It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.
Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.
I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.
> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead....
> I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
It's worth noting that journalism in general has had its revenue streams decimated by Craigslist, clickbait, subscriber loss due to competing with free, etc. Except for very few prestige outlets, most media outlets have been forced to shrink their newsrooms, year after year, for a couple decades. Even though the prestige outlets are healthier, they're not so healthy as to be able to pick up all the slack.
It's easy to criticize someone for not doing as thorough a job as you'd like, but it's not very reasonable when that person is the last man standing from a team of ten, and the team's workload has increased in the meantime.
I think we are in a transitional period of journalism which is why it is so crazy right now.
Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.
In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.
But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.
> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed.
I would argue that that is not their primary responsibility. That is, in fact, to put food on the table.
Journalists are not well paid and, more importantly, are easily replaceable. "Real journalism" is hard, but makes no money, while pop-journalism is very easy and profitable. So media companies demand and pay for pop-journalism. And that can be done by far too many people.
So blaming them for doing what they need to do to get paid when doing "real journalism" will get them fired is... pointless.
> but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed
It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".
This conversation isn't formal enough to be meaningful.
If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless.
In order to mislead with a "true" fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).
The essence of "lying by telling the truth" is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.
Fortunately, It's much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.
Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.
Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with "true" implications.
I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn't teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).
I love the idea of this article, but it doesn't address the reason things are the way they are. Facts get checked for literal accuracy because that's what's easy to actually do in a reasonably unbiased way. We stop there not because that's all we want, but because everything after that is too messy to even come close to systematizing.
If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextualization, i'd love to hear about it, though.
As a stop-gap, it may help to aggressively denounce things taken out-of-context as being out-of-context.
In usual communication, we focus on fact-checking things in the context in which they're most valid, with the presumption that any contextual ambiguity'd be understood/resolved. In such scenarios, it can make sense to fact-check something literally, in the context in which it's claimed, then handle the contextual-migrations appropriately in discussing inter-related points.
But Twitter-like platforms destroy this -- short blurbs in a relatively context-free space make it difficult to be honest even for folks who'd want to be, and seems to be a playground for folks who'd want to lie under pretense of factuality.
The appropriate reaction to claims removed from context would seem to be to deny them. Not to say that the claim is false (at least, not in a context in which it'd be true), but to note that the claim isn't relevant to the current-context (at least, not without a basis for connecting it to the current-context).
---
To note it, a problem with allowing folks to declare claims as being out-of-context (if they're not required to support it) is that it gives everyone a free-pass to weasel out of acknowledging anything that they dislike. So, it's unsuitable for adversarial contexts or otherwise unreliable exchanges.
Which is what I think makes debates, politics, etc. on platforms like Twitter basically garbage: it's too easy to lie if context isn't observed, and it's too easy to dodge stuff if it is.
So while Twitter-like platforms might workable for non-adversarial exchanges (like sharing pictures, announcements, etc.), adversarial exchanges on such platforms would seem structurally predisposed toward undesirable behavior.
Well, if we talk about the big issue of the past couple of years, we can certainly contextualize in the context of that because we have an end goal for the communication, which is to attempt to convince an individual to take action A over action B.
So you can easily show high quality contextualisation - it's showing that the case against is less preferable, e.g. arguing against yourself.
For example, Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, an y% chance of passing that on to someone, who then has a z% chance of being seriously disabled or dying, and they have an a% chance of not obtaining that disease via some other mechanism".
You take the opposing viewpoint and try to dismantle it. This is the role of the media, to inform, not to latch onto micro-facts like "lockdown saves lives" and push them because they're easy wins.
All the "fact checking" sites I am aware of are heavily biased. It seems very unlikely that they actually try to be unbiased in their checking. It already starts with selecting the facts they check (cherry picking).
This inevitably makes me think of a video about how meat consumption is not as bad by "things I've learned" on youtube. Search for that name and "meat" and you will inevitably find it. I thiught the claims in the video sounded too good to be true, so I read the study most of the claims in the video were based on.
They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans had to eat it. Which meant no actual land gains, only a modest reduction in co2 emissions, and that people would become unhealthy by eating 4500kcal/day, mostly from corn.
Even worse than the 3.1mn views is that the study in question was covered positively on TV and in newspapers.
Thats an unfair summary. The video also cleared up some simple facts that are often missreported and unjustly simplified in favor of a feel good frame.
Same with what types of calories are fed to cows especially. As in for humans indigestible byproducts of industrial agriculture. For example, this is the "corn" we speak about in this context. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissilage Used in both cow and pig feed. Here a picture
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Sonsbeck...
Its the shredded plant. The stuff that gets also used in biogas plants.
Calling these lies by omission out is not something that needs stricter "factchecks" that are less focused on facts to protect people from unwanted conclusions.
