People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology that was never before available in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and desktop publishing software.
Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.
> because authorities time and time again have misled them.
I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation.
When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station.
When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods.
When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome.
The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls...
Which erodes trust in authorities.
And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.
> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong.
A bit of a tangent, but polls don't make predictions, people make predictions based on the polling data. Some people predicted Hillary with 99% chance, and 538 predicted Hillary with 66% chance. When dealing with probabilities it's not as simple as "wrong" or "not", but if people were betting then those that bet 99% would have lost a lot of money, and 538 only a little. As a result I trust 538 a lot more now; that's the nice thing about people making specific predictions, you can over time learn who to trust.
Anyhow this tangent ultimately agrees with your point, as you and I know that if a talking head makes a "99%" prediction, it's got at best an 80% chance of actually happening.
How can you objectively say that 538 was right or not?
They use numbers to come up with probabilities, but there are a lot of baked-in assumptions about things like turnout, various sampling errors or biases, etc.
They have reasons for their assumptions, such as using information from previous elections. But the current election may violate those assumptions, but it's hard to say how much and with what probability.
I trust 538 for the most part. But it's just models and those models have assumptions and it's quite possible the assumptions were just wrong in 2016. We only have one data point, so we'll never really know.
You can’t over one poll. It’s really consistency that you’re looking for over many, many polls.
The worst part of figuring out the trustworthiness of a source is putting in the time and effort to comb over all of its output and comparing it to reality, an effort that can take a long time.
Which lends me to ask: how can you say that you trust 538 if you also say there is only one data point? Because there shouldn’t be: 538 made big news during the election of 2008. 538 has been around since 2008 so you should have a lot of polling predictions to comb over.
I actually don’t have an opinion of 538 as I haven’t put in that work.
Doesn't this only works if an election has two possible outcomes? Revotes and voids are possible as well in most cases. In 2022 these things somehow feel like they're much more likely than before...
Those are the raw data from polls (an estimate of the popular vote), not the predictions from them ("who will win" - which is what the original commenter refers to).
> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out
I.e. a couple weeks before James Comey announced a reopening of the investigation into the email issue?
I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data, but I think this is a bad example because the "facts" on the ground changed significantly in the time period.
> I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data
I did not say this.
I'm illustrating the original poster's comment about these forecasts being guesses of likelihood.
Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself.
Yet I'm sure all of us knew folks who had opinions riding on the 85%+ forecasts, and then losing faith in the predictions as they wildly changed over the course of weeks.
As you say, "88% chance of winning" is not "expected to receive 88% of the vote".
The 538 model attempted to weigh the reliability (recency, reputation, magic pixie dust) of polling data and project a range of outcomes.
And even with a "perfect" model, it can take a while to absorb exogenous events like the Comey surprise.
The causes of 538's prediction error might be unknowable. Or, to be fair, if it was even an error! Would we expect probability to approach 100% in the moments before polling opens? Maybe in some fields, but 538 did not attempt this. IIRC they ended at ~70/30 Clinton. A single roll of a die (1d6) will frequently come up 1 or 2.
"Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself."
Why is that not an indictment of the model? Stuff happens in politics. Things change.
A month out you should ordinarily have much less certainty than a day before. But their predictions were the opposite, where certainty was falling. Sure, there can be reasons for that kind of inversion, but usually it's just arrogance and neglecting the long tail of black swans.
"FBI Director going rogue the week before the election" isn't something you could factor into a prediction because it just hadn't ever happened before. It'd be like trying to factor in "What if an asteroid hits Kansas the week before?"
By itself, that's unlikely. But the point of black swans is not that a particular thing will happen, but that there are zillions of low-probability events and they add up to a high probability.
>Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day:
It is funny seeing this here because it is a great example of how it is hard to fight misinformation.
What you said is technically correct but it is extremely misleading. There is no reason to use 538's projection a month out from the election when you could be using the one from the day of the election which had Clinton at 71%. You seem to have chosen the moment in which Clinton's odds were the highest to suggest the projection was wrong. Your comment is just as factual as if I said "538 was one of the few outlets that had Trump favored a few months before the election". That would also be technically true but it glosses over the fact that they only had Trump favored on a single day out of the several months they did projections.
Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538? Is this just run-of-the-mill bias? Is this an honest mistake? It this specific date chosen intentionally and your motive is just being misunderstood? There is no way for a third party to know the definitive answer to these questions, but if I was 538 I would certainly feel a little attacked by your comment and might jump to calling it misinformation.
A parent commenter stated projections from reputable outlets were "significantly lower than 99%." Given the original claim of "polls predicted a 99% chance," focusing on a reputable source's highest prediction lends credence to the statement.
That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well. It's not irrelevant (Oct. median was 85%), and calling my providing a link misinformation is pretty bizarre.
I suspect this is not the first time you've felt obliged to stick up for 538 but you're purely wielding a strawman in this case. I've expressed no judgement.
Anyway, we're talking about the general populace's sentiments around the predictions. Why would we possibly talk about the predictions made the day of the election – those numbers had done no work in shaping that sentiment.
>Given that comment train, wouldn't you focus on the moment they were at their highest? That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well.
No, because that 88% was basically a prediction of a prediction because as other people pointed out that occurred before news that changed the makeup of the race. You can't blame them for not knowing the news ahead of time.
It would be like if I predicted the Rams win the Superbowl this weekend, then we find out on Saturday that 10 players will miss the game due to Covid. I might then revise my prediction to the Bengals winning. If the Rams win wouldn't you say my prediction was wrong because of my final prediction? My initial prediction might have been right but that was made with less information and I revised that prediction once I got more information.
Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information. As they got more information their predictions became more accurate. It should be obvious that they weren't changing their model in a vacuum to push the odds towards Trump. More information was coming out that improved Trump's odds and the model reflected that.
And to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation. I used it as an example of why it is hard to categorize misinformation. Some might view your comment as misinformation and some might not. The only value judgement I made was that it is "extremely misleading" and I stand by the categorization regardless of the motive behind your comment.
>It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.
You were trying to correct someone who was defending the accuracy of the general industry predictions. If you were not directly criticizing 538, the criticism was certainly implied.
>> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?
Are you familiar with the concept of scare quotes? I specifically used quotes there to indicate that I was not directly calling your comment misinformation but was instead using that term with some detachment.
> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day
And the way statistics work, a 90% forecast is truly a 90% forecast - they weren't wrong with this. It's just people think 99% chance of winning basically means "they won". But that's not how it works. So the idea that these numbers are misinformation is incorrect, it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.
We're talking about metrics with objective definitions that are taught in schools around the country, not headlines like "The President is cancelling his trip to Africa because he hates black people". I don't know, seems like a huge difference to me...
No. If the media reports that the average salary is $50k/year that is not disinformation even if a lot of people will misinterpret it as meaning "most people make $50k/year" simply because they don't understand that an average is a measure of central tendency, not distribution.
Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.
If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.
It's ok to pass on accurate information that requires the public to put in the work to accurately understand it.
It is probably impossible to have the complex dialogue sufficient to inform people both intelligent and willing to put in the work in a way that is not apt to either be misunderstood accidentally or more frequently on purpose.
You're comparing apple and oranges. The 99% prediction[1] was based on the statistical significance calculated against the polling results, and was not the actual polling numbers suggested in the wiki that you linked.
I don't think any polls themselves gave odds, but I would say any aggregator that gave 99% odds was definitely wrong. Nate Silver gave about 70% odds, as did prediction markets - that is much more reasonable.
My own trust in authorities is eroded by more recent and basic things than your list of horrific things.
For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge of the country and there was never any accountability for the policy and military failures.
Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was just to run him down in the press for several years? If they didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for years?
Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change - we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too much to talk about stuff going wrong.
I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?
I'd even add basic things like the TSA to the list: the government says this is required for everyone to be safe, but every single study or analysis shows it is ineffective and security experts universally deride it; and yet, the "authority"--which might literally be the agent at the scanner with a smug attitude about the whole thing--is adamant this is important and that maybe you are a terrorist for nothing other than making a sarcastic joke about the situation.
My elderly parents were both submitted to full body pat downs and my dad had to pull up his pant leg to demonstrate that yes, his leg brace was a medical device.
Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.
Looking back on this comment, I probably should have included that this happened within the last month, as if we haven't had 20 years of practice figuring this out.
Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? ;P I will say that if everyone (including the agent at the gate who doesn't seem to want to admit this to even themselves) said that out loud--instead of claiming it was a critical security measure--it would make me feel a lot better about the whole thing and I might not even be upset about it anymore (though at that point you might also see the public opinion holding it together change).
> ...the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief.
Not exactly true, two important things intersect:
1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I struggle to get across to people as a small-government proponent, but the people in power physically cannot understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the pulling achieves. Most of them aren't even numerate and the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad incentives.
2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a different and much simpler creature from anything that turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to deal with that swing voter rather than do what the politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible results).
Governments are incentivized to do everything wrong at every level.
* Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from providing services that people want. They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
* Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever.
* Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its land, or its resources. They merely get to control the state for a short period of time. That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?
> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever
Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
> I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?
Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play between the two systems.
> Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they" meaning the government). The government earns money by demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you disagree?
> Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
> Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate executive is generally compensated with shares in the company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such incentive whatsoever.
I think it's more accurate to see the government's primary function as deciding who gets what sinecure, not accomplishing things. I would wager that's the historical norm.
Your list of failures, among others (homeless industrial complex), make much more sense through this light: they're all wealth transfers to political friends.
I think you and I blame different people for that.
I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame everyone else for their problems, demand instant results, get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about style over substance...
Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking heads.
Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have the power to take out a democratically elected president. To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.
My recollection is probably a bit off, but IIRC, the FBI knowingly and repeatedly lied to the FISA court ("material misstatements") in order to obtain secret search warrants to spy on the Tump campaign based on opposition research which was directly funded by the Clinton campaign, who had hired a former MI6 spook to find or make up dirt who also happened to be working for the bureau and was secretly leaking everything to the press! There were basically no consequences for anyone involved, including the FBI. I wouldn't believe that story line in a movie.
The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the civil rights movement.
That's certainly the Republican narrative of that FISA warrant. The inspector general report that found "material misstatements" found no evidence of politically-motivated or intentional abuse. It was basically technical sloppiness.
The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the Church Committee in the 70s.
That unclassified public NIE "summary" was manipulated by Bush and Cheney. If you can find the classified full NIE it has much more nuance and strong dissents. Instead of showing rogue agencies it's evidence of full White House control.
I would agree that the White House placed a ton of pressure on the CIA to come up with a justification to invade Iraq, but the whole thing smacks of them trying to cover their own asses after the fact. Yes, there were dissenting opinions, but the IC still signed off on the NIE, including the summary, and top officials at the CIA have their share of the blame as much as Bush and Cheney:
> On the other hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002 “fact sheet” on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the charge in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would become notorious as the “16 Words.”
If they knew it was a lie, and repeated that lie to Congress, pawning it off as just 'Bush lied, people died' (which, not saying that was your position, but that's what your comment initially came off as, hence my reply) absolves the CIA of the blame they justly deserve for their part in Iraq. But you're right that they certainly were not a rogue agency.
>> To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.
Your certitude here is making you look quite ignorant of history.
In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[28][29] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".[30]
The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment, and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't control the intelligence services, the legislative branch doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence services have their own secret courts. There is no sense in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how they spend their budgets
They also have the power to take out a democratically elected president. For instance, they could've published the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or Trump's cabinet to remove him.
The intelligence services are a perfect example of the unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who violate American rights and ignore the law. They are incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they outmatch on paper.
Intelligent services have been abused by presidents many times but there is no credible evidence that they act in opposition to a sitting president. Obama's FBI issued the Trump campaign FISA warrants but Trump installed his own people at the CIA/DOJ/FBI etc. The closest rogue agents against Trump were the whistleblowers like Colonel Vindman that were mostly rooted out and attacked relentlessly to discredit them.
