Comment by zigzigzag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zigzigzag | Hacker News Reader

"News at 11: Humanities professor shocked to discover many people disagree with mainstream academic & globalist groupthink"

(and no, I don't think social science is a real science)

You don't need to study this stuff professionally to see what's going on here.

1) Trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time. That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example). Large federal governments like the US Federal Govt and the EU became more and more opaque, with ever larger and more byzantine bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks that seemed to create a game of tails we win, heads you lose. Judges interpret the law to suit their political preferences, not what a plain reading or common sense would seem to imply. And so on.

2) Whilst trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time, trust in the mainstream media has collapsed dramatically in relatively recent times. This too is fully deserved: people don't trust the traditional news outlets (in the USA) because they lie a lot and are nakedly biased. The difficulty of finding any national newspapers that supported Trump and the practice of outlets that had never declared before in their history declaring for the 100% globalist/liberal-elite-style Clinton, summed this phenomenon up. The subsequent artificial mass hysteria over Russia and the (dubious at best) Russian "hacking" of the election reinforced this idea: the media is as locked in a form of groupthink as Washington itself is.

You can't repeatedly teach people that there are no reliable sources of information, and that conspiracy theories are sometimes real, and then act surprised when large numbers of people start seeking out alternative sources of information that more frequently support conspiracy theories.

That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example)

Modern institutions may or may not be trustworthy, but AFAIK they weren't laughing off "vast conspiracies" which later turned out to be true. For example, I'm not aware of any mainstream media which laughed about the echelon program which later turned out to be true.

It's true that mainstream media didn't write about these theories, but one can easily argue that was reasonable given the lack of evidence.

It's important to note that details matter when reporting news, and these details were unknown prior to Snowden. It's also true that often the details get ignored (as one can see by the number of people who think that the PRISM program says that Google/Apple conspired with the NSA when in-fact it says the opposite), but I'm not sure that is completely the media's fault.

I first heard about the Echelon/5 eyes network on 60 Minutes some time in the early 90's. I remember controversy about it flagging people for mentioning "bomb" in phone calls, so I would say I did hear about it from the main stream media.

People still called it a crazy conspiracy theory when I brought it up, but I usually attributed that to them not watching enough news, not watching too much.

I'm still pretty sure the stories about flagging calls for mentioning keywords in the 90's were urban legends. The sort of computing power to do that didn't exist then.

It's a conspiracy theory pasted onto a kernel of truth (Echelon).

Even after snowden there is a lot of the same stuff going on. The stuff he leaked sure didn't show that the NSA was doing some sort of active analysis on all communications. Though at least now it's probably within the realm of technical possibility.

Whoever downvoted this: Downvoting should be for comments that are low quality or don't contribute to the conversation, not perfectly fine comments with which you disagree.

I don't necessarily disagree with everything the parent wrote, nor did I downvote, but maybe "I don't think social science is a real science" is not the greatest starting point for making a genuinely social point.

It's like saying "I don't think physics actually exists, but here's my take on gravity."

Isn't that a pure opinion, of which you simply disagree? It is hardly a rare opinion at that. It's been a problem for the field since the start:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...

There's no contradiction between having views on social issues, and believing that people who call themselves social scientists maybe aren't following the scientific process as usually understood.

Oh, he was not saying that there are bad social scientists. This is a completely valid statement to make.

However, calling a discipline unscientific is not a matter of taste or opinion. There are a bunch of scientific methods and as long as you stick with them, you are scientific. No matter how well received your results are. (This, by the way, holds also true for climate science.)

There is a clear contradiction between calling social science unscientific and then relying on their concepts (trust, institutions, applied law, globalism, groupthink, etc.) in the very same argument.

edit: I can not answer to anyone anymore since I'm "submitting too fast. Please slow down." Sorry.

There is something to the argument that the inability to experiment limits scientific rigor.

Yeah, but to a certain extent that's true of things that no one doubts are science. Evolutionary biology is limited by the fact that evolution is non-repeatable, for example.

I used to be an archaeologist. Definitely a field where you can't experiment; you're studying the evidence left by the past. But good methodology in archaeology is making hypotheses about what you expect to find in a new excavation or an inadequately studied old collection, and then testing those hypotheses. Yes, there's a problem with controls, but that's not unique to social science.

