Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

When your "culture and identity" is based on relying on blatant disinformation, whether it is that the earth is flat, the govt is poisoning you with chemtrails, or NASA is fake, that is already getting corrossive to society.

When it extends to anti-vaccine disinformation, it is an active threat not only to public health but national security. Many of these types of disinformation are actively weaponized and spread by adversaries.

It is right to threat those kinds of threats to the society and nation as we would treat any physical threat -- actively work to neutralize it.

Just because war is moving out of the physical and into the information sphere, does not make it less serious.

View on HN

The principle I'm appealing to is that we have to ask whether it's appropriate or desirable to have that technology applied to us(*). It's not disinformation if it's just outgroup culture.

It seems unwise to imagine oneself engaged in a war because it just licenses your opponent. The idea of war is that it the extension of policy, which in every other circumstance can be negotiated, but if instead of negotiating policy, these same people are engaged in a deception to exterminate or subordinate an opposition, that's not policy, that's just a power struggle for its own end, and it's not something to be reconciled.

If you want to treat fellow citizens as an enemy force, say so, and they will come to the table as one. But if you want to just decieve them, I'd wonder whether we were the baddies. We probably don't want to make civilian technologists legit targets in this war either.

Surely the people developing or advocating these techs are capable of enough self awareness to recognize how every example of "blatant disinformation," has an equivalent worthy of targeting, so introducing them as anything other than abstractions doesn't really yield perspective.

> If you want to treat fellow citizens as an enemy force, say so

Dividing people is a bad idea because we have much more in common than is different between us. We should always try to be more inclusive and tone down the class wars and cancellations. We probably won't make any social progress while throwing stones into the opposing tribes instead of working together.

But you can't be inclusive of falsehoods, you can only open to legitimate concerns raised by the various groups, because any solution we find needs to be viable in the real world.

I don't trust revolutionaries - I've been burned before, and also read history. Revolutionaries, social warriors and activists love revolution more than peace itself. If we want to succeed we need to win the peace, not the war.

It seems unwise to imagine oneself engaged in a war because it just licenses your opponent.

Conversely if one's opponent(s) considers themselves to be fighting a war and you don't, then you're placing yourself at a severe disadvantage. I'm not sure where you got he idea that the grandparent comment was proposing deception of one's fellow citizens, since it was bemoaning weaponized disinformation which is by definition deceptive.

The idea of war is that it the extension of policy

This is an idea of war that views it as a tool of leverage in interstate negotiations. But if there's evidence to suggest than opponent is using it for other purposes as you describe, then it would be foolish to ignore that.

> It's not disinformation if it's just outgroup culture.

Just because wrong information can become outgroup culture does not suddenly make the wrong information true.

Particularly when it stipulates world views that vilify whole other groups as allegedly being responsible for everything wrong.

The end result is not just a culture that might endorse violence against others, but something that could probably be described as a cargo cult where wrong information becomes dogmatic tradition.

Antisemitism has already taken such a shape, most if not all of the theories voiced by some modern outgroups are just reboots of allegations that are centuries old and have justified violence for just as long.

Case in point: The whole "elites abducting children to sacrifice them" theory, which regained popularity trough QAnon, is just a more modern take on the William of Norwich blood libel [0].

That has been around for close to a millennium because it's an idea that survives in certain religious outgroup cultures. Do we really have to tolerate the intolerance to be considered tolerant? Is there really no rough line that can be drawn?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Norwich

I'd say that Popper's Paraphrase isn't a useful argument when it reduces to just a first-accusers advantage. It's a small mercy that he died before seeing what his work would be reduced to.

Tolerance is meaningful when it is mostly unbearable, otherwise it's just preference. That idea is elaborated well in SSC's "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup." The relative truth of wrong information is a glass house I don't think advocates of censorship are intellectually equipped to defend. Their only tool is deception, and inevitably force, and the points we can score on them have no value.

The deeper controversy is whether on the internet we will accept a rules based order, or discretion. It's the old "rule of law vs. rule of men" issue. What has changed in the last 140 years or so is of course, total, instant globalization, with the internet, but more subtly, that the language used to reason about these things has itself become unmoored.

What I think we should all reflect on is how as individuals we can become a bit less enthusiasitically murderable to one another, before worrying about how we can change what others think. It's the one problem we can all make progress on.

> What I think we should all reflect on is how as individuals we can become a bit less enthusiasitically murderable to one another, before worrying about how we can change what others think.

One big step towards that is agreeing on a common conceptualization for the world and universe we live in.

