Why we're Post-Fact
granta.com
granta.com
This can happen for a number of reasons, but the current primary reason is that social media is biased against facts. Content that is controversial, emotional, and timely spreads faster. Factualness in that environment is just irrelevant and expensive.
It boils down to distribution and incentives. If the incentives don't change, things will only get worse. And as lies are repeated and internalized they will be used to inform policy. This has catastrophic consequences — if you are driving a car, and ignore the "facts" out the window, you crash.
Concrete evidence that facts & social media don't currently mix: https://firstdraftnews.com/recent-research-reveals-false-rum...
A chilling overview full of citations about how this affects dangerous conspiracy theories (written by a bay area founder & VC who also helped win a legislative battle against anti-vaxxers) http://www.fastcoexist.com/3059742/social-network-algorithms...
Another overview by the Editor in Chief of the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology...
Feel free to contact me (email on my profile page) if you want to learn more about bias mitigation strategies (something I'm actively exploring).
>How did we get here?
This whole article is based on the false assumption that we ever lived in a fact-based world. Before recently people never had accurate and cheap means of data recording and information sharing that let them look behind the curtain and realize that they have been lied to all along. From the Lusitania to the Gulf of Tonkin to the USS Liberty to WMD in Iraq, history is built on lies and distortions. The internet allows people to get occasional glimpses behind the curtain, which is one of the reasons restricting the internet and stifling free speech is the dream of dictators from Beijing to Moscow to Washington DC.
The freedom of, and instant access to, objective sources via the Internet inspired great hope in me that media-driven fake news narratives could be overcome once and for all. For example, once access to Federal U.S. legislation online was created after the 1995 turnover of Congress, people were able to actually see what legislators were doing rather than media narratives creating or inhibiting advocacy.
Alas, all that even otherwise-literate people seem to care about now is forwarding (often utterly false) memes to one another.
It's easier than ever to get at original sources, yet few bother.
The point is that people no longer care about exposing the lies; facts have become irrelevant compared to cheering for your team, right or wrong. That is the recent development, and a very worrying one despite what the usual lofty detachment of the HN comments here thus far seems to think. You can't have democracy if people don't care about the difference between true and false (well, you can, but it will be unable to accomplish anything; it will just stagger along dysfunctionally until it is replaced by an autarch when the people get sufficiently sick at the lack of results from the government)
Perhaps you should read the article again or work on your reading comprehension.
>The point is that people no longer care about exposing the lies; facts have become irrelevant compared to cheering for your team, right or wrong. That is the recent development, and a very worrying one despite what the usual lofty detachment of the HN comments here thus far seems to think.
Facts have always been irrelevant compared to cheering for your team. Facts have never mattered when it comes to partisanship or tribalism. The point is that recent technological developments and the mass communication of information have allowed this dichotomy to come to light, so that our disdain for facts is just more apparent, not a new phenomenon.
If the disdain for facts is having macroscopic effects on society now, and was not before, this is a distinction without a difference. Simply redefine "post-fact era" in your own view to, "now it can have a much greater impact than it could before" and the article's analysis remains mostly intact.
> Facts have always been irrelevant compared to cheering for your team. Facts have never mattered when it comes to partisanship or tribalism.
This is the crux of our disagreement, I think. I believe you are mistaken, or at least that the degree to which "facts are irrelevant" to people has undergone such a large increase that it is having many more visible and serious effects on society.
Consider something like Watergate, which caused the President's party to demand his resignation. Would that happen today if the exact same events transpired? It absolutely would not. People in the same tribe as the sitting President, whichever that is, would just brush off the whole thing as lies and spin created by the media. The "post-fact era" is what changed between then and now.
You're making an interesting argument; please don't spoil your comment and discredit your point by being rude, even if someone else is wrong and/or missing it.
In the past, while your own biases could filter how you perceive contrary information, it was very difficult to outright avoid all contrary information (unless you just walked away from any news altogether). Now, we're getting to the point where that's become more and more of a new normal, while simultaneously allowing people to state with no hesitation that they're well-informed and pay attention to current events. It's just that they're paying attention while standing in their own narrowly-defined echo chambers that can become more and more isolated with time even when they know better.
Case in point? On election night back in 2012, Romney's team and advisors were surprised by their loss in line with pre-election polls that various conservative commentators rejected for a litany of reasons. I can see voters being surprised after buying into a certain spin, but the professional campaign staff with years of professional experience with that exact issue making the same mistake? Or what about the anti-vax movement or climate-change denial? Far from convincing people, overwhelming scientific evidence just serves to get them to double-down on their position.
