Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking
dl.acm.org
dl.acm.org
I'll give a personal example, a few months ago, a leading French newspaper (Le Monde) published a debunk about the coronavirus origins, mostly trying to debunk that it originated from a lab in Wuhan.
The problem is that what was presented as undeniable facts was in practice very poorly constructed, and we know today that things are not that clear cut.
In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as possible.
Unfortunately, this is not what I am seeing.
No amount of truth will ever convince someone who is predisposed to not believe you.
This is something I strongly believe and I wish more people thought about. Do you happen to know if we have a lot of scientific evidence for it?
Omniscience has become extremely popular in the last few years as well, and I'm pretty sure there's no evidence for that at all (but I'm speculating about that, perhaps there is something out there).
I'm not ashamed to admit that I've dismissed plenty of people in my life.
I don't have time to argue with and debunk Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis, nor do I think it would be productive, because in my experience almost all such people are way beyond reasoning with.
Also, when such people "debate", they're often just trying to spread their propaganda to bystanders, and not engaging in any kind of good-faith argument with you.
Finally, I recognize that if these people ever get power they will crush, in a very literal way, using violence, anyone who doesn't agree with them, who is not "pure" enough for them, or who stands in their way.
Nazis lie, is the way I frame it to myself. I try to recognize the tells, the techniques that are being used, the pivoting and debating attitude, the historical precedents, if possible the escalation as masks are dropped and the ideological payload is hinted at or delivered. There's always a payload. Everything else is the game.
Nazis lie. I'm interested in identifying them, not debating them. If I can identify them, I can identify their payload and odds are it's something I'm going to want to walk away from, and I'll do just that.
True. Nazis are ready to use violence to gain dominion over others. Lying is a form of violence, so it just makes sense for them to use it. It is easier for them to lie than use physical violence and preferably they don't get caught. Just use their power to influence.
But I wonder if the paper perhaps did not consider this:: Even though correcting someone can make them defensive, the correction might be very helpful to all the other readers of the same discussion, so they don't get mislead.
Sadly yes to 1 and 3. Live in person.
Online? Tons.
It is interesting you bring in Flat Earthers. What do they have in common with Nazis? Anything? I think there is something. It is the message "Don't use your brain to come up with answers just adopt our doctrine as faith".
I've actually experienced something like that. I once found myself peripheral to some internet controversy where there was this guy who seemed like he was on "my side" but prolifically posting in a really counterproductive way. In good faith, I spend a lot of time trying to get him to realize that, only for him to eventually to throw random slurs at me. I'm pretty sure he was just an alt-right type who didn't actually care much about the specific controversy, but was just trying to exploit the drama.
You're at a restaurant on the ocean and some fairly educated dude wants to go all flat earth. I'm like, "let me go get some binoculars and you can tell me why the bottom of the container ship falls below the horizon first. We can even estimate the distance based on size of ship and magnification factor to get a radius for the earth".... "No, it doesn't work that way".
Huh? Why are all the other planets round? Why does the earth cast a round shadow on the moon (vice versa for eclipse)? Why can you fly to India in either direction in the same amount of time? It's conspiracy theories all the way down.
Stupid, angry, or willfully ignorant, they're painful to talk to.
I think that is the intention behind their social discourse, to be painful. To disagree. To prove that they are superior.
>Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing.
Your discomfort is the point for them.
Quickly figuring out that you're in such an interaction and bailing before your day is ruined is the best you can hope for in the short term.
What do they gain from causing such discomfort to others?
They might not believe so very seriously in their own ideas? (I never met a flat earther)
You have a lot of control over your own mind and emotions, so don't relinquish it to malevolent tricksters. And if you can't do that quit social media. but really everyone should quit social media probably.
Yes, was trolling with my cat sometimes, as a child, she got angry, it was fun (but I stopped when I grew up)
> these feelings can follow you around for days vexing you and bringing you back to that negative state of mind. and that is hilarious to [the trolls]
Good point, I've felt those feelings indeed (and maybe the cat too)
Agreed that social media can be like that, and also, it steals time
Most people play some kinds of irrational games to generate emotions they are addicted to. The difference is what kind of emotions they want, and what kind of scenarios they use to obtain it. There is a popular book on this topic called "Games People Play", strongly recommended.
From the psychoanalytical perspective, all these games ultimately are sick attempts to indirectly extract symbols of love, when people are too afraid of a more direct approach (aren't we all sometimes?).
The recipe for this specific game is that I cause you discomfort, and if you continue interacting with me anyway, it means that you have forgiven me (for causing you the discomfort), which means that you care about me (otherwise why would you keep interacting with me). So I frustrate you in order to extract a costly signal of caring from you, so that I can feel loved for a moment.