If we can't even agree on such very measurable basics, like the Earth being a globe, what hope can we have on agreeing on anything that's meaningful to our everyday life or anything deeper philosophical?

I originally hoped the web would be the solution to this, a global medium for a global species to arrive at a global worldview, yet here we are, with increasingly more outgroups believing increasingly delusional/unrealistic worldviews.

This sounds "right" but then how would you feel applying this things like native American tribal beliefs, e.g. regarding genetics and migration. Those may be scientific facts but many reject them due to fearing further dispossession of their land, etc.

You're clearly an information warrior, but what if I think that you're the one spreading misleading information?

It's weird that you fully expect that you, or someone else who agrees with you, will be in control of this.

Whether you think that I'm spreading disinformation, or whether it is someone else is easily determined by looking to the external facts.

The fact is that the earth is (nearly) round, contrails are not chemical sprays, Capricorn One was a C-grade movie while Apollo-11 went to the moon, and that anti-vax movement was started by a fraud attempting to discredit existing formulas to promote a formula in which the paper's author had a vested interest (and which paper was retracted, along with his MD and license) and that vaccines do work.

That is the point. A society cannot remain cohesive if there are no shared truths.

You may not want to take it seriously, but I'd suggest you consider the following quotes, and why and how disinformation can be weaponized.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov

"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.". ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

> A society cannot remain cohesive if there are no shared truths.

On this we agree. This truth needs to be on a scale of one, some, or all truths that are shared. Let's disqualify all, and simplfy to finding an example of one.

The other thing about the truth is that it probably shouldn't be falsifiable, as it's a bit of an all-in bet on whatever that is. It shouldn't be a complicated mystery because then you are back to the relative problem of who has discovered more and how do you know. The perfect example truth is the one that is not knowable either way, but something that can be believed.

We should probably recognize that destabilizing that example shared truth is an attack on social cohesion as well. Can't think of an example at the moment, but I certainly agree it would be the One Important Thing you would need to believe, or you're basically left with a kind of hellscape.

Everyone needs to pick and choose which information/disinformation battles they want to take part in. Flat-Earthers, Chemtrail People, Moonlanding Hoaxers, these people aren't really worth anyone's time. How does someone else believing the world is flat impinge on your ability to live your life?

Now, I can understand wanting to combat vaccine hesitancy because that does tangibly affect society at-large (recent measles outbreaks). But most of the disinformation boogeymen you listed are just people with kooky ideas who aren't persuading society.

Lastly, it's okay to be wrong about things. The body of human knowledge is so vast that everyone is bound to be more wrong than right.

There is a difference between 1) simply being wrong by mistake vs 2) deliberate and maintained ignorance vs. 3) deliberately deceiving people and poisoning the agora.

Mere ordinary wrongness is a big enough problem. And to the degree that it is mere cultural ignorance, it can be merely annoying.

But intentionally spreading disinformation, fear porn, and cultivating false outrage to inflame divisions in society is much more serious, and should not be conflated with mere buffoonery.

This line of thought will both be extremely ineffective (and further incentivize misinformation) and highly unjust. At some point you need to stop and realize everything isn’t a conflict that necessarily has losers to be “neutralized.”

Agree, it only becomes a conflict when some parties are deliberately weaponizing disinformation.

Mere ignorance is something we must unfortunately tolerate.

Active work to spread disinformation that will literally kill people - see [1] or just search for it, where a mere dozen people are responsible for 65% of the spread of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, and are working to deliberately undermine vaccination efforts.

This isn't mere ignorance, it will get people killed. And before you say something like "well the fools that believe that idiocy deserve what they get", consider that while they may (sort of their choice), the family, friends, neighbors, first responders, and healthcare workers do not deserve to be exposed unnecessarily to those biohazards.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/facebook-insta...

Every single revoking of civil liberties (e.g. censorship) has been done in the name of safety. That doesn’t make it acceptable.

If you want to combat misinformation, pick a better solution. And as I said above, censorship is pretty much impossible, both legally and technologically. It simply cannot be done.

Did you even read the article?

The ENTIRE POINT of the idea is to NOT censor anything, but to add context -- adding information, not censoring it. Letting people make their own decisions.

The problem here is that there is a massive asymmetry. This has been noticed for centuries with the maxim "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes" (some interesting history on that at [1]).

This is because our brains are tuned to seek out novelty, and to seek out information on threats.

This enables those who want to manipulate us and especially the masses -- creating fake news and fear porn will get the attention of pretty much everyone, and anyone who is not both actively better informed at the time, and actively thinking, will be inflamed and motivated.

