The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
> "In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant."
She said in the USSR that there was very little information and everyone knew the government was lying but no one could guess at the truth.
Having read Postman, McLuhan, Chomsky, etc, and having dabbled in media, I felt qualified to answer:
In the USA, the truth was always available, but everyone is overwhelmed with information (called 'infoglut' in the 80s), so few people had the wherewithal to figure out what's what, and most people just shut down.
Today, I'd say even the truth is hard to find, even for the motivated and experienced researchers.
I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would not have been worth the cost in the past.
1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing “engagement”.
2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that they become hard to filter out.
So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the blame as any other factor.
Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content, but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on a large scale so far.
This may be true in principle, but the fact that advertising exists, or even can exist, refutes this in practice.
Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today, there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable one when applied to an alcoholic.
To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol is reasonable for me - but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that there are also many who struggle to do so.
I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.
Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv.
I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.
I used it to refer to physical consumption of alcohol, and by analogy spending time browsing the internet or similar. I'd quibble that the way you're using it would be more appropriately termed 'exposure', and then you could roughly equate social situations where alcohol use is prevalent to websites that expose you to a deluge of information.
This might seem like needless hair splitting, but I think it's core to the point I was trying to make. Exposure to alcohol at a social event isn't a problem for me - a non-alcoholic - because alcohol is pull (ie no one is actively coercing me to consume it). But that's irrelevant to an alcoholic, for whom exposure itself poses a problem.
Similarly, no one is forcing me to browse social media or navigate through to the next clickbait headline. But for some people, mere exposure is sufficient to cause this - they fail to successfully self-regulate their information intake.
So then to complete the chain of analogies, the article is about the power of employing such a deluge of information in a motivated manner. Depending on how nefariously this is done, we might compare it to anything from regular advertising (open and obvious), to product placement in movies (subliminal), to historical cigarette advertising prior to regulation (open, but usage is harmful to health).
I've never seen any proof of that assumption. To the contrary, all evidence I've seen from the world of marketing and PR would support the opposite.
Anecdotally, it's never been easier to shove things in peoples faces. First thanks to TV, now thanks to social media.
It is (well, technically - not reasonably with push notifications being abused for ad delivery), but there's a lot of push content embedded in the pull content. For instance, when I visit HN, I pull information intentionally. If I follow a HN thread to an interesting article, I again pull information. But the ads that are in that article are definitely push.
'b0rsuk already linked my longer exploration of the topic. In a lot of places in that essay, you could replace "advertising" with "propaganda" with no loss in the argument. The way I see it, the two are different only in their goals (direct economic vs. political gain) - beyond that, they're the same thing.
EDIT: I've had this suspicion not so much with articles, but with comments. In particular political discussions I couldn't help but feel that there was deluge of comments arguing in favor of a particular position that struck me as manufactured.
Meanwhile the headline stuck in my mind almost instantaneously and created an impression of the state of the current world.
So I have to take hours away from my device entirely ... but I also have to be very careful what ideas I even glance at, because they take root in my brain.
Believe it or not it's an incredibly challenging problem. Google is burned at the stake everyday for their biased response on searches when they're parsing disgusting amounts of data and attempting to minimize noise. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't honestly, because even if you can effectively minimize returns for a given query (regardless of topic), there is then information loss to some degree and therefore arguably a bias.
I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth.
Everyone believes that, even flat earthers and anti-vaxxers believe that.
Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances.
Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.
EDIT: Looks like they haven't posted the first episode yet, just the 2 minute preview. I guess they're delaying the podcast in favor of the on-air broadcast.
Observations ('sense data' and personally-acquired life experience) are what we can (conceivably at least) fully agree on. 'Sam has hair'. 'Don't kick boulders.' Those upon which we can agree are the foundations of (that terribly-abused word) 'truth'.
We need to careful about using the word 'perception' as a stand-in for 'interpretation'. When we talk, we agree to pretend that we understand what each of us is saying. But when the words from my reality-tunnel cross the threshold of your reality-tunnel, your ears will likely hear my sounds, but then your brain interprets them. Danger, Will Robinson!