Why not a more direct approach? First, I am afraid to ask whether you care about me, because you might say no. Even worse, if you said yes, I would still be suspect that you are lying; maybe you are just being polite. But when I cleverly extract forgiveness from you, if you stay with me regardless of the discomfort I cause, then I can be sure that you genuinely care.
Of course, the damage caused to both sides by this approach is obvious. But sometimes people just don't know how to do it better, and any symbol of love is better than nothing.
Well, “round” can be an attribute of a plane; its typically referred to as a circle. A more descriptive term is “spheroid” but outside of a small set of long-distance navigation tasks the flat earth mental model is perfectly sufficient and computationally less expensive.
Flat Earthers are never talking about a "holographic universe," though. They're always talking about the Earth being like a board whose edges you could fall off from.
I realized just how low quality most debunkings are last year when I started wondering what happens if an uncertain person specifically searches for [$idea debunking] on Google. I chose "5G causes Coronavirus" as the idea in question. Sure enough, a whole pile of articles claiming to be debunkings came up in the results. The problems became apparent when reading them. Some of these debunkings were barely more coherent than the idea they were trying to debunk and would be very unconvincing. Almost always these were written by professional journalists. I did eventually find one that actually took the reader seriously and was free of obvious contradictions and errors but it was written by a physicist.
Common problems are:
- A belief that simply repeating the words of the journalist's chosen academic or corporate spokesperson is the same thing as a debunking. If someone is finding your article in the first place, it means they already have doubt about the establishment's view of something so simply repeating it can't convince them. This tactic is especially useless because basically any idea no matter how crazy it sounds will have academics and credentialed people who openly support it and campaign for it, so it turns into "my experts are more expert than your experts", which is less convincing still.
- An extremely off-putting and arrogant tone of the form "I can't believe I have to write about this, but ..."
- Articles that contain internal contradictions or are written in a manner implying the debunker doesn't understand the topic themselves. One debunking I read started by asserting that although 5G uses millimeter waves, such waves are completely harmless and only crazy deluded people could possibly think they were dangerous. Half way through the article it started talking about military experiments that beamed mm wave at enemy soldiers to cripple them with pain. No mention of strength or energy consumption was made anywhere, apparently without noticing that "used in weapons" and "harmless" are mutually exclusive without much more detailed information about why some are harmless and others aren't.
- Debunkings that aren't actually debunkings but rather, explanations of why $idea is true but good. One example of this is the (no longer available) section of the EU Commission website that claimed to be a database of debunkings of "myths" about the EU in the British press. When I spot checked some one day it turned out a large chunk were like this, maybe the majority, i.e. "Newspaper X reported Y. This is true but is justified by our policy goals". Well, that's a retort in a debate but not a debunking of a myth, and when that happens it makes people lower the perceived weight of the word "debunk".
These kinds of problem are so common it left me with a much greater understanding of why even some ideas seem to grow faster and further than you would intuitively expect.
When you want to convince someone and win them over to your way of thinking, never ever lie, make your position out to be stronger than it really is, or treat them as anything less than an intelligent human being.
If you can't do that it is better to stay silent, because speaking is likely to have the exact opposite of the intended effect.
This applies to everything from parenting to political discussions.
The problem I’ve seen is that people want others to disprove their crazy theories. Disproving anything takes substantially more time and work than just saying any old nonsense in the first place.
This is made worse by the hordes of crazy/stupid people on the internet who demand (in bad faith) that everyone who disagrees with their obvious falsehoods takes the time required to provide evidence (that they’ll never accept anyway) is the biggest part of the problem.
tldr; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Unfortunately most of the people spreading this kind of thing online don’t understand what actual evidence is.
Try debating a flat-earther, and then explaining that we knew the Earth was round for thousands of years prior to NASA. It will not compute.
For this we have to stop pointing the finger at the others—their ridiculous beliefs, their preposterous disregard of evidence—and face that we ourselves are the same way. It's not that the other side does it more; it is simply that it is easier—much easier—to see it in them. If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness. (I don't mean you personally, of course, I mean all of us.) And let's be honest: we all feel that we don't do it as much. I feel that myself even as I write this.
A timeless essay on this is Orwell's "Looking Back at the Spanish War" (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel..., discussed last year at [1]). The depth of consciousness that Orwell reached in that essay is profound, but its profundity is obscured by how simply he states it, and no doubt also by the fact that we all think we already know it and are the exception to what he describes.
Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
---
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
[1] Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 - Nov 2020 (128 comments)
To your point though, I don’t think it’s accurate to suggest everyone is as consistently wrong as everyone else when there are groups of people suggesting that the entire concept of science itself is propaganda.
I will read what you’ve linked though, as it seems genuinely really interesting.
I think we should all practice simply seeing it for a while (I'm tempted to say 20 years might be a good minimum), and then maybe we'll be in a position to accurately derive consequences in a way that doesn't just re-establish the original self-deception.
p.s. I took out this bit of my comment above: "Or, if you prefer, we're all crazy/stupid in this way." because after reading your comment I realized it was too baity. Mentioning it that here because I don't want to deprive your post of that context.
When you wrote:
> If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness.
It sounded to me as if you said everyone was equally wrong as everyone else. Thanks for clarifying that that wasn't what you meant
I think this is incorrect: "[or if] you don't do it as much" -- some people indeed does it less (you'd be one of them I think)
> it was too baity
I agree (I think the section I quoted still is :-))
I think there are groups of people claiming that the scientific consensus on particular topics (climate change, COVID-19, etc) is based on ideological bias, vested interests, conspiracies, etc, rather than on good quality scientific evidence. However, most of those people have no problem with accepting the scientific consensus on unrelated topics. Few people are going to deny the scientific consensus on the citric acid cycle, for instance.
I think if you bet against the current scientific consensus, most of the time you are going to lose – but maybe not always. If we look back over the history of science, we can see areas in which what was once considered the evidence-based scientific consensus was later decided to be actually based on ideological bias. For example, a lot of 19th and early 20th century science on biological differences between different human descent groups was believed at the time to be based on good scientific evidence but is now in hindsight viewed as corrupted by racial prejudice. How can we be sure that a century from now, people might not look back on some elements of today's scientific consensus as also corrupted by bias/prejudice/ideology/etc?
But we don't know whether that will happen, and if it happens we don't know which parts of the contemporary consensus will be viewed as corrupted, nor what will be seen as having corrupted it.
A venn diagram would show a significant overlap between these groups, there's a lot of overlap between young earth creationists and climate change "skeptics", the same is true for flat earthers and other conspiracy groups. It's rare for people to believe in just one conspiracy and the other conspiracies they believe throw out just about every branch of science we have.
When you add the two party system super groups to the venn diagram you'll see most of these grouped to a specific side, which indicates a strong degree of ideological bias is at play.
Most YECs are "climate change skeptics", but only a minority of "climate change skeptics" are YECs. Indeed, many of the leaders of the "climate change sceptic" movement, even if they might be occasionally willing to share a stage with YECs, do not endorse YECism themselves – for example, Lord Monckton or Bjørn Lomborg. I think that's especially true outside of the US – European conservatives are far more likely to take "climate change scepticism" seriously than to take YECism seriously.
YECism is much more popular in the US than elsewhere because of the distinctive US religious history which produced an emphasis on hyper-literal interpretations of the Bible. Catholics, Orthodox, and the more traditional Protestants (Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed) never had the same emphasis, because they had the historical memory to know that YECism had been considered in the first few centuries of Christianity and judged to be optional (see St Augustine's 5th century book The Literal Meaning of Genesis). Many Americans forgot that history, Europeans remembered it, which is why some European conservatives will believe in "climate change scepticism" but very few of them have time for YECism.
> the same is true for flat earthers and other conspiracy groups
The vast majority of conspiracy theorists don't want to have anything to do with "flat earthism". People who seriously believe in "flat earthism" are a minuscule (and irrelevant) minority.
> When you add the two party system super groups to the venn diagram you'll see most of these grouped to a specific side, which indicates a strong degree of ideological bias is at play.
I'm not an American, I come from a country (Australia) with a two-party system but a weaker one than America's. But I don't think any one side of politics has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. Historically, certain kinds of conspiracy theories have been popular on the left as well – such as conspiracy theories about the CIA or Mossad. (Some CIA or Mossad conspiracy theories are probably true, but a lot of them surely aren't.) Here in Australia, traditional left-wing conspiracy theories include that the 1954 Petrov affair was a setup by Australian intelligence agencies, and that Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis was secretly engineered by London and Washington.
My anecdotal experience is that the majority of people who believe in UFO conspiracy theories are left-leaning. And people who believe in UFO conspiracy theories are often inclined to believe lots of other conspiracy theories too.
> Anyone who wants seriously to look at this problem needs to grapple with the following: preferring one's beliefs to counterevidence is not just a property of "crazy/stupid people", but of humans in general, including oneself and everyone on one's own side. This is a difficult fact to face, and to the extent one can face it, I think it changes everything. Even if one makes the smallest beginning at doing so, it already starts to change everything.
