IT'S A TRAP! Seriously. I love the intent here. But in my view the whole premise is epistemologically wrong. (A word I'm almost educated enough to use.)
Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage.
This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things that subtract a lot from growth are not included.
And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history do not match our mainstream perception of national character at all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social change are not supported by the majority.
Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth consensus.
What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its experts?
Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.
I think the overton window plays a part and it's certainly an interesting window to look at the problem of misinformation thorough, but I think that we are seeing something that's even more painful to think about. We are seeing where people believe authority is derived from.
The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto others. The author believes authority can be derived via consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation" believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by their religious leaders).
If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I supposed to share a world view with someone who believes authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus be reached?
Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally incompatible axioms about the world and how information is determined to be true.
The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.
> Nevertheless, we had a functional polity in that era, with dissidence, yes, but also with broad consensus about what was true, false, and subject to reasonable contestation. As someone who often felt dissident, I can tell you that it sucked. Lots of important values and ideas got no meaningful hearing outside of very ghettoized information spaces. At the same time, it was a much more livable society beyond the frontiers of ones own dissidence. There was a lot one could get away with just taking for granted, as an individual trying to make sense of the world. Collectively, politically, we were a much more capable society, we had a stronger shared basis for action in the common good. The church of network television was consistent with an era of bipartisanship, and with experiments in policy—which were often mistaken, in part due to the narrow and blinkered information environment that framed them! But at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present
I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to, and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity that was always there.
at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present
this is the critical part.
only with consensus is it possible to try things, and fix failures without shaming those that supported the idea.
elsewhere the author mentions multi party systems as an improvement over the two party situation. well, yes, but, in the end, any party system makes consensus difficult. even when there are coalitions, they mostly mean that one party agrees to support one issue against their own interests if the other party will support one of theirs. this kind of vote trading is not helpful.
really the only way to get consensus is to completely abolish the concept of parties altogether.
it's the same issue with unions. they are necessary today because employers do not act in the best interest of their employees. but unions and employers are in a constant struggle fighting each other, and consensus is not possible. but only consensus is able to ensure that a company operates to everyones benefit.
This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you will see.
From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky. Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals to your own.
Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will destroy it. That's why countries have militaries.
As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos.
> As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos.
Consensus based systems assume that bad actors make up less than 50% of the political power. As long as that is true, Consensusville should be able to fight off the chaos from bad actors
But this model and your strategy makes dissent necessary in the first place. To such a degree that the content of any opposing view is secondary compared to the mere existence of dissent as there is a guarantee that you will be wrong when enforcing consensus at some point.
The categorical imperative would only forbid the people of Authorityville to spread chaos in Consensusland. It has no intrinsic contradiction as it is not a strategy for conflict resolution and you would need to adhere to it in dominant and not dominant positions.
There are just some wrong premises for misinformation. Misinformation is fought best with free information. There are untrue statements about the economics of misinformation and that it would win against free information because it is easier to produce. I believe this is empirically wrong and has lead us to wrong conclusion who best to combat it. And this will result in less ability to form consensus and also less trust.
> We could use "permissioned blockchains" (which involve no speculative financial tokens or environmentally destructive "mining") ubiquitously in important institutions to notarize almost everything
This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.
Its an interesting article and while I didn't have the time to think the topic through - so I will not share my thoughts on the subject - there are some points in it, which I will definetly think about.
What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very inaccessible. To me it felt like some words and phrases where deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could benefit from some more simple english.
On one hand, there are people who say "flood the zone with shit" and regularly signal boost memes from Stormfront. On the other hand, there are people who think that the New York Times is a newspaper of record and want to fight misinformation. Obviously, there's wrongdoing on both sides here. Instead of fighting Stormfront, why don't we create state-backed committees at community colleges which label populist, right-leaning viewpoints as academic consensus?
I find articles like this - and the fact they make the front page of HN - pretty illustrative of how "misinformation" is nowhere close to our biggest media problem.
Misinformation is downstream from retrograde political views and basic historical literacy. The solution isn't a better media ecosystem. It's better social relations.
> Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States.
> It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans.
> Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”
Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative means.
>Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not.
False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.
I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment to claim otherwise.
I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform to distribute my nonsense.
Am not a censor, I agree with this. What people call “free speech” is really “free mouth utterances” with basically no consideration of whether or not what is being said is actually a sincerely held belief being expressed in good faith. Because the belief that current public discourse is anything at all a marketplace of ideas or some collective Socratic circle is also extremely naive and juvenile.
By making no distinction between (picking an obviously repulsive view) a post that outlines someone’s argument why they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing watermelon and fried chicken with the caption “ni**, right?” [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted to protect with free speech in the first place.
Free speech should be measured in “freedom as in liberty” instead of “freedom as in anarchy.”
[1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon town.
Free speech is a tenant of functional society but it is not the only tenant nor is it the most important one. The Internet tends to focus on it because free speech is what it’s best at. And while that focus is important, it’s time we changed its primacy so that we can see its effect on other critical, more subtle, tenants.