A note on Afghanistan, the military started the war paying farmers to stop growing poppy in an attempt to defund the Taliban. The next season farmers planted more, expecting to be paid to burn thier crops again. No dice. Crop production ramped up, flooding the market with Heroine and subsequently rounding out the pain pill opiate crisis in the US with a swell of Afghanny (circuitously routed through south American drug Lords) heroine. And the Taliban got funding for decades. Now the media is aghast at how much regular people hate the government now. Trump support is just a big fat middle finger to an inept establishment that currently has it's pants down around it's ankles.
I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?"
The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration necessary.
All the stage setting for them Kyiv on Trump's watch. If Trump had won a second term it would still have happened. We ascribe entirely too much power to the office of the President sometimes.
And stage for that was set by those laughable red lines in Syria. Remember that?
US resolve is non existent that much is true. It has little to do with Trump or Biden for that matter. When Obama let Assad use gas Putin took notice, everything else comes from that.
About Afghanistan.. it was not the withdrawal it was the laughable way it was done. Abandoning Bagram.. what dumbfuck thought of that? We DO know what idiot approved it though.
It is clear Russia is taking advantage of Biden's fear of military action. China, North Korea, Iran all have been more aggressive. The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone the impression America will back down.
Trump kept everyone off balance.
> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way.
And it sounds like you're confusing them here. "Sometimes chance comes out that way" is something that applies to aleatoric probabilities. But major elections are not uncertain in an aleatoric sense; they are uncertain in an epistemic sense, and the polls were correct to worry about why they were wrong.
you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong
I mean, sure, if you don't think pollsters have any responsibility for due diligence. The polls were an accurate representation of what people were willing to admit to planning and doing, but a lot of people weren't willing to say they were voting for Trump. Popular culture and media spent months telling those people they were isolated deplorables who had no chance, but in the voting booth nobody can shame you. Asking people over the phone whether they were going to vote for Trump was like asking them if they liked being spanked in bed.
One thing to think about here is that US electoral system practically counts different peoples votes differently. A voter in Georgia mattered a lot more than a voter in California or Wyoming. Small polling errors in either state are inconsequential, but hugely consequential in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Lots of polls are national polls, not state polls too. As it happens, the average of national polls predicted the vote totals overall very well. But that doesn't matter. Because it still came down to a few thousands of voters in a handful of states.
Right now the press is fuelling a frenzy over Russian troops, trumpeting "eminent war!!" daily. It is rediculius, completely unfounded, incendiary, false, and just plain dumb...but clicks matter.
Russia has has something 130,000 troops positioned just outside Ukraine's borders and in Belarus. They have tanks, missile systems, amphibious landing ships, medical units, established supply lines, etc.
They actually invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea.
I mean, the possibility of an invasion is not exactly far-fetched.
>you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong
They were wrong though, multiple key polls in battleground states were far outside their margin of error, indicating methodology failures or bias. As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.
I also don't think anyone needs to misrepresent research and science, since huge swathes of it are fraudulent anyway. From the reproducibility crisis to outright fraud and lies, trusted institutions have been desecrating their reputation for years.
The CDC now enjoys a trust rating around 50%, because of incompetence and lies. News media is worse, because they lie more than they tell the truth.
That poll has it 47% to 43% Clinton when the actual results were 48.2% to 46.1% Clinton. The only real discrepancy is they overestimated the vote totals for 3rd party candidates. The numbers they had when excluding 3rd parties was 49% to 46% Clinton. Do some blending of those two and they basically nailed it. Is this really the poll you want to call out as fundamentally flawed?
>As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.
Your link says 2.5% margin of error and not statistically significant. What am I missing? Ironically the comment appears to be misinformation.
>Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support
you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not, etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications, titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other.
that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about.
that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.
I would also like to add to your point that there's a delusion that tech can moderate a couple billion people.
In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they aren't working.
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
No, that's wrong model.
Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.
What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.
> That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology
Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way.
You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available.
There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable.
What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.
>> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
> No, that's wrong model.
> Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.
> What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.
I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.
What's changed is our ability to detect authorities are lying to us. It's higher than it's ever been. That erodes trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to us.
Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.
With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view.
Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.
To a great extent you have to and with some regularity. Anyone who spends or accepts currency as payment is exercising some trust in the government and the authorities who manage the financial system. When Kennedy told the country about the Cuban missile crisis, the country had to believe he was largely telling the truth about the situation, etc.
Trust isn't necessary at all when faced with a behemoth that can and will crush you without noticing or caring. "Going along to get along" has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with survival.
Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.
Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed.
Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.
>Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.
Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1].
Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s
N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.
>It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.
Are you claiming that I set up and knocked down a strawman? Please do elucidate. This should be interesting.
Sure. I don't actually know a plumber who wants to perform coronary bypass surgery on me. In fact, I don't require such surgery, at least not at the moment.
My comment was more "reductio ad absurdum"[0] to make the point rather than a strawman.
And that point being that "expertise is not an illusion" in many cases.
While it's true that there are folks who claim to know some things better than other folks, there are many areas (like medicine and a variety of other fields) where credentialed expertise is not only valid, but essential.
My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.
Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work.
The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.
> The only thing special that the Chinese have done
I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree.
This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."
I’m talking about the government banning unapproved narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These controls exist currently in China but not in the United States.
I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:
People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
I am not at all saying that authority can be depoliticized, I am simply pointing out that the underlying politics are what guides adherence to or rejection of a particular authority, depending on whether the authority's politics are in alignment with the recipient's or not. So I feel that statement that 'people just don't trust authority anymore' is not accurate, as people seem perfectly willing, in fact sometimes overly-willing to trust authority, with the caveat being that that authority must align with them politically.
To clarify: I am talking about the reception of authority, not the innate linkage of authority itself to the authority figure's politics, but the linkage of the authority figure's politics to the politics of the people deciding whether to be receptive or not to that authority.
> I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:
> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe.
Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1].
The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority.
>> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
> This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority.
Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.
"People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that."
Far more complicated than this, sorry. I agree with that observation if you gleen your evidence from portrayals in the media...and to some extent this is true but the populist power base in aggregate is far smarter and more purposed than this. What you described in the above quote could also be attributed to flatly thumbing their noses at the evidence because they want a certain outcome and they know they can get it by chaos. You create chaos by appearing to believe outrageous bullshit and acting on it within an approved political arena. It's protected chaotic behavior that serves the populist agenda.
Take the Supreme Court judges and how their rulings, and take issues that you can assume.
For atleast some of the judges, one can clearly have predicted how they would have voted. The justices might have just taken a vacation on the beach and just call in the vote...
This seems like accelerationism, not a solution to CDC’s issues.
No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust problems aren’t fixed by political stance (eg. Trump advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government, anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks the left in these characteristics. And pro-conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts simply won’t break through to some people.
The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. It:
- failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first weeks,
- failed to allow many US labs to import and work with COVID samples, and
- has continuously given dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple.
They didn’t trust Americans to say that “masks might work, but we want to reserve the best masks for medical workers and those at highest risk of death”. Michael Lewis had a book which describes how the CDC and FDA are simply too risk averse as the pandemic started (and before). They were unable and unwilling to change.
Also, the problem I see isn’t that the CDC doesn’t hire conservatives. It’s more that conservatives don’t enter lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism, science, art are dominated by liberals because conservatives don’t encourage their kids into those fields because modern conservatives don’t value these jobs. That and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It’s hard to be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a Young Earth Creationist). It’s hard to retain a literal interpretation of the Bible after learning about other religions and myth stories.
> The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics.
Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them.
I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.
> They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.
It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.)
The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.
That's a fair point, but they don't have to compromise the truth. "The science we have says to do X, but if you can't do that at the very least do Y and here is the outcome you can expect as a result of failing to X"
Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people.
That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.
It's pretty much all the same to the unwashed "Trump Supporter." There is a populist movement in America that is somehow being missed for what it is. The populists will use and discard politicians on a whim. Whoever is perceived to piss on the establishment the most will curry favor and be elected at that moment.
This is what Roger Stone and Steve Bannon we're looking to do with Trump. Slam dunk.
This all arises from deep, deep mistrust and a perceived lack of representation on the part of the establishment toward the unwashed.
Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like Marcuse and
Derrida.
"As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the circumference of
the shadows surrounding it. That is not an endorsement of ignorance,
but a warning that our philosophy and socio-politics must expand in
proportion to our technologies."
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth.
I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue.
>Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis.
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists".
Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab. The Chinese authorities certainly didn't release any more data, the only thing that changed was the presidential administration. How can this be explained? Why would the “authorities” try to initially divert attention from the evidence pointing to a lab leak from China?
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the perception that the "authorities" have a different set of values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.
That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.
> That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.
Yeah, but it's important to emphasize the values aspect, because I think that's where the emotional energy comes from. IMHO, that energy is fuzzy, resentment against one authority in one area transfers to a different authority in a different area, just as long as they're perceived being alike in some vague way. For instance, I don't think there'd be so much distrust over COVID response if there hadn't already been a bitter culture war where medical authorities sometimes take sides.
Authorities, moderation, and the mistrust of both are nothing new. The modernity crisis is that we can't trust our instincts any more about what's a centralized authority, what's an individual, what's a moderated environment, and what's a public square. There were always battle lines to contemplate, but now the front line is everywhere.
There was a brief window during the latter bit of the 20th century and early 2020s during which public trust in the media and academia were relatively high. The relevant factor as far as I can tell were that these institutions aspired toward neutrality and objectivity (someone will predictably miss the distinction between aspired toward and successfully delivered 100% of the time, but hopefully the rest of us can enjoy a fruitful discussion). It really feels like there was a significant shift in these fields away from integrity and toward activism in the most recent couple of decades, and that this is driving mistrust (and consequently causing people to feel around through the fog for more reliable institutions, often unsuccessfully).
I can't bring myself to subscribe to (2) for a variety of reasons.
1. The post-2010 media has been as consolidated as it ever has been--around coastal elite / woke left ideologies and Democratic activism (I say this having only ever voted Democrat in POTUS elections for whatever that's worth). Granted, social media provides a diversity of opinions--even still, there are other factors.
2. The post-2010 media unanimously and widely publishes high-profile, objective, and trivially verifiable falsehoods (a few from memory): characterizing the Google Memo as an "anti-diversity screed", the coverage of the Nicolas Sandman still photo, the coverage of the Rittenhouse saga, the coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, etc. Note that all of these errors support the same woke left viewpoints (as opposed to random errors). There's also a long tail of more subjective issues ("why does the media keep bringing up racial disparities in police shootings without exploring obvious follow-on questions?").
3. The post-2010 media landscape includes reporters and entire publications who rather proudly consider themselves activists, who insert themselves into their stories, and who loudly broadcast their biases (typically woke-left biases) on social media. This is a stark departure from the 20th century journalistic ethos.
4. The academic fields which became openly activist have similarly experienced a degradation in public trust, while the more objective fields have retained much more trust. This mirrors what we're seeing in the media.
All of this seems to boil down to a failure to pursue neutrality in my view.
I suspect the tight 20th century Overton window was a result of 20th century epistemological institutions' pursuit of neutrality. The institutions were much more fact-based and opinions began to converge around facts.
That may be true in a non-general sense. There are many people that take the time to research and learn the truth, and there are probably a number of people that prefer to just go with the flow of their peers. I really couldn't tell you what the split is, but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group.
> There are many people that take the time to research
Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out.
Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore.
And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.
Let's take this even farther. Let's say I'm going to do "research" correctly (at least how I would interpret it)
So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc.
At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.
Maybe a difference is, back in my parents' generation's time, nobody was willing to publish crackpots and quacks, but today, literally anyone can create a YouTube channel, and build viewers. Modern platforms exercise very little editorial control, and are willing to publish anything. So, the dry, boring experts are getting drowned out by popular Joe Rogans.
