The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
wsj.com
wsj.com
I agree, and I believe it's because most people don't consume news to gain a true picture about the world. They consume news to have stuff to talk about with other people, to have "social objects". Almost none of the news is actionable or even relevant to a regular person anyway, so the primary value of a news piece is whether or not it's interesting, and whether everyone else watches the same news (otherwise it wouldn't work as a topic for casual conversations). Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant.
This explains what news you see reported. People killed by a thunderstorm in the mountains is something easy to talk about. You can marvel their stupidity (being in the mountains during storm). Similarly for jet ski casualties. Sewer dumped into Vistula river (another fresh topic from Poland)? Oh the Incompetent Government / the Evil Companies! Venezuela and Hong Kong are complex political topics with no clear right solution, with no clear heroes or villains (at least, not when you dig into the complexities). It's not something suitable for casual conversation.
I was with you when you offered a critique of the news-cycle and the banality of infotainment, until you segued into recommending a comedy film, as a way to gain further insight and draw parallels with serious matters.
If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check.
The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.
One would hope those journalists would employ some type of standards on what they choose to report, and how deep they investigate it to avoid confusion.
The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely.
Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.
That stat refers to money spent buying new books and ebooks, I think. It excludes e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines, and online reading, like blogs and special-interest websites, doesn't it? An extremely large majority of which is non-fiction, I'm guessing.
I'm suggesting that it has a general information theoretic advantage.
I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge.
#Whoops
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-...
Besides, of course, the stupid lists of factoids that used to get emailed around - duck quacks don't echo etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
Facts matter, yes. But a false narrative, even, or especially where constructed at least in part on true facts, is vastly more significant.
A characteristic of virtually all Big Lie Narratives is that they contain, often major, nuggets of truth. But the arrangement of narrative amonst these, and eventual insertion of false (or at the very least, unverifiable) facts, eventually proves these out.
A classic example I've run across is "It's All a Rich Man's Lie", an epic 3h 40m YouTube conspiracy yarn which, at least in its first hour or so, sticks largely to the domain of underlying truths: yes, there are "secret societies" at Ivy League schools, yes, many major US industrial firms maintained operations or divisions in Nazi Germany, etc. But no, actually, Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech (mentioned about 20 minutes in) was not about the Yale Skull & Bones group, but instead about the Soviet Union, and its practice of leveraging unflattering or inconvenient reporting from the US itself against the US.
(The question of whether or not Kennedy was right in asking for self-restraint on this basis is a matter for another discussion.)
Often the individual elements and false narrative become apparent by pulling back ever so slightly from the presented story, and looking at the greater context of facts offered. A few paragraphs of surrounding context from the Kennedy speech ("catnip for conspiracy nuts" according to one source) make painfully clear that its topic is not what the conspiracy nuts would make it to be.
The fact that such checking is expensive and takes time makes the fabricators' job all that much easier, and the debunkers' harder.
Another interesting case is the "J.P. Morgan Bankers' Manifesto" hoax, by one Thomas W. Gilruth, first published in 1892, and still making the rounds on social media over 120 years later. I'd run across it by way of an meme whose message appealed to me, though thinking it might be too good to be true, I dug deeper.
To my knowledge, this is the most substantial debunking of the Gilruth hoax ever published:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
Fake news can be generated with far greater volume than truth.
Fake news can be specifically engineered to appeal to various cognitive biases promoting virality.
Truth serves reality. Falsehood can, and very often does, serve specific partisan interests who have a hand in promoting its spread.
These are four powerful factors favouring falsehoods and their dissemination.
There are also deliberate actions, evicenced in documents and testimony, to obscure objective truths. There is a distinction between reasonable differences of opinion, and abject falsehoods.
The principle of anekāntavāda is of many sidedness. It is not of any sidedness.
So if I post a story claiming Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza place basement, that is unequivocally false. If I run a story saying Hillary Clinton is an evil person seeking to lead the country astray, that may or may not be true depending on many different factors, definitions, personal beliefs etc. It would be wrong to label it as fake news,for this reason.