It used to be that the truth was constrained by the information that gatekeepers in positions of power or media let us see, and all it took to be reasonably informed was to watch or listen to a reputable media outlet for half an hour in the evening, and ignore whatever they believed the bad outlet to be.
This masked the complexities of reality for most of the population.
The internet has exposed the turbulence beneath the surface of publicly accessible knowledge. Thanks to social media, the subjects of journalism can now respond to it, or head it off with nearly the same amount of reach as journalists themselves. The sane can be said of anybody with a half-formed opinion on anything.
Many journalists have seemingly gotten so busy responding to the gnats and the niggles, and the affronts to their authority that they didn't realize they'd been caught in the undertow (see Twitter and facebook's community's influence on what is/isn't covered).
This has become increasingly visible in their work, even as their platforms are being chipped away thanks to competition in an increasingly fragmented landscape with incentives aligned towards catering to increasingly niche constituencies.
As a result, the adversarial nature of our information landscape has been laid bare to a swaths of the public.
Does realigning our expectations as to where, how, and if we'll find the truth redefine it? Not literally. But from a cultural perspective it does.
For the better? I don't know. I doubt it. Esp. in the US, too many of us weren't prepared to operate in such an environment and we're culturally already predisposed to conspiratorial thinking (rich coming from me). But it's where we're at right now.
A fact can't be misleading; it's the argument that uses it that might be misleading. So this really just points to us keeping up our abilities to ferret out the actual arguments and using critical thinking to oppose them if they are invalid.
I made https://en.howtruthful.com/ to facilitate presenting the core structure of an argument concisely, with the true parts and false parts appropriately marked.
It seems quaint now, but in 2016 when the term was publicized, it was very specific and direct: there was an epidemic of utterly fabricated political clickbait being shared from anonymous websites. Stories that were literally no more than unattributed fiction were widely circulated on social media, seen by millions, and a huge proportion of those people were taking them to be genuine (if politically motivated) news reporting.
Maybe at the time, it seemed like someone would do something if they pointed out that this was happening.
Of course, what someone did was immediately adopt the term to describe (what they saw as) low-quality, poorly-sourced, or overly-opinionated political reporting. And then a bunch of people who thought that reporting was actually pretty good started throwing the term back at what they thought was overly-opinionated, and suddenly the discourse was about bias in the mainstream media, and no one seemed to care much anymore about the tsunami of literal fantasies being deliberately spread by propagandists unknown.
Personally, I don’t care. If the most popular use of a term is nonsensical, I use next most popular meaning that has some sensical usage.
I don’t buy this whole “you can’t use the words ‘racist’ or ‘cloud’ because they’re so overused as to be meaningless” thing. Words are (briefly) overused all the time. And then they’re not, and we can carry on using them according to their original purpose.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a succinct consensus quite yet.
Speaking of, I recently started listening to the Philosophize This podcast, which attempts to give basic overviews of some major philosophers and schools of thought in a generally chronological order. I'm really enjoying it so far, and while it's probably easier to download and organize them with itunes or an app, the episodes are here:
Another somewhat more in-depth but possibly slightly more boring podcast is "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps". There's at least one spin-off on African Philosophy. I really enjoyed the almost-boring slow-paced nature of its approach.
I've spent a lot of time watching media of all stripes misrepresent politicians of all other stripes by selectively misunderstanding what they said and picking up on pithy but misleading quotes. It is a key part of how the game is played.
Reading through Reddit, someone asked what sites you can go to which are like Breitbart but to the left. One answer I thought was interesting was something like "all other news sites."
There are a small number of sites which seem to get pretty close to middle. I would still want to follow a mainstream and right left leaning site to get my bearings though.
However, I do think it's useful to know the narratives which are being spun out of the facts. Then when you have a discussion with someone, you understand how they arrived to whatever crazy beliefs they might have.
This is only true from a very rightwing point of view. If you want a real left wing point of view, read actual left wing sites like www.wsws.org a real socialist site. They have not much in common with CNN.
In general, if I am interested in a certain topic I try to read both sides. Russia, China and co. have also english newspapers. Then I usually find out that both sides lie or disconnects facts from context to a point that I think I got a basic understanding of what happened, but are disgusted by all of it and leave.
Facts stand or fall on their own, for the most part, in conformance to some external reality.