I wonder if this isn't just thermodynamic in a sense. It might take a lot more energy to change a belief or network of them than not doing so.
What an interesting thought. Say a belief, a set of brain neuro-electrical structures of impression memories coupled with theory framework, could be quantified so the effort required to change the belief could be established. Like to lose belief in gravity and naturally think relativistically would cost X energy.
If the story is horrible, you've got to understand what in that is so desirable for the person to believe. Why do they cling to that particular narrative? Something about it, works, for them.
I think there's a lot of people out there absolutely terrified and right on the edge of un-survival. They are genuinely in continuous, ongoing danger, and need a narrative that will give them a target for their terror, one that could maybe be attacked and fought back against.
It is not terribly difficult to take panicked people and persuade them to run away from the exits, or attack the doctors, or otherwise direct their energy and panic towards some goal. The reason to do that is not arbitrary, rather it is to gain power through controlling those people, and it's always worked very well.
You take away that power and control not by arguing with the angry, panicky people, but by persistently removing the threats that generate their panic. The worst enemy of an ousted demagogue is a boring, reasonably trustworthy rival that does things to remedy the material distress of the panicky and angry people. You don't have to argue them into submission, you defuse them by making them comfortable, and that's why we see desperate attempts to maintain the panic and terror.
They're aging suburbanites whose TV came with a youtube app.
Parent’s post is an exercise in imagination. It might be accurate for some, it might not be for others. It certainly doesn’t match my experience, which is summed up pretty concisely in my post. It may not be kind, but it’s also not wrong.
You're talking about Biden, right?
The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:
The core essence of a conspiracy theory, the thing that demands it be debunked, is that it's unfounded. It's an attractive idea without evidence, and one of the tools used in propagating it is to flip the script and point out that the absence of evidence is in fact "absence of disproof", and thus... evidence.
So what are you doing? You're taking an assertion without support (that covid is a lab leak) and then framing it as a legitimate argument by pointing out (1) that it is "not that clear cut" (by which I assume you mean that there's no evidence but not disproof either) and (2) that people who say that it doesn't have support were somehow arguing in bad faith with "poorly constructed" arguments.
This isn't a legitimate fact under dispute. It's just not. There's no evidence, literally, beyond the mailing address of the lab.
> In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as possible.
In my opinion an argument debunking something should be done with simple facts, irrespective of political concomity. Being wrong isn't a political opinion.
They're referring to a post made here the other day suggesting that there may actually be evidence that is was a lab leak.
But to the conspiracist mind, any statement other than an unambiguous "THIS IS UNCONTROVERTABLY FALSE" becomes twisted into something that sounds like evidence for the conspiracy.
Which is why debunkings need to be firm and clear. Admitting that something is possible in theory is just nodding to people who want to hear something very different.
I don't remember it well enough to say whether I consider it evidence or not. If you haven't seen what I'm referring to then I think you're just being dismissive. In any case, there was a post here many considered credible that claimed to have evidence that it could have come from a lab. Do with that what you will. In the mean time, I don't know whether it came from a lab or not and I don't need to.
And that's how we get conspiracy theories. No one did the homework. There is no completed homework. You're all just cribbing from a faked assignment.
That's not what's happening here at all. I responded to you originally to tell you what someone was referring to.
> Because you want to believe it, you're willing to cede logic and decisionmaking to the internet crowd, figure that someone must have done the homework
No I don't want to believe it and you need to stop. I never knew, never cared, I still don't know and still don't care. You're tilting at windmills here.
Does that help? You're doing the same thing here that a lot of failed debunkers do:
1. Citing establishment authority as if it's the last word. By definition anyone who believes in a "conspiracy theory" has reached that point by concluding the authorities aren't being truthful. That's rather inherent in the nature of what a conspiracy theory is.
2. You aren't taking it seriously. If you were, you would have done a quick bit of Googling and encountered the articles in question that go into a lot of depth on the evidence of the lab leak hypothesis, including a lot of micro-biological evidence.
3. You're making statements that are clearly false. There is evidence, quite a lot of it. Perhaps you won't agree that it's strong enough, but to claim there is no evidence is false. When a debunker makes a statement like this and people know it's false, it degrades the credibility of the whole anti-theory-position, because now people start to suspect that the people denying there's a conspiracy don't really know what they're talking about.