I know the video you're talking about (I also watched multiple rebuttals of the video which pointed out the issues you mentioned among others). It's been a while since I watched it though, I may be misremembering. I found it very useful as a steel-man of the pro-meat side and even after watching the rebuttals I came out with a more complexed, nuanced, and less certain opinion than I went in with.
You have a statement, like "meat agriculture uses more water than plant agriculture." Then you have a fact checker that says "yup, if you look at the amount of water to raise a cow vs to water a grain field with equivalent weight, calories, or whatever other metric you're using, it takes far more water to raise a cow". This truth gets copied around the internet and used to support claims and policies -- "meat uses more water. We have a water shortage in California. Therefore we should ban cows in California because of the water shortage." The logic makes perfect sense, and all the underlying facts are true.
The video then gave the context, which is that cows are often raised on otherwise unproductive grasslands that aren't used for crops anyways, and those that aren't being raised on unproductive land are usually eating corn from places that don't have as much of a water problem (e.g. the Midwest). This doesn't debunk the fact that a calorie of cow uses more water than a calorie of potato, or corn, or soybean -- you can still find those facts on any fact checker on the internet and they're still just as true -- but it does weaken the claim of "we should ban cows in California to help with the water shortage".
In the context of the linked article, this is both "Decontextualizing and recontextualizing" and "Reinterpreting and pre-framing meaning". The claim "meat uses more water than plants" is decontextualized from the world where corn is grown in places without water problems and meat is often raised in situations where water use is minimal, and reinterpreted and reframed in the context of local environmental problems to support a predetermined conclusion. Of course there are probably examples in the video where it makes the same mistake the other way around -- but by watching both that video, the rebuttals, and the discussion, you can come to a better, more complex understanding of the issue, which can't be a bad thing.
Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.
It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
> It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality.
No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that.
> In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
> Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
The biggest marketeers of "Propaganda" are those that claim they have access to the capital-T truth. If it feels like you have access to capital-T truth, you're almost certainly trapped inside an ideological construct.
That said, ideological constructs aren't necessarily bad things, since society simply could not function without the shared "truth" they allow for.
Adversarial wielding of facts could be the basis for a new model of public knowledge, one that corrects the shortcomings of current news media and social networks.
Causal mapping [1] websites can aggregate the back and forth of heated discussions, eliminating emotional responses and distilling the core ideas of each opposing position. Such compilation of facts an argument in a readable, neutral format (e.g. see Kialo)[2] could work like the academic debates of old, allowing facts to be analysed in context and the validity of arguments to be tested on their own merits, not on their emotional appeal.
It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.
Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.
I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions.
> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.
In case anyone is curious, one can read the following front page article from March 8, 2003 to see how the NYT discussed reports from Blix and ElBaradei: https://archive.is/EdUCX
Misrepresenting facts in this way is still a form of lying. Speaking technical truths doesn't change that. Most lies aren't complete fabrications, honestly, even when they do contain a few.
I agree. The problem isn't just cherry-picked truths either. It is the use of non-sequitur arguments by "fact-checkers" like Politifact, WT.Social, Snopes, etc. to draw false conclusions from various things that are indeed true.
For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."
Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.
This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.
Their best method is hiding editorial and misinformation with references to earlier stories where the opinion or falsehood is in a (sometimes unattributed) quote, but in the later story is stated as a well-known fact. That's why they're in court with Palin right now.
There are more sophisticated techniques I’ve seen in local TV. Put two pieces of unrelated news one before another. Make sure the transition that nobody notices. This usually shed some bad impressions for the first news when done intentionally.
Oddly enough, I see no mention of any specific source in the article, yet the top comment here is bashing the NYT. Is there some reason for this? Does the NYT represent the entire industry? Are they alone in deciding what is news, or its priority? (One would be forgiven for thinking this is, in fact, the primary purpose of a news room).
Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?
If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.
I get the feeling this article was written by very smart people with noble intentions coming from backgrounds quite similar to mine.
I found it tremendously unsatisfying.
This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)
If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.
My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as "love thy neighbor as thyself."
There's a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.
For example, in a court of law, where you have a handful of jurors, some witnesses, a carefully curated set of rules, and highly trained professionals guiding the process. Errors are made.
The truth is not always found and an innocent person gets locked up or a guilty one walks free.
Epistemology is an ancient practice. In the western tradition this was first pointed out over 2,000 years ago.
Then there is the problem that human beings are not rational actors and it gets a whole lot messier.
One big reason for the rise in both far right and far left extremists is that mainstream media has mastered this practice a long time ago. This is why people don't inherently fully trust mainstream news that is mostly bought and paid for aka submarine PR. Catch & kill and China buying articles in the MSM weren't revelations, they were just confirming everyone's suspicions.