Evolution has been proven experimentally, so I'm not sure why you're picking on that specifically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution

Archaeology isn't a science either, even though I've studied it myself and ancient civilisations are a particular favourite area of study for me. Archaeologists and historians in general frequently do things that wouldn't match the usual understanding of the scientific process: that doesn't mean we shouldn't study history, but comparing the fields credibility to that of physics is really problematic.

But to clarify, when I said "social science" I was referring to people who explicitly call themselves that. Archaeology and even psychology wouldn't count under that definition - but if someone actually says they are a professor of social science, to me that's an immediate red flag because the "research" produced by such people is in my experience usually just a complicated and expensive form of personal politics blogging.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good talks on this topic. There's a paper here:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...

I downvoted it because spreading the myth that "mainstream media is lying" is both low-quality and dangerous, and is otherwise a litany of right-wing talking points that add nothing new to the discussion. I'll gladly reconsider if OP can give me a specific example of the New York Times knowingly publishing a statement of fact, in the last year, that turned out to be wrong.

What is really dangerous is the mainstream media (NY Times, Washington Post) running stories based solely on anonymous sources.

The public has no capacity to vet the credibility of anonymously sourced claims.

Almost all of the current media narrative on the Russian story comes from stories with nothing more than "American officials say".

Remember that "American officials said" that Iraq definitely had WMD. Public support for the invasion was built solely on anonymously sourced news. American officials were actually politically motivated ideologues manufacturing consent, with journalists at the New York Times like Judith Wilson playing the part of the useful idiot.

The same thing is happening right now. This [1] New York Times story is a perfect example.

There is no place for anonymous sources on issues of war and peace in a republic. Allowing this low a bar for journalistic evidence leaves us completely vulnerable to manipulation.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nune...

The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all.

And people misunderstand the mechanism here: journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources. They know the names, and they build relationships with these sources. The sources/treacherous illoyal leakers/whistleblowers are career politicians or officials, and their relationship with someone at the Journal or the Times is equally valuable for them.

Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate. See for example "leak zero" of Flynn talking to the ambassador. We'll see about the example you added on Nunes' sources, but it seems like that information also has multiple confirmations by now.

I'd also like to point out that you're moving the goalpost and not answering my question, and that I actually thought about a specific exclusion of the NYT's failure on WMDs because it's getting old.

I also seem to remember that it was a very-much-not-anonymous Colin Powell who made the WMD case to the UN which actually allowed the US to invade.

> The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all.

Since the "information" is claimed to be from anonymous sources, there is no way to determine whether the information is accurate or wholly fabricated. Given the media's extreme bias now, it is not a given that it is not the latter.

BTW, seems like few people have seen this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

>Since the "information" is claimed to be from anonymous sources, there is no way to determine whether the information is accurate or wholly fabricated. Given the media's extreme bias now, it is not a given that it is not the latter.

It's not immediately possible, but of course, as more information comes to light, you can verify of falsify it. So please show an example, from the last year, from the New York Times, where they published something from an anonymous source that was later disproven[1].

Here, I'll start with something that was proven to be right: Flynn's phone call with the ambassador was reported (with anonymous sources, on Jan 12th, and confirmed by the president's spokesman the next day: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/14/us/politics/f...

[1] Because I've learnt to qualify everything: This may actually happen on occasion, but I'd expect the journalist in question to acknowledge it, give an account of their relationship with the source, and what steps they are taking to avoid a repetition.

A major problem with anonymous sources is not just the inability to verify the claims, even more troubling is the inability to assess the motives of the source and their context and agenda.

The phrase "American officials" connotes an objectivity, as if the information was revealed by God himself.

> journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources.

Isn't that exactly the point? Their credibility is gone.

>> Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate.

>> journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources.

> Isn't that exactly the point? Their credibility is gone.

What makes you say that?

I could see a good argument that they are not impartiality, but that seems a different thing.

To some degree one can look on a case-by-case basis.

For a specific example, I find Fox's George Russell reasonably credible, but he is clearly not impartial.

On the other hand, Fox's Judith Miller seems more impartial but has some pretty serious credibility issues.

> the myth that "mainstream media is lying" is both low-quality and dangerous

"low-quality" is a pejorative cop-out. What's dangerous is the mainstream media taking sides politically to such an extreme that the public can no longer gain a balanced perspective.

> litany of right-wing talking points that add nothing new to the discussion

Then you should equally downvote the respective left-wing talking points--except that doesn't happen here.