None of that is evidence. Bring evidence.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
The hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory already has strong circumstantial evidence behind it. Lab escapes do happen, have happened, and the WIV is full of corona viruses under study. In fact it contains the closest relatives to Covid-19 known.
Now all of that doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a reasonable hypothesis that’s not yet proven. To characterize it, though, as a “conspiracy theory”, seems disingenuous.
Circumstantial evidence would be if you had a source from inside the lab -- a memo, maybe, or a leak from an intelligence agency that interviewed a whistleblower -- that told you they believed covid was a lab leak. Or maybe that they were working on something with features that match covid better than that bat virus does, etc...
Absent that, sorry, you're engaged in a "conspiracy theory" in the vernacular. Hiding behind the dictionary definition of "conspiracy" isn't really helping your case.
The WIV is in the exact place where the outbreak began, and houses the same strain of viruses, and researches them by breeding new variants. And, viruses have escaped from laboratories before. It occurs fairly regularly.
This is far from a "conspiracy theory", not to mention that it doesn't even involve a conspiracy.
Imagine instead that you pointed to the squashed cat and demanded that I debate the Very Important Possibility that the cat was in fact killed by an illegal Chinese helicopter.
"Uh, dude..." I reply. "That cat was clearly run over by a car."
"But no!", you say. "There have been helicopter slayings in the past, right? And there are no track marks! And the Chinese are known to be developing helicopters that could totally do this to a poor cat. There is an airport just miles away! Look at all these other people who believe in the helicopter theory! YOU ARE SUPPRESSING THIS IMPORTANT EVIDENCE!"
Get the point?
[1] In fact recognized newly evolved strains of existing viruses outnumber "lab leaks" by a factor of something like tens of thousands. Pick any one disease and it's basically guaranteed that it's not a lab leak.
But since I don't have any hope that all debunking be rigorous as you describe, I'd prefer that a context-free, objective "debunked" not every be claimed. Rather they should say "x debunked it, you can see here" sort of thing. It's just an argument like any other. But maybe there was a time when such things really were just about as good as objective?
With regard to your example here, it does not fit your original situation of a claim being being corrected - and it is a remarkably small issue to ge worked up about.
As far as I can tell, nothing in your latest post has anything to do with the claim in the post you are nominally replying to.
The real problem is that appeal to authority works so well. Japan has a 99% conviction rate, because their culture is so differential to Authority. The state brings on an expert witness, and the jurors accept it as fact. Its how humans work. You would think people are critical thinkers. Sadly, more often than not, people will defer their thinking to someone with higher status.
If you frame your goal as "stop the spread of disinformation" rather than "convince people to return to the fold," is this result even perverse?
If you can make all the people who believe in crazy conspiracies act in a toxic and obviously partisan way, does it limit their ability to spread their ideas? I.e. does debunking push people outside the overton window?
Reporters and prosecutors traditionally do this by asking questions that make insane assertions so that they can get a denial co-ordinate, and use it as leverage to orient the narrative arc around the issue being denied. A conspiracy theory does something very similar. It's an accusation in the form of a question or unknown.
The theorists themselves index too heavily on whether or not the plot they imagine is true, I think because they have this imaginary conditional that if only this horrible thing were true, only then the discussion includes them, and they become stakeholders in the events. This is the error of conspiracy theorists: that their perspective and experience would suddenly matter more if they were proved right. It won't.
They don't have a plan for a world where the conspiracy theory is true, whereas I think the smart view is to look at conspiracy theories and consider how to survive and prevail in a world where not only are they true, but we can't imagine how deep they go. A big part of that is weighing the quality of denials they get. The efforts to debunk news are so partisan and crappy as to be evidence that the theories are "over the target" (in the lingo). Somewhere between the lie, the accusation, and the denial, the truth is located.
It doesn't help that we choose to ride these people for years and never let them forget about their mistakes, so much so that some mistakes can be a death sentence for your future career. So what incentive is there to admit that they made a mistake?
If you think that someone trying to correct you is likely to be a political opponent trying to score points, it makes sense that you would be vigilant and defensive.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/arguments-as-soldiers talks about one aspect of this where people might feel like they have to defend anything that "their side" says and dispute anything that the "other side" says.
Sometimes people online actively try to defuse this by adding some context expressing sympathy or a non-judgmental or non-confrontational attitude. (That is, assuming that they merely want to counter mistaken ideas and information, and not people who hold or spread them!) I wonder to what extent that works.
It's the same reason my dog steals socks. If someone is chasing them for a stolen sock, it must be of high value and therefore it must be stolen more frequently, carried away, and buried in the backyard. It's a part of the brain we share with dogs, apes, sheep, and cattle.