If everyone is bought and paid for, I might as well become an extremist. I’m probably screwed either way, but at least the nuts offer some sense of hope.
> What if we really wanted to understand what was going on in a way that accounted for all the facts and their various frames and interpretations?
Then we are demonstrating a level of good faith and interest that seems missing in most discourse.
I like the drive behind this - to really get to the bottom of things and promote rational comprehension rather than have people simply sniping at each other with misunderstood datapoints - but I'm not sure a lot of the people who are engaging in such behaviour are really that interested. As mentioned in the article, what they are really after is ammunition.
Still, I welcome this, as it's far better than just throwing up our collective hands and deciding any attempt to improve the quality of public discussion is necessarily censorship.
Tinkerbell School of Progress. Clap louder and surely Tinkerbell will fly. Like the evergreen advice to teach critical thinking. Certain to work. Next time.
There's no profit in pursuing "truth" in the face of tenacious anti-truth. Truthiness is an outgrowth of identity. And identity is impervious to logic, reason, facts.
The best we can do is help ourselves navigate the chaos.
It's a real simple checklist:
- Share your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Sign your name.
And then you can start productive analysis, fact checking, verification. Anything less should be treated as gossip, propaganda, or trolling (distraction).
Identity isn't entirely impervious to logic. But if you can create the impression that your identity is under threat - by setting up an either/or scenario - it means, to your amygdala at least, your survival is at stake. Very straightforward way to shortcut rational thinking.
The problem is that journalism stokes the formation of camps by a) conflating ideas and identities, b) bothsidesing everything, and so creating artificial identities to be perceived as neutral, and c) knowingly exploiting that "fear sells" and targeting the identities they manufacture.
Which then becomes ripe pickings for any sociopath out for their own interests.
The only way I'm aware of that can overcome this at scale is forming a larger group identity that's more inclusive. But that only seems to work if there's a large outgroup you can unite against, as far as I can tell.
It depends on what you encourage people to identify as. I predict better results from someone who identifies primarily as a "human truth-seeker" than from a "$immutable_characteristic $ideology world-improver".
Tangentially, some years ago I recall reading a few articles about the problem with 'misconception busting' articles [I may try to find such an article later]. Apparently, content formatted like...
> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content
> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content
... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.
This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.
I first heard this on the Sam Harris podcast. If I remember correctly he explained it as a function of our memory saving the myth and _then_ the "fact". It is easier to recite the 1st part of the memory so some people forget the "fact" and thus beleive the myth more strongly.
Scientific method tries to get as close as possible to facts.
The issue is that popular press and "influencers" ignore limitations in studies and always tell just their interpretations while pointing to "the science".
Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.
> Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.
No, I don't think it's that simple. Take the classic culture war issue: abortion. There's genuine, widespread, and deep opposition to it. The "covert interests" didn't manufacture that opposition, but they have latched onto it to help make unpopular policies (e.g. laissez faire economics, tax cuts for the rich) electorally viable.
Thats an interesting way to look at it. Picking a specific culture war, I’d like to examine gay conversion therapy. Who would you say are the covert interests pulling strings on either side?
I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information. Anyone who wants to stick to their priors, can. Anyone who wants to delegate has an array of choices to choose from. And those who want (and have the time) to chase deeper comprehension themselves can do so (still delegating some here and there, recursively).
This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have full disclosure from the author.
> I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information.
"Information" is not "knowledge". Information can consist of many falsehoods, knowledge should contain few if any falsehoods. We want a decent signal to noise ratio in our information, which requires some base of reliable knowledge.
So I think there's a place for fact checking. This used to be the domain of good reporters, but many of them have shit the bed hard on that for a couple of decades now, and lost most of their credibility. Now is the age of "fact checkers", which aren't doing much better frankly.
I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this:
population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.
And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.
When people talk about "lying with statistics", this is what they mean.
Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.
Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?
To be honest I don't find that sort of claim overly deceptive. % of infected that are vaccinated is an important metric because it helps describe the further reduction in infection that is possible through further vaccination. That's an obviously different metric than infection rate, and should be understood as such. The root problem is widespread statistical illiteracy.
One example: people who simply state “women make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes” to imply the advantage of being a man vs a woman.
The reality of how this number is calculated (eg averages across professions, even though men and women tend to work different professions, part time vs full time is not taken into account) suggests the conclusions that come from this 82 cents number is more nuanced than the initial statement.
I thought the generalized examples here[1] were objectively adequate.
Using real world examples in this context strikes me as dancing into a mine field and a dismissal of the nuanced exercise towards understanding that the author suggests[2].
Imagine papers with conflicting results. One side cites one subset of papers. The other side cites the other subset. Both feel the other are are disingenuous.
