Bush Did North Dakota
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
It reminds me a little of forced choice assesments [0], commonly used for interview screening or employee assesment. Its interesting, but kind of inevitable, that people will often default to the choice which is "best" rather than most accurate/correct. Forcing a choice can have all sorts of effects, and it depends on the context if that effect is good or not.
[0] https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-...
Questionaire A.
1. Do you think Osama Bin Laden is evil?
2. Do you support Bin Laden being brought to justice for his actions?
3. Do you trust the government?
---------------------------------------------------------
Questionaire B.
1. Did you believe the CDC when they said masks were useless against covid?
2. Do you believe the current consensus that they are useful against covid?
3. Do you trust the government?
Do think as a populace we'll ever get beyond the inherent subjectivity of poll results? A NYT article yesterday, "Young People More Likely to Believe Virus Misinformation, Study Says" [1], cited that 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats. But I looked at the paper [2], and it turns out they were offered a "not sure" option. So am I justified now in thinking that there's something wrong with these Gen Z kids? I think most likely not...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-m... [2]: http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%...
Doesn't that simply mean they are a few months behind on the news of the origins of coronavirus? The main theory used to be that, and the topic is irrelevant enough to people that it's unrealistic to expect them to be updated all the time.
In fact, bats are still the leading theory.
According to Wikipedia: While there is scientific consensus that bats are the ultimate source of coronaviruses, it is hypothesized that a SARS-CoV-2-like coronavirus originated in pangolins, jumped back to bats, and then jumped to humans, resulting in SARS-CoV-2. [...] Therefore, based on maximum parsimony, a specific population of bats is more likely to have directly transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans than a pangolin.
Though it doesn't mention "eating" specifically, I imagine that transmission could happen from butchering a bat in preparation for consumption, handling of bat remains, or being bitten by a bat.
So what's up with the New York Times[2] and that study[3]? Are they really picking bones over the word "eating"? Is there a new leading theory that no one bothered to add to Wikipedia?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-m...
[3] http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%...
What a sad time we live in that this is actually a reasonable thing to ask.
Maybe we're interpreting "official" differently.
By “official theory” I meant the narrative that NYT and similar establishments are going with now. Infer from that what you will.
And “official” seems to have lost a lot of its meaning in recent times.
People ask me, if there is a vaccine for COVID-19 would you take it right away, or wait, or not take it? My answer is that I am going to do what my doctor recommends. I still question authority. But I have learned that there are limits to my knowledge and judgement that aren't always obvious to me.
1. Going out of their way to promote the narrative that we should listen to the “experts”.
2. Lying to us for our own good—for instance, about masks early on.
“Question authority” sounds a lot more appealing when the alternative is, “shut up and do as you’re told, dummy”.
It's unusual that we get to see the bleeding edge science before it's all figured out, and it's definitely making things confusing, but it isn't sad.
And what are we supposed to conclude from that fact? Someone heard that coronavirus is bat-related, it's not completely unreasonable to assume that it made the jump to humans when someone prepared one for eating.
I also think that studies of the form "people who disagree with me are stupid because they think X" are fundamentally dumb. This particular issue is just a small part of why I think that.
-11% of the population would not disagree with a ridiculous claim (4% agree + 7% unsure)
-2 to 1 people when given a somewhat plausible event they have never heard of would be inclined to think its more likely false than true.
My main takeaway though is getting people's beliefs through polls is hard and you probably need to carefully craft multiple questions phrased in different ways while trying to avoid showing your bias to get a "true" result.
Maybe it was bats. Seems like the jury is still out on that one. Even if it's wrong, I think Gen Z's could be forgiven for conflating it with Ebola in the origin story. Mind you, most of them are going to say "bats? I don't know, let me look that up" in real life. In a survey you have to go with "uhh, I do remember hearing something about a deadly virus that came from eating bats..."
The reality is we probably aren’t going back to a world with a predominate narrative. Contrary to the mainstream story, conspiracies aren’t just something stupid people latch on to. They often hide metaphorical truths, even if the actual details are exaggerated or false. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to events in the past decade, e.g. Epstein. Combined with information overload, technological advancements like A.I. commenting and deepfakes, and political-financial incentives to frame events in biased ways, I expect the situation to only fracture more.
The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income. It’s beyond me why the billionaire class hasn’t chipped in a few bucks to save the journalistic concept of truth - unless of course, they have no reason to.
If billionaires were controlling the purse strings, it seems unlikely they would be as willing to report negatively on them or their businesses either.
I'm unconvinced there is any way to deliver reasonably unbiased 'truth' journalistically
And my idea was more: get anonymous donors to put $10 billion in an untouchable trust that funds a nonprofit news source, which is itself policed and funded by a separate anonymous trust. Full public transparency for everything. The legal mechanisms are available, even if the decency isn’t.
Why is the only solution a centralized one, for you?
It failed. Only large one I am familiar with.
I agree with you. It needs to be centralized because it has to be authoritative.
> Personal accountability?
What on earth does this look like? Going up to random punters buying the Sun, grabbing them by the lapels and asking "why are you reading this propaganda?"