>we choose to ride these people for years and never let them forget about their mistakes<
Maybe it's the people who refuse to acknowledge they're contributing to that climate of douchebagery while producing no dialogue of productive value who lack integrity. If you're public fact checking someone in 2021 it's because you're either an asshole or unaware that you're being an asshole.
It's hard to argue with a video or a transcription.
You'd think so, but people either refuse to watch it, or claim they have watched it but then have no trouble saying something wild that's a complete contradiction.
There is video of many things. Choosing which ones to show and promote is itself a point of view, and greatly biases the political slant of news.
Randomly true things don't have much explanatory or predictive value.
My current view of the interpreters of primary material is that they have little in the way of deep knowledge or overview to add to the mix, I'd just as soon try to suss it out myself. If anything, internet-provided 'news' is architecturally similar to a game of 'telephone'.
In terms of public policy, it's just a mental puzzle in any case, it isn't like that world that you access via a little screen and keyboard can be changed in any significant way.
IMO, a more useful approach is to bring forward all novel perspectives on a topic and let people make up their own minds. Many people don't like being told what to think & distrust the notion of "authoritative sources". However, full disclosure of knowledge & reasoned arguments demonstrates a good-faith account of a particular issue. Institutions having to resort to "correcting the record", especially when the title begins with "No, ..." & the predictable comparison to the flat-earthers, only sows more distrust in the institutions. The refutation by strawman may make the proponents of the institutional narrative feel more self-righteous & confident, but only insults & strengthens resolves to resist such narrative from opponents of the institutional narrative.
Who decides which politics are wrong? If that isn't "every individual who is faced with the choice, on their own" then is it still politics, or is it more herd management?
If a doctor says "take this pill," do you huck it down or look it up and see if its something you actually wanted to eat?
People trust "authority" too much.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3gy_CLXho
Or you can read, e.g. Snopes' explanation that being convicted of making bombs to blow up a government building doesn't make one a "convicted terrorist" because there's no such crime as "terrorism."
the label terrorism is usually only successful in the most homogenos and brainwashed cultures, where all complexity and nuance is stripped away. it's great for propaganda or when you need to criminalize a whole society of people.
If you're referring to this Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/), the "mixed" ruling seems perfectly reasonable. Saying someone is a "convicted terrorist" is a fuzzy claim, because there is no such charge one can be convicted of. It's not like "convicted murderer".
That's how fact checking sites usually introduce bias--they don't actually lie about literal facts, they just have shifting standards about when things need to be absolutely literally true, when they can give false impressions, and what counts as "mostly" when something is mostly true or false or mixed.
It's weird that the group that is getting the most dangerous misinformation about Covid has a better idea of the risks of it. And this is one area in which fact checking has been prominent and possibly over-zealous. It can shut down conversations too quickly instead of letting people come to understanding.
I think it's at least partially because it's hard to advocate for a middle-of-the-road position, each side thinks you're an undercover partisan for the other. So it's hard to advocate for something like quit complaining about masks, they're not that great but they are helping, vaccines work and you should get them unless you have medical issues, but they're not 100%, some lockdowns probably cause more harm than help, some of the rules are either nonsense or enforced in silly ways that have nothing to do with Covid risk, and the virus is dangerous but the risk isn't evenly distributed across all populations, and even if it's not a big risk to you personally, you're being a real jerk if you go out a lot and help unknowingly spread it.
For the latter point, bombing government buildings is a central example of terrorism and nobody thinks there's a crime of "terrorism" when they hear "convicted terrorist." By the same standard, Snopes would have to say that the 9-11 hijackers were not terrorists. The slipperiness of the word is entirely a matter of people who want it to be about the goodness or badness of the person instead of achieving political goals by initiating violence.
As for Rosenberg, you're focusing on the terrorism and ignoring the convicted. She was not convicted of terrorism, or even of bombing buildings, but of explosives possession. The word "convicted" has to mean something. I believe that O.J. Simpson is a murderer, but calling him a "convicted murderer" would be false. If the claim was "convicted of felonies due to her involvement with a terrorist organization", there would be a much better case for "true."
p.s. the crimes she was convicted of did not include bombing government buildings, that part of the tweet is strictly false.
They could very well have picked a different tweet, it's not like they're forced to pick this and only this tweet.
Both weakman and motte and baileys are old rhetorical tricks, they're not very convincing.
In the absence of evidence for such a tweet, why should I consider the Snopes fact check a 'weakman'?
As for minutiae, that's the whole point of fact checking, to care about minutiae and not whether a statement just generally feels right. It's not about whether Rosenberg is or was a good person, it's about whether the specific claim made about her was unequivocally true.
