Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct. If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.

However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.

View on HN

And a stopped clock is right twice a day. So all the stopped clock merchant has to do is wait for the clock to line up, then shout from the rooftops that they have the right time.

It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.

The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming total nonsense from fabricated sources.

Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks ("decentralised time") to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally ("railway time").

Clocks are a great analogy. As pointed out, the problem is in verification. Say everyone has a clock and they're all showing different time. How do you actually get to the ground truth? Observe and measure planetary motion? That's too much hassle. This is where the analogy cracks a bit (or does it?). What you want is for your clock to show the same time as others' clocks do, so you join a group where you synchronize your watches. Other people join groups too, possibly with different synchronizations. Fact has become convention, subordinate to localized social utility.

> Clocks are a great analogy.

Indeed they are, and in no small measure because everyone is convinced that they know what clocks do and nearly everyone is wrong. Everyone thinks that clocks measure time. They don't. They measure the space-time interval between events, but when you try to explain that to people their eyes glaze over and they start mentally fitting you for a nice padded cell. But this actually matters if, for example, you want to understand the details of how GPS works.

Fake news is the same way. Most of the time it really doesn't matter, e.g. the person working the register at the grocery store can believe that aliens have kidnapped their pet hamster and it won't impact their ability to ring up your order. So most people go through life believing crazy things it never matters, until when it finally does their thought processes are so deeply entrenched that the actual truth sounds completely insane to them (c.f. "clocks don't measure time.")

Truth is constant, lies are variable. With news, you need to look at stories that use different sources and find out the consistencies. The problem on the web is that so many articles are plagiarized or paraphrased from an original source like the AP.

Not to mention when falsified opinion then gets expressed as fact. A great example was a false Trump quote just a few days ago on Twitter.

> Truth is constant, lies are variable.

Is truth really constant though? The answer would probably depend on the domain being considered. Many things change over time and truth can change with them. So perhaps the core problem is that multiple contradictory “truths” can exist depending on ones point of view and ones point in time.

This would be separate from intentional misinformation which does tie into the debate. It seems likely that the modern problem of multiple clocks could just be a representation of different points of view.

Let's make a distinction between universal truths as you described and local truths that are defined as an accurate retelling of the events that unfolded at a certain time at a given place. That cannot change with time as its already been "recorded"

You lost me at "accurate retelling"

Things always happen a particular way, regardless of peoples memory of that event. Case in point, a video camera can sometimes give an accurate retelling of the events at a particular place at a particular time.

A video is closer to the event than a textual retelling, but is still only a proxy. The choice of camera positioning can significantly change the viewer's perception of the event, and the narrative formed.

Ok then let the accurate retelling be defined as the view from all angles. One need not interpret events that transpired before to interpret the action because thats where bias in news comes from. It comes from trying to infer meaning and deduce reasoning with no factual proof. Actions speak louder than words so its more important to describe the action than the intent

That explains why the illuminati want to split us into different time zones. Keep us divided.

In attempting to dismiss the point Bill Gates gets it partly right. 'you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says "Hey go read this"...', and says so as though it is some arbiter of quality as they would have verified first.

Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from people we trust and like we probably don't engage natural scepticism. Not like you might if you doubted the source, or heard a wild claim on the news. The friend has become the source, and reinforced the veracity. The sharing model did that. It probably also explains the amplification effects of social.

So I suppose the meta question is did they pick a side, or was it picked by the random connections within the peer group?

not really. I migth have dozen of friends who did read, and did figure out it was BS.

But the systems optimize for positive interactions (which generates eyeballs/pageview/ad impressions). So even if a dozen friends dismissed something, correctly, that one dumb Shitposter will get the word accross and the sytem will benefit the thumbs up with a zero effort propagation (one click) versus the critic (time to sit down, write an argument, work to have that thumbsuped... or o HN: create an account years in the past, acumulates karma just so you can downvote things that are actually wrong).

the incentives are the problem (advertising) not presence of wrong content amidst good content.

Relatedly, a big problem with Twitter/FB was showing the friend dismissed content as well as the verified content, because dismissed content eyeballs is still eyeballs on content, then making it sometimes hard to tell which was which.

A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).

Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm. (Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid to promote that content in the first place.)

I believe that pre internet society naturally crafted trust networks that, even far from perfect truth, were vastly superior to the scattered noise we have today. Unless we evolve a way for people to get massively interested and educated to be their own trusted filter.. (not impossible ..)

The Internet has the problem that it has many easily available untrustworthy sources and the information needed to verify what they say is harder to find or not there at all. We have a world of shallow information at our fingertips, but deeper learning and research is still in the realm of paywalls and undigitised content.

And if your friend has not verified the watch, and you set it against theirs and tell your friends this time which you believe to be correct when asked, you are now unknowingly propagating incorrect time.

In fact, if you get a bunch of people who, say, want to get up a bit later, they can band together to set their time deliberately wrong and influence as many people as they can to synchronise with their incorrect time (whilst all along pretending it is the correct time), and soon it becomes hard to know which groups are telling everyone the correct time, and which groups are disseminating the wrong time to achieve their political ends...

> they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.

People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.

Then you notice it's dark outside... ;)

And then see that a solar eclipse was predicted for today.

At 9AM!

But are any clocks correct? What is the correct time?

Are you sure the correct time isn't just someone declaring their clock is the correct time and everyone else's clock is relative to theirs?

At what point does this metaphor wear too thin?

It’s a bit more pernicious than a single clock that’s off.

It’s a group of clocks claiming time is significantly off and that the “other clock group” is the wrong bunch.

That gets very convincing quickly.

News by definition is a 2nd hand source of information. You are relying on someone to accurately report a situation based on the information given to them by their sources. There's always likely to be parts missing and it's important to look at all the "Clocks" to get the whole picture. With the web, it's very easy to think you are reading from multiple sources when in reality they are all owned by Verizon Media.

Agreed, the thing is it seems that previous singular clocks were somehow cared for in a way to keep it in the middle. It's no perfect information but systemically, it made everything run somehow at a single pace.

Maybe that's true for clocks, but it's certainly never been true for the press.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com