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Comment by m_herrlich | Hacker News Reader

Some of the things people currently believe are so patently absurd and obviously made up that labeling them as false would not make much difference. It's would be just one more conspiracy vector.

Even if it did, how could the regulators possibly keep up with the gish gallop of misinformation? There are those who seriously examine and rebut the claims of q-anon et al. but can you imagine a more thankless task?

A better approach is to teach good informational hygiene to kids. Pull from a variety of information sources, weight the ones that correct errors, awareness and taxonomy of cognitive biases, stuff like that.

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I think in any community that is gratified in some way by a belief, there's a spectrum from actually believing at one end, to enjoying the camaraderie and enjoying the belief as a conscious fantasy at the other end, and I think people who inhabit the "conscious fantasy" end can slide towards the "true believing end" via suspension of disbelief, like people do while enjoying a movie or a role-playing game.

When the community is something like a sci-fi fandom community, people on the actually believing end of the spectrum would be considered mentally ill, while people on the camaraderie-and-fantasy end are considered well-adjusted. In a religious community, it's more complicated, and people on either end of the spectrum might be accepted or stigmatized depending on the religion itself and the point of view of the beholder.

Either way, if you think of fandom communities and religious communities as analogues, you wouldn't expect these communities to go away until people can no longer get gratification they want from them. I don't know how that can be accomplished.

I know it's sensitive times to comment anything but I can't help remembering all the ancient chinese idioms we used to learn and laugh about in class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/%E4%B8%89%E4%BA%BA%E8%A1...

From 'learning from any 3 random wanders' to 'fear the tiger of 3'. Was that actual wisdom or cynical conclusion of human behaviour?

Informational hygeine is already part of the high school curriculum in every state I'm familiar with. Maybe we could make it better, but I struggle to think of any specific reforms that'd help.

The current information hygiene and media literacy curriculum as I understand it leans heavily on using 'reputable sources'. This is well and good until those sources start to lose their reputability by publishing stories that stretch credulity (WaPo and the NYT with their 'anonymous intelligence sources familiar with the thinking of people near the matter'), become increasingly partisan, or simply appear too selective in their coverages with the benefit of hindsight. Noticing these things invalidates the majority of the curriculum in a student's mind, and leaves them unequipped to deal with the beasts wandering the information wilderness.

If I were to reform this, I'd place greater emphasis on information composition, and source/author auditing. Acknowledge that mainstream publications often miss things that less reputable outlets will cover (albeit poorly), and teach students to think in degrees of certainty.

>This is well and good until those sources start to lose their reputability by publishing stories that stretch credulity (WaPo and the NYT with their 'anonymous intelligence sources familiar with the thinking of people near the matter')

It sounds like maybe we should add courses on journalism then too because there is nothing specific about this approach that stretches credulity if done properly. Unnamed sources are a crucial part of a lot of good journalism.

They are, and some of the greatest journalists alive, such as Sy Hersh have built their very respectable careers on anonymous tips and having privileged information from those they can never cite.

That being said, it's important to be exceedingly leery of them, and use them sparingly, preferably as supporting evidence for a larger story. Lacking the same degree of accountability, they just as easily can be used to launder political narratives to sympathetic journalists who will breathlessly parrot them as they can be used to inform the public of goings-on behind the curtains of corporation and state.

Used too lightly as the primary crux of nearly inconsequential stories which hammer in too small a number of talking points, 'anonymous x familiar with y' can quickly become shorthand for 'this journalist/publication is in bed with a subfaction, and this is the new talking point'.

Anonymous sources are a tool that is neither inherently good or bad. You singled them out in your previous comment as being linked to untrustworthy reporting.

That’s because anonymous sources been particularly abused in the past few years - reporters taking a source at their word while doing a minimum of verification.

Properly used unnamed sources are a crucial part of good journalism, but much of the problem we've seen recently is that media outlets aren't using them properly. I'd point to the Miles Taylor essay as a good concrete example of what goes wrong:

* They granted him journalistic anonymity for an opinion piece, which is very much not a common practice.

* The NYT published no corroboration of Taylor's claims, and their descriptions of how the editorial got published suggest they didn't even attempt to find corroboration.

* Their description of him as a "senior administration official" substantively misled people - the phrase is generally understood, and was understood at the time, to refer to people like agency heads or cabinet secretaries with direct accountability to the President.

And this is from an uncommonly responsible outlet! Many others will happily publish detailed claims of fact attributed only to "one person with knowledge of the matter".

The Miles Taylor column was not a journalist citing an "unnamed source". It was a publisher allowing an anonymous opinion column. Those are different things. It is also important to realize the fundamental differences between reporting and opinion pieces including the expectations on fact checking.