So why should anyone attempt to prove that Snopes is following this rule when I have yet to see any evidence that this is, in fact, how Snopes operates, when even if we assume it is their standard, they don't appear to be following it very consistently?
That's a very odd burden of proof--asking me to prove that they follow a rule you just made up--don't you think?
If the claim that was flying around the Internet at the time was that Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist, that's the appropriate one to address.
I certainly don't claim that Snopes is perfect, or that their choices never exhibit political bias or bad judgment. But I think this case is an odd one to pick as the key evidence that Snopes is untrustworthy.
This is intentional manipulation, they already know that most people read headlines (which are frequently the least accurate part of any story) and ratings fill a similar role.
Worse, they'll later compile the ratings into statistics and spread the misrepresentations further, all while claiming that technically in paragraph 7 they did admit the thing, which is why that's called a motte and bailey strategy.
Not that I think similar process was possible in fact checking...
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Eschew flamebait."
There is a similar arms race in science: Charlatans use scientifically sounding language. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be published in a scientific journal". Then the charlatans create their own journals. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be supported by a meta-analysis". Then the charlanatans create their own meta-analysis. Etc.
It always takes some time to adapt, but if you tell people e.g. "always verify political statements at fact-checking websites", as soon as your idea becomes popular, politicians will create their own "fact-checking" websites. (Or take over the existing ones, whichever is easier.)
I have some heuristics that I use for myself to determine what information I trust... but if they became public and popular, it would be quite easy to subvert them.
You'd have to be pretty biased to call a literal quote unchanged by context a "mixture" of truth.
That's not the claim. That's an editorialized take about the claim, altered from the original and stated just-so (so it that contains a weakpoint, which you are now litigating—because that's what the weakpoint was crafted to enable); the "plight of younger people" comes from the editorial purporting to debunk it, not the source tweet.
The closest thing to a claim in the source tweet is that the original words were spoken and the person who said it is the one who was speaking.
They'll do real fact checks, but are very selective on what to fact check.
So a journalist from the state broadcasting service states on TV that "these soldiers will shoot at anything that moves".
She says that about what is known by everyone who has a clue to be some of the more restricive and professional soldiers that exist.
Will it be fact checked if I submit it?
No. I tried.
They'd rather publish a bunch of factual but funny and trivial fact checks than pointing out that a mainstream reporter is - at least in my opinion - lying through her teeth to make people hate a certain small nation.
The claim is that Trump got unemployment to a 50 year low. Snopes rules it "Mostly False".
The problem I have with that is that unemployment really was at a 50-year low. Snopes just wanted to deny Trump any credit for it so they throw up a lot of dust and smoke about whether the president deserves credit for it.
Compare that with this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-created-more-jobs-tr...
In this case, the claim is that Obama created more jobs than Trump during adjacent 3-year periods. Snopes rules it true, full stop. They don't throw in any caveats about whether the president should get credit.
Whether a sitting president deserves credit for economic conditions is always a debatable point. Politicians will just hold whatever position is convenient for them and partisans will line up on their respective sides. I can't help but notice that Snopes lines up pretty predictably on one side of any political issue.
There’s nothing factually wrong with that article at all, but the entire article is loaded full of opinion and unnecessary adjectives. If someone posted that to Wikipedia they would get rejected for “lacks encyclopedic tone”.
And why does it matter? because if I try forwarding this to anyone who actually believes or sort-of-believes in the Clinton conspiracy theories, the first message they get from reading it is “I’m a democrat and I think this is the stupidest of stupid conspiracy theories and you’d have to be stupid to entertain it” and then they dismiss the whole article before they ever make it down to the useful case-by-case analysis.
If a fact checking website wants to be taken seriously by both sides, they need to refrain from attacking the people they are arguing against.
Preventing fake news and fact checking is not about attacking sound political opinions, but about making them possible.
This is an Achilles' Heel which is unfortunately now well known by the enemies of democracy. An article from last year[0] highlighted this quite well:
> The Kremlin specialises in offering alternative “narratives”: about who poisoned Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, for example. The goal is to confuse the public and to spread the idea that the truth is unknowable. It’s a form of epistemological warfare.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2020/jul/12/covering-...
Look at the "no campaign"[1] that got the ball rolling on removing Pinochet from power. They won on rainbows, birds, and flowers. "No" is happy good-feeling, "yes" is scary and bad.
Don't correct, or debunk, or engage. Just flood the channels with your message. Infiltrate. Buy the opposition. That is how you govern effectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Chilean_national_plebisci...