This is something that's usually said by people who want you to drop your defenses and believe in lies they concocted.
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing we've seen so far that would suggest we aren't all inhabiting the same, shared, physical universe - so there is objective truth. There are facts about the world around us, and when you're reporting them accurately, you're reporting the truth. If you deny those facts, you are reporting falsehoods.
Now one of those facts is that we all observe the world through a limited and biased sensory and cognitive apparatus. We can't perceive the entirety of the universe, only a small fraction of it. This sometimes leads to "contradictory truths".
The best analogy I've come up with so far is projections. Imagine the universe as a 3D space, and anything of interest as a 3D shape - but what each of us is observing is 2D projections of it. So there is a cylinder in that universe, representing an issue. I can claim the issue is circular. You can claim the issue is rectangular. We've both identified the true aspects of an issue, but our views are incomplete. Our views combined can help us understand the full form of the issue. But what's most important, if someone comes in and says they see a spiked star, they're just wrong. There's no "multiple often contradictory truths here".
This is the way I like to think about the world and debates on issues. Each of us operates on a set of facts and intuitions that are a result of a heavy dimensionality reduction. We operate on projections. But there is an objective reality, of which our conflicting views are different projections, and that reality makes it so that only some projections are valid, and others are wrong.
And just because an issue is primarily social doesn't mean it's magically not about the observable reality. Human beings are physical, material objects. Just damn complicated ones.
There's a novel called The Truth that pokes fun at this idea through a story about the birth of daily newspapers and tabloids in a fictional city-state.
The quote that I have in mind is a little long to format here, so I'll pastebin it:
That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves.
My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. The idea that a media channel, editorially controlled, AI heuristics driven, or "wisdom-of-the-crowd" determined, can act in complete disregard (or open opposition) to the truth and reality, and fail to be held to account, is a key problem.
To those who respond with "but who then would determine the truth": these institutions are already determining at least the perception of truth, through what they promote. Repetition, as the WSJ article and its cited research show, create impression of truth. And whilst not all ground truths can be known, some can be well established, as can be deliberate campaigns to obviate and obscure truth.
Dante's deepest circle of hell was reserved for the betrayers of others. But immediately above this was the circle reserved for the bearers of false witness. An arrangement in an age where virtually all information was conveyed through witness, either oral or spoken testimony. Much of the social, religious, and communications institution of the time was devoted to establishing the importance of truth, and the consequences for falsehood, where independent verification was difficult or impossible.
Advances in information technology have offered increased opportunities for verification, but also broken down many of the foundations of trust in individuals and institutions. Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally.
We need to reestablish trust, adherence to trust, accountability to trust, and institutional trust. Information technology to date has worked in the opposite direction.
This ends poorly.
> My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions.
I've noticed that on issues that provoke strong feeling, folks often put things in opposition that really aren't opposed. This is a great example. These aren't opposites. They're simply two different approaches to the same problem. They're not mutually exclusive in the least. Nothing about teaching people to think critically harms or opposes holding media institutions to account for what they say or vice versa.
Anyway, I don't think more accountability for media institutions is a bad idea, but I can't help thinking it alone won't fix the problem. The internet isn't going away, and it's fundamentally a many-to-many medium. Unless some authority systematically censors and reviews public fora --- I'm talking about everyday conversations and posts on Facebook, reddit, chatrooms, HN, Slack --- we're not going to be able to go back to the days when fact-checked journalism could keep misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theorizing at bay. (Hell, I guess those days never existed, but I think these problems have gotten worse.)
Perhaps the best point of comparison for the effect of the internet as a new medium is the invention of the printing press. Generally regarded as a good thing in the long run, but it led almost directly to centuries of religious warfare in Europe. Not a heartening thought.
WSJ put the onus elsewhere than themselves.