That's just the promise of the internet isn't it? If YouTube didn't exist, I'm sure joerogan.com would be more popular than some university professors website.
I'm not sure many or even a handful of people really research. I feel the many go to youtube to be told by their favorite talking head how to feel or rationalize a subject. That is not "research".
I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust.
That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me.
People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist.
I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters.
Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
I think it’s a little more complicated than your wording.
We don’t go all the way to first principles on every topic, so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We tend to trust people like us. When there were still gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by engagement-focused algorithms.
Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities. Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly trusted in recent years.
> Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they
Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not secondary.
Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems likely many people aren't learning the lesson about institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the institutions themselves.
Wouldn't it be more like a crisis of post-modernity? They say high modernism and all that 20th century stuff is behind us.
People never trusted authorities outside of the first world. The Western governments were hiding their true nature much better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit the same problems people living outside of it are used to. Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy for a century.
Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong to and support them. Typically your government is your worst enemy, not some foreign dictator.
Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive you to extinction.
There is no such thing as "more good" more "more evil", simply "existing to survive" - but there is an absolute binary of freedom vs. non-freedom? There is no such thing as moderation(pragmatism) in policy? There is no power(government?) except those trying to demoralize and exploit you to extinction?
Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
>Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we really have no idea what they are blathering on about.
Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able] assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well.
To quote a terrible movie[0], in the case of the comment you're replying to "the only winning move is not to play." IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc.
Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident?
I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."
> At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.
Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.
I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess.
That's in an environment where people demand simple and concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for something and receive a full service for it has become the norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a result, services and the information on cutting edge are not spotless.
> I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess.
the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks actually do anything or not, this was deliberate misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen people on this very website admit that they are aware of this fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although they were deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So With Righteous Intentions, So It's Okay.
once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the Authority says going forward is the Truth?
I don't talk about authority at all, that doesn't interests me. Just to be sure, by authority I mean people who hold authority over something due to their appointment.
For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our right wingers often import American propaganda and it's death giveaway when they start talking about something that some American politician like dr. Fauci said.
In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In fact, the health ministry showed better than the average competence and just as they start building some trust, they were exposed to be lying shamelessly.
Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere.
Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation happens when people try to digest very complex information beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person who is actually in control of the complex information tries to simplify things to the layman.
If physics were more mainstream, we would have people misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those. It's just that those people are not marching on the streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build around layman misunderstanding things and building alternative realities over oversimplified scientific topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and when they speak publicly they commit the sin of oversimplifications and best guesses presented as clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the universe.
I don't think so, they usually follow local spiritual leaders. That's why no issue is ever resolved by their authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the time.
There are some glaring counter examples to your assertion.
The Catholic Church is the largest sect of Christianity, the largest religion. Protestantism (typically a smaller, more local organization) is actually a smaller branch, but has many megachurches.
I don't agree, unless your definition of modernity is the set of unfounded and unvalidated beliefs that have been largely imposed on people against their will for the last 100 or so years.
I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on power and control… and reality for that matter. They reject reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural order and life, and it will always fail eventually.
It's terrifying, the only thing that can combat this is to win at a critical thinking cat and mouse, that will become ever more in the favour of propagandists.
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning.
See:
“Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study”
Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls the information.
Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument is simply over who gets the power to do it.
"Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible. You can vote on it, you can form a temporarily consensus, you can elect people to make a decision for the community, but at the end its about convincing people through discussions. Naturally there exist edge cases where the conclusion is close to 99.9% determined from the beginning, like with spam and malware, and at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong).
Remove the discussion and give the power to decide what is truth to a company and what you get is the consensus within that company. Naturally that won't be fair, reproducible or representative. Give the power to governments and you get similar results, just with more police and military, through with the slight bonus of people being at least being elected. Still a pretty pointless exercise unless discussion and transparency exist.
> ...at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong).
> "Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible.
Wikipedia is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to (Western) epistemology. On one hand, it's a totally free and relatively up to date encyclopedia of incredible scope. On the other hand, it's a platform for political propaganda masquerading as Undeniable Truth.
I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about misinformation in an article that has value to special interest groups with media leverage.
For example, the headline picture is from a normal prison in Xinjiang that houses convicted criminals of various Chinese ethnicities, not a "Uyghur Concentration Camp". Yet it is misused as representation of "Uyghur Genocide"?
The good thing about Wikipedia in this case is that it cites sources for every single claim. There are 502 citations on that page. So even if it's inaccurate, it is inaccurate in a way that the reader can assess, whereas the alternative way to find out about that conflict is through single news articles (ie. most of the citations are news articles, but it's like a longitudinal reference point of ALL news articles about the topic).
Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it.
Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues.
I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels (allegedly)
It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".
It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against.
It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs.
Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign.
And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?
> While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".
Why do people say “there is no evidence of X” to mean “the evidence that has been presented of X is not sufficient to make me believe that X is more likely than not to be true.”
I mean, I get that it sounds stronger to an audience that has no exposure whatsoever to the debate, but to otherwise it seems mostly to be credibility-killing.
When people say "there is no evidence of genocide", they mean it in a legal sense. No legal definition of genocide applies to China's domestic policies in Xinjiang. The UN and US government both agree on this point; they don't pretend to prosecute China for something they know they can't prove in an international court.
But that's not the point. USG doesn't give a single F--- about distant Muslims, much less Chinese Muslims.
The propaganda effect is the point. And Wikipedia is an important tool for that.
> When people say "there is no evidence of genocide", they mean it in a legal sense. No legal definition of genocide applies to China's domestic policies in Xinjiang.
Evidence has been provided specifically to the internationally accepted legal definition of genocide. [0] If that doesn't convince you, that's fine, but there is not “no evidence”.
Are you referring to when far right racist Adrian Zenz horribly misinterpreted some official Chinese government documents to make his case for "forced birthrate suppression"?
Please link this "evidence". The actual primary evidence.
Well, I feel your frustration. Indeed the English Wikipedia isn't immune from Systemic (western-anglo) Bias, as one would expect, and there's no one denying that within the community, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
> And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?
Please don't stoop to childish insults. While a mountain of headlines might appease your fifth grade teacher, it is not a substitute for primary evidence in a rational debate.
If you have primary evidence of this alleged massive atrocity, please share it. Otherwise, I am done engaging with you.
lol two of the sources are literally post graduate level efforts, ironic given your fifth grade teacher comment.
You don't know what primary evidence means. I've linked several sources that include indisputable, concrete evidence, including verified CCP documents, as well as eye witness, first party testimony that maintains consistency across accounts from entirely different people.
Describe evidence sufficient to your standards and provide rebuttals to the evidence provided. I know you can't and won't do either of these things, I'm just explicitly demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty you're employing to minimize the horrors of the CCP.
Your contentions don't hold up to even the most basic scrutiny or challenge.
You can personally challenge that very photo on Wikipedia. You can edit it out with a convincing argument that it's being misrepresented. You even have a citation; you can argue that the citation itself shouldn't be trusted and give a good reason why!
And mods there will listen to well crafted arguments, and commonly do.
They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects.
> They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects.
"Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
Indeed, when one side argues for dialogue, human rights, cooperation, peace and maybe a bit of socialism, and the other side argues for kicking immigrants, building an ethno-state where anything manufactured on foreign soil is heavily taxed, and the poor are left to starve to death, the middle ground really isn't the right answer. Middle grounds are rarely conducive to any intellectually honest discussion and this can clearly be seen in American politics: where the GOP has been sliding more and more into the right, the Democrats have followed, trying to capture the moderate Republicans that don't agree with the new "extreme" GOP.
There aren't only "two sides", as much as American conditioning may have you believe. And if you want true representativity, you get problems like this: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182
> They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum
Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it like that is a very US-centric way of going about it.
Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics should really take a stroll trough the self-declared conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which features some of the most delusional content I've seen on the web.
>They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects.
Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might be?
In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal representation."
In a broader context, "equal representation" would include the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz, actual Nazis, etc.)
There are examples of parties from the broader political spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party, American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.). Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party system.
Pretending that the major US political parties represent the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at best, and willful deception at worst.
I think the root problem is that Wikipedia was created by a couple of Objectivists and they projected that philosophy (belief in a universal Reason) onto its structure.
Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia.
The real world doesn't work like that.
Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive topics.
If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering) rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
I feel like the line between Wikipedia and Objectivism is a bit of a stretch.
The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world.
I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify.
I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?
> The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy.
On the contrary, I think the belief in a universal Reason is the root what makes it a ridiculous ideology. Way to go putting a postmodern veneer on Plato.
> Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something.
This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.
I find on Facebook these days I often have to use some substitute Unicode characters and obscure out words in pictures if I want my post to be seen by my own friends. Even if it's a scientific, reputable piece of content, all it takes is a word like "COVID" or "election" to trigger their censorship system and my post doesn't show up in their newsfeeds.
I'm tired of this censorship bullshit where companies play gatekeeper between me and my own friends. Even WeChat in China doesn't censor this much. Almost always if I post something on WeChat my friends see it in their feeds within seconds. But on Facebook, nope. Their algo stands in-between and decides whether or not it should be censored from each friend.
> all it takes is a word like "COVID" or "election" to trigger their censorship system
I can count multiple posts on my newsfeed in the last 48 hours on both topics, for better and worse.
Whatever it takes to have something cross a threshold where it doesn't show in newsfeeds, it's definitely something more than words like "covid" or "election."
But for friends, if I mutually added someone as a friend, I want to see 100% of their content by default, with an option to mute their content if they get annoying.
I don't want an algorithm deciding this for me.
I have COVID experts in my friend circle and I most certainly want to see 100% of their posts, for example.
> But for friends, if I mutually added someone as a friend, I want to see 100% of their content by default, with an option to mute their content if they get annoying.
Facebook very deliberately removed the option to get a raw feed, and a lot of people have never forgiven them for it. All sorts of totally mundane stuff you post won't get seen.
I'm sympathetic to the problems of algorithms mediating what's seen; I'm often annoyed at the ways feeds are put together myself. I'm especially annoyed that the former feature enabling you to look at a feed of specific lists of friends seems to have fallen by the wayside.
That's distinct from the issue of whether FB is systematically demoting / hiding posts by keyword, and there's evidence that they're not doing it based off the keywords you specified.
I've also noticed some strange behavior based on those types of keywords on Facebook as well, but there is something more than just the keyword itself. I believe there there is some sort of user reputation rating or other algorithmic factor (or maybe even their own friends reporting the content) -- because certain people on my feed get demoted faster than others.
Unfortunately unless the algorithm is disclosed to the public (IMO it should) nobody will know with certainty.
Find a service that provides this for you, or build that service yourself. At the very least, you'll discover why no existing service provides this.
"I want" doesn't translate directly into value for everyone. Heck, it's fairly rare for you to even know what you actually want.
I do grow weary of the constant, "But I want it!" attitude that seems pervasive on the Internet. You aren't entitled to the perfect-for-you feed from Facebook.
The fact that the policy is not fully disclosed is, in itself, not OK.
And no, I don't care that disclosing specific moderation rules "helps the bad guys." That's another pernicious modern trope, and another example of online services confusing their problem with my problem.
It doesn't even take that. If Facebook doesn't want you to see somebody's updates, you'll never see anything from them.
It really likes to show covid stuff though, since that drives their engagement and advertising bits. You have to click an extra button to see the post in the end, but you're still notified that the post exists
its about so much more than simple censorship, they also more heavily push certain information to certain people… this kind of thing can influence where you shop, who you’re friends with, and who you vote for… and most people aren’t even conscious of it… this kind of opaque algorithmic feed should be illegal
Just like the last couple of years have turned us all into amateur epidemiologists, the last handful of years have turned us all into amateur epistemologists. The very foundations of how we as a society collectively decide on what reality is, have come under an adversarial attack. So now we're living through the societal equivalent of realizing that we've been storing passwords in plaintext and have been hacked. We're trying to minimize the damage and fallout, and stop the damage from happening further, all the while trying (and failing) to invent a set of best practices to prevent this from happening again.
