America is facing an epistemic crisis | Hacker News Reader

America is facing an epistemic crisis

vox.com

60 pointsnerdponx35 comments

This is a fascinating proof of its own conjecture. The author bashes "tribal epistemology" while enthusiastically engaging in it. I think people experiencing this kind of fear should consider reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" for more insight into why conservatives seem so obtuse. I found one of the relevant sections in this blog, which also seems informative in general:

>...it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...

Where do the examples cited in Vox piece fit in Haidt's framework? Is 'Pizzagate' an accurate prediction? Was Obama really born outside the US? Did protesters at Columbia University actually support pedophilia?

This is where tribal understanding comes in. “Pizzagate” has proven to be accurate by the understanding of its proponents. The name is a joke, and it really has nothing to do with pizza; the basic premise of it is that there are pedophiles hiding in positions of power and privilege. Just about everyone knew Comet Pizza was a stretch from the beginning. People tend not to look at nuances and skepticism like this when faced with an opposing tribe’s position.

In regards to Obama, most people really don’t care. It’s kind of a silly law about birth place anyway. As for the protestors, I think you will find that most people know not to trust every picture, and everything along those lines gets healthy skepticism from people on all sides of politics.

> shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own

Or, the theatre critic is intentionally caricaturing and polarizing the other side in his efforts of persuasion.

Too often we assume what people say is what they actually believe, when really they are trying to do 'spin' a more favorable narrative

I think Haidt understands perfectly well that this is hyperbole, but it shows a severe lack of empathy even so.

Haidt should say he thinks it's hyperbole if he believes it so. Hrmm.. this is looking familiar

“One of the many ironies” doesn’t only imply unintentional irony. You should note that Haidt is a liberal.

How very charitable!

I don't care whether he's Dem or Republican.

The vox piece suffers from the same problem, which is why it probably got flagged. If the vox piece is dishonest in some ways too.

The worst thing you can do is purport to explain someone else's mental state. Or attempt to explain some aspect of their internal psychology. No, respond to actions and events, do not try to read the tea leaves of some else's mind, because you will be tempted either consciously or unconsciously to read exactly what supports your narrative and rejects the opposing narrative

When someone writes a book and you read it, the best thing you can do is try to interpret their meaning. You should really read the whole thing, and the context might make more sense.

Novels and political punditry are very, very, far away from each other.

First of all, advance apologies for meta.

But this is rather interesting. I am not sure this article deserved to be flagged. It's an opinion piece, so one can't expect too rigorous source vetting. That said, the reference links weren't particularly shabby.

And it's political, which goes against the HN guidelines. However: it does make couple of very interesting points.

The first one: that partisan media is more insulated than before. That's certainly a viewpoint that carries weight and has been discussed, in various forms, on HN for quite some time.

And the second one? That in the current political climate there is no more room for moderate and reasonable discussion. You either broadcast a polarised and incendiary view or get no visibility nor acknowledgment - but when you do submit to the attention economy, you get flooded and drowned out by the professional wound-ups.[ß]

---

[ß]: Modern Finnish has a term which I don't know how to translate properly: "ammattinärkästyjä". It would fit really well here.

>And it's political, which goes against the HN guidelines.

People violate this "guideline" so much that I literally did not even know it was a rule (and yes, I checked beforehand) until I was shadowbanned for it without warning. Apparently the rule is that you can talk about politics if you don't talk about too much, or exclusively, although I strongly suspect it had more to do with having the wrong views than posting about them too frequently (data on this would be welcome).

I believe politics is off topic if it's a mainstream news story - "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic," as the guidelines say, although that's a bit vague. I think the guidelines allow for political articles with intellectual merit and which demonstrate an "interesting new phenomenon" worth discussing to potentially be on topic.

Will Self, in his wonderful novel _The Quantity Theory of Insanity_, proposes that the total amount of insanity is fixed, and when someone becomes more sane someone else has to become less sane.

As previous forms of unsubstantiated belief become harder to sustain due to cameraphones (think Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Jesus working at a Burger King in Wichita), perhaps that psychic energy has to go somewhere else.

Thus, maybe it'd be good for society to help restore people's belief in harmless bullshit (the Loch Ness monster legend was at most responsible for a few drownings) instead of the extremely harmful bullshit that we've seen so much of recently.

Perhaps generative image models can solve our epistemic crisis by inserting monsters, fairies, or gods into 0.001% of smartphone pictures.

This article is based on a false premise: that „traditional“ media outlets are the arbiters of truth and factual information. What is actually true is that it used to be much more expensive to run a world wide media network and so it was much easier to establish a “consensus”. The narrative in traditional news media is also manufactured and far from an impartial or factual account.

„Manufacturing Consent“ gives plenty of historical examples of war crimes committed or facilitated by the US and their coverage by the news media, „collusion“ with Russia is a rather mild charge in comparison.

The article didn't say that traditional media is the arbiter of truth. It said journalism among other things which include science. I think you completely misunderstood the premise.

It is implied. I think you misunderstood.

I wish that the author could have talked about the Harvard study and "tribal" mindset without overstating his case.

> At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything.

No, they don't show that. From the Harvard study's conclusion:

> “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”

The undermining of the "neutral arbiters" like science and mainstream media is something we should be talking about. But can we do it in a way that's not just encouraging more insularity?

"This study shows my tribe is better than yours because my tribe doesn't think tribally."

What does this have to do with tech? Nothing.

Thank you for the downvote for my pointing out that this (now flagged) article is a violation of the guidelines.

The "right" propagandizes by inserting false data.

The "left" propagandizes by redacting true data.