That this is a long-established tendency of the empowered. See Annie Leonard on "anti-littering" campaigns (responsibility dodging by manufacturers of disposable packaging and goods so packaged): http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/AlterNet-SOW13-AL-102... (PDF). It's very much a blame-the-victim approach.
That there is no mention at all of accountability for the distributors, amplifiers, curators, and promotors of disinformation.
Once you start looking for such patterns, they become painfully apparent. I've taken to calling them out.
Wouldn't it be great if we could help train others to be able to do that too?
That bodes poorly for generalised skillsets.
There's a generalised rebuttal to calls for greater intelligence / education as a solution to problems: All the children aren't above average. And if your solution to some circumstance is to make them so, or pretend that they are, you are going to be having a bad time.
I'm not against education. I'm against having it be the only suggested remedy. Particularly from a party with a vested interest in both deflecting responsibility and creating the problem in the first place.
Part of this is, I think, the degree to which electronic media and modern society has allowed us to self-segregate. Increasingly, our communications are directed to people who already agree with us, which allows us to communicate in a code of canned talking points. Given the self-selection in media consumption, that applies to media organizations as well.
Some advocate, knowingly, willingly, and with great compensation, for the Devil.
Which would you do?
If everything in mainstream media is modulated by advocacy for one commercially-expedient policy or another, then a person might as well throw a dart and choose a random authority on the web. At least there is a better chance that the wrongness will be uncorrelated (flat earthers) rather than deliberately malicious in support of some corporate agenda.
This analysis reverses the causality. The point of privacy systems isn't to remove trust, but rather to be able to operate in an environment in which trust has been removed.
Bitcoin arose from a lack of trust in the Federal Reserve, and even deeper, a lack of trust in the rule of law from what happened to E-gold and Liberty Reserve. We seek private communication tools due to a lack of trust in network operators and in governments - a paranoia that is continually rejustified by ongoing domestic spying and commercial deep packet inspection.
People that operated by "trust but verify" were able to see this crisis coming down the road as, unfortunately, many of our society's institutions have shirked their duty to be verifiable. And as public trust has waned, these institutions have simply doubled down on their authority rather than reforming themselves to be beyond reproach.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.
Before Bitcoin every other digital payment provider was either shut down or forced to move to reversible identity-based transactions. People were forced to trust them to transact, only to have that trust repeatedly betrayed - eg Paypal horror stories.
So I wouldn't say that Bitcoin itself is responsible for "[trusts] removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally", but rather that it's filling a niche created by traditional institutions' destruction of their own trustworthiness.
A destruction that ultimately came about because those institutions were unable to refrain from trying to police customers' business, after said business became more legible (no longer opaque) due to the rise of computing technology. Concretely, there would be much less demand for Bitcoin if say government et al didn't corrupt the banking system in an attempt to stop individuals from altering their own state of mind. But alas they couldn't resist pulling that lever, and when they didn't get the full result they wanted, they kept trying to force it until it broke.
The principle of technology reducing trust is a general one I'd first considered a few years ago. Bitcoin is a specific instance, as are numerous other surveilance, manipulation, and scoring systems. Shoshana Zuboff beat me to the punch by a good three-to-four decades with her three laws of automation and information, in The Age of the Smart Machine (published 1988, based on research in the late 1970s):
1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.
2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.
3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machi...
I think we're talking past each other, and perhaps I didn't make my original point clear: Attributing a lack of trust to specific technologies themselves is a red herring that obscures the deeper cause for the trend. In fact I'd go further and say that the usual pattern is the adoption of insecure naive technologies, with demand for security features only occurring after bad actors arrive. (Interesting link, I'll have to check it out)
I think the bigger picture with transaction systems is that such trust was never scalable in the first place. Businesses took computing technology and naively tried to scale up the old way of doing things - knowing a limited number of people by face. Hence national ID numbers and surveillance databases with [social] credit scores - to keep it hard to "run away" as running away was becoming easier.