> So now we're living through the societal equivalent of realizing that we've been storing passwords in plaintext and have been hacked.
Or perhaps, we see everyone else around us has their passwords in plain text, but we haven’t yet checked our own.
It’s easy to call out low hanging fruit like QAnon or /r/superstonk but harder to personally introspect which major, identity-defining beliefs that I have can be attributed to the global hive mind, and in which ways that made me subject to strange influence by motivated actors.
This is why I rotate my social media/news consumption habits every couple of months. I go from right to left, select a particular bubble to wade into for a while. Then I stop. Switching up your bubbles on purpose makes you more aware of them.
It helps that my political beliefs are unorthodox enough that I can agree with most groups about something, though.
Each community decides what is "fair" in that community. Each community "represents" a slice of people. People leave communities that don't seem fair to them, that don't make them feel represented.
TL;DR: Tribal people have mores. That's how tribes, people, and mores work.
It sucks that our Tribe can't be 7 billion people. It really does. But we should see it as a positive and a war of _benefit_ instead of a war of _ideas_. What _benefit_ does believing in QAnon offer? What _benefit_ does being apart of Group A have over Group B?
Each community is responsible for its own truths and policing them how they see fit. We should be arguing over how to make our _benefits_ better than theirs, not trying to force our ideologies onto them.
When that tribe has externalities to their behavior that harm members of my tribe, is when it gets rough. (I want you to stop putting mercury in my drinking water, endangering my drinking water with your oil pipeline, I want you to wear a mask to reduce my chance of infection, etc etc etc.)
100% agree. There is conflict between tribes and that something that I am not clear on how to fix as nothing other than violence seems to help ensure _my_ tribe doesn't get killed off.
In my perfect world, it is Mutually Assured Destruction between tribes that keeps us not putting mercury in any drinking water outside our own, etc. I know that isn't going to work but that is the most _fair_ to me.
My experience is new problems which look a lot like old problems are fairly common. And, in most cases, the solution to the new problem often ends up looking a lot like the solution to the old problem.
Our current best-worst solution to tribalism has been a small number of sovereign nations with large populations and democratically elected governments. Everyone admits the emergent qualities are suboptimal but they are still better than all the other options we've tried so far, as the saying goes. The solution to online tribalism is likely to look very similar.
Considering that the externalities of these internet-based tribes cross over into the physical world (such as the drinking water/oil pipeline examples above), I suspect this leads to a likely future where internet tribal communities end up overlapping with traditional national boundaries (eg, China's great firewall).
To be clear, this isn't the future I want but it's starting to seem like the most likely outcome. I admit my past optimism for a truly "open" internet is being tested these days. I don't want a closed internet anymore than I used to - but it might simply be the only practical option if society wants to continue functioning.
Sure, one tribe wants to live free of societal consequences, but they still want to participate in society.
Else every serious libertarian would actually go live alone and grow their own food. That doesn't happen. In reality, they go buy groceries alongside everyone else.
> It sucks that our Tribe can't be 7 billion people.
We've barely gotten to a stage where that is even considered a viable and realistic idea, just because it's not instantly a smashing success does not translate to an ultimate failure.
Particularly as many such big ideas had to go trough their "growing pains" before ultimately working out.
I don't have any data to back this up but my overall feeling/ideology is that we can't have groups larger than some number. I like Dunbar's number [1] as a rough guess but am more than happy to raise it to something like 100k if one were able to be convincing. But I do not see any path forward where we can get buy-in from 300 million people let alone 7 billion.
If we were to have a Tribe of 7 billion people, we would need to come up with "facts" that can be agreed upon by 7 billion people. We cannot get 7 billion people to agree that the earth is not flat. I don't have any hopes that we can get 7 billion people to agree on human rights or other things that can be described as "us vs them".
This may be my anarchist/extreme leftist ideologies that I personally hold bleeding into what I think is possible/should be done. I have a very hard time separating those feelings from "facts" and I think that makes this point even more clear!
> I don't have any data to back this up but my overall feeling/ideology is that we can't have groups larger than some number.
That goes contrary to my personal experience with a www that wasn't mainstream yet, but most certainly already had larger groups of people.
As tired and lame as it might sound, imho the biggest culprit is social media and what kind incentives it has set.
Social media does not thrive on facts and information, it thrives on emotions, but dry boring non-sensational headlines and information don't make people emotional.
What makes people emotional, and interact with your platform, are the crass headlines and claims, the dramatic stuff. So that's what gets pushed to people, and they react accordingly by liking it, and at that point it's already a self-reinforcing loop with increasingly more sensationalist and crass claims that constantly need to top each other to stay relevant.
It also directly affects what kind of content people contribute and most importantly how they do it; All the big "influencers" spend quite some time and effort in optimizing their content for that extra reach, along with that come certain behavior routines to sell the content, which then get normalized.
And because traditional media struggles to keep up with that, and stay relevant, they also get colored by this, not only by having made social media their new source of reporting, but also by making their own reporting more in line with these trends.
Too many just chasing the dopamine kicks from the "likes" and "karma", it feels like mass-hysteria that's steadily increasing in intensity.
I've heard the theory, and I find it compelling, that what binds large groups together isn't a shared set of facts but shared exploration of some great mystery. Not sure it's so much an upper number as that not everyone is interested in plumbing the same mysteries.
Plausibly true...but on large social media platforms, you could at least get slightly sane about how much scale matters. If I share videos / photos / captions of my great-grandsons enjoying a bubble bath with a few older in-laws...the Brain Police do NOT need to check what I say about COVID, or whether a 1-year-old boy's nipple can be seen through the bubbles. Vs. if some content is suddenly being viewed by thousands or millions of people - maybe that's where 99.9% of the fact-checkers and well-intentioned censors should be focusing.
And maybe show some humor about it. Say, tag the COVID-fiction stuff with "This content is cool and getting really popular, but it seems pretty weak in the Facts Dept. If you enjoy it, you might also want to check out Night of the Living Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Shadow of the Vampire, and The Andromeda Strain. Sign up for Horror Classics now, and get your first month free with discount code 'COVID'..."
This is well laid out, but it absolutely freaks me out that we even have to explain to very smart people why free expression of ideas is important. I know it's human nature to persecute, but I hate being reminded of it so often.
Bullshit.
In the beginning there was the word. Next there was the lie.
All throughout human history we’ve tried to figure out what actually is. The key component of that is figuring out what information we can trust.
We can never simply throw our hands in the air and say “it can’t be done” “it can’t be fair” or any othe cop out. We all do it every minute of every day. We can do it better, we must!
I can never find the Far Side that I want to find. There's one where one cave man is holding his hands up really far apart, and the other cave man is shaking his head in doubt, and it's captioned something like "Early fishermen"
Right! Surely people will trust us more if we ban them for saying that Covid-19 might have come from the Wuhan Virus research center, or that vaccinated people can get and spread covid, or that cloth masks are ineffective. Once we ban misinformation then trust in media will return.
>That just sounds like another strange all or nothing type measuring stick.
But yet that's what's happening. Trained virologists are getting strikes for daring to talk about things that aren't strict CDC narrative.
I think banning things like say ISIS recruitment and things that are dead pan, unarguably and immediately dangerous is tolerable censorship. Outside of that, it seems like a political tool.
I thought I had this figured out, and then you complicated it and messed me up.
Nobody is actually targeting misinformation. (How much are flat-earthers censored?) What they're actually targeting is speech we don't like. We might say "harmful" instead of "don't like", but I'm not sure how sharply that division can be drawn; if you don't like certain speech, you can find reasons to claim it is harmful.
And you could argue that the lab leak hypothesis was harmful. It was leading people to mistrust scientific experts at a time when they really needed to listen to experts, when not listening to experts was causing definite harm, including a lot of death. The lab leak hypothesis was also almost certainly false... until it wasn't, until it became at least reasonably plausible.
So I was all ready to say that it's just speech we don't like, and censoring speech because we don't like it is not an acceptable thing to do... and then you mentioned ISIS recruitment videos. That is speech I don't like. It's speech that is harmful. It's speech that probably contains a number of statements that are provably false.
So I'd really like to draw the line where the lab leak hypothesis is OK (even when almost everyone thought it was false), and ISIS recruitment videos are clearly censorable. But at the moment, I don't see how to do it, other than my intuition of what's OK and what's not. And my intuition doesn't work when someone other than me is doing the actual deciding.
Can anyone state a clear standard here? (The more objective, the better.)
>I think I made it clear up the chain that I don't doubt folks will get it wrong.
Right but I'm reading it like you don't seem to have a concern about accountability and how wrong these organizations are currently getting it. At what point do they get it so wrong so often, it's better for society that they stop trying. At what point does getting it so wrong so often turn from "curating misinformation" turn into "silencing political opposition."
I know this is over the top, but if 20% of death penalty cases were, "oops we got it wrong," it's time for them to stop trying to implement the death penalty.
The death penalty has the convenience of having very good other options and generally resources dedicated to a few events. Personally I see no reason for the death penalty considering the alternatives.
The examples shouldn't sound strange, as they all happened during the past two years. What is "misinformation" one day (complete with banning and shaming) is "fact" or "science" the next, and vice-versa.
The same is true for gore, porn, or other types of undesirable content, yet hardly anyone wishes to post on platforms that make no effort to control those.
There's an important distinction. The power to censor gore can't be used to gain undue influence over society and democratic process. The power to censor political speech can.
The founders didn't trust themselves with the power to censor political speech. The idea that such dangerous power should invested in unelected, unaccountable tech barons is, frankly, so absurd that I struggle to believe that anyone advocates it in good faith.
It's not though? Sure, there are edge cases (breastfeeding being labeled as porn, for example), but the vast majority of what is blocked as porn on major social networks is actually porn as understood by most people. That's not the case for most misinformation.
I'd argue against this. From the things that I see removed from those I follow on instagram, I would never label as porn. And then they loose their entire account based on extremely puritan value judgements.
Even if that's true, you can still moderate in a fair, reproducible and "representative" way, because the goals are different. In the case of NSFW content, the filtering can be opt-in: "don't show me this stuff, because I'd rather not see it". The point of moderating "misinformation" is not to let anybody see it, because you don't want them to see it.
platforms that has no content controls tend to give users the ability to perform content controls themselves. The Internet is a nice example where as a platform, undesirable content does not generally diminish the usefulness of the Internet. Few is leaving the Internet because there is too much gore and porn, nor is it desirable to have ISP censor the Internet in an effort to reduce gore and porn. If there is too much gore and porn, it better for the user to simply decide for themselves to not visit sites with gore and porn.
That isn't true though - you can police those in a fair, reproducible and representative way. Whether or how widely they ought to be policed or not is another question, but NSFW content filtering effectively never produces false negatives and really only produces false positives in rare cases.
Do you think? How about medical content? Or artistic content? Is nudity OK even if it's sexual, provided certain sex acts are not shown? Which sex acts and how graphically? There have been plenty of dust-ups over the years about what kinds of nudity should be allowed.
I don't think we can. What is (or isn't) revenge porn? Are we policing that effectively? Do people get in trouble for posting cute pictures of their kids in the tub?
We should get away from thinking that moderating perfectly is the goal. There is no way we could even decide what perfect moderation is, let alone carry it out. Our goal should be "mostly effective", or something like that.
Yep. Many of the social or content websites advertising as being "moderation free" don't seem to thrive or last very long, even though that tends to attract a specific type of crowd.
For the longest time they thrived and were considered the de-facto standard.
But the politicization of that whole field, trough FUD about "social bots" and "fake news", made that very difficult to keep up.