> I'll gladly reconsider if OP can give me a specific example of the New York Times knowingly publishing a statement of fact, in the last year, that turned out to be wrong.

When it comes to journalism, honesty is about much more than merely not making factually false claims. The media is expert at painting a tinted picture by selectively reporting what's convenient to their worldview. What's really interesting is that you seem to imply that they don't do that.

What's really interesting is that OP spoke specifically of lying, and there doesn't appear to be anybody able to back up that statement.

I'm using that statement because I've seen it repeated so many times, and it's the one that – unlike your equally common accusation of bias – has somewhat-accepted definition and could be proven.

The New York Times lies routinely.

Here's an example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/world/europe/aleksei-nava...

"Aleksei Navalny, Russian Opposition Leader, Receives 15-Day Sentence"

I picked this one because it generalises: the statement that Aleksei Navalny is the "Russian opposition leader" is one you can find in every mainstream media outlet: WashPo, Reuters, the Economist, the BBC, etc. But it's false. I first fact checked this statement years ago and have occasionally rechecked it since to see if things have changed, but at no point has Navalny ever held a position that could be described this way:

- He isn't coming second in any polls

- He doesn't come second in elections

- Only around a third of Russians have even heard of him

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Russia...

The former communist party does better politically than Navalny.

No matter which data set you pick, Navalny is never the "leader" in it ... except western media attention, where journalists act as if there are only two politicians in Russia, Putin and this other guy.

You can find endless other examples if you start fact checking, all from supposedly reputable sources. I can't even begin to list them all because we'd never end.

I suspect your belief that the mainstream media is a bastion of truth and factual excellence is not one that will be easily shaken, so you believe whatever you want to believe. But I've given you an example, as you asked.

To quote from the very article you're citing:

"At the urging of Mr. Navalny, tens of thousands of Russians — many of them in their teens and 20s — poured into the streets in scores of cities across the country on Sunday to protest endemic corruption among the governing elite, despite a blanket ban against unsanctioned rallies of any size."

I'd say that organising the largest protest against Putin in a decade does make you "a leader of the opposition". And if you're questioning his involvement with these protests, I'll let this Russian court make my point: "The court on Monday also fined him about $350 for organizing an illegal demonstration."

No it doesn't. "Leader of the opposition" has a clear meaning. By your definition Nick Clegg is leader of the British opposition because he was involved in organising a recent big anti-Brexit protest, but nobody in the UK would recognise such a definition.

Regardless of what you may personally believe about Russia or its politics, the statement that Navalny is "leader of the opposition" is simply 100% factually false by any hard, observable data.

leader |ˈlēdər| noun

1 the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country: the leader of a protest group.

• (also Leader of the House) (in the UK) a member of the government officially responsible for initiating business in the House of Commons or House of Lords.

You're arguing the second definition, which is specific to the UK.

I told you that you wouldn't accept my response, despite it being a data-based rebuttal to a statement of fact in the NYT, and you did not disappoint me.

Anyone can lead a protest, especially small ones. To be "the leader of THE opposition" you need supporters in great numbers in any country. Navalny simply doesn't. The polls show quite clearly that other politicians who run against Putin have higher name recognition and more popularity.

Just look at yourself - if hard polling data that contradicts a specific statement of fact can't convince you, nothing ever will. You'll always find yourself falling back on trying to argue that technically the NYT's statement doesn't mean what it seems to mean regardless of what counter-example is picked.

Hi there! Actual Russian here.

Aleksei Navalny is indeed a de-facto leader of Russian opposition.

>- He isn't coming second in any polls

Not true. [1] is the only major election in which Aleksei personally participated. He came second with huge gap between him and the third one (despite state-organized media campaign against him).

Moreover, it seems you misunderstand Russian political climate. There are no real political parties here except those loyal to Putin. Most "candidates" in that wiki list are sock puppets with the exceptions of Navalny and Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is not really a politician at this point, so your ironic assessment of

> journalists act as if there are only two politicians in Russia, Putin and this other guy

…is actually true.

Here are a couple of other data points for ya:

- Navalny's NGO called FBK (Фонд Борьбы с Коррупцией, Anti-Corruption Fund) made two biggest investigations to date: on Chayka (Russian's Prosecutor General) [2] and on Medvedev (our prime minister) [3] ([4]). They have more than 20M views between them on Youtube alone (there are countless copies on other social networks) and the latter triggered biggest demonstrations in 5 years.