When you continue reading beyond this presupposition, the author does not conclude we need better or more accurate censorship. Instead his point is that we need new ways for building consensus that crosses partisan lines. Then he hypothesizes mechanisms for building this consensus without needing censorship.
His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world, bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize the faction who 'lost'.
most of humanity's longest existing civilizations don't care about free speech, or liberalism altogether for that matter which is a fairly novel experiment in and of itself.
You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to express your discontent with censorship without advancing any point.
Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it etc.
Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to criticize the Quran.
'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of barbarian wants that?
Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem? This essay is much more thought out and rational than your flame-bait response.
"Free speech used to be compatible with interests of the royalty, but as the society has grown bigger, the royalty and freedom of speech can no longer coexist, and one of them has to go." would be a more honest statement.
There's a big part of the argument here that is that what is and isn't misinformation is largely unknowable by any individual, and that different people disagree on different experts' authority.
But that's just not true.
It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them from confusing other people too.
It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information. The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to that level, as a society, is extremely low.
Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president [1]. What if Bob and Steve see Nature as a political organization? Are they incorrect? Should they be silenced?
In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer. (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.)
People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s. Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those people lived in the south, of course.
I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.
[+] [-] Julesman|3 years ago|reply
Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage.
This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things that subtract a lot from growth are not included.
And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history do not match our mainstream perception of national character at all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social change are not supported by the majority.
Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth consensus.
What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its experts?
Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.
[+] [-] hayst4ck|3 years ago|reply
The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto others. The author believes authority can be derived via consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation" believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by their religious leaders).
If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I supposed to share a world view with someone who believes authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus be reached?
Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally incompatible axioms about the world and how information is determined to be true.
The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to, and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity that was always there.
[+] [-] em-bee|3 years ago|reply
this is the critical part.
only with consensus is it possible to try things, and fix failures without shaming those that supported the idea.
elsewhere the author mentions multi party systems as an improvement over the two party situation. well, yes, but, in the end, any party system makes consensus difficult. even when there are coalitions, they mostly mean that one party agrees to support one issue against their own interests if the other party will support one of theirs. this kind of vote trading is not helpful.
really the only way to get consensus is to completely abolish the concept of parties altogether.
it's the same issue with unions. they are necessary today because employers do not act in the best interest of their employees. but unions and employers are in a constant struggle fighting each other, and consensus is not possible. but only consensus is able to ensure that a company operates to everyones benefit.
[+] [-] hayst4ck|3 years ago|reply
This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you will see.
From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky. Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals to your own.
Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will destroy it. That's why countries have militaries.
As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos.
How do you defeat that?
[+] [-] woojoo666|3 years ago|reply
Consensus based systems assume that bad actors make up less than 50% of the political power. As long as that is true, Consensusville should be able to fight off the chaos from bad actors
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
The categorical imperative would only forbid the people of Authorityville to spread chaos in Consensusland. It has no intrinsic contradiction as it is not a strategy for conflict resolution and you would need to adhere to it in dominant and not dominant positions.
There are just some wrong premises for misinformation. Misinformation is fought best with free information. There are untrue statements about the economics of misinformation and that it would win against free information because it is easier to produce. I believe this is empirically wrong and has lead us to wrong conclusion who best to combat it. And this will result in less ability to form consensus and also less trust.
[+] [-] hunglee2|3 years ago|reply
one of many beautifully written lines. An outstanding essay for the quality of thinking and writing
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468
[+] [-] rocqua|3 years ago|reply
Really git has too many features, and too little publishing features that prevent repudiation.
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asimops|3 years ago|reply
What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very inaccessible. To me it felt like some words and phrases where deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could benefit from some more simple english.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-...
[+] [-] kastagg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttpphd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pickovven|3 years ago|reply
Misinformation is downstream from retrograde political views and basic historical literacy. The solution isn't a better media ecosystem. It's better social relations.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
> Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States.
> It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans.
> Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”
[+] [-] DangitBobby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n0tth3dro1ds|3 years ago|reply
>Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not.
False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.
[+] [-] whatever1|3 years ago|reply
I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment to claim otherwise.
I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform to distribute my nonsense.
[+] [-] Spivak|3 years ago|reply
By making no distinction between (picking an obviously repulsive view) a post that outlines someone’s argument why they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing watermelon and fried chicken with the caption “ni**, right?” [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted to protect with free speech in the first place.
Free speech should be measured in “freedom as in liberty” instead of “freedom as in anarchy.”
[1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon town.
[+] [-] wussboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocqua|3 years ago|reply
His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world, bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize the faction who 'lost'.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to express your discontent with censorship without advancing any point.
Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it etc.
Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to criticize the Quran.
'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of barbarian wants that?
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akomtu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackees|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrispeel|3 years ago|reply
I think the website was created about 20 years ago (and looks like it), yet I see no problems with the font
[+] [-] dogmatism|3 years ago|reply
change it to something more readable
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
But that's just not true.
It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them from confusing other people too.
It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information. The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to that level, as a society, is extremely low.
[+] [-] kodyo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peyton|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x
[+] [-] drewcoo|3 years ago|reply
In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer. (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s. Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those people lived in the south, of course.
https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-ri...
I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|3 years ago|reply