Case in point; Liveleak is now gone, with it at lot of content that's now hidden away in private archives of data hoarders.
Now, one can handwave that away as just a bunch of snuff and gore porn, but there was so much more there than that; Controversial livestreams that were deleted from the original platform also serve as evidence, war footage, all the things authorities and governments often don't want people to see.
Like footage from the Syrian civil war on YouTube; Google scrubbed massive amounts of that, possibly including evidence for war crimes [0]
By now it's reached a point where even documentaries about certain wars get an automatic age-lock from YouTube, the only way to watch those is to confirm your real identity with Google.
On that end the surface web has lost so much of its "bite", it hardly feels like the web anymore.
For example, things in the US have moving and TV ratings based on the type of content. People can opt-in to watching things at that rating level knowing the types of content in it. They can do it for themselves and their children. Some TV stations only have certain types of content and remove others.
With social networks some will say that certain types of content isn't for that network. It's the same idea.
What these channels and networks aren't doing is telling you what is misinformation or not. They aren't making truthy statements.
Modern social media is making truthy statements. booleans. Not about what content is allowed in the network but about what is true and not as a whole. That's different.
You are simply not allowed to show hardcore porn on broadcast TV. That said, standards were edging toward allowing more things until the FCC cracked down hard after the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl performance. This question is more political than you like to pretend.
This should be fairly obvious? There have been myriad occasions where we have collectively discovered that certain "facts" are not, in fact, facts at all.
Given that the reality of reality is beyond the grasp of certainty, a platform owner still is able to make choices about what is and is not acceptable within their community. This is well understood in indie game community management; nurturing nurturing communities involves removing bad actors, and making _subjective_ calls about whether people are acting in good or bad faith.
You're telling me that companies publishing information have to take an editorial stance on what they publish? I'm shocked!
More seriously, even though there's no "closed form" solution, it seems like each publisher can take a reasonable subset of what they can stomach. If "good information" is an amorphous, moving blob floating in a sea of "bad information" we can draw simple polygons that are more/less inclusive of "good information" while allowing more or less "bad information" to be included.
It is interesting, how the concept of misinformation is bound to time. Imagine 1 year ago, somebody would say:
"if you are vaccinated, you are still able to catch covid and spread covid", or
"cloth masks don't work", or even the first "misinformation" from the whole pandemic
"covid was leaked from a Lab in Wuhan"
All those 3 "misinformation" and many more were policed pretty hard until 2021.. Today 2022, they were either proved to be true or have high probability to be true.
> It is interesting, how the concept of misinformation is bound to time. Imagine 1 year ago, somebody would say: "covid was leaked from a Lab in Wuhan"...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and that once that proof was evident, it was then safe to assume it was no longer a case of disinformation.
Of course there are two sides to this: What if the 'covid leaked from a lab in Wuhan' datum was so angrily suppressed that the requisite extraordinary proofs were never unearthed, or worse, destroyed... then the probable truth may have never seen the light of the day. Thankfully, in this case, that didn't happen.
I was expecting a link to a paper that would be similar to results like in "On the impossibility of fairness" by Friedler et al.
This twitter thread seems defeatist and hand-wavy. The thread does have good intuitions in focusing on uncertainty and nuance. For example, the difference between asking questions and sealioning is hard to tell
Because of that, I agree that a perfect solution probably doesn't exist because of similar trade-offs like in the paper I mentioned, but doing more research at least lets us find out what we are trading-off and what we are willing to sacrifice.
It might be easier if we stopped considering twitter and instagram as suitable places to publish nuanced, serious stuff that was liable to misinterpretation and misrepresentation
Moderation/censorship/whatever you want to call it is a heavy-handed solution to a societal problem. The fact is that science isn't a linear process and the general consensus will flip all the time and this is normal. Coordinating a public health response while the science is still being conducted in real time necessitates some educated guesses which might be wrong. An effective response also requires adaptation in the face of new evidence.
All of this uncertainty is in direct opposition to how large groups of humans behave. There was a HN post recently using MSFT Azure as an example about why executive/C-level communication is so repetitive and basic; you simply can't announce something to a thousand people and expect them to understand context and nuance. The example there was that the execs zeroed in on new features above all else, resulting in tons of bugs. But trying to focus on both features and bugs was a lose-lose, people would find excuses to not do things using whichever focus was more convenient.
Executive Q&As at big companies are another example. I'm not sure why we still do them. It's simply not possible to have a deep dialogue in this environment. You wind up with disgruntled employees tossing up call-out questions, CEOs dodging any sort of concrete answer, and nobody walks away better informed. Let me be clear, I loved these at a smaller company where the CEO actually knew me personally, but they are a colossally cringe waste of time at a 2k+ person company.
The big platforms are also in direct opposition to one of the solutions to this problem, which is breaking down communication to small groups of people that actually know each other, and rationally discussing context and nuance is possible. Twitter is built around having the entire internet respond to a tweet. Of course this results in chaos.
Moderation is the only solution. It doesn't have to be balanced, as long as people stick around and keep using the service.
"The amount of energy needed to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
It can take ~15 minutes to create a Twitter post containing misinformation, but a team of fact checkers can invest hours/days/weeks into the post. The fact checkers research the topic and write a refutation that's well-sourced and hopefully as objective as possible. Meanwhile, there are 1,000 more posts freshly minted with exciting new misinformation.
You can't police society in a fair, reproducible, and representative way either, but how many people want to get rid of police entirely? Only a tiny fringe.
Sometimes the grossly imperfect solution is still an improvement on no solution at all.
"Don't bother policing misinformation" can't have methodological flaws the way moderating can, because it's just the absence of something. But ultimately what I think most people care about isn't soundness of methodology, but the results, and so the question you have to answer is: is a popular platform that makes no effort to control misinformation healthier for society than ones that do make that effort?
You have to revive a culture where truth is paramount. Unfortunately, I think a lot of cultures that value "truth" also tend to shoot down complexity in favor of simple, but wrong, "truths". For example, when it comes to complex topics like sex and gender, people tend to gravitate to either "There are only two sexes, a biological "fact" somewhere between, e.g. bimodal but overlapping distributions.
It's also good to remember that ideas like the heliocentric theory, the germ theory of disease, etc. would have been labeled as "misinformation" at one point in time. Now, they're the theories believed by the majority of people because that's where the best evidence points, which just goes to show that sometimes it takes hundreds of years for the best ideas to win. So I say let them fight.
The Cochrane review that was removed agrees with the authoritative sources that Instagram uses. This seems to be a case of misapplication of policy and doesn't support the OP's thesis that the policy itself is bad.
I would argue that the Cochrane Library itself should be considered an authoritative source, but again, that is a problem with application of policy rather than a problem with the policy itself.
This reminds me of something out of one of Neal Stephenson's latest fiction novels, Fall; or Dodge in Hell [0].
The concept of the "web" devolving into a deluge of information ranging from completely false to purely factual that's almost unusable without a moderator. In-universe, moderated streams are available by subscription/hire, with inexpensive "AI" or shared streams with little personalization, all the way up to dedicated moderators that act more like a personal assistant constantly monitoring and updating your personal feed.
It sadly seems like a highly prescient view of what our modern-day internet is becoming. It's taking longer and longer to review multiple takes on a subject to get a full picture and failing to put in that due-diligence makes it hard to shake that feeling that you're just falling into a party-line decision on a subject as more "news" outlets become highly polarized.
Some days I just have to "run dark" on news to get a breather, but then everything seems all the more overwhelming when I get back online and see what new mess has erupted in the news cycle.
Unrelated but how does one sign up "anonymously" to twitter these days? I tried one of my twilio phone numbers, one of which even worked with facebook but they're being rejected by twitter. Is there a way to sign up without a phone number?
A more accurate title would be "You cannot police Covid misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way" You can't because it's relatively new, still being researched and there are varieties of scientific opinion about various things. The debate is ongoing.
You can police Holocaust misinformation in a fair, reproducible and representitive way
Yeah I'm going to have to categorically disagree with that. You can totally police misinformation in a fair means by requiring that it presents credible evidence of weight commensurate with the impact of what it argues, and explain to those who are policed in a transparent manner why and how they can appeal it.
There is no one on earth who can form a credible argument that 5G spreads SARS because it's fucking lunacy. The evidence for ivermectin improving severe covid outcomes also clearly showed it was only noticeable in regions where untreated parasitic worm infections are common, so yeah, getting rid of multiple other infections led to better outcomes. Various counter-arguments against anthropogenic global warming (even the honest ones) have been thoroughly invalidated for decades.
It's like raising the required work to send spam or spray malware at random internet hosts. It doesn't fix everything, but it evens the playing field between trolls and agents of discord vs people having real discussions. We know this works because high-value discussion forums like the heavily moderated science subreddits do it and there is no mass hysteria -- and reddit should probably be compensating those mods, but that's another issue.
If your commercial platform does not put in the bare minimum content moderation to keep dangerous horseshit out of the common discourse where gullible and naïve people with no ability to serious discern credible statements from well-practiced lies, there should be penalties scaled to the revenue of the business.
Just because Facebook or whomever clearly didn't give a damn and phoned in some half-assed keyword flagging system doesn't mean it's impossible. It means Facebook doesn't care and needs to get fined until they do. If you can't link some credible evidence because of stupid limits on Twitter, maybe Twitter is just a terrible discussion platform.
<< You can totally police misinformation in a fair means by requiring that it presents credible evidence of weight commensurate with the impact of what it argues, and explain to those who are policed in a transparent manner why and how they can appeal it.
If, and I do mean if, you can consistently define misinformation. The issue is that, not unlike porn, 'i know it, when i see it' approach to identification is not a great way to gather trust of people you want to impose that upon.
> by requiring that it presents credible evidence of weight commensurate with the impact of what it argues
The people saying various vaccines result in significantly better outcomes and shorter infections from SARS have millions of man-hours of testing and evidence backing that up. Anyone can watch a boat come up over the horizon with the top visible and reproducibly verify the earth is, at the very least, curved. That's the opposite of "I know it when I see it."
Arguing over favorite colors has no material impact on anyone. Loudly proclaiming incendiary medical statements on public forums very obviously has had massive impact, and if you can't back it up, that's misinformation even if by astronomical luck it's accidentally correct.
This is exactly why professionals and other serious people give measured, complex answers to questions that don't translate well to in-group signaling grifter gear, and exactly why we need some sort of brakes on the countervailing screeching of slogans on the other side because that train zooms out of the station and picks up idiot passengers left and right before the people who know what they're talking about can finish a sentence. This isn't hypothetical. We've been watching it happen for decades.
I think if you truly want to battle misinformation then you can't use the approach of dragging people kicking and screaming to The Truth. Rather, help people find it for themselves. Give people empowering tools to find the truth whatever it may be.
Three examples: Formal logic, statistics, and how to detect deception. All of these are general purpose. Teach people about fallacies, what an appropriate sample size is and make them play Diplomacy. Teach about historic hoaxes and how they were disproven, as well as about conspiracies, ones that were successful and others that were uncovered and failed. Tell the stories of corruption and coups.
For technology companies, build un-opinionated features that users love and work so well that people opt-in.
I agree that education plays an important role in this. It's not a coincidence that the political party whose leaders claimed that covid is a hoax is also the political party writing legislation to censor teachers and ban books.
> It's not a coincidence that the political party whose leaders claimed that covid is a hoax is also the political party writing legislation to censor teachers and ban books.
Both of those are misleading half-truths, but that is better discussed in another thread.
In my experience, there's only one way out of the misinformation hole. Read a lot of competing views and keep as emotionally neutral a stance as possible. Learn why people love religion, science, alternative medicine, math, psychology, meditation, fighting, cars, guns, sailing, skiing and politics.
What's the fraction of a % of people willing to spend that kind of effort. To learn for the sake of learning, not to prove a point or show others they are right :(.