And that worked for several decades while that network was effectively small so nodes on it could be trusted. But rather than ever rearchitecting for the realities of the new environment, they simply attempted to fortify its fundamental flaws (hence "identity theft"), and now creative destruction here we go.
And my case is that it's not. More specifically: advances in communications and information technologies inherently and intrinsically undermine trust mechanisms in institutions and human interactions. They do this, in part, by replacing that trust with technological surveillance and verification. Which is, I'll note, more scalable, and possibly more reliable. But also insidiously corrupting of the social mechanics which have been established over time.
I'm probably not expressing this well, for several reasons. One is that I'm still thinking through this, and I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, though I'm fairly confident of the relationship.
In geographically-distributed pre-technological societies -- any empire (Roman, Chinese, Persian, Hindu, British), you had institutions -- business, courts, religions, governments -- which opereated without anything remotely resembling high-speed communications. Letters would take weeks, or months, to cross oceans. High-speed communications involved couriers on horseback -- the Pony Express largely replicated a 2,000 year old technology first established on the Royal Road of Persia, in which messages could travel 1,600 miles in about nine days. More liesurely transits took three months.
Ships sailed only from May to November, and couldn't sail close to the wind. For six months of the year there was no effective communications. Explorations and even cargo voyages might take several years.
In all of this all parties had to trust the others. Perhaps not perfectly, but sufficiently. And there were numerous mechanisms in place to effect this.
When we talk of technologies -- photographs, audio, video -- allowing us to "no longer rely on eyewitness testimony", what we're saying is that we are deprecating human testimony. Not without reason, but also not without consequence. And when the application of technologies presumes distrust, as social credit systems, email and keystroke monitoring, and pervasive closed-circuit video all do, the rot runs deeper.
If the trends aren't absolutely inherent and intrinsic, they're very, very close to that.
I agree the general case seems intuitive as you're describing. The trends are certainly correlated, and I don't know if it's even possible to refute.
But talking about specifics seems like possibly assigning undeserved blame, and can lead to ideas that if only we could prohibit a certain type of technology, that we could retain trust. But rather what a lot of technology is doing is exposing that perhaps that trust was never deserved in the first place.
If we're thinking about responsibility for the lack of trust in media, should we gripe about how better information availability allows people to check the mainstream narrative? Or rather, should we admit that perhaps they've been selling us paid-for agendas the whole time, and are only finally seeing the repercussions?
A significant factor is the writings of Joanne Yates and James Beniger (independent books), both looking at the development and evolution of business writing and communications from the 17th century onward (Beniger goes back further, Yates largely looks at the late 19th century onward, principally via DuPont). The nuggets of the idea formed reading those.
The reasons I feel the tendency may be generalisable is that the trend appears to be independent from any given technology, far more dependent on the factors of scale (amount of comms) and rates (one-way and round-trip information), and how systems respond given informational, control, and feedback cycles matching these descriptions. That is: it's a fundamental cybernetics / systems effect, not a response to any specific technology.
Keep in mind that "oh, I can trust people far more who I can stay in touch with by mail / phone / email / chat / SMS / voice chat / Skype ..." is actually a form of the argument I'm making. Yes, if you can rely on technology then those you can keep tabs on are more trustworthy. But that gain is relative to those whom you cannot, which is to say baseline trust is lower.
Maybe.
Then there's the problem that technically mediated information is itself no longer trustworthy. Analogue transmission and recording formats (photos, phonographs, film, phones) were fairly trustable in that they presented analogous representations of a ground truth (subject to framing, editing, selection, editing, and other effects). Computers are enabling fabrication of perceptually realistic media and signals, close to or at realtime in cases, to the extent that we cannot trust records or transmissions. The fact that information can be tuned to us (whether we want it to be or not) makes it inherently untrustworthy. Reality, as a rule, doesn't bias itself systematically to our preferences or weaknesses. Digital media does.
Media intermediates. Screens are projections, of our biases, the sender's biases, and the system / intermediaries' biases.
