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Comment by harpiaharpyja | Hacker News Reader

This is a conversation that we need to be having as a society.

Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's trust.

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Agreed. The issue is all those controlling the narratives of the argument are institutions that want to be the authoratities standing and the beacons of truth and information.

If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea.

Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.

Education isn’t an answer. It’s good and we should as a society optimize for it, but it’s vastly overrated. There will always be cognitive differentials. Educated people are easily duped by uneducated conmen and putting people in a classroom for more of their young adulthood won’t change that much at all. And don’t get me started about “re-education” camps. It’s great to have an abstract one size fits all cure for the ills of society, but “education” is not the panacea people like to pretend it to be.

> Education isn’t an answer.

What do you think would be better?

Right. I can't think of anything better, either. But at least we try.

> Education isn’t an answer.

Maybe not the only answer, but it's a good start. And not just science and critical thinking, but also humanities and history.

I cannot imagine that Twitter sees the need to separate information from disinformation as anything but a liability. They are just a good example of how bad we are at this task. But while I imagine lots of people want to be able to control the narrative, I somehow doubt that this is what the social networks are trying to do. They are too busy selling us the next big mattress or toothbrush or whatever to be bothered with fact checking.

> scientific method

While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least I can point out to them that they aren't following the scientific method :-/

Ethically compromised Scientists funded by vested interests may also use their credentials & processes to create the appearance of the scientific method while practicing pseudoscience. These ethically compromised scientists may also form an unofficial political coalition in the peer review process.

They also might get into a drunken fistfight! I heard one of them got caught speeding!

What, exactly, is your point? "Corruption exists"? We know that.

At some point all this comes down to ethics and choice: who do you want to be.

There no level of technical education that can fix that. You need either live examples and/or possibly a background in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn’t answer, at some point you still have to “choose”. Easy? No. We learn to avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the responsibility of choice elsewhere.

My penultimate physics teacher worked in some air pollution research lab for the government - on some policy related issues they would basically be told "Here's the result, get us some data - or else..."

Can not agree more with you on this. In reality quite a lot of "smart" people with science or engineering degree are not very scientific in their heart. They just blindly be trained to use scientific methodology to do their daily job. A lot of academically competitive people don't understand a very simple fact: Those who are already deceived can not find they themselves are fooled. So anything that's controversial need to be resolved by the approaches other than reasoning based on their own strong beliefs while considering the opposite side are evil.

Even on HN, quite a lot of HNers can not differentiate their strong beliefs, which might be generated from indirect sources like MSM or activists, from solid facts. i.e. something can reach consensus of normal people by verification. The Massive Weapon of Deception can be effectively used again and again if that matches the majority belief.

There is no single truth in the complex topics that politics considers. People will always approach problems with solutions grounded in their values.

For instance, say crime is a problem in an area. How do we address it? Do we encourage everyone to arm themselves in defense? Do we establish additional surveillance and arrest/detention ("broken windows" policing)? Do we address the root problems of crime?

The best that we can hope for is that we come to a shared understanding of the current reality: What is the crime rate? Who are the victims? Why is it happening?

Once there is a shared understanding (provided by science), then we can discuss solutions (guided by values/compromise).

The problem is that science is messy, and hard to synthesize for the general public. Just think of all the frustrations around mass media reporting of individual research results (Eggs are bad for you!, Eggs are good for you!). Results are often nuanced and resistant to becoming a meme or a headline. They are often themselves subject to bias and spin.

The best that we can hope for, and that we can strive towards in good faith, is being open to the evidence. "When the facts change, I change my mind." And hope that people in power appreciate this position as well.

The main issue with relying on education, teaching fact finding, the scientific method, etc., is that the average person is honestly just not very intelligent or capable of the level of thought that we'd be asking from them. If politicians, major companies, are allowed free reign to blanket them in partisan propaganda and disinformation, no matter how much we try to educate them, they're not going to be able to see through it, reject it, and come to their own decisions based on data, logic, first principles, etc.

Although people are worried about disinformation, many people will also label anything they don't like as such. That way content can be censored in a palatable way.

Recently, we’ve seen “fake news” turned from a very specific type of propaganda — literally invented stories on invented media with the intent of being shared on social media, for radicalization purposes, think “Denver Guardian”[0] — to be rapidly watered down to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s obvious why. Hyperpartisan deliberate misinformation is the coin of the realm in conservative media. It’s been like this going back to the John Birch Society. (And no, sharing misinformation is not symmetric on political extremes.[1])

[0] https://www.cpr.org/2016/11/23/we-tracked-down-a-fake-news-c...

[1] https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-most-fa...

Start doing your own fact checking of the more left leaning publications. You may be surprised.

Precisely. This practice of attributing loaded labels such as this is intellectually dishonest, yet it happens with gusto in the US today.

The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.

All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear. Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.

This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way down it for a number of years. I personally mark the beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective, and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension of Bush the younger.

This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad person for having it.

We need to go back treating snake oil salesman like we did in the 90s before we got rid of the fairness doctrine.

Please explain how the fairness doctrine works on the internet, or any non-public medium?

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