Anyone who's done therapy where they managed to deconstruct some of their childhood crap, and gained some re-evaluation of the deepest tenets of their existence (note: if that's you, then it was probably a good thing because you probably were suffering under some ugly nonsense absorbed as a child, that you're better off without!) knows the truth of this.
There's no specific moral position to propagandizing the human mind. It's about what you're doing with it, and why. Bottom line is you can't do without that story, without that propaganda, so come up with a good story to go with your good purpose. It's story vs. story, all the way down (or up, if you're optimistic).
In other words, if someone responds badly, it's hard to say whether it's more because they hate discovering they're wrong about something, or more because they hate feeling humiliated by being called out in public.
When sharing information is intrinsically tied to risking public shame if you're wrong... maybe that's what can be better managed.
The word derives from "de" and "bunk" -- an older word effectively meaning "bullshit". In other words, to "debunk" a claim means "to remove all the bullshit" from the claim.
If a claim or argument is indeed, for all intents, a "bullshit argument", then it is quite fair to "debunk" it. But this isn't how most people use the word.
Most people seem to say "debunk" as a means of saying "refuted", or worse, "rebutted".
Just because an argument can be refuted doesn't mean it was a bullshit argument. Quite often an argument is perfectly valid, and only fails when the premises fail to be 'proven' conclusively. Not to mention that more often than not, 'proven conclusively' is a highly subjective notion to begin with.
To say an argument was "debunked" is effectively a very rude way of dismissing / diminishing the person making the argument as being full of bullshit, when in fact their argument may have been a perfectly valid one, and possibly quite sound even, and may even have been useful in furthering the conversation.
The research in the article is about false political news, most of which is proper bunk. Occasionally, false political news arises from a genuine misunderstanding, but most of it is deliberate propaganda intended to smear the other side.
But presented as conspiracy theories
Virtually everything the leftist media has printed in the past 4 years has been shown to be false:
- WaPo admitted Trump's phone call conversation to an election official was faked (used in the second impeachment)
- Twitter has admitted they shouldn't have suppressed the Hunter Biden stories
- fact-checking by many social media sites has been outsourced to interested parties, often controlled by the Dem party or CCP
- there was no insurrection, since the 5 people who died were not killed by rioters, were mostly let into the Capitol by police, and didn't have guns.
I could go on, but it turns out the left/Dems are outright daily liars.
The poster you're responding to doesn't appear to be operating in good faith, so the sources are irrelevant: they're purely vapor. You can just make stuff up and claim it, and if you can get someone to argue over the stuff, you've just become ONE SIDE of a both-sides narrative and legitimized the thing you made up. You can con yourself into believing it if you're a paranoid type, or you can be just out to manipulate. It does not matter whether you're sincere or not. It's the outcome you're after.
I'm not interested in their sources. They're giving enough 'tells' that they're operating from sort of a post-reality position, and it really doesn't matter whether that is out of delusion or manipulation.
Well, how can one verify if something is correct or not if there is no link to sources? Without sources, there is no way. With the sources, one can verify the sources, if needed in depth (recursively). (Except if one side controls all the sources, as done in the book 1984. But in the western society, we are not in this position yet, luckily.)
Neural networks have relatively stable connections (neurons know only neighbours, and assign thrust / weight to each other). That is a "gossip". But as a society, we want a faster way. But faster ways (radio, TV, Twitter, Facebook... this site here) are more dangerous, so we need the sources.
> if you can get someone to argue over the stuff, you've just become ONE SIDE of a both-sides narrative
And you steal other peoples times.
> They're giving enough 'tells' that they're operating from sort of a post-reality position
For you, yes. But for others, it might not be obvious. So calling out "where are the sources", and then seeing there are no reliable sources, might help those others.
False:
"""However, Trump has used the correction to claim in a statement that “the original story was a Hoax, right from the very beginning,” which is untrue. The original story that got so much attention was Trump’s call with Raffensperger, for which we had the full and accurate transcript all along. It has not been corrected. Furthermore, it remains the case that Trump did in fact call Watson to insist he won the state and that she should turn up evidence revealing fraud. “The country is counting on it,” he said.
Overall, the Post’s correction changes what we know about the exact words Trump said to Watson, but it doesn’t fundamentally change our understanding of what Trump was saying and doing to Georgia state officials at the time."""
It is only going to take us to a Trump flamewar, and a Trump flamewar isn't going to take us anywhere new.
Who gets to say it's false?
Activist journalists?
At the very least if one was incorrectly classified you'd need to do some legwork to demonstrate that.