Reading this made me think of a situation with a non-adversarial notion of trust. It used to be that you could make plans with someone a week or two in advance, and generally just expect to show up at a place and time, and they'd be there without further coordination. Whereas now with instant communication, personal plans can be easily altered at a moment's notice, and so they will. (Of course my own getting older is a confounding factor here too...)
The larger effect you're describing feels like a different way of describing model "precession", in that once a state of affairs becomes taken for granted, the head of the pack/smarter agents/attackers (however you want to think of them) move to playing off those assumptions. Everyone else who is still "playing by the rules" then feels like their trust has been violated.
I'm drawing the distinction between general trends and specific technologies, because I feel the only thing you can get out of the general trend is to predict that we will have ever less societal trust over time (barring using it to indict technology in general ala Kaczynski). But is there an inherent problem with less trusting, IF the same thing can be accomplished with verification? Keep in mind, we don't necessarily account for all the people that previously got swindled because they had no choice but to trust, and that trust was betrayed! So it seems like the real "trust" crises arise when something we traditionally trust has been undermined, but without a corresponding better way to verify.
Looking at the specific course of mass news media - everyone kind of came to just trust what they were saying, so that trust became an asset to monetize (propaganda). Then as more people saw through their bullshit, their remaining audience became less critical, meaning they can lower their standards even further, setting up a feedback loop. Now the TV is down to base disaster porn and a political sporting arena.
Granted I do think there is an abstract point to be made that even if mass media was pushing detrimental propaganda to eg go to war or further other entrenched-interest goals, having everyone united on the same page can be valuable in and of itself. I just think that has to be evaluated on its own topical merits - like considering all of those remote victims of economic wars - rather than generally lamenting about trust.
(This comment got lost in a tab, and I didn't necessarily cover everything I wanted to. But I might as well late-reply with what I did write)
Which is categorically and empirically false. But I don't want to be too hard on them, they are journalists after all.
You make me feel extremely lucky.
In a lot of third world countries it is pretty common and even expected that the average Joe will vote for whomever appeals to their emotions. Every sin of the politician is forgotten and forgiven even if the said politician has a history of inciting murder or being corrupted etc.
There is a good chance that people who voted for their candidate made up their minds long before any kind of "fake news" hit their newsfeed.
Politics today is far more deceptive because the speed of delivery and feedback for communications allows it to be.
Only going to get worse unless a new platform/network/protocol is created for the future of "trustless" news and publications.
We shouldn’t use the term “fake news”, which is a term designed to undermine trust in news institutions. When we use the term, we contribute to the undermining.
Fake stories and their spread are a different matter - they can be a form of propaganda as well, but they can also serve other properties (selling ads, such as in spam, is a major reason for fake stories).
Paltering is what Chomsky rails against in traditional media in his books such as Manufacturing Consent. Ex: tortured Polish Solidarity Catholic priests in the USSR get national headlines, but Catholic Priests murdered by US-funded death squads in Guatemala do not.
"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." - Hitler
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, is generally credited with scaling up the "big lie" technique. He had access to radio broadcasting, which was new then, and pushed mass production of radio receivers. With those powerful tools, propaganda became far more effective.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news
The practice is an old one, though the term is largely a 20th century development:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fake%20news&ye...
(I believe that the 1940s spike had a different connotation from the 1980s-1990s usage.)
The term became massively more widely used during the 2016 US presidential campaign, and its popular meaning shifted under a misuse assault to "news I don't like", though that strikes me itself as a disinformational tactic to water down the term:
That’s the fundamental aspect of human nature that needs to somehow be changed. It’s not that hard to develop critical thinking skills — but parents don’t want it, corporations don’t want it, politicians don’t want it. Where is the constituency that is going to push for and pay for critical thinking skills in childhood education?
Hmm, the question that then arises in my mind is: are parents that do encourage their children to question them properly preparing those children for a society that will disregard them with that attitude?
(Working from your assumptions here - I'm not necessarily sure how widespread the disregard for a questioning attitude is.)