Narrative is the thread or story that's created, not just from individual facts, but the relationships which are drawn between them. It's possible to tell a false story (e.g., not truth), from a set of true facts, by misrepresenting the relationships between those facts.
This is how much (bad/false) conspiracy-theory stories get constructed -- if they're not totally true, they're a mix of truth and falsehood, but the narrative by which they're strung together is almost wholly false or misleading. This creates a huge cognitive load in addressing as you've got to sift through and sort the truths from falsehoods, both atomically (for any given event, place, person, thing, etc.), and for the relationships between elements.
There's a particularly insidious (and extremely long) bullshit conspiracy theory, "Everything is a Rich Man's Trick", tying everything from WWII to JFK to Nixon and beyond together, which operates on this basis. There are a great many indisputably true facts (several quite interesting ones) in the piece. But the relationships are bullshit, with one of the early lies being that JFK's "Secret Society" speech addressed anything other than the Soviet Union -- which listening a few seconds outside the clip included in the video makes clear.
Among the problems usual approaches to debunking encounter is that fact-checking individual items within such stories fails to address the overall narrative.
There's also the case that a story can be constructed of fictitious events, and yet be fundamentally true or accurate. This can show up in science (Gregor Mendel's genetic inheritence research appears to have been at least in part fabricated), in journalism (elements and facts in many stories are incorrect, though the overall narrative is often roughly accurate), in fiction (historical, political, or other fiction can create a highly-accurate or realistic picture of events or conditions) etc.
Where facts and narrative both align with reality, they're often quite compelling.
Oh no, the conspiracy goes back way longer. When the secret cult started building pyramids all over the world and then they hijacked Jesus teachings and corrupted it and when they brought down the roman empire, just after Atlantis ...
I can recomend Illuminatus! by Wilson and Shea. It was written under the hilarious assumption that all the conspiracies are true ..
Not that it is original or unique.
[0] http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174
Instead of trying to to repair that trust, pieces like this hand-wring about "fake news" and the rise of anti-intellectualism:
"Why won't these dumb bigots listen to us? Don't they know we have their best interests at heart? If only they were more educated, like us, they'd accept our reporting and science uncritically!"
People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people. The fact that so much media attention was devoted to such a trivial dispute is a testament to the devolution of national dialogue and debate. Instead of digging deep into the meat of issues that affect people and addressing the central argument, it's a never-ending labyrinth of "gotchas":
"So and so was false when he said 64%, it's actually 55%."
"So and so said this, and this group came out demanding an apology."
This sort of reporting might be more forgivable if the rest didn't read like propaganda, twisting news stories into things that are "technically true", but designed to give readers a false impression. Media writers have realized that most read only the headline and maybe the first few lines before clicking away, and the writers see this as an opportunity to inject hyper-partisan deception into the minds of their readers this way.
I expect an administration to be truthful in both important and trivial matters. If they lie about trivial ones, folks at the time knew they’d lie about important ones (see attack last week, child separation, etc)
I believe the notion is that if people are willing to commit themselves to boldfaced, objectively false (by any measure) lies, that's exceptionally strong evidence about their honesty and sincerity regarding more complex topics--topics that are much more difficult to pin down with simple facts.
But you're right--the constant stream of fact checking at this point is just exhausting and pointless and merely serves to drive ad revenue. Hugo Chavez fairly won election after election with endless rivers of rhetoric and excuses every bit as bombastic as Trump's. Indeed, Chavez had his own TV program during his presidency, something Trump can only approximate. I'll bet that most Venezuelan voters never truly believed most of what Chavez said; they just didn't care. He embodied a fantasy to which they had wedded themselves. Charismatic leaders do that, especially populist ones.
At some point the aggregated, revealed concerns of the body politic shift from reality (facts, hard-nosed politicking, etc) to fantasy. And I don't mean fantasy as in not objective--the life of every community is a reflection of various narratives. I mean fantasy as in the rules for decision making are intrinsically different; consequences become completely divorced from causation. America seems to have made that shift.
That word is used by people for politicians they don’t like.
Can you give me an example of a politician who is not populist?
