Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

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I just finished Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion. In it he argues that different people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts due to three things:

1. Sampling. There’s a big universe of facts, and each media outlet reports on a tiny piece of this universe.

2. Stereotypes. When you read a news story, you unconsciously pattern match and associate it to related examples you have in your mind.

3. Context. When you read a news story, you subconsciously have some fascet of your own identity in mind (as a Republican, as a pro-choice person, etc.).

All three are in effect when stories are reported on and consumed. It’s a series of lenses that samples, then distorts, the truth in a way that given the same real-world event, different people may come to completely different conclusions about what happened.

I’d add a #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.

> #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.

He called it propaganda and it was a big problem during his time.

> Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can decide how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at what. The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.

IMO we got here because social media allows people to run from one form of censorship straight into the arms of another without realizing they're still being censored. The same thing happened in Lippmann's time. People did not realize their circles were excluding information. The result was a couple periods of very-difficult-to-reconcile division.

Reminds me of Jaynes point that IIRC the beliefs of two perfectly rational agents with very different Bayesian priors can diverge even if they are presented with exactly the same facts/information/data...

Lippmann's time and ours were presenting different facts to different groups.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667943

Do you have any sources for this? I'd love to read more about it.

I think it’s in Jaynes magnum opus Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Good timing! I've just finished Le Bon and Bernays.

> people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts

Le Bon points out a more basic issue. He wrote about the kinds of crowds who used to storm the Bastille and so on—and appear to have returned to American history today after a long vacation. He concluded that the members of such crowds simply don't do things like considering facts or drawing conclusions. Instead, they associate chains of images and follow suggestions from prestigious leaders. TV advertisments do exactly what he suggested, and so does Donald Trump. It appears to work.

This puts me in a dilemma. As a physicist with egalitarian tendencies, I want everyone to take action that will provide the things they want and need, according to valid arguments founded on the laws of nature. But apparently, one of those laws of nature says that valid reasons have nothing in common with the reasons people do things.

Bernays resolved that dilemma by telling people like me to manipulate everyone else into doing what (we believe) is in their best interest. I'm really uncomfortable with that position, but it's hard to see an alternative.

Is that Crystallizing Public Opinion? Will read next.

Lippmann says the answer is two parts:

1. For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy.

2. For politicians, improve data so they can make better choices.

Interestingly, (2) sounds a lot like data.gov, a century before data.gov!

> Is that Crystallizing Public Opinion?

Propaganda.

> For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy

The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.

> The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.

It wasn't always the case that "fake news" aka propaganda made so much headway. The degree to which that was happening from ~2015 until now is a unique phenomenon not paralleled since Lippmann's time.

Thanks, ordered!

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