The issue I’m referring to is at the institutional level, not the individual one. As far as I’m concerned, when anyone with critical thinking skills analyzes the media, it all looks like propaganda. That doesn’t really help society get more accurate information.
What that means in practical terms, I’m not sure.
If you want good information, you can still pay for it. Nation-states do this. Hedge funds do this. There is more data available on the open market than ever before. But the buy-side of that market has shifted considerably.
In the article before this one he more or less intimates that it's not necessary to publicly refute false heterodox belief (creationism/ID). W T F? He also ignores, or doesn't include the reasons why it became such a huge topic in the 2000s: bush's presidency.
Some may take that to the extreme of "believe the opposite of anything that sounds like what media would say"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation...
I think that's the wrong conclusion.
What the statistic in question suggests is far narrower. That, when specifically directed not to seek out other information, about 1/3 of people will assume Alex Jones is telling the truth about an issue, while 2/3 will assume he is lying.
I don't think generalizing that to level of belief in conspiracy theories is valid; while I suppose one might assume that the "North Dakota crash" refers to a conspiracy theory, the explicit question refers to whether Alex Jones is lying, so the personal credibility of that source is definitely being tested in the question (and without any actual story for respondents to evaluate, its the only thing that the question can be testing.)
> Respondents to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears were asked if “The government is concealing what they know about…the North Dakota crash.” A third of Americans (33%) think the government is concealing information about this invented event.
Edit: I guess this phrasing (for each conspiracy) actually would be satisfied by the existence of any classified information about each topic, even classified information that wouldn't materially change the public's impression of the event. It's almost certainly true that "the government is concealing what they know about" the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, for example, because there are some files and documents related to those matters that the government won't release publicly, which isn't the same as saying that those files and documents would change anyone's assessment of who is responsible for those events.
That's my problem with the way the Chapman survey was worded. The prompt was overly broad. Answering "yes" for some of those "conspiracies" is reasonable, not an indication of conspiratorial thinking. It does, however, provide an upper bound for such thinking since a person who believes in conspiracies about those things (or are just general "black helicopter" types) are not going to answer in the negative (unless they think the poll is part of a secret government plot to out them...).
That is a prior.
There can’t be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional.
That's "proof", not "evidence". If you see someone holding a bloody knife, that's evidence in favor of them having killed someone, even if turns that they didn't (and thus that the evidence was misleading).
Your prior would be the truth value you assign without knowing whether you've heard about the supposedly-covered-up thing. (Which is admittedly a hard epistemic state to be in for a significant length of time. Eg, compare: what is your prior that this question has a odd number of letters in it? Obviously about 0.5, but it's trivial to count them and force your epistemic state to near 0 or 1.)
My prior about the number of letters in the question is based on what I do know about what I don’t know.
I know nobody has told me. I know the letters are not alternating in color. I know the letters are not in a grid. I know there are more letters than a quick visual would allow me to count - e.g. more than 8, etc.
i am willing to speculate that the same may be true of psychosis. i'm not an expert or anything but what is true of depressive symptoms seems like it could be true of psychotic symptoms as well.
many people may be suffering from very low-grade, subclinical psychotic symptoms, with a smaller number progressing to diagnosable mental illness.
this idea is consonant with findings that schizophrenia diagnoses increase for people who live in cities, and with the social defeat hypothesis.
it seems to me that this would explain the increase in the past few years in the particularly bizarre kind of conspiratorial thinking described here.
old-fashioned conspiracies (JFK, UFOs) had a kind of internal coherence and logic that seems to have gone away -- if you look at conspiracy stuff nowadays, conspiracy theorists don't even try to make sense any more. it's a style of thinking that really seems like it must the result of some kind of difference in mental processes.
I'm really confused about what "North Dakota crash" is supposed to be suggestive of. A UFO?
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...
(Memory brings me the Mother of All Bombs, DDG brings me Moab, Utah, USA, and Moab, Jordan)
What reasonable people are saying is that Trump is an authoritarian, a person who admires other strongmen, a person who has had business relationships with Russia and has no problems with vehement conflicts of interests, and that there have been substantial reports of Russians creating political connections with people in the Republican party and various think tanks.
That's not necessarily a conspiracy, nor is it an idea of a "grand plan" to steal elections. Connections for the sake of influence and personal relationships have played part in politics since forever, and does not require conspiracist thinking to assert than and to assert certain factual evidence that suggests people are putting personal and party interests over that of national security.
What does that mean?
Like just based on the size of government... someone is probably a pedophile. But I don't know what that means other than there is a lot of people in government.
Beyond that "that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government" seems too vague.
No, actual specific public officers have been arrested and convicted of child sex crimes.
There's a difference between belief that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true, and belief that there might (or even the stronger belief that there absolutely is) "pedophilia within the ranks of the government".
One is a very specific conspiracy theory, and one is a belief that a phenomenon which is present throughout humanity and which, like most things, is enabled by positions of power is not somehow magically completely excluded from government. (So, in a sense, an anti-conspiracy theory.)