Both sides are citing true facts (“these papers exist”), both sides are wrong (the data is in fact inconclusive)
That may be a strategic decision. The minute they provide examples, they start losing anyone in their audience who is pre-committed politically to that example.
I have established a way of dealing with and taking from 'facts' by following these steps:
1. What is said? Do I understand it? Where does it come from?
2. How is it to be understood? How to interpret it?
3. What does it signify? Can it be classified and/or compared with other known things?
4. What can be taken from it? What implications does it have?
Looking at news in this way, it is clearly visible, how most things that are communicated answer 3. and 4., omitting its foundations 1. and 2. Sometimes the bias is created by changing 2.
(The fine-definition of the steps is still in the works. So far, I am very happy with this method. It helps me a lot to understand things and what things are really about. Suggestions?)
They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.
The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don't really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying "well, you can prove anything with facts" which feels like it's going in the wrong direction.
Reading all the other comments, there's a strong vibe of "see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers".
Faster heustistic is to check not whether the facts are true, but if the implied conflict that connects them is real.
The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.
Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.
Hi - where is that "dog bits capitalist oppressor" from btw? Google only has this comment. While I've been developing "news/internet literacy" for decades, I found it insightful to focus not just on facts but the spin and intent of fact presentation. Would love to read more if you've got some thoughts/links :)
It seems to me lying with facts boils down to two techniques:
1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.
2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers are representative and pre-empt the listener's getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.
Specific facts when a reader doesn’t know the entire story can frame the story however the author wants. Without existing knowledge of the details, a reader has no way of discerning the difference.
If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.
Good faith is part of the problem; you trust that a headline, an article, a summary etc acts in good faith, that you can trust journalists and the like. But they often have an Agenda, pushing a certain narrative or a certain political goal.
I mean, even when an article ticks all the boxes for being well researched, factually correct, neutral in language, even then it can be misleading for not having a counter-point (for example), or its hosting platform to de-emphasize the article.
What has more impact, a headline saying "tinfoil hats cause headaches" prominently posted on the front page of a newspaper in big impact font, or a byline four pages in?
The PR teams create perceptions and narratives by misleading with facts on social media, in ways mentioned in this article. But I think people get it after a while and it can't be used for long term perceptions and narratives.
Would be great if the author included some actual real life examples. This is why I find Chomsky so convincing. He usually presents his argument with lots of evidence.
This increasingly common use of the word "weaponize" (as a dysphemism for "utilize") bothers me, as does the article's use of the phrase "information war."
As horrible as it is to spread disinformation and propaganda, it seems unnecessarily extreme to describe that as analogous or comparable to warfare or physical violence.
How about they apply their own theory to the framing of ‘information warfare’ that they simply assume as a factual part of what is happening but make no attempt to investigate?
Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.
But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.
Looks like a wonderful project! Society'd seem to do well to focus on how we can have real, honest dialogs. Current forums for stuff like political debates have malicious, deceptive strategies that may work better than honest ones, which just seems like a bad thing for society as a whole.
The solution'd seem to be to have cultural dialogs, e.g. on politics, occur on platforms where optimal strategies are constructive. This is, where deceptive strategies would lose out to honest ones.
Slightly different perspective: facts are completely unimportant, because:
- what seems like a fact may not be a "fact" at all, it may be a misunderstanding
- knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don't know the facts you don't know
If certain truths are probable, the facts known today (or perceived as knowable today) should not get in the way of exploring them.
Do not let any fact or a collection of facts get in the way of your exploration of the truth.
If one is extremely conservative, it may seem like a good idea to only stick to what is already known (i.e. the "facts") but even then, because of the fact that you can never be sure that everything there is to know is known at this time, one should still keep an open mind.
Imagine two friends, Alice and Bob. Alice thinks COVID is not a problem. Doesn't mask, hasn't had a single shot, all the rest. Bob is terrified of COVID. Masks up at home, space bubble helmet outside, all the rest.
The only outcome that works is Alice and Bob agreeing that they have different risk preferences. That they each should live their lives in accordance, but that they have no right to force each other to adopt the same behaviors. Bob gets used to doing a lot of stuff over Zoom, and Alice gets used to doing a lot more Zoom calls than she did before.
What if, instead, Bob tries to force the entire world to wear masks all the time, and undergo an endless stream of boosters, all in order to satisfy his risk preference? Alice will respond in-kind, and now we're in a tit-for-tat situation. Endless retaliation.
Now, imagine that Bob has political power, and can mandate his desires into law. Bob has now used deadly force -- the police -- to coerce Alice into doing what he wants.
Alice, being a big fan of consent, is having none of it... and that's where we are today.