None of this is new. Isolating yourself from new, uncomfortable knowledge has always been possible. But it was never as easy as it is now. And that's the point I think the parent was trying to make: the ease of isolation, and the extent of its spread across the politically active populace, have radically changed the negative consequences of the phenomenon at a societal level.
The hardest thing is that we aren't talking about something--the internet, social media, etc.--that's the cause here. It's not. A town's only neo-Nazi can go online to talk to like-minded shitheads to avoid having to painful answer that maybe there's a reason that they're their town's only neo-Nazi. The same tool can also help an LGBT teenager try and escape bullying by connecting with others with shared experiences who can tell them "It Gets Better." Being able to connect to like-minded groups isn't the problem; it's what happens when you do that, and then proceed to filter everything through your shared beliefs. Even when it isn't actively divorcing you from reality, it can still distort your perception.
" A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
But, seriously, people were never interested in facts. They were only ever interested in the status that comes with them.
Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied –
but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.
* 43% of republicans believe Obama was born abroad [1]
* the usual lies about anthropogenic global warming
* Iraq had WMDs
* Sarah Palin or Donald Trump are fit for office
* crime is up (it's down; American hasn't been this safe in ~50 years)
* racism doesn't exist, or anti-white racism exists
[1] http://www.salon.com/2015/09/14/a_staggering_number_of_repub...
> anti-white racism exists
Yeah, so Dallas didn't happen. Go read some extreme BLM propaganda. Some (a lot) of it is blatantly racist.
And if we're talking about lies, one only needs to look at Clinton's political career. Excuse me, you only need to look at the last month.
That's the whole point of this article. Don't delude yourself. Both parties are controlled by a bunch of liars.
"When people say that reverse racism (AKA anti-white racism) does not exist, they are using the word 'racism' to mean 'a socioeconomic power structure that systematically disadvantages people of a particular race'. By this definition of racism, they are absolutely correct. There is no systematic oppression or disenfranchisement of white people in America.
However, many people (especially those less familiar with modern feminist discourse) understand the word 'racism' to mean 'an instance of a person or group treating another person or group poorly because of their race'. By this definition, anti-white racism does exist. White people are certainly sometimes treated poorly because of their whiteness.
Arguments over the existence of 'reverse racism' almost always occur between people who do not agree on the definition of the word 'racism'. Before you respond to this post about reverse racism, please consider the possibility that the person to whom you are responding is neither crazy nor stupid. Instead, they may simply be using a different definition of 'racism' than the one to which you subscribe. If you interpret their post with a different definition of 'racism' than your own, do you suddenly find it to be much more reasonable? If so, you may have been missing the point.
It is always best to agree upon shared terminology before engaging in debate."
Yes, African Americans are discriminated against. But it's not just them. It's anyone without power or money that is systematically disadvantaged. To make it a racial issue is to ignore that, and it's to fall into a divide and conquer strategy that people in power play off of.
If we are talking about beliefs here then surely there are,the widespread ones in the democrats, are just the inverse of most of the things you posted? I.e most of the democratic party believe in climate change. Irrespective of the 'truth' of such a belief it is widespread.
While I haven't done extensive differential lie analysis, even if I did and shared it, it would be derided as partisan just because people start from the assumption of equality in lying between different groups.
No it's not, and it is important.
It explicitly calls out this argument in the last paragraph. Talking about the period leading up to the second Gulf war:
But for all their cynicism, the spin doctors and political technologists were, at this point, still trying to pull off an illusion of the truth....
Now, ~10 years later though:
one reaction has been to double down, to deny that facts matter at all..... Putin doesn’t need to have a more convincing story, he just has to make it clear that everybody lies, undermine the moral superiority of his enemies and convince his people there is no alternative to him. ‘When Putin lies brazenly he wants the West to point out that he lies’ says the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, ‘so he can point back and say, “but you lie too”’. And if everyone is lying then anything goes, whether it’s in your personal life or in invading foreign countries.
Here's the article. It's better than this one.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-polit...
I spent the weekend talking to a lot of americans about the events in munich, and a big majority of them was happy to quite simply shitpost about it en masse even if every evidence that came out contradicted them. CNN didn't help either.
And I think you've replied to the wrong post. I haven't said a word about what Americans like or don't like. So maybe you're a little out of touch too.
Not my creation, welcome to the youth of the usa (30 and below). Try googling it.
As to "wrong post", i could swear your post originally called the author of the article out of touch. Either i am misremembering or you edited it. (And i just checked, HN does not mark edited posts.)
Further, the author does spend a lot of time on trump, but this part condenses to "americans like shitposting and trump exploits that":
> This is a (dark) joy. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s okay. The very point of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense.
