Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true.
They say that victors write history, but that shouldn't be the goal.
That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles.
People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?
It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.
I've never seen this argument, and frankly, I don't really understand it -- what are "equivalently trained professions", and why all "equivalently trained professions" should be paid the same?
> and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading.
That's interesting, can you show me some data behind it? I haven't heard this one either.
It's incredibly common. Even here on HN. I personally empathize with it because I'm a programmer and I'm quite certain much of the work I do provides less value than a decent teacher would _in the long term_.
Societies benefit from paying teachers more as:
- they deserve more
- higher salaries attract better teachers and actual domain experts who have little economic incentive to teach when they can make more elsewhere.
- a better educated workforce will pay for itself in the long run, although I think FUD over deficit spending isn't necessary here and would be fine if it eventually creates increased output/asset creation.
I am not claiming that these ideas are proven, just that I personally empathize with them. If you or anyone has research to counter or back up these claims that would be very helpful.
Do you see how this turns into editorial really fast?
The WaPo and Politifact are particularly trash "fact check" brands. They're pure editorials.
edit: To hopefully ward off reflexive political downvotes: my politics are the opposite of rayiner's, I have the opposite opinion on what teacher pay should be, and certainly would argue about what the historical record shows about it. I wouldn't have my argument pop up in a tooltip when you mouse over rayiner's comment, and I certainly wouldn't call it a "fact check."
I am not aware of any other profession where the statistical impact of training is not reliably distinguishable from zero so this is a thin reed to hang any argument on. If we’re going to reward people for the length of time they’ve been in training without regard for the value of their skills or outside demand that seems unjust. If no one wants to pay someone to be a minister or theologian after doing a Master’s in it that’s fine. Equally if someone is dissatisfied with the salary they earn, whether as a teacher, librarian, lawyer or bin man they are free to find other work.
I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.
The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.
Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.
That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.
Propaganda isn’t “telling people the truth and warning them about false truths”. Propaganda is spreading a message, even if it’s known to be false, in order to induce a desired behaviour. It does not care about the truth, it does not care about the wrong decision, it cares only for a specific outcome and uses any message possible to achieve that outcome.
If the point of education is not to tell people the truth and warn them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions, what is the point of education?
This is not a compliment, this is doubling down on saying I was arguing in bad faith. Scientology is an excellent baseline for nonsense, not a thought-terminating cliché. I also use flat-earthers: if your argument would work just as well for flat-earthers, it's an empty argument.
In school, I was taught the tools to get my computer to do what I said and how to read. Not the truth, and what to ignore, except in history or social studies class. Needless to say, what I was taught in history and social studies in the 80s was propaganda, even the true parts.
Education is not telling someone what is true or not true, it is to train the methods of discovering truth and disproving lies. It is critical thought.
A fact check, and more egregiously censorship directly is against critical thought. It tells us that most humans are not fit for handling complicated problems or balancing sources - that instead we must trust some other authority to do that. It does not require a long search through the history book to find egregious mistakes by every journalistic outlet running today - including those purporting to be fact checkers.
If humans are unfit to engage critically with diverse information than so are the fact checkers. There is no human who is so trained and intelligent as to be unerring in their judgements and fact findings.
History doesn't repeat, but it has it's tropes. The well-intentioned erosion of freedom of speech and the subsequent censorship is not new. It will get worse before it gets better.
Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you might also want to read Y? Have you ever been to a museum and seen a placard next to an object describing its historical significance? How is this somehow different? Because it’s “on the internet”?
IA is not compelling anyone to click on the link to PolitiFact, or the link to the report on foreign interference, or the link to the Medium content policy. They aren’t deleting or rewriting the content of the page. They’re attaching a link.
Do you think that a book or a documentary destroys the “integrity” of the original material by adding a non-destructive narration or voice over that offers extra context?
How could someone can even do what you want, to “look at the content and context”, if IA doesn’t provide any context?
> Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection.
(emphasis mine)
Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.)
The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries.
[0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...
Some of the practices you're describing in book publishing do bother me. I have no issue with the author of a work making corrections, errata, disclaimers, etc. But when a publisher agrees to publish a book, and then reneges because they don't agree with its contents, I find that disturbing.
I don’t want archive.org to be an exciting organization. I want it to be a boring organization that just archives as much of the internet as they can plausibly can.
It seems that current leadership is not content with being that.
Who gets to choose which articles are scrutinised and which aren't?