What if Bob is afraid of other people firing their guns in their backyard because he doesn't want to get killed by stray bullets. It just doesn't work anymore because the risk Alice and Bob are taking depends more on what other people do than what they themselves do. After all Bob isn't gonna kill himself with a stray bullet. Bob not shooting guns but Alice shooting guns while pointing in Bob's house direction doesn't solve the problem.
Thank you for your example of how to mislead with non-factual strawmen. This example might be connected to reality if:
1. There actually was a law requiring individuals "wear masks all the time".
2. There actually was a law requiring individuals to get an "endless stream of boosters".
3. Alice respected the boundaries of private businesses that made wearing respiratory protection or vaccination a requirement of associating with them.
4. Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection, rather than violating their personal space or perhaps even assaulting them.
5. Alice paid the costs of her own healthcare, and/or her "insurance" company were efficient enough to charge for her expected increased costs.
6. Healthcare providers were able to freely disassociate with Alice as to not have an undue burden on their resources due to the results of Alice's choices.
7. Alice displayed rational recognition of the scientific and legal realities she was dealing with, rather that irrational rejection of such.
8. Alice displayed some understanding of historical precedents, as pandemics are infrequent events that only appear novel.
I'm a libertarian, so if you want to discuss practical ways of making it so that different value judgements can coexist, I'm all for it. It starts with acknowledging the existing non-independence like the points I listed, and will generally be about nuanced corrections to the medical consensus rather than wholesale rejection. But really, it's fallacious to frame the larger situation as being about individual freedom when the overriding characteristic is political herd behavior. What has really happened is an abrupt change in prevailing conditions, combined with professional political machines preaching simplistic easy answers that play to peoples' biases.
WesternWind|4 years ago
Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.
I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.
tablespoon|4 years ago
> I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
It's worth noting that journalism in general has had its revenue streams decimated by Craigslist, clickbait, subscriber loss due to competing with free, etc. Except for very few prestige outlets, most media outlets have been forced to shrink their newsrooms, year after year, for a couple decades. Even though the prestige outlets are healthier, they're not so healthy as to be able to pick up all the slack.
It's easy to criticize someone for not doing as thorough a job as you'd like, but it's not very reasonable when that person is the last man standing from a team of ten, and the team's workload has increased in the meantime.
cloutchaser|4 years ago
Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.
In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.
But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.
pydry|4 years ago
anamax|4 years ago
Journalists themselves do NO say that "keep the public informed" is their primary responsibility.
The dominant "why are you a journalist?" answer is "to change the world."
sputr|4 years ago
I would argue that that is not their primary responsibility. That is, in fact, to put food on the table.
Journalists are not well paid and, more importantly, are easily replaceable. "Real journalism" is hard, but makes no money, while pop-journalism is very easy and profitable. So media companies demand and pay for pop-journalism. And that can be done by far too many people.
So blaming them for doing what they need to do to get paid when doing "real journalism" will get them fired is... pointless.
mbesto|4 years ago
It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".
ouid|4 years ago
If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless.
In order to mislead with a "true" fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).
The essence of "lying by telling the truth" is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.
Fortunately, It's much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.
Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.
Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with "true" implications.
I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn't teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).
bogdanoff_2|4 years ago
afro88|4 years ago
darawk|4 years ago
If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextualization, i'd love to hear about it, though.
_Nat_|4 years ago
In usual communication, we focus on fact-checking things in the context in which they're most valid, with the presumption that any contextual ambiguity'd be understood/resolved. In such scenarios, it can make sense to fact-check something literally, in the context in which it's claimed, then handle the contextual-migrations appropriately in discussing inter-related points.
But Twitter-like platforms destroy this -- short blurbs in a relatively context-free space make it difficult to be honest even for folks who'd want to be, and seems to be a playground for folks who'd want to lie under pretense of factuality.
The appropriate reaction to claims removed from context would seem to be to deny them. Not to say that the claim is false (at least, not in a context in which it'd be true), but to note that the claim isn't relevant to the current-context (at least, not without a basis for connecting it to the current-context).
---
To note it, a problem with allowing folks to declare claims as being out-of-context (if they're not required to support it) is that it gives everyone a free-pass to weasel out of acknowledging anything that they dislike. So, it's unsuitable for adversarial contexts or otherwise unreliable exchanges.
Which is what I think makes debates, politics, etc. on platforms like Twitter basically garbage: it's too easy to lie if context isn't observed, and it's too easy to dodge stuff if it is.
So while Twitter-like platforms might workable for non-adversarial exchanges (like sharing pictures, announcements, etc.), adversarial exchanges on such platforms would seem structurally predisposed toward undesirable behavior.
throwaway22032|4 years ago
So you can easily show high quality contextualisation - it's showing that the case against is less preferable, e.g. arguing against yourself.
