People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tomorrow, but for the next 30 years
Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.
"The problem". What problem are we talking about again here? Is the problem that people are believing wrong things, or the spread of polarization and toxicity?
I don't care if people believe "wrong things". How's that old song go? "All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest"? People will always believe whatever they want to, regardless of "evidence", regardless of history, regardless of persuasion. "Post-truth" society is such a ludicrous term. There was never a "truth society" to begin with. Never. If someone doesn't want to change their mind, you're tilting at windmills. Doubly so if this person is an anonymous account.
What I care about is stopping the spread of toxic and divisive stereotypes.
Look at the front page of Reddit. Every other post is a screenshot of an outrageous anonymous tweet, or a picture of a receipt with a nasty note on it, or a text message conversation. Look at how the public receives this: "Who cares if it's real or fake? The point is that it reinforces my stereotype of 'them'. We know 'they' exist, and we must do something about 'them'."
That's what's driving polarization and toxicity. The urge to respond with outrage to anonymous trolls. This is a problem we can fix by down voting and moving on.
But those beliefs lead to actions, which have negative consequences, which can affect us all.
No it isn't. Responding to toxicity or an external insult is precisely what the immune system does. An autoimmune disorder would be an activation of the immune system against some other bodily system that is healthy and functioning.
For instance: some people consider anti-vax sentiment to be child abuse, but dont consider cross-sex hormone injections for young children to be child abuse (and vice versa).
Another example is how many consider the swastika to be a symbol of genocide, but give a free pass to the hammer and sickle -- even though both of these symbols' ideologies have been similarily genocidal.
Humans are incredibly social beings, they hide in each other, as well as grow in each other. People absolutely can and do change their minds on all sorts of things every single day, and it's a "throw my hands up in the air and quit" to say otherwise.
Yes, people change their minds. But the more passionately they care about something, the less likely they are to change their minds about it. On the big questions that people care deeply about (politics, religion, vi vs. emacs), evidence doesn't seem to change peoples' ideas nearly as much as it should.
If you are an ethnic minority in a society where xenophobic nationalists believe you should be killed, do you think you'd care if people believed those "wrong things"?
Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.
- both sides are wrong
- the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other
Etc.
"If you accept X then we need to do Y."
"I don't think we should do Y"
"Then you reject facts."
Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.
(Edit) This doesn't mean I don't believe in truth, right/wrong etc... it means that I'm constantly balancing what's most likely to be trueish - subject to higher quality information at a later time.
A policy choice is the linkage of a fact to a particular goal; while few policy choices are so simple as to admit of a binary choice, you can certainly rank them on a gradient.
Of course, it helps if your goal is clearly definable and you maintain awareness of consistency. Otherwise, a goal of, say, improving life expectancy might be satisfied by a eugenics policy which made unpersons of those with medical conditions that would lower life expectancy.
To go even further, people may agree on the 'what' of a goal, but disagree on the 'why' of a goal, which very much inform what policy choices they are amenable.
Some have called this increased polarization.
I see it as a slide towards violent authoritarianism.
I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.
We do have the ability to determine truth from fiction, it just takes more work than cynically throwing up your hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying.
The desire to compel others to conform to one’s ideal of correctness is the fundamental impulse of authoritarianism.
...but also libertarianism, for a particular aspect of correctness.
My understanding is that the core value / principle of libertarianism is individual liberty.
How do you derive compelling others from that?
Yes, and libertarians tend to hold that it is right and proper (and even often define “violence” to exclude this use of force) to use any degree of force necessary to get others to observe the individual liberties libertarians see as essential.
Maybe, but it's also the impulse of people who rightly care about the future of our shared world.
Literally no authoritarian says "i want to suppress people because I'm evil mwahaha." Every single authoritarian says "i need to suppress this evil disinformation because i care about the future of our shared world---unlike you unworthy people who presumably don't care."
That's not rationalism, that's just saying "I'm right, they are wrong, end of discussion".
Good luck with judging who's right and who's wrong.
Yes, in a world with literally billions of people, you have a few millions who believe outlandish things. If that was the extent of the problem with polarization/toxicity on the internet (or public debate in general), I doubt we'd talk about it, and I'd be very happy with the state of the world.
Those people have no large base, no stable membership, no money, no power. Focusing on them is like decrying the fall of science because 6yo Timmy still believes in Santa Clause.
* the Flat Earth Society has a very stable membership and patreon. Mark Sagent's youtube channel alone has 58k subscribers. Social media influence is the source of money, and a power all on its own. * Gweneth Paltrow's pseudoscience has a facebook group with 500k members. She has a netflix series and a reliable income from her online storefront. The facebook group came first, then the netflix series. * QAnon is a persistent conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Regardless, tripcodes (a public hash of the password used for identity verification on 4chan) denote a persistent online identity, so he's got a following... and the following is what causes power.
