breath guard at the salad bar - keeping you from exhaling droplets six feet in front of you.
Bob's mask protects Alice more than it protects Bob.
If you're still making do with an ersatz cloth mask, sure. I've been wearing a P100 from the start of the pandemic. Both bowls of political Kool Aid are actively harmful - framing PPE as being about protecting others has also damaged the discourse.
Edit: also, I do agree that keeping stuff out of the air is preferable to filtering it after the fact (especially with mucous membranes etc). This concern is addressed somewhat by (3), and also by the additional point that Alice needs to demonstrate empathy of understanding and respecting Bob's choice as well.
I had them before the pandemic, but I've seen them in stock quite regularly. Zoro appears to have my 3M 7503 half-face piece and 2297 filters in stock right now. For welding you might want a proper vapor filter though (60921?). 3M has some nice pdfs that list all the different options.
For pandemic usage when I need to filter my exhale, I disabled the check valves by popping the mask apart, removing all 3 valve flaps, and sealing up the output hole. This makes air flow through the filters bidirectionally. I've also seen a 3d-printed adapter for the 6100 series (I think) that attaches a third filter to the output. Separate input and output filters is probably a better way to go.
Haha, yes it is. They're the customer-facing brand of Grainger so they've got everything. Their search is okay and some of their product data can be lacking, but their selection is massive. As I alluded to, it's often worth it to go find the manufacturer's pdf catalog and then search by part numbers.
Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.
I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.