For example, Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, an y% chance of passing that on to someone, who then has a z% chance of being seriously disabled or dying, and they have an a% chance of not obtaining that disease via some other mechanism".
You take the opposing viewpoint and try to dismantle it. This is the role of the media, to inform, not to latch onto micro-facts like "lockdown saves lives" and push them because they're easy wins.
kkjjkgjjgg|4 years ago
bjoli|4 years ago
They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans had to eat it. Which meant no actual land gains, only a modest reduction in co2 emissions, and that people would become unhealthy by eating 4500kcal/day, mostly from corn.
Even worse than the 3.1mn views is that the study in question was covered positively on TV and in newspapers.
cf141q5325|4 years ago
Like grazing sites being interchangeable with farmland. So something like https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets which pictures almost everything that isnt a forest as possible agriculture land.
Same with what types of calories are fed to cows especially. As in for humans indigestible byproducts of industrial agriculture. For example, this is the "corn" we speak about in this context. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissilage Used in both cow and pig feed. Here a picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Sonsbeck... Its the shredded plant. The stuff that gets also used in biogas plants.
Calling these lies by omission out is not something that needs stricter "factchecks" that are less focused on facts to protect people from unwanted conclusions.
harpersealtako|4 years ago
You have a statement, like "meat agriculture uses more water than plant agriculture." Then you have a fact checker that says "yup, if you look at the amount of water to raise a cow vs to water a grain field with equivalent weight, calories, or whatever other metric you're using, it takes far more water to raise a cow". This truth gets copied around the internet and used to support claims and policies -- "meat uses more water. We have a water shortage in California. Therefore we should ban cows in California because of the water shortage." The logic makes perfect sense, and all the underlying facts are true.
The video then gave the context, which is that cows are often raised on otherwise unproductive grasslands that aren't used for crops anyways, and those that aren't being raised on unproductive land are usually eating corn from places that don't have as much of a water problem (e.g. the Midwest). This doesn't debunk the fact that a calorie of cow uses more water than a calorie of potato, or corn, or soybean -- you can still find those facts on any fact checker on the internet and they're still just as true -- but it does weaken the claim of "we should ban cows in California to help with the water shortage".
In the context of the linked article, this is both "Decontextualizing and recontextualizing" and "Reinterpreting and pre-framing meaning". The claim "meat uses more water than plants" is decontextualized from the world where corn is grown in places without water problems and meat is often raised in situations where water use is minimal, and reinterpreted and reframed in the context of local environmental problems to support a predetermined conclusion. Of course there are probably examples in the video where it makes the same mistake the other way around -- but by watching both that video, the rebuttals, and the discussion, you can come to a better, more complex understanding of the issue, which can't be a bad thing.
sebastianconcpt|4 years ago
Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.
It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
tablespoon|4 years ago
No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that.
> In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
> Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
The biggest marketeers of "Propaganda" are those that claim they have access to the capital-T truth. If it feels like you have access to capital-T truth, you're almost certainly trapped inside an ideological construct.
That said, ideological constructs aren't necessarily bad things, since society simply could not function without the shared "truth" they allow for.
TuringTest|4 years ago
Causal mapping [1] websites can aggregate the back and forth of heated discussions, eliminating emotional responses and distilling the core ideas of each opposing position. Such compilation of facts an argument in a readable, neutral format (e.g. see Kialo)[2] could work like the academic debates of old, allowing facts to be analysed in context and the validity of arguments to be tested on their own merits, not on their emotional appeal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causal_mapping_softwar...
[2] https://www.kialo.com/
ncmncm|4 years ago
It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.
Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.
pphysch|4 years ago
> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_correspondent#Gulf_War
areyousure|4 years ago
Broken_Hippo|4 years ago
ren_engineer|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
innocentoldguy|4 years ago
For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."
Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.
This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.
PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago
pessimizer|4 years ago
charlieyu1|4 years ago
6LLvveMx2koXfwn|4 years ago
Which is why, in a court of law, you swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", as selective truth is no truth at all.
rndmize|4 years ago
Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?
If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
sophacles|4 years ago
For instance, right wing hacks love to point out the flaws in NYT over and over on thier quest for "media is bad", while ignoring:
* they too are media
* there are just as many examples in their own organization and almost every other
*choosing to play dumb that they choose the examples as part of a targeted smear campaign
CountDrewku|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
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papandada|4 years ago
I found it tremendously unsatisfying.
This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)
If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.
My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as "love thy neighbor as thyself."
There's a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.
engineer_22|4 years ago
For example, in a court of law, where you have a handful of jurors, some witnesses, a carefully curated set of rules, and highly trained professionals guiding the process. Errors are made. The truth is not always found and an innocent person gets locked up or a guilty one walks free.
Epistemology is an ancient practice. In the western tradition this was first pointed out over 2,000 years ago.