- FBK voluntarily publishes financial reports which you can find here [5]. According to them, FBK got 40 million rubles in donations during 2015. This alone makes them most-donated-to political NGO in Russia by far.

All in all, I believe this particular fact check lead you astray.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_mayoral_election,_2013

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXYQbgvzxdM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwlk7_GF9g

[4]: I strongly recommend you to check those out, they have English subs

[5]: https://fbk.info/about/reports/

Hi there! You being an actual Russian doesn't change anything about my argument, which is about the reliability of western media and not Russia specifically, that just happened to be a convenient example.

Your rebuttal is that:

- The other higher polling and more well known politicians aren't "real" opposition politicians, they are just sock puppets.

- Navalny did well, once, in one city, in a race which Putin didn't participate in.

The first is your opinion only. You don't have data to support that, just your own political viewpoints. You being actually Russian doesn't make any difference; you can find people in the UK who think Tim Farron is the "real" leader of the UK opposition because he's actually trying to overturn brexit, but that isn't based on any hard data either.

The latter is irrelevant: I knew about that election and when the west says Navalny is "leader of the opposition" they don't mean against Sergey Sobyanin, obviously, as nobody in the west knows who that is. They mean against Putin. And regardless of what you may believe about the other politicians in Russia, "opposition leader" has a clear factual definition which he does not meet.

This political opinion is invariably phrased as if it were inarguably scientific fact in the New York Times and elsewhere. Your personal belief that it "feels" true doesn't change the facts: the media is lying.

Wonderful. He presented you the facts... and you've dissmissed them since they didn't fit your agenda.

No: I presented polling data. He said that the other politicians named in the polls aren't "real" but offered no data to support that, it's just his opinion.

If facts are defined by anything, they're defined by data. The data shows that Navalny simply isn't a major player in Russian politics, yet western media constantly and consistently claims that he is. Fact.

You see, it's quite hard to show to a person on the outside the absence of real political contention between the "official opposition" here and Putin's regime. It's the thing about showing an absence: I would need to provide you with a ton of context for you to appreciate the glaring complacency of the "official opposition".

Here are some examples, though:

- we had presidential elections in 2012. Per Russian law, there are only two entities who can sue for electoral fraud: a candidate whose score was harmed and a state prosecutor. The fraud was widespread during that voting, with dozens of filmed cases (see [1], [2], etc. One of fraud cases I witnessed myself). Guess which candidate stood for themselves in court? Not a single one.

- can you please name a single "opposition party" which participated in the recent (26th of March) protest?

- can you please name a single "opposition leader" (including 2012 candidates) who debated against Putin or demanded debates? In fact, can you please provide an example of any sort of pointed critique of Putin (like the curious source of wealth of his friends) from any candidate in the 2012 election campaign?

I should also note that you are very dismissive of my "opinion", and yet I'm definitely more knowledgeable of the intricacies of the political process here. I don't think that sounds like a desire for "facts"; on the contrary, you are trying to dismiss counterarguments to your (wrong) accusation.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEf9YSxobTE

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwwlBzmM8qs

IMO we should taboo "right-wing" and "left-wing" when discussing the reliability of the mainstream media. I'm a radical leftist, and I wouldn't trust the NYT or the WaPo if they said the sky was blue without double-checking with a more credible source. I think most leftists who were around in the early 2000s feel the same way.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/30/contra-nyt-on-economist...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one...

Neither probably constitutes an outright lie, but seem irresponsibly misleading to readers,both should cause readers to trust the nyt less

Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere.

And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi...

[2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...

To counter your assertion that it's just "the right wing" who have lost trust in the MSM, I would direct your attention towards: https://www.off-guardian.org

Trust in the media is also extremely low among those voting for independents, and only half decent among Democrats:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...

If 51% trust in the media is seen as 'good' for the left wing, then standards have really fallen.

If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).)

And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right.

My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery.

[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...

Apologies if I'm out of order but is there a particular reason why therpe1's posts are being marked [dead]? [dead] posts are difficult to read )in my browser at least).

I strongly disagree. While Democratic Party loyalists and the establishment center-left may trust the mainstream media, in general progressives and leftists don't. They're not going to InfoWars, of course; they're going to The Intercept, CounterPunch, Jacobin, Truthout, etc.

Left-Center here. Appalled at the media bias. You must not be looking.

Out of curiosity: Which way do you see the media being biased?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com