A good leader is responsive to manifest problems, as opposed to problems in the abstract (which are often manufactured and non-existent); prefers evidence-based policies; and most of all is willing and eager to make course corrections (reality is messy and dynamic). In general it's difficult to do that today without being populist, as a populist almost by definition enjoys greater independence from the political machine and special interests. (Not that political machines aren't important! Hillary was nominated by the DNC machine over Sanders because the DNC machine was built to prevent someone like Trump from being nominated.) Of course, being populist doesn't mean you'll be a good leader; it depends on the character and ability of the person in power, and the extent to which their personal ambitions can be checked by the system--i.e. by making success the only option, as opposed to permitting a populist leader to manufacture success through lies and deceit.
A non-populist president would be someone like George H. W. Bush (the first Bush), who clearly represented elitist interests, albeit an enlightened elitism. America has a long history of this sort of elitist politician, largely to our[1] long-term benefit, starting most famously with George Washington. But H. W. Bush was the last one. Now we have a mix of ideologically (George W. Bush, on balance) and populist (Obama, on balance; Trump as an archetype) driven leadership, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
[1] Notwithstanding that some groups do better than others. But so much about healthy democracy is about minimizing the risks of majority power, and minorities are often at their most vulnerable when populism controls. See, for example, Andrew Jackson, whose politics and character may be the closest to that of Trump. Or consider that during the heyday of union power mid century, big business and African Americans sometimes had an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend relationship, as unions were notoriously racist. Look at how minorities have faired in the Middle East when populist governments come into power in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, etc.
One example that comes to mind is states with both a president and prime minister, and the president is meant to remain somewhat outside the political fray.
As such, good examples of non-populist politicians would be, by definition, leaders that don't generate a lot of clickbaity headlines and don't achieve a great deal of global attention, although perhaps Angela Merkel is a good example.
The defining characteristic of a populist leader is that they claim to have the backing of The People (often, in practice, a minority of voters, much less of the populace) who uses this supposed mandate to dismiss any checks and balances against their power, while consistently presenting a divisive "us versus them" narrative often one-way directly to the public through uncritical broadcast media or rallies, rather than accepting public scrutiny from journalists or opposing politicians.
But sure, maybe you think all politicians are equally bad that way.
Aside from possibly Angela Merkel, can you name some technocats that are good examples of what you describe?
My impression is that technocrats, generally, are just as populist as all the others, if not more deliberately so.
The amount of time spent on voter sentiment and polling data, not to mention a target audience of 'intelligent, enlightened voters', makes me almost as suspicious of 'technocrats' as they make of the typical populists.
Angela Merkel - formidable and respected even by her opponents, but never one to take the easy, populist route. Has called populism "poison"
Tsai Ing-wen (Taiwanese president, running for her second term this weekend) was a law professor. She's not a great public speaker.
Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian Prime Minster. Former investment banker. Had a tendency to have complicated policy positions which most people who worked in whatever field he was forming policy for would consider technically correct, but were hard to explain.
Hillary Clinton - terrible public speaker, overly concerned with polling and unable to read people (in complete contrast to her husband who was very much the populist)
Mario Monti - former Italian Prime Minster and economist.
I've tried to find examples from all sides of politics.
I really used to like the "This Week Tonight" show. I used to watch it all the time.
Then they misrepresented or they didn't research a band I liked. So I thought "If they are this wrong about a band, what else are they wrong about?".
> People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people.
Also this article and many others like it constantly ignore the fact that Trump almost always uses hyperbole. It is obvious it is hyperbole. However it seems it is expedient for the author to ignore this.
Most authoritative sources are lying a huge percentage of the time, even if the lying takes the form of misrepresenting a situation, cherry picking data, begging the question, etc.
Everyone says news has gotten worse, and I’m sure there’s some basis for that claim, but also you couldn’t as easily check how wrong a news source was until recently.
Humans are using them for nefarious reasons.
Humans have been dicks from the beginning of time.
https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/
in particular the "Precedented, therefore harmless" variant.
But here's a counter-perspective on polarization: the winners don't get to control the narrative anymore. Both sides are lying rather than just the one who gets the pulpit.
The meme you’re pushing here, that lying for politicians is par for the course and not worthy of note, is pretty destructive: An important part of political discourse is deciding what to believe when.