How does not living up to a statement of future intent have anything to do with living in a "post-fact" world?
This was pointed out repeatedly, by various official statistical agencies etc. but they just refused to back down from the lie.
They had some stock lines about "gross vs net" (also a lie), about how the figure wasn't 350 but could be increased without UK consent (also a lie), or they just switched to quoting the accurate figure in yearly terms and hoped that no-one in their voting demographic could divide by 52.
Also, roughly half the actual figure is spent on UK farmers, deprived regions and so on, and they'd also promised to maintain those payments.
So, lies upon lies basically.
In fact, UK has a veto, and Turkey won't be able to join until it gives back half of Cyprus (which is never).
We just have the internet now to, occasionally, figure out just how duped we've always been.
For me, not even a little bit.
Trump for example, rails against NAFTA. And let's just set aside the fact that he blames Clinton for it, when it was written and signed and voted in by Republicans. Even if it was a Clinton or Democrat thimg, whether it is good or not is complex, I'd want an expert to explain it to me. That leaves an opening for people like Trump.
That's quite the study you have there… Also, how simple is the statement "conservatives are the ones looking for simple answers"?
It's also puzzling that you would liken Trump to "conservatives", when it seems like there's quite a few definitely conservative people out there who flat out refused to endorse him (all three Bush for example, Ted Cruz, John Kasich among others).
http://time.com/4372882/john-kasich-donald-trump-republicans...
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/01/07/are-conservatives-rea...
But note they begin by stating that it is widely regarded as true, by people with various different backgrounds and specialist knowledge, and they're not really that confident in their rebuttal even though they've presented a paper that undermines the evidence of that theory in one particular narrow area.
"The current consensus in psychology is that political conservatives are uniquely simple-minded. Indeed, even the famous critic of political bias and Heterodox contributor Jonathan Haidt (and colleagues) suggested that there is a “consistent difference between liberals and conservatives” on several measurements related to cognitive complexity"
Was it always like this? I hear a great deal about how things are getting "worse", but throughout human history, hasn't it almost always been the case that the people in charge defined truth? From Hammurabi, the Pharaohs, the Athenians (with a brief stop in democracy), the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman-Turks, and now the Americans, hasn't power always lied? Why do people expect this not to be the case?
For us to be living in a post-fact world, don't we have to have lived at one point, in a fact world? I'm not sure we did...
I wonder, how can we revert this? How can we go back?
The horrific thing is: if I ask someone if the leave campaign will be charged for fraud, they think I am nuts. As if lying politicians are above the law.
The leave campaign regularly told lies about even unimportant things. Simple fact-checkable assertions, which they made were simply not true. Not debatable, or open to interpretation.
This is from Boris announcing his candidacy: "Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed. It had to be done at a European level, and the French were opposed."
The bike one is particularly infurating, as while the French wanted to delay the introduction of the rule, the UK actually opposed it. Which he knows, because he protested this at the time:
"London Mayor protests UK block on EU ‘safe lorries’ law"
https://www.euractiv.com/section/transport/news/london-mayor...
Rather, democracy is above the law. Because demo-cracy (literally: "people in control" in ancient Greek) is that which makes the laws.
Besides, what "fraud" would the leave campaign be charged with? They didn't do any or at any level, any more fraud than the stay campaign.
(Yes, he just got fired by Fox. He's now advising the Trump campaign.)
The classic remark on this is, of course:
"All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true within itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
This wasn't original with Hitler. What was new was the ability to use radio to promote a big lie. Radio allowed scaling the big lie technique. Goebbels put that into practice effectively. His version: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
Now, too many people have enough bandwidth to do that, and we're buried under a mass of bogus info.
For example, look at the way Jon Stewart chose to skewer Sean Hannity recently. Say what you will about tone and bias, but the meat of it was a legitimate question of hypocrisy backed up with citations. (Tellingly, Hannity's response was exclusively ad hominem and ignored the central charge.)
(What I won't accept, however, is a technical wiggling between "he's a racist person" versus "he has made racist statements". I agree that this distinction sometimes matters, but generally it does not. For example, I don't think Trump is a racist person at heart, but he does make statements that legitimize the charge of being racist. When the latter is true, the former is irrelevant.)
For example, how do I live with my country doing what will be "sometimes eating roasted children" if it was a person?
And that I know for fact. I choose to "worry" which will probably give me cancer, but simpler people choose to ignore facts for good and live peacefully.
Or it's things that can't be backed up, like his personal eyewitness accounts.
Yes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/01/do...
And yes. You did say you saw this, right? After seeing this I'm not sure what is in question.
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
You can go to the "people" menu and compare it with other people. Yes. He flat-out lies. More than most politicians.