There is another way that I have found myself more comfortable with as I get older. That is to simply not have an opinion, and at times actively ignore, things that are either irrelevant to my life or outside of my control.
On many topics people rebel against this attitude, because they see it as a moral imperative to be an activist. But that's not how I choose to live, and I find it is easier to be happy this way.
One of my siblings comes to mind as someone who is good at this. This seems like another way of saying we have to choose our battles (priorities).
I believe working (as wisely as we can) in the service of others is important. But we have to prioritize, and being peaceful, & kind & responsible to those nearest us are high priorities.
It may be true that we "cannot police misinformation" in a good way. I haven't figured out otherwise.
BUT: I'd really like to know what would happen if we required putting some words like this all over the place (FB, ...): "Please consider: are info sources accurate and reliable? How do we know that?--perhaps based on trustworthy behavior over time of the original eyewitness and all reporters in the chain to us; and corroboration by other such reliable sources? And/or of the organization that employs those people? Do you know who they are, exactly, and their history?"
(I read about some study that I couldn't find later, which said something(?) like that had a useful impact.)
I and my extended family have traveled, read a lot from a variety of sources, gravitate to plainness and honesty and personal growth/learning more than to entertainment, and know people who know people who travel extensively, have personal experience in a variety of fields, etc, and I think many of us are very careful about whom to believe, for what. I think most of us (?) would know, soon enough at least, if we were being duped by digital sources about important things.
Edit: to aid my thinking, here are some interesting other thoughts I got from others' comments here: A significant % of humanity chooses what to believe not based on facts/reliability/truth/honesty/goodwhatevers, but based on things like: ego, group membership, repetition, and what they want to believe (I suppose because it feels more reassuring/familiar/comfortable/safe/simple/easy for them at the time, sometimes due to fears or the other reasons listed above like ego, group..). I suppose rampant addictions (including porn) are major contributing/distorting factors, as people try to self-medicate for their fears and hurts.
Now, how might one best decide whether oneself is susceptible? Maybe we can consider, now and again, what we love the most -- truth, kindness, improvement of self and others, etc, or pleasure/power/attention? I think the first 2 commandments as taught in Christianity are relevant: to love God w/ all our heart, might, mind, and strength (which I suppose is aided by understanding His true nature and the good he offers us); and to love our neighbor (every other human) as ourselves -- treating them the way we would want to be treated, helpfully for their specific situation.
I think part of the problem is companies wanting to police misinformation, or problematic language, or whatever as a single step without feedback loops.
I think you have to see it as an iterative process, where moderators, policies and heuristics intended to target misinformation will, inevitably, have both false positives and false negatives. You then have to have systems in place to correct those, and minimize them in the future.
Currently that system is basically just public outcry or boycotts, because the companies assume they got it right or don't have to do more, and that they can apologize their way out of it, or give 100 million to a charity and keep it, or whatever.
But we deserve not just better systems, but also continual work to make those systems better.
Without it, I believe the best thing you can do is public outcry, and moving your content or your subscription.
Things which were at one point considered "dangerous misinformation":
1) Slavery is immoral
2) Black people should be allowed to vote
3) Women should be allowed to vote
4) Bacteria exists
5) The earth is round
6) You can question the church
etc. Now that is not to say that "vaccines may carry more risk than is being reported" is correct, and should be placed next to "black people should be allowed to vote". However, if the anti-misinformation crowd is allowed to reach their conclusion, then we will never be able to challenge the orthodoxy again.
As a side note; is this all the result of people not learning philosophy in school? It's legitimately horrifying to me that so many people have no concept of what it means for something to even be true, or how we could reach consensus on that. What does it mean to "know" something, what is the purpose of dialog, etc.
There's a long tradition of elites working to reduce the level of education received by the populace, in part exactly because it prevents them from determining what's true.
Misinformation is really a side-effect of mass manipulation of truth by authority. Yet most of the safe-guards for misinformation in social media have been built to police the wrong group of people.
They seem to so desperately want the world to be flat that they will come up with any argument that whatever conclusively disproving new evidence they just looked at to prove their idea was somehow manipulated or in some other way confounded.
Surely when others hear their sincerely delivered explanations some will also conclude that the world is flat.
Is there a cost-benefit analysis we should perform here?
What are the costs and benefits of policing misinformation about other subjects?
This week I was reading about how cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry 60% of the time. They have a financial interest in the studies going their way and those studies do. Yet, many studies not funded by them go a very different route.
Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
The other day I was listening to an edge theory on something. I didn't know I would be hearing one when I first took the time to listen. The theory was based on evidence, the case was logical and well reasoned, and what was different was assumptions. The conclusion was not the majority. Is that misinformation?
We don't tend to go deep anymore so how can we tell where misinformation really exists? Who decides what's a kind of hard that needs to be stopped?
>This week I was reading about how cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry 60% of the time. They have a financial interest in the studies going their way and those studies do. Yet, many studies not funded by them go a very different route.
The lipid hypothesis used to be a theory. A significant portion of the 'science' has been revealed to be illegitimate. Cholesterol had a 'scientific consensus' that it was evil causing virtually all cardiovascular disease. Used to...
So what happened? In 2005 you now have to declare your conflicts of interest. Dieticians suddenly started falling bigtime to conflicts of interest. Virtually all of them publishing that cholesterol was evil had conflicts. They were funded heavily by the cereal companies. Science started looking at the lipid theory and it's all fraud.
Cholesterol is no longer a boogy man. The lipid hypothesis has been downgraded to an invalid hypothesis. If you're taking statins, go talk to your doc and get off them.
>Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
When the statin patents expired in 2016. It's not a surprise that the keto movement reformed in 2017. That cholesterol became a hypothesis and we found out what's really going on.
Ancel Keys much later in life acknowledged that dietary cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with blood cholesterol.
The even more interesting since the conflict of cinterest change. People have been trying to understand what the actual real data says. Cholesterol may be real problem, but why? You'll notice... this was also published in 2017.
Sugar in your diet damages cholesterol and makes your body struggle at cleaning it up. They found however, sugar isn't exactly the culprit. It's refined sugars and mostly candy and related high sugar things that are causing the problem.
>The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
Censorship is hard. Anything being labelled misinformation is immediately considered something that must be evaluated.
I've heard this before. There has been a large uptake in publications on cholesterol from the egg industry. But, you have to look beyond direct funding for a study. For example, I was looking at how one company give money to a non-profit they control. The non-profit funds the studies. Studies don't say they were funded by the company. Money was effectively laundered.
Drug companies wanted to sell people on statins so they funded studies. Egg companies want people to eat eggs that are high in cholesterol so they fund studies. It's a mess of advertising.
High cholesterol is know to lead to atherosclerosis[1]. It's one of the things that is involved in forming the plaques that build up in arteries which lead to forms of heart disease.
What caught my attention was the long term studies around the people of loma lima. There are many vegans and vegetarians there who have been involved in long term studies. They have the same jobs as others in the area, live in the same area, and have many of the same habits of others with different diets. This has been great for looking at how diet affects things. Through those studies they've learned a lot about how diet affects cardiovascular disease.
>I've heard this before. There has been a large uptake in publications on cholesterol from the egg industry. But, you have to look beyond direct funding for a study.
The problem was both side I'm sure. Cereal corps on one side, eggs on the other. One trying to counter the other.
The beauty is that since 2005, that changed. It's not 100% but it was pretty effective. We can now see what's really going on.
Ancel Keys himself has admitted and even pushed way later in life that dietary cholesterol doesn't matter. So the egg industry is innocent.
>High cholesterol is know to lead to atherosclerosis[1]. It's one of the things that is involved in forming the plaques that build up in arteries which lead to forms of heart disease.
Sure but what causes this is what matters. As explained in that webmd link I provided is that this is caused by sugar. Primarily refined sugars. I must admit I don't understand how sugar damages ldl
>What caught my attention was the long term studies around the people of loma lima. There are many vegans and vegetarians there who have been involved in long term studies. They have the same jobs as others in the area, live in the same area, and have many of the same habits of others with different diets. This has been great for looking at how diet affects things. Through those studies they've learned a lot about how diet affects cardiovascular disease.
That's the problem when cereal companies discovered they were the cause of so many diseases. As the saying goes, 'it's always the right time to do what is right' but they didn't want to be out of a job. They did the wrong thing. Afterall, Kellogg the man was an absolute scumbag responsible for the deaths of millions.
In fact, the lipid hypothesis having used to be a theory and being downgraded to hypothesis probably makes it far less than a hypothesis.
The wikipage uses a single source for this 'consensus' and look again that magical date of 2017.
What does this 'consensus' really conclude?
>Consistent evidence from numerous and multiple different types of clinical and genetic studies unequivocally establishes that LDL causes ASCVD.
The 'consensus' is that LDL causes illness. I dont believe that's in contention. What we are discussing is what causes LDL to cause illness and we are discovering decades of bad science.
To be clear, you can study high cholesterol by simply having test subjects eat eggs. It reliably raises serum cholesterol in real time. It's also the reason why blood cholesterol tests have you fast before testing. Seeing what foods raise cholesterol isn't some mysterious science that we haven't cracked.
All of the egg-industry funded studies which try to show that "dietary cholesterol doesn't affect serum cholesterol" are doing extreme mental and linguistic gymnastics. That statement, which can sometimes be shown to be true, only applies to dietary cholesterol in isolation from any other food, including cholesterol in isolation from the rest of the egg. Dietary cholesterol with saturated fat, which is the most common way that dietary cholesterol is consumed, does more to raise serum cholesterol than any other food. Oh, and also high cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease.
>The biggest influence on blood cholesterol level is the mix of fats and carbohydrates in your diet—not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food. Although it remains important to limit the amount of cholesterol you eat, especially if you have diabetes, for most people dietary cholesterol is not as problematic as once believed.
So exactly what I said.
What's important as well, 'especially if you have diabetes' because as I said, as did my webmd link say. It's sugar that is doing it.
Healthline fantastic source because they source their sources. Literally the title says exactly what I said.
>The amount of cholesterol in your diet and the amount of cholesterol in your blood are very different things.
I could probably steal healthline's sources but I'll just leave it here.
>All of the egg-industry funded studies which try to show that "dietary cholesterol doesn't affect serum cholesterol" are doing extreme mental and linguistic gymnastics. That statement, which can sometimes be shown to be true, only applies to dietary cholesterol in isolation from any other food, including cholesterol in isolation from the rest of the egg. Dietary cholesterol with saturated fat, which is the most common way that dietary cholesterol is consumed, does more to raise serum cholesterol than any other food. Oh, and also high cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease
As I believe I conclude above. This 'egg-industry' boogyman is untrue. In fact, your body will continue to produce cholesterol for you if you eat a low cholesterol diet. It's obviously not sufficient, we are evolved to be on a high cholesterol diet. What a low cholesterol high sugar diet does is hide the huge dangerous spike in ldl that the sugar causes. This is a tremendously unhealthy approach to take when the correct approach is no sugar.
If you eat a low cholesterol diet. Your testosterone will be tremendously low. So for example about the same time this all came to light is some youtubers(try guys) went and got their testosterone checked and it was so low that they are either 100 years old, castrated or women. Virtually all those guys are probably incapable of having children and their doctors should be putting them on supplements to fix this asap. Huge health risks like osteoporosis is near certain.
Did you know that fertility clinics is an amazing industry profitability wise. Customers lined up around the block waiting for months.
Have you ever had your blood cholesterol tested? You know how they tell you not to eat beforehand?
It's trivial to see the effect of foods on serum cholesterol. It's not some unknown part of science that statistical analysis can only partially shed light on. Person eat egg; person cholesterol go up.
>Harvard ought to be a good source
"Harvard" isn't disagreeing with me here. The author is saying that dietary cholesterol with other fats is what determines disease risk. High dietary cholesterol with high saturated fat increases risk of coronary heart disease.