And no I don't think it is necessarily newsworthy. A lie about the number of people in some crowd is still just a dog wagging its tail.
The problem is: given this belief, and how common it is, why should any politician not start lying, taking bribes, etc? After all, everybody thinks they do so, no matter how they actually behave.
My opinion is just statistics ultimately. No use complaining about the data. And I'm not a game theorist, but as for higher order effects, I'd bet a systems where no one trusts politicians works out pretty well for all players. The real problem, actually, is that too many people trust the lies, which gives liars an advantage over honest candidates.
There's a lot of shadow boxing in the article. But given Epstein and MIT I can see why filters would seem like a good idea to people who used to arbiters of truth.
That's a whole book, here's a taste from The Chomsky Reader: "What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It — and Why" https://chomsky.info/reader02/
> Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — a simple case. Everybody understands immediately without any specialized knowledge that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That’s exactly what it is. You don’t debate it; it’s not a deep point that is difficult to understand. It isn’t necessary to know the history of Afghanistan to understand the point. All right. Now let’s take the American invasion of South Vietnam. The phrase itself is very strange. I don’t think you will ever find that phrase — I doubt if you’ll find one case in which that phrase was used in any mainstream journal, or for the most part, even in journals of the left, while the war was going on. Yet it was just as much an American invasion of South Vietnam as it is a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when nobody was paying any attention, American pilots — not just mercenaries but actual American pilots — were conducting murderous bombing raids against Vietnamese villages. That’s an American invasion of South Vietnam. The purpose of that attack was to destroy the social fabric of rural South Vietnam so as to undermine a resistance which the American-imposed client regime had evoked by its repression and was unable to control, though they had already killed perhaps eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking the political settlement called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords.
> So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam.
> I don’t know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They’re defending Afghanistan against capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don’t think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States invaded South Vietnam.
> Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There’s a vast difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves.
Chomsky would not agree to your TLDR in the slightest, and he doesn’t think the USA is evil.
How could it be? Three words to sum up Chomsky?
(Technically, I'm mocking his critics, not him. Eh? Get it?)
Cheers!
Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be seen by yourself:
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inaug...
Found via https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/
Not true. From the CNN perspective, the big gaps on the right are still visible, even though what I said about the vantage point is obviously true. Here's a picture that illustrates why the Reuters photo was in a better position to show gaps than the CNN photo.
Reuters
CNN
|||||||| | | | | | | | | | | | |
In the CNN photo the square in front of it is empty on the left and right of the mall, and on the right side the second square in front of it is mostly empty too. Maybe it is slightly fuller than the pic put out by the Trump Inaugural Committee, but in the Getty Image of the Obama inauguration the crowds continue another city block at least (the photo cuts off while they are still dense, but it's much further than in the Trump photo as can be seen by aligning the curve at point [1]). Pic at [2].
Conclusion: that photo doesn't present any evidence that there were more people than claimed. In fact it strengthens the case that there were more people at the Obama inauguration.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%...
[2] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/...
"Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs (mit.edu)"
"The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution"
What are the odds?
Before, we were led by false centralized narratives filtered by an elite. Now at least we have the potential to find the real truth because it's all out there. It doesn't destroy critical thinking, it's the opposite, it makes critical thinking indispensable because each individual must do the work themselves.
I think the problem is not fake news, the problem is that people got used to believing all the BS from authorities; they were trained to, so now they are easily fooled. Eventually, exposure to fake news will untrain us and force us to actually think for ourselves.
IMO the discussion around fake news serves the interests of the elite. They don't want people to think for themselves.
I think most people either don't know how, don't care enough, or have enough time to think long and hard about every subject. I'd wager most people rather are OK with outsourcing critical thinking on most matters to authority figures of some kind. So when people are no longer capable of recognizing legitimate sources of truth, they likely gravitate towards whatever figure aligns with their biases & beliefs.
Yes there are problems with having gatekeepers of any kind, but I'd rather have that then a world where some random moron spouting conspiracy theories is taken seriously by too many people.
Also, I agree that fake news makes critical thinking indispensable, but it also does nothing to improve one's critical thinking skills, which is one of the reasons it's dangerous.