Once again, another reason people should learn more about journalism in school.

This seems like an incredibly bad faith argument to me.

Do you feel that the "Anonymous" op-ed was published in a manner that encouraged any sort of critical consumption?

My point is the '"Anonymous" op-ed' was in fact an op-ed which comes with a different set of publishing standards than reporting. Most people either are ignorant of or refuse the recognize the differences between the two from a journalistic point of view. Fundamentally a bad op-ed in the NYT shouldn't have anyone questioning the quality of reporting that the NYT puts out.

I don't know. I understand the journalistic theory behind it, but as applied here, it feels like the equivalent of an investment bank explaining that it's unfair to hold it accountable for its false Libor submissions. The NYT's institutional reputation was a fundamental part of what made this op-ed work - nobody would have believed it if it were on a random anonymous Blogspot - and that reputation can't be cleanly divided according to the company's internal firewalls.

There's a point where you have to hold organizations accountable under normal standards, rather than letting them set up special rules to define their bad conduct out of existence.

You still aren't delaminating the differences between opinion and reporting. This would have been an egregious column to post as part of NYT's news coverage. It isn't among the worst columns the NYT has published as part of its opinion columns. There are different standards for the two and different reputations for each department inside the company.

Basically what you are doing is blaming Alphabet because it doesn't hold YouTube and Google Search to the same standards and Trump was banned from one and not the other. Those products serve separate purposes and therefore need to have their own independent expectations and practices.

Wow. I'm a huge consumer of news media and I never saw that this source was revealed. I'm only now learning the identity of the author, but you're absolutely correct that the portrayal was incredibly misleading and I'm infuriated at the attempted deceit.

I'll try to cite some hypothesis, hope it helps...

'Within limted thought-processes; which can be owed by censorship, selfcensoring or sure a lack of information, one thought may be proceeding linear.'

"If you may give this one moment more, associating happens within a 'certain' time as well it may make 'a career' and runs on a limited tracks."

Now you may imagine conflicts - as unexpected consequence, resulting in a quiet retreat, in its simplest form to shut up, hardened resulting in isolation - just to reenter a thoughtloop of to rest, to became keeping calm... now add promiscuous, rash, screenwork and you have qualified for obsession and addiction, maybe... ^^

edited: eh! ther was way too many chars and text to 'translate' to round the full -too drunk- picture in this little textbox...so... (-; recursion

I think that's a fair assessment. I don't know if it's still true, but for at least the first decade after Wikipedia went mainstream, I did see a lot of schools compromising their credibility by insisting that it wasn't a "reliable source" so you shouldn't read it to learn about things.

The problem with labeling a source with a "reliability score" is the ad hominem fallacy.

It's less than a single semester of content, and you don't really practice it, since you're pretty much guaranteed to be spoonfed authoritative information anyway.

That's very interesting!

I have a pet theory that Informational Hygiene is going to be one of the most important classes in the upcoming years, taking a similar place to sex ed.

Are there any resources on classes in the space? I did a quick Google and didn't see anything that stood out.

> taking a similar place to sex ed

That's a great analogy, and sadly why I don't think these classes will help as much as we'd like.

The places where they are needed the most are the places that are going to alter the content of the classes to fit their agenda. Just look at sex ed classes in strongly conservative areas.

But the first thing to suspect would be state school. A lot of politics happens in what gets taught to kids.

I recall being taught that the civil war was about "state's rights" -- even the teacher rolled her eyes on that one.

Teaching will not solve the problem with incentives - QAnon is just more fun.

> QAnon is just more fun.

As a counter-example, to me being right or approaching truth consistently and in a repeatable manner is much more fun than believing whatever I want to believe.

I know which beliefs I'd like to be true, but self-deception isn't as fun as being right; right as in claims made within an independently validated methodological framework that makes my claims reproducible.

That's isn't inherent, I assume, but learned.

> Teaching will not solve the problem with incentives -

Citation desperately needed!

The, arguably, oldest human system of hierarchical organization called Church would like to have a word with you: a system based purely on psychological and social incentives, nothing else, giving relevance to itself and propagating certain world-views, beliefs and thought-systems.

> > QAnon is just more fun.

> Citation desperately needed!

You might find this take on QAnon from a game designer's perspective interesting:

https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...

> It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards [as ARGs and LARPing].

> When players arrive at the “correct” answers they are showered with adoration, respect, and social credit.

> ... the breadcrumbs [from Q] are not facts, they are [...] Puzzles and clues for the “investigators” to uncover. [...] solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.

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