Then there is the problem that human beings are not rational actors and it gets a whole lot messier.
chaostheory|4 years ago
notriddle|4 years ago
Nursie|4 years ago
Then we are demonstrating a level of good faith and interest that seems missing in most discourse.
I like the drive behind this - to really get to the bottom of things and promote rational comprehension rather than have people simply sniping at each other with misunderstood datapoints - but I'm not sure a lot of the people who are engaging in such behaviour are really that interested. As mentioned in the article, what they are really after is ammunition.
Still, I welcome this, as it's far better than just throwing up our collective hands and deciding any attempt to improve the quality of public discussion is necessarily censorship.
specialist|4 years ago
There's no profit in pursuing "truth" in the face of tenacious anti-truth. Truthiness is an outgrowth of identity. And identity is impervious to logic, reason, facts.
The best we can do is help ourselves navigate the chaos.
It's a real simple checklist:
- Share your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Sign your name.
And then you can start productive analysis, fact checking, verification. Anything less should be treated as gossip, propaganda, or trolling (distraction).
Lastly, I have no idea what to do about identity.
groby_b|4 years ago
The problem is that journalism stokes the formation of camps by a) conflating ideas and identities, b) bothsidesing everything, and so creating artificial identities to be perceived as neutral, and c) knowingly exploiting that "fear sells" and targeting the identities they manufacture.
Which then becomes ripe pickings for any sociopath out for their own interests.
The only way I'm aware of that can overcome this at scale is forming a larger group identity that's more inclusive. But that only seems to work if there's a large outgroup you can unite against, as far as I can tell.
_0ffh|4 years ago
anthony_romeo|4 years ago
> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content
> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content
... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.
This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.
brutusborn|4 years ago
oreally|4 years ago
zekica|4 years ago
The issue is that popular press and "influencers" ignore limitations in studies and always tell just their interpretations while pointing to "the science".
tgv|4 years ago
a_imho|4 years ago
dandanua|4 years ago
[deleted]
Ambolia|4 years ago
tablespoon|4 years ago
No, I don't think it's that simple. Take the classic culture war issue: abortion. There's genuine, widespread, and deep opposition to it. The "covert interests" didn't manufacture that opposition, but they have latched onto it to help make unpopular policies (e.g. laissez faire economics, tax cuts for the rich) electorally viable.
QuadmasterXLII|4 years ago
bigodbiel|4 years ago
This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have full disclosure from the author.
naasking|4 years ago
"Information" is not "knowledge". Information can consist of many falsehoods, knowledge should contain few if any falsehoods. We want a decent signal to noise ratio in our information, which requires some base of reliable knowledge.
So I think there's a place for fact checking. This used to be the domain of good reporters, but many of them have shit the bed hard on that for a couple of decades now, and lost most of their credibility. Now is the age of "fact checkers", which aren't doing much better frankly.
raziel2701|4 years ago
population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.
And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.
nvusuvu|4 years ago
refurb|4 years ago
Then later on admitting half of those admissions weren’t for covid, but for other reasons.
bena|4 years ago
Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.
Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?
rory|4 years ago
commandlinefan|4 years ago
beachy|4 years ago
throwawayarnty|4 years ago
The reality of how this number is calculated (eg averages across professions, even though men and women tend to work different professions, part time vs full time is not taken into account) suggests the conclusions that come from this 82 cents number is more nuanced than the initial statement.
metaphor|4 years ago
Using real world examples in this context strikes me as dancing into a mine field and a dismissal of the nuanced exercise towards understanding that the author suggests[2].
[1] https://consilienceproject.org/content/images/size/w1000/202...
[2] https://consilienceproject.org/content/images/size/w1000/202...
paulsutter|4 years ago
Both sides are citing true facts (“these papers exist”), both sides are wrong (the data is in fact inconclusive)
dang|4 years ago
blueflow|4 years ago
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
golemiprague|4 years ago
[deleted]
nailer|4 years ago
That is absolutely truthful.
I will omit to mention that engine coolant is water.
h0nd|4 years ago
1. What is said? Do I understand it? Where does it come from?
2. How is it to be understood? How to interpret it?
3. What does it signify? Can it be classified and/or compared with other known things?
4. What can be taken from it? What implications does it have?
Looking at news in this way, it is clearly visible, how most things that are communicated answer 3. and 4., omitting its foundations 1. and 2. Sometimes the bias is created by changing 2.
(The fine-definition of the steps is still in the works. So far, I am very happy with this method. It helps me a lot to understand things and what things are really about. Suggestions?)
ZeroGravitas|4 years ago
They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.
The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don't really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying "well, you can prove anything with facts" which feels like it's going in the wrong direction.