>>The amount of cholesterol in your diet and the amount of cholesterol in your blood are very different things.
>I could probably steal healthline's sources but I'll just leave it here.
The egg industry claim is that "high dietary cholesterol doesn't raise serum cholesterol". The word "serum" means in your blood. We are concerned with what foods raise your blood cholesterol (because high serum cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease). While it might be the case in some studies that high dietary cholesterol IN ISOLATION FROM OTHER FOODS doesn't raise serum cholesterol, high cholesterol eaten with the foods it's most commonly eaten with does cause high serum cholesterol.
>...Your testosterone will be tremendously low...
The reason this is all relevant is because people's cholesterol is way too high and heart disease has become a leading cause of death in developed nations.
Since about 2010 heart disease has been on the rise again after decades of decline, which seems to coincide with the craze in keto type diets. Sugar consumption has declined slightly over that same time period.
>Since about 2010 heart disease has been on the rise again after decades of decline,
Curious, not sure I know exactly what this graph looks like. Also looking for this, it's hard to find. Some graphs certainly show an increase since 2000. But they are poor sources I wont share.
Which this source and others say the opposite. That the problem is getting better.
Keto's re-emergence was in 2017 or so. So not really included in the data. Keto is also not a widely accepted diet, so impossible to account for in wide data like this.
>which seems to coincide with the craze in keto type diets. Sugar consumption has declined slightly over that same time period.
I was using American numbers. Keto is pretty popular here - the Atkins diet exploded in popularity in the early 2000s.
I don't think it's "clear" that sugar causes cardiovascular disease. I think what is clear is that obesity plus inactivity are overwhelmingly the main causes at a population level. Obesity can result from eating lots of sugar and/or from eating lots of fat.
But just about every population level study shows that consuming red meat increases cardiovascular disease. We'll have to check in a decade or two from now to see what effects keto-style diets have on cardiovascular disease but as tasty as they are, I'm not going to take my chances with one. Everything in moderation.
We don't need to eliminate all misinformation. Just getting rid of the 5g/microchip/flat earth/vaccines cause autism zone would be enough.
EDIT: We did this for ages. Remember in the 90s how the only place you read crackpot weirdo outlandish conspiracy theory garbage was Weekly World News and Nexus Magazine?
Communism has failed every time its been tried but that fact is meaningless to people who demand to try it again. Same situation here, now we are dealing with a significant proportion of people that demand free speech for me but not for thee.
This borders on epistemological nihilism. Of course few assertions about truth should be beyond challenge. Of course there are grades of confidence and properly conducted discourse (including venues/methods of challenge) can improve the quality of conclusions. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as poor-grade or even garbage assertions.
And functional institutions not only have a responsibility to try and establish some kind of reasonable consensus about the truth, they basically can't operate without doing so.
When courts make rulings, they can't do it without establishing facts of a case. That's not "presuming" so much as it is simply functioning. There's a process for arguing details out... and an end at which details are accepted as established. Potentially subject to review, but not arbitrarily.
"The sky is blue". Ok, we pretty well agree on that. But do I perceive "blue" in the same way that you do? We'll never know.
Regardless, people are not using the term "misinformation" in that way. They are using it for phenomena we cannot all readily observe for ourselves, and for which there is a claimed, but not actual consensus.
800 years ago it was "misinformation" to claim that the Earth orbited the Sun. Today it is "misinformation" to claim that germ theory is incorrect or that vaccines are not always "safe".
But the people using and spreading the "misinformation" meme are human and have imperfect knowledge just like everyone else. Indeed, they seem closed-minded and intolerant of others' opinions. For me, if a person uses that term, it is a clear signal that the person is wedded to a particular worldview and it is pointless to even engage them in conversation on the topic in question.
This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one side to silence the other, rather that debating the subject with definitive proof of their claims. With all of the unknowns of many of these current subjects, I would think open debate presenting theories from various sources would help find common ground.
We've inherited this rationalist idea that people form opinions as the result of careful consideration and weighing of evidence. This is mostly false. Evidence suggests that people form ideas from (1) group-membership and (2) repetition. If this is true, imagine you were a person trying to influence public opinion and had access to social media. An obvious strategy would be to...
1. Create an account with clear political affiliations (american flags, laser eyes, pronouns, etc in the bio). This establishes group membership.
2. Repeat a basic message over and over and over.
This is exactly what we're seeing.
I'm 100% for allowing free and open debates. I'm not for bot- or state-controlled accounts trying to sway public opinion.
What would you call someone printing and distributed flyers helpfully informing a neighbourhood that Election Day falls on May 5 when the actual Election Day is on May 4?
What would you call someone who distributes and prints “Get out the vote” flyers with polling locations to certain communities and demographics but not others? Or, let’s say a social network like Facebook sends one group of voters reminders to vote but not others? Selectively spreading correct information can still be malicious.
Are you trying to imply this was a lie or misinformation? Conditions continue to evolve, as do recommendations by experts. The President of the US is listening to experts.
Neither did calling out Biden for doing the right thing based on the best info available to him.
The person I responded to has clearly chosen his path. All too often, that path leads to abusing veterinary supplies... and telling the world how awesome it is to do so.
> All too often, that path leads to abusing veterinary supplies... and telling the world how awesome it is to do so.
The grandparent poster listed an example of election day incorrect information, the person you responded to listed an example of a politician stating incorrect information. Whether it's a good example or not is highly debatable but ad hominem style attacks don't help your argument.
Your argument doesn’t make the point you think it does. If someone maliciously placed convincing fake road signs on the road then they could easily cause severe injury or death. This would be a serious problem, not to be taken lightly.
The problem that I currently see rampant is that “definite proof” is hard to come by. There are a lot of people that use a set of alternate facts and call these definite proof. I’m afraid that with some people, I’m no longer arguing about how to interpret certain data, but we’re on a level where we cannot even agree that we are observing the same universe. And I honestly don’t have an answer to that problem.
Second to that: Data can change as we gather more knowledge about something. Covid is a prime example - in the beginning, very little was known. Some theories turned out to be mostly true, others didn’t hold up. Some advice was sound, other not. Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn’t do anything.
I’m afraid that with some people, I’m no longer arguing about how to interpret certain data, but we’re on a level where we cannot even agree that we are observing the same universe.
On the upside, this is one of the more respectful descriptions of the problem space in question that I've seen. It's common to act like "The other person is just a nutter, clearly."
This doesn't really move the conversation forward, but an important point to make (I think) is that we as a species have never agreed that we're observing the same universe. Think of all the wildly different beliefs that have co-existed (though certainly not peacefully!) at the same times throughout history. It's a feature of all reality, not a bug of the _current_ reality (I say this because some people seem to think we're in a new & novel time of history where no one agrees on anything because of "the internet" or "misinformation", but I don't think that's the case. Humans have always disagree on what reality is).
I have this theory that what-about-ism as a debate technique, elevated by more readily available un-helpful "facts" (e.g. single varient evaluation of complex system), hased cause people to forget the utility of facts. When you and I have a REAL disagrement about something importand and complex the FACTS that we can both agree on and take for granted are what ENABLES us to find a new higher resolution understanding - we can get further because we can focus. I try to look out for what-about-ism disguised as refuting evidence, and approach people's belief epistemologically.
And then there were the theories that were "debunked" and marked as "conspiracy theories", often by people in powerful positions, against their better knowledge, because a narrative was to be held up. Masks are useless. There is no connection to the Wuhan virology lab which specifically worked on that exact class of virii and gain-of-function research...
I used to be carefully trusty of official sources. I am no longer.
> Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn’t do anything.
And some people point back and use the censorship of people who turned out to be correct as an argument that we were way too quick to leverage the 'misinformation' label to suppress the truth.
This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one side to silence the other, rather that debating the subject with definitive proof of their claims
The problem here is that it takes far more effort to refute bullshit than it does to spread it.
With all of the unknowns of many of these current subjects, I would think open debate presenting theories from various sources would help find common ground.
What happens in reality is that whoever asserts greater certainty has the upper hand, particularly in the absence of genuine authority. Science is (correctly) reluctant to make unconditional promises, while con artists have no such hangups.
That's the standard, "nice" answer to how to deal with BS.
In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard? Brandolino's law comes to mind.
What's the likelihood of your spending a lifetime engaging with wrong people online having enough payoff to be worth it, even if it does have real consequences?
It's a question of how different the actual real world would be if one were to "stop caring that someone is wrong on the internet" versus the alternative world in which one cared very much about this.
I would suggest that most of the time, the likely answer is "little to no different". In light of that, how many hours of one's life should be devoted to it? Almost none, probably. If improving the world is the goal, arguing on forums or Twitter is surely a terrible use of time and energy for most people (those with a massive audience, lots of money, fame, or any combination of those things, may be exceptions).
It's similar to keeping up with day-to-day national news. How often is there something actually important and actionable that one learns only by closely following non-local news, that wouldn't have made its way through the grapevine (or down to local news) fast enough anyway? Barring people who need to trade on that information or otherwise need to be very plugged-in for their job, or what have you. Yet some people try to paint following such news closely as necessary for being a good citizen. Is it, though? If I look at it honestly, the difference between checking in on what's happening nationally (or internationally) every day, and checking in once a quarter, is practically indistinguishable, in terms of what I do and what I can realistically affect. Even once a quarter is probably more frequent than necessary to achieve approximately the maximum actual real-world benefit it is likely to provide to me.
Yet people follow pundits on Twitter or read news sites daily or watch 24/7 cable news and seem to genuinely think they're a better citizen for it, rather than that they're engaging in a low-value hobby like watching daytime soap operas or following e-sports as a spectator (which are fine diversions and people should absolutely do those things if they enjoy them, but practically no-one's under the illusion that those are laudible or improving activities)
Exactly. It just becomes a form a virtuous consumption that is slightly interactive in that you can report people who cross some line. This feedback loop is part of the design and keeps you consuming and interacting.
A rough list of voting one can do, in order of likelihood of it affecting anything in the real world, most-to-least:
1. Voting in local party elections/primaries/et c.
2. Voting in local elections.
3. Voting in state-level party primaries.
4. Voting in state-level elections.
5. Voting in national-level primaries (that is, conducted at the state level but for national offices)
6. Voting in national elections.
7. (Largely as an effect of how US Presidential elections work) Voting for president, specifically.
Note that this is damn near perfectly the inverse of participation rates in and media attention given to these activities, and that people will shit all over you for failing to do #7 while they themselves mostly ignore the lower numbers. Meanwhile an hour a year working with/for your preferred local party may very well be more effective than all of that voting. But "you didn't vote for President, so you don't get to complain and are a bad citizen". Horse-shit.
National electoral politics is largely a busy-box: "There so much wrong in the country and it's always getting worse, but at least I have a say in it!" Every 8 years we 'throw the bums out' yet the policies never really change.
No. But, moderation for the sake of the eventual societal consequences is the default in the Chinese (PRC) system. It's not necessarily a bad system. Their ideas have lifted a billion people out of poverty. But, it's not ours.
I'm saying that censorship like this is incompatible with the western values as we know them. Yet this doesn't invalidate what the Chinese have accomplished. It's possible to have two conflicting ideas at the same time.
This is so vague... Me breathing air has real consequences. You probably mean "societal" consequences, and it's also way too vague, moderating has real consequences as much as not moderating.
This is one of those things that is easy to worry about, but the sheer amount of possible 'consequences' from any misinformed point of view is impossible to actually estimate the likelihood of. We can collectively conjure up all sorts of bad things someone might do if they believe [xyz] but we should not give in to this kind of paranoia.
A collapse of basic medical care, an attempted coup, a third of the country no longer believing that an election where their side didn't win can be legitimate...
... But it's difficult to get a person to care about a subject that they believe themselves to be capable of buying their way out of/ignoring the consequences of. Nothing matters to a nihilist, and they will smugly point out that we're all wasting our breath over nothing.