Voltaire pointed out that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

The people spreading disinformation treat that as an instruction instead of a warning.

Adding this kind of contextual information seems a far better solution than censoring.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

Yes I read the article, but I was replying to your comment, not the article’s argument. I replied to that directly in another comment.

You seemed to be arguing for censorship, which is what I was replying to.

Please read more carefully

I am absolutely not arguing for censorship, especially since censorship creates it's own blowback, which is often even more helpful to the disinformation.

I am merely arguing that disinformation needs to be fought, especially actively weaponized disinformation.

It looks like this contextualization could be a very good method.

> Agree, it only becomes a conflict when some parties are deliberately weaponizing disinformation.

Agree, it only becomes a conflict when both major parties are deliberately weaponizing disinformation.

I think other commenters have warned about this. It's fairly easy to tell what political allegiances you have. Just understand that your parties spread a lot of disinformation as well. As an independent, it makes me cringe to watch liberals act like they aren't responsible for loads of disinformation, hyperbole, fear mongering, and misinformation too. Much less that it doesn't have Russian origins.

Funny how easy it is for assumptions to be wrong - I'm also IND, and I oppose disinformation from whatever side is the source, or none. IDGAF about the party.

Yes, RUS sources are the current major problem, as that 'govt' has been running an active measures campaign to undermine western democracies for close to two decades.

And those measures extend into both parties. They are specifically designed to maximize polarization, as polarization undermines democracy, and the assault on the truth makes everyone more malleable. People don't need to specifically buy into the dezinformatsiya (that's a mere bonus), the win is when people give up and say that the truth cannot be known, so disengage.

The fact is that one major party has fully bought into the active measures (and driven out those who don't go along), but the major wing of the other party is just as dependent on those measures, and that wing is also just as inclined towards authoritarianism if they get power.

The current fight is not between the parties, it is authoritarianism vs democracy.

Fighting dezinformatsiya is key to maintaining democracy and avoiding authoritarianism.

I agree with all of the above. What I'll add is that I stopped using the "at-coneervatives" talking points exclusively and started including the "wing" of liberalism that engages in similar behavior. The problem is that it's not really a wing anymore, it's pop-culture and mainstream, or at least at the beginning stages of it. If you only address conservatives, you're doing those people a favor too.

Debunkers got people killed. Facebook, Twitter, and most of the mainstream media suppressed early warnings about COVID.

Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.

And every single person I know who is smug about how ignorant other people are for not getting vaccinated ignored warnings about COVID because it wasn't on a major social media platform or cable television.

Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.

If COVID had happened in 2014, it would have been much less of a problem because people would have been able to communicate with each other.

I wish I could say that people have learned from their mistakes.

If you were wrong then, isn't it possible you are wrong now?

This post is amazing because it seems to have come from a completely different universe than the one I inhabit.

In my world people were having early concerns about COVID in January. We were getting sporadic reports from China and it was bad. Experts were saying that it was only a matter of time till it got to the US and the worst part was that we didn’t have enough stockpiles of face masks for everybody. There was advice to save masks for medics and first responders until the supply situation improved.

People were already in a panic and buying up all of the toilet paper for some reason. Then in March the cases spiked and the lockdowns came.

If you were getting a lot of misinformation then maybe you should consider your sources. If someone was lying to you in 2020 they are probably still lying to you.

Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news

Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.

Pick a lane buddy.

> Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.

It was, and here is an additional irony: In the beginning, downplaying COVID-19 with Chinese people (especially people from Wuhan) did not go over well and was not appreciated: "This is transparent pandering. I don't care how 'not-racist' you are towards me; my family members are dying and my city is in an apocalyptic lockdown so you can shut the fuck up about how this 'isn't serious'". Maybe said more politely, but definitely thought.

C'mon, wouldn't you be angry if your granddad were in the hospital on oxygen, and everyone around you, rather than acknowledging the gravity of your situation, was instead busy making whatever self-serving noises Buzzfeed told them to? This is a total failure of empathy, it completely underestimates peoples' ability to see right through you, and it's othering.

There are lessons here:

1. You should worry about the truth or falsehood of a belief rather than the assumed political consequences of that belief.

2. You should engage with people not to demonstrate to them that you hold "good beliefs" -- this is a persistent mistake made by white liberals; they think what they profess to believe is something that matters -- but rather to work together towards shared goals.

And, at the beginning of a global pandemic, there should have been a hell of a lot of shared goals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com