Reading all the other comments, there's a strong vibe of "see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers".
motohagiography|4 years ago
The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.
Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.
NikolaNovak|4 years ago
DFHippie|4 years ago
1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.
2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers are representative and pre-empt the listener's getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.
brightball|4 years ago
If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.
emmelaich|4 years ago
What we need is humility and good faith.
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
I mean, even when an article ticks all the boxes for being well researched, factually correct, neutral in language, even then it can be misleading for not having a counter-point (for example), or its hosting platform to de-emphasize the article.
What has more impact, a headline saying "tinfoil hats cause headaches" prominently posted on the front page of a newspaper in big impact font, or a byline four pages in?
zerop|4 years ago
Synaesthesia|4 years ago
jnurmine|4 years ago
Looks like a magazine, elegant, no cruft.
botev|4 years ago
jasonhansel|4 years ago
This increasingly common use of the word "weaponize" (as a dysphemism for "utilize") bothers me, as does the article's use of the phrase "information war."
As horrible as it is to spread disinformation and propaganda, it seems unnecessarily extreme to describe that as analogous or comparable to warfare or physical violence.
rob_c|4 years ago
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
100% of commenters to your comment at the time of writing this comment linked to wikipedia, STATISTICALLY PROVING that they are shills of Big Wiki.
bsedlm|4 years ago
zepto|4 years ago
Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.
But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.
_Nat_|4 years ago
The solution'd seem to be to have cultural dialogs, e.g. on politics, occur on platforms where optimal strategies are constructive. This is, where deceptive strategies would lose out to honest ones.
ComradePhil|4 years ago
- what seems like a fact may not be a "fact" at all, it may be a misunderstanding
- knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don't know the facts you don't know
If certain truths are probable, the facts known today (or perceived as knowable today) should not get in the way of exploring them.
Do not let any fact or a collection of facts get in the way of your exploration of the truth.
If one is extremely conservative, it may seem like a good idea to only stick to what is already known (i.e. the "facts") but even then, because of the fact that you can never be sure that everything there is to know is known at this time, one should still keep an open mind.
defaultprimate|4 years ago
You can be open to new evidence defining what objective truth is without dismissing the existence of objective truth due to unknown unknowns.
unknown|4 years ago
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donw|4 years ago
Imagine two friends, Alice and Bob. Alice thinks COVID is not a problem. Doesn't mask, hasn't had a single shot, all the rest. Bob is terrified of COVID. Masks up at home, space bubble helmet outside, all the rest.
The only outcome that works is Alice and Bob agreeing that they have different risk preferences. That they each should live their lives in accordance, but that they have no right to force each other to adopt the same behaviors. Bob gets used to doing a lot of stuff over Zoom, and Alice gets used to doing a lot more Zoom calls than she did before.
What if, instead, Bob tries to force the entire world to wear masks all the time, and undergo an endless stream of boosters, all in order to satisfy his risk preference? Alice will respond in-kind, and now we're in a tit-for-tat situation. Endless retaliation.
Now, imagine that Bob has political power, and can mandate his desires into law. Bob has now used deadly force -- the police -- to coerce Alice into doing what he wants.
Alice, being a big fan of consent, is having none of it... and that's where we are today.
Same would be true if the roles were reversed.
maximus-decimus|4 years ago
mindslight|4 years ago
1. There actually was a law requiring individuals "wear masks all the time".
2. There actually was a law requiring individuals to get an "endless stream of boosters".
3. Alice respected the boundaries of private businesses that made wearing respiratory protection or vaccination a requirement of associating with them.
4. Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection, rather than violating their personal space or perhaps even assaulting them.
5. Alice paid the costs of her own healthcare, and/or her "insurance" company were efficient enough to charge for her expected increased costs.
6. Healthcare providers were able to freely disassociate with Alice as to not have an undue burden on their resources due to the results of Alice's choices.
7. Alice displayed rational recognition of the scientific and legal realities she was dealing with, rather that irrational rejection of such.
8. Alice displayed some understanding of historical precedents, as pandemics are infrequent events that only appear novel.
I'm a libertarian, so if you want to discuss practical ways of making it so that different value judgements can coexist, I'm all for it. It starts with acknowledging the existing non-independence like the points I listed, and will generally be about nuanced corrections to the medical consensus rather than wholesale rejection. But really, it's fallacious to frame the larger situation as being about individual freedom when the overriding characteristic is political herd behavior. What has really happened is an abrupt change in prevailing conditions, combined with professional political machines preaching simplistic easy answers that play to peoples' biases.
coliveira|4 years ago
stirfish|4 years ago
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MengerSponge|4 years ago
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known|4 years ago
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fdhfdjkfhdkj|4 years ago
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Brannon121|4 years ago
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erwincoumans|4 years ago