Power in its purest form is asking someone for something and getting it. This looks different in the modern age than it did previously, but saying that celebrities don't have power belies the entire concept. These are celebrities, either advocating obviously false things, or due to their advocation of obviously false things, and millions of people are taken in.
In contrast, the expected Iowa caucus turnout numbers are going to be around 60,000. Or, in other words: There are more people believing in flat earth than there are democrats caucasing in Iowa. How in the world is this not a problem.
I mean, isn't the answer already in these sentences? The world vs Iowa.
It's not that I don't believe pseudoscience and cults are a problem, it's just that they are a small problem on the grand scheme of things. Increasing polarization of society at large is a problem on a different scale. It's something that has very tangible effects for most people, some guy believing that the earth is flat and having 60k people watch his videos really doesn't.
So sure, paying attention to the edge cases is fine, but focus most of your attention on the big issues.
There's a tendency to wishfully think that people are rational and should be expected to sort out their own information environment with no governmental influence whatsoever, but I don't buy it at all. We're predictably manipulable, emotional creatures, and we can decide rationally to improve our information environment without falling into your implicit slippery slope.
Yes. I never said authoritarianism is bad. In fact, I probably consider myself an authoritarian.
It has begun to happen, with phenomena such as people being fired for Facebook or Twitter posts. It doesn't seem impossible to tie a sufficiently-advanced pattern-recognition network to the firehoses of data on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et. al to automatically tie together the scraps of personal info people accidentally leave behind and severely compromise online anonymity.
Be interesting if it happens.
On the social side I can't even imagine how destructive it could be. People (especially on HN) love to lament how restrictive and oppressing the "everyone knows everyone" small town life can be. So now that we have the anonymity online we can escape to, we've all turned around and started building the biggest "small town" imaginable! One with no escape.
This is naive. Facebook has just as many extremist bigots as any other anonymous platform.
Apologies, I didn't mean to insinuate that you were. My point was that this is the usual (and often intended) consequence of your argument, as I understood it and have seen it in the world.
Calling someone a liar doesn't help by itself, but if we can bring clear and irrefutable evidence to a discussion, I think we can reasonably reject outright incorrect views.
It also takes more work than "But I'm right!"
If you've done the research, if you know that you're correct, it's one thing. (Even then, not everyone who is incorrect is lying.) But it's a real temptation to say "I'm right, they're wrong, they're lying" when you haven't actually done the work to be sure you're right.
I am prone to that temptation. You almost certainly are, too. So be careful. You can be the one in the wrong.
And I really do mean a complete lie. This wasn't a dispute over creative redefinitions of terms like Boris' NHS funding claims, or some nitpick about a minor detail. Corbyn and a worryingly large chunk of the press took an example of US food safety regulations being unambiguously stricter than EU ones - of them placing all the same restrictions on food manufacturers that the EU does, plus more - and falsely claimed their regulations were weaker instead, using graphic, emotive, memorable language, and everyone believed and repeated this total inversion of the truth.
The thing that gets me is that on some level, people must've known that US food isn't really unsafe. There's not some big movement of people who refuse to eat US food - by and large, everyone trusts food there as much as they would food here. The other thing is that despite this pretty much the entire press dropped the ball on this lie. (It is not even close to the only prominent anti-Brexit or anti-Tory lie they left unchallenged or outright made themselves.) Even Full Fact did initially - they actually helped spread the false claim themselves, and only came back to it a month or so later after it had spread across the internet multiple times and been used by Corbyn repeatedly in his campaigning.
This is both a cause and a consequence of the defunding of journalism and the change of the profession from news to views.
Private funding is making the situation worse.
Public funding is the instrument of authoritarian regimes- state sponsored media.
I think the root cause is lack of objective, critical thinking skills, and the glorification of "how it makes you feel" being more important than "is this reasonable".
I.e. emotion driving reason, rather than reason driving emotion.
See also: Donald Hoffman's experiments in truth-maximizing vs. fitness-maximizing: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25450
Journalism is dying because it's become not only useless as a means of information dissemination --- new media is better at that --- but also because journalists have become contemptuous of the public. They have only themselves to blame.
The problem comes when you have 5 civil engineers saying a bridge is not safe, and 50 random members of the public saying it's safe. If we treat those opinions as equal, we end up with a bridge collapsing.
The hell, average maanger lies.
The only improvement I see is decentralization, which is a very slow, but powerful process. The Gutemberg printing press showed that it is possible, and Bitcoin is doing the same thing right now, but I think superior technology for organizing people and resources is the only solution.
That said, yes, we absolutely cannot ignore the toxicity in its entirety. Ignoring it entirely is how little old ladies at church bible studies wind up dead. There are certainly classes of toxicity that it's just military sense not to ignore. Religious and ethnic extremism, etc. Basically anything that is going to cause issues with physical violence. To my mind, violence is the line.
Most people just glance at headlines, image, or whatever, and don't read articles or examine comments. Those comments about it being wrong only help inform the subset of people who bother to look at comments.