I have to agree with you, one of the reasons could be the "left" propaganda machine were traditional gate-keepers, so withholding data would be easier way to lie, and the "right" propaganda machine is disruptive and attention-seeking given its untraditional foundation, needs "sensationalist red meat".

The traditional post Eisenhower media infrastructure _was_ essentially conservative.

I think your dichotomy here is not left/right but populist/non-populist (aka liberal[1]).

[1] the term liberal has been overloaded for some time now. But it’s important to understand the distinctions. The gist is that most of the deeply conservative thinkers in our post WW2 history believed in a liberal socio-economic order: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism

This is nonsense both-sides-ism. The right very obviously redacts true data (just look at Fox News re: Mueller). And the issue is not just whether people lie and omit facts. You have to consider the the magnitude and motivation behind those mistruths (Obama is a Muslim, Clinton conspiracies, climate change denialism), and what people do with that. Are they open to fact checking, or openly hostile to it?

you haven't negated my point, nor are you self-aware enough to realize that obviating "fact checking" is a primary goal of redaction (the typical strategy of the left). an idea that is absent is by definition excepted from scrutiny

frankly you are just echoing the Vox/Atlantic script...alternative viewpoints are "fake" or "conspiratorial"...because obviously no one armed with the facts could possibly disagree with the prevailing worldview of the NYT, HuffPost etc

critical thinking in 2017 isn't about filtering out obvious BS like Fox news...it is about filtering the much more subtle BS from Vox, Atlantic etc

and just to show you this isn't political for me...I at least have respect for sites like TheTrace that clearly present themselves as issue PR platforms, even if I 100% disagree with their views

I tried hard, but I cannot fathom how hard scientific evidence fails to convince people. It is good that philosophy has a categorisation for this phenomenon, but I find it scary as hell. Because it means that I am totally displaced in a society like that, and that I will be unable to do anything about that, because the only thing I know for convincing people is trying to lay out the facts for them.

Scary!

Science only tells you what is, it can never tell you what should be. The value systems possessed by most people revolve mostly around what should be, and aren't affected so much by what is (except insofar as it can tell you what can't be, even if you really want it to).

Basically, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is", and science can only give you an "is".

> Basically, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is", and science can only give you an "is".

While empirical science does not deal with matters of moral concern as such, the fact-value dichotomy you refer to is grounded in confusion and shoddy philosophy. Indeed, it arguably contributes to the moral skepticism that has placed morality outside the domain of facts and made it a matter of ideological preference. Bring back moral facts and you stand a chance of staving off the smog of sophistry across the political spectrum.

>moral facts

Could you perhaps list a few of these "moral facts"?

I could, but that's not a terribly meaningful or productive question. Take anything you take to be a statement of moral significance (e.g., a moral judgement). If it's true, then it is a moral fact.

A better question might be about why the fact-value distinction is false, or something about the nature and basis of moral facts. In the former case, we find the distinction to originate in Hume and that his account of what constitutes a "fact" to be highly problematic, if not incoherent as he is elsewhere (e.g., Hume's fork). (Furthermore, we find that everything is pervaded by value. Science itself is conducted because, in the best case, it is done because truth is valued. Pragmatists, on the other hand, would be doing it because some form of utility is valued.) In the latter case, you might find the literature about moral realism interesting (e.g., Oderberg's introductory text "Moral Theory"). Ultimately, the ground for morality is teleological, and on that understanding, moral facts are not controversial.

Historcise.

Science hasn't always been here as some form of ground truth. Science still relies on philosophical needs to form its epistemological base.

The fault lines lay in the models and metrics which are inherently laden with ideological propositions.

http://fucktheory.tumblr.com/post/57633497486/in-which-steve...

https://newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-respo...

This article misses or understates a few important points.

1. The left has a growing (in power or quantity, I can't tell which) anti-science/anti-objectivity fringe and it includes university faculty. We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist. Social scientist professors describe their field as one of activism, not truth seeking. These are among the more egregious absurdities that come out of some university departments, but there is a long tail of lesser absurdities.

2. Journalists haven't been "committed to objectivity, but sometimes erring" for the last twenty years or more. They consistently report the news through their political lens (consciously or unconsciously). We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias). Granted, the New York Times is far better than Breitbart, but it's hardly a paragon of objectivity.

3. These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom? How can we hope to fix our epistemic rift without making these institutions trustworthy to the objective person?

>We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist.

I agree with you completely on this, but do you have some sources for it? I'd be really interested to see how widespread the problem is, exactly.

>We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias).

This is a feature, not a bug. If you're a leftist, at least - this is the true purpose of the "diversity" push to remove white men from positions of power and replace them with left-leaning white women[0] and non-white minorities[1]. It is happening in tech specifically (and not any other male-dominated profession like truck driving, or female-oriented profession like nursing and kindergarten teaching) because tech companies have a vast amount of power and influence, and leftists want to stuff positions of power within those companies with people who will support them.

>These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom?

"Social justice" is a fancy word for radical leftism. Again, it mostly seems to revolve around removing white men from positions of power, and replacing them with people of a more left-leaning demographic.

[0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Re...

[1] http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/

Indeed. I am disappointed by the article's own Manichean, tribalist, myopic flavor. The rampant skepticism and ethos that embraces bullshitting to get your way is not partisan, it is -- as many other things -- broadly a property of our decadent culture's return to sophistry. As long as people fail to take truth seriously, and fail to engage in self-criticism instead of scapegoating some Other for their own moral failings, we will continue to spiral into the Twilight zone of insanity we've been inhabiting for some time.

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