Are you saying that these things haven't happened, or are you saying that I should not care whether my father can get an 'elective' surgery done sometime this decade? Or that the next election will be ran in a fair manner?
I think our healthcare system sucks because it sucked before the pandemic, not because of misinformation. I remember thinking COVID would really show the gaping cracks in our healthcare system, but instead, the system blamed their deficiencies on the unvaccinated.
Our healthcare system, for the population as a whole, was awful before COVID. Hospitals that weren't at peak operating (read financial) capacity were shut down all over the country, which forced their patients to go to already overcrowded hospitals. The costs are/were off the charts. I don't think misinformation was the cause of it.
We've been dealing with this for over two years now, yet our healthcare system hasn't increased even temporary capacity in a meaningful way to account for it.
Something about this story seems suspicious. You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few areas:
> Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”.
What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.
>In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl clutching before?
In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving into this old news story. I guess my point is that there is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a good justification for policing misinformation as strongly as some people want.
> This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim.
That part of the story is comparatively easy to check - the audio is available if you follow the link in the article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes. The quote is “I’m sorry you’re ok with children being raped.”
That’s not a rhetorical trick.
It’s an attempt to smear a person or organization by slinging dirt that has no grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless lines of reasoning is part of the problem.
I maintain that it is still a rhetorical trick. "If you oppose X, you must be okay with Y" is very common. Underhanded and unfair, but it happens all the time.
>You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
Honestly your first line kinda describes your theory here...
I don't have much reason to think that story is fake, but if a few sentences are enough for you to just write it off I'm not sure it matters what I say. There are other stories on that issue.
I'm not claiming the story is fake, or that none of what was reported actually transpired. But rather, I sense that the reporters are ideologically motivated and what they have presented here is not "the whole truth", to haphazardly borrow a term.
One of the reasons why I say this is because there absolutely was a coordinated effort to stymie the construction of the border wall and one of the proposed tactics was to use the EPA and threatened species as a foil to prevent it's construction. Cards Against Humanity employed a similar strategy: "It was revealed that the creators had purchased vacant land along the wall and "retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built." So in that sense, this isn't some unique stochastic attack on the noble butterfly center. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_Against_Humanity)
But going back to my sense that something isn't quite right, the laundry list of associations is what stood out: Bringing up QAnon, bringing up Pizzagate, bringing up Steve Bannon, and bringing up anti-maskers. If I was a propagandist, I would end up writing a story just like this. Especially because you can report that wonderful institutions like National Butterfly Center and The Children’s Museum of Denver are victims of all of the above groups. Again, not to dismiss the story entirely, but it seems to hit all the right notes.
>"I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual consequences of misinformation."
How so? I am skeptical, but what actual negative consequences have resulted from this?
>"That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted."
Do you likewise feel the urge discount any story that brings up Antifa? I do. It is because in the minds of most partisans they loom larger than their real life impact. While QAnons and Antifa are completely different, they are utilized as boogeymen by ideologically motivated reporters. Still, the mention of these two groups only serve to raise my skepticism level rather than make me outright deny everything around their mention.
> You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
Funny how that keeps happening! I keep getting news stories that confirm my per-existing biases that the world is mean and we need internet moderators to make it all better again.
If someone is making an argument from bad faith, that's intentional and it's a waste of time to correct them or engage them at all.
All the "fact checking" links that are displayed now when you post about controversial subjects on social media platforms do very little to change minds and only reinforce the idea that there's some global narrative that's controlled by a cabal. They merely only serve to make people who already agree with the positions that are being linked to as fact checks better about spending time online.
I feel like debates (especially on BS) are (or have to be?) repeated way too often, why is that anyway? Why can't it be one single tree, consisting of branches on multiple platforms, collecting, managing and curating?
Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the "Gish Gallop".
In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong, wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're wrong!
Sealioning is not at all the same thing as a Gish Gallop. A Gish Gallop is throwing out very weak arguments or evidence (so, bullshit) faster than a sincerely-engaging opponent can address them. Sealioning is a much more deniable tactic, relying on "just trying to have a conversation" and playing the victim when others disengage or tell you to fuck off.
Simple Sealioning example:
Sealioner: "Do you have anything to back up those figures for holocaust deaths? I see that thrown around a lot and I'm just not sure" (absolutely being a disengenuous piece of shit who's trying to slyly push holocaust denial, but indistinguishable from someone who is in fact curious, aside from that actually-curious people don't end up in these kinds of exchanges half as often as lying assholes do)
Other person who knows exactly where this is going: "Fuck off out of here with that shit."
Sealioner: "Oh my, I was just trying to ask a question. Now I'm really not sure about your position. You seem very touchy about it for someone who has the truth on their side. Can anyone help me?"
A Gish Gallop of the same thing would be throwing out "references" to holocaust denial stuff faster than they can be debunked (and dutifully ignoring the debunking).
until Donald Trump came along and was better for ratings. Look at the subjects that constantly get flagged on Hacker News, such as:
women just can't get ahead
it's so awful that young people this day don't believe in free speech
In both of these cases you can point to very real cases where a women was the victim of outrageous misbehavior or where a speaker came to a campus and was treated really rudely.
The problem isn't with the facts of a particular incident but rather with the emotions that these topics evoke: in either case we all have our frustrations about the barriers we encounter in life and the ways we feel unheard and unsafe.
Conversations like that rapidly deteriorate into people talking about their own personal pain and suffering but with the identifying information (usually) deleted so anything valuable is gone, you might feel compelled to get involved but any of the power that comes out of groundedness is gone when people are talking in generalities, about principles, either from the "liberal" viewpoint of "this situation is fundamentally unfair" or the "conservative" viewpoint that the moral accounting has to be done accurately down to three decimal places.
>In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard?
Why do you care to police speech? Is it ego? It's a fool's errand.
I feel like a more fundamental question is "Who is qualified to interpret the data?"
Then you can ask, "Of the qualified people, what were they saying at the time?" And if you care to dive deeper, "What evidence were they using to support their opinion?" and "What is the earliest that credible information arrived that should have changed their position?" and "Did their position change, when enough new evidence came in?"
Is there some better set of questions you can think of than mine?
I wouldn't consider that misinformation. At the time those statements were made it was thought the vaccine would prevent transmission. Not a medical expert, but I always thought the reason you got a vaccine was to prevent infection. Measles vaccine is somewhere near 97% effective at stopping infection. Heck, even when the vaccines for covid first came out it was big news if there was a breakthrough infection.
Fast forward to today. The general consensus is the vaccine typically prevents serious illness and death in most cases for the common variants. It doesn't do a great job preventing infection.
One of the mistakes those in charge made was never admitting something like the following when new, solid information was understood:
1) We were wrong.
2) This is something we've never seen.
3) We're learning as we go.
4) It doesn't do what we said or thought it would do, but it does this.
No one in real power ever says anything remotely like it. They speak in absolutes and it has gotten so bad they are choosing to misrepresent studies to suggest following a path they think is best versus admitting the studies just suck.
Misinformation flagging for something like covid was never going to be practical to implement as there was so much changing on a such a limited timeframe. Toss in politics and the governing structure of the USA and it was never going to work.
Yeah, these statements have uncertainty, but they're not being discussed. It seems that uncertainty is being intentionally omitted, and discussion of it is actively fought. This seems a terrible way to maintain trust!
>At the time those statements were made it was thought the vaccine would prevent transmission
Okay. How did they come to this conclusion? We'll never know, because we're in this asymmetric war about information, where dunking on your political enemies is more important than just being transparent. Showing us how they came to that conclusion, and then going through your points 1-4 would go a long way to restoring that trust (partially), but alas they won't do it.
Wow. I haven't kept up with pro-vaccine media (I got mine, seemed like a good idea, just haven't paid attention to the messaging very much aside from health official guidelines and such) but damn that's bad. No wonder BSABing this issue is so effective.
Some of that's excusable by "the best information at the time was wrong" and some of it's not even wrong but the usual thing I've seen a lot of the last couple years, where some people take a limited statement as absolute or saying more than it is and then claim the original was wrong (when it wasn't) but a good deal of that compilation appears to be indefensible.
I propose you find some of the liberals who still insist that Gore defeated Bush, and hone your art on convincing them of the truth first. Once you have completed that relatively simple task, move onto the fools who propose that the 2020 election was brazenly stolen in the dead of the night in each swing state via mail-in ballot harvesting.
I have a theory that as long as transmitting a piece of information is profitable it will be transmitted, 99% of the time. You can change the percentage but you can’t reduce it to 0.
I upvoted you, even though "never" is a big word, because though I think about history a lot, no counter-examples readily come to mind, sadly. Except me, I'm usually right. Just ask me. Right? :)
>I upvoted you, even though "never" is a big word, because though I think about history a lot, no counter-examples readily come to mind, sadly. Except me, I'm usually right. Just ask me. Right? :)
That's the thing about the age of enlightenment and founding of the USA era. You didn't have the internet or reddit or whatever to steal your attention. You could work through these sorts of things and when you do, you discover tons of wisdom. The founders of the USA provided no exceptions to free speech. Afterall, truly there should never be any. In fact, the freedom of religion is an even larger non-exception. Religion isn't defined, there are no exceptions.
Hundreds of years there were no exceptions and only recently have flawed humans thought up exceptions
Thanks for your thoughtful, well-worded comment. Despite my poor wording, then awkward attempt at irony or humor ("I'm usually right"), I think we are in agreement. I strongly support the bill of rights, and the principles underlying the Constitution. Much could be said there.
I am not trying to be contentious, and can be wrong or stupid at times, but maybe there is an exception (or penalty) for some intentional lying from a position of trust. Like, a hired lifeguard buying insurance then saying "there are no dangers", when he knows the beach is closed due to an infestation of sharks, pollution, and whirlpools, which he has also just seen. Or maybe that is not called mere speech. Still....
interesting to see "5G" on the "outright misinformation" section of the graph in the illustration, because this is yet another example of just how muddy things are.
John C. Dvorak was fired from his decades-long tenure at PC Magazine after he wrote a column questioning 5G technology. the US was well on its way to integrate Chinese 5G technology into our telecommunications infrastructure, and then that got pulled (I think?). somewhere in there, people made all kinds of accusations about 5G, ranging from "there's potential for ongoing health issues due to exposure, maybe" to "5G gives you covid" to "no wait it triggers the microchips in the vaccines and controls your thoughts."
the 5G rollout is fishy, not least because mild, reasonable criticism and/or asking "why do we really need this, we can already stream 1080p videos to smartphones via 4G, what else could possibly be achieved by increasing bandwidth, given that in order to do so, you need a much higher density of transmitters, maybe that's not the best idea" now lumps you in with "5G is turning the frogs gay" or whatever. you have to be unquestioningly in support of 5G deployment or else you're a Conspiracy Theorist who implicitly believes all the crazy things I said above.
case in point: the image in this post that labels "5G" (broadly!! without even the nuance of addressing any specific accusation!!!) as "outright misinformation". if you aren't the kind of person who thinks critically about these things, but agrees with the content of the post, that we're living in a deluge of misinformation and also agrees that it's impossible to police this misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way... you may come away from reading this post and viewing the associated image thinking "every possible negative thing I've heard about 5G technology is definitely, 100% 'outright misinformation'".
and this is exactly the point I'm making here: misinformation is easier than ever to produce because you don't have to poison the well, you can just dump a load of sewage right into it and then that well is forever tainted, critical thought is suppressed under a load of bullshit, then there's some new story the next day to move your attention onto the next thing.
unless we outlaw smartphones, none of this is ever going away. this is the natural consequence of carrying the Internet in our pockets.
Parachutes? The one RCT we have on parachutes failed to show any statistically significant benefit from using them when jumping out of plane. Hardly settled science.
People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology that was never before available in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and desktop publishing software.
Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.
Moderation isn't going to change any of this.