Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmygrapes | Hacker News Reader

Just kinda spit balling here so forgive the lack of empathy, but it seems to me like the overall System is perfectly capable of correcting itself when people succumb to "misinformation" to the point it harms them. Yeah we don't want anyone to get harmed, sure sure, yeah, of course, that would be simply... awful. Yet... we learn best from failure, correct?

In other words, at some point every concerned individual needs to let those insistent/destined to fail to do so, and let others learn from their mistakes.

Everyone's gotta stop trying to save everyone else.

View on HN

I don't disagree with this, but there's a threshold in which the misinformation becomes the prevailing "truth" for a portion of the population, and is no longer able to self-correct.

If there is a force actively working towards this as a goal, do you not think that force should be actively opposed?

The problem here is each political leaning will say the same of the other regarding misinformation - which is always subjective.

The only difference is that one side has staked their existence on upholding free speech, to never silence the other, but not vice-versa. It’s not a fair fight.

I always think: “how do you get to Hitler’s Germany”. And it doesn’t come from the group that upholds free speech.

It comes from the group that says censorship has become an unfortunate necessity.

We should respect those that hold true to principles that do a disservice to themselves.

I agree with the concerns you bring up but isn’t framing this as a free speech/censorship” problem too broad when the main concern is propaganda/misinformation being essentially broadcast (and amplified by engagement algorithms) over quasi monopolistic tech platforms?

> (...) but it seems to me like the overall System is perfectly capable of correcting itself when people succumb to "misinformation" to the point it harms them.

For this hypothesis to be valid, you'd require a population which:

a) had decent critical thinking,

b) consumed reliable information from reliable sources,

c) wasn't targeted by bad actors who hijack information channels to saturate it with disinformation,

d) wasn't radicalized to the point where even basic health and safety precautions are attacked as being partisan politics.

What we have been seeing for the past year or so is that the system is unable to self-correct if attacked hard enough. Also, we also that the system indeed has some capacity to self-heal if the volume of disinformation is actively tuned down.

I would argue that you don't need any of these assumptions to be valid. All populations throughout history had partially excellent, partially catastrophically-flawed perceptions of reality and truth. And being "high info" or "low info" has zero link, since it's easy to find "pop science" factoid that are well-known and accepted, and have been highlighted in Ted Talks (not TedX) and popularized to millions, yet are false. The fact is, you can still reproduce, and still code a program, repair a car, do whatever your job is, even if you believe the earth is flat; you can't be an astrophisicist, but if you'd believe in flat-earth you weren't going to be one anyway. They just cause social problems if they're, e.g., colleagues of yours, and are pushy about their views; and I think that's what the "pro-censorship" crowd tries to address. Try to have a "deep enough" conversation with random strangers today, and you'll see it's not their "facts" that are the problem, it's that most people's thinking process just isn't rigorous. Internet censorship simply can't fix that; you censor certain views, you'll just find that people shift to adopting equally unrigorous views on the opposite side; and may be just as pushy if that's their temperament.

> you'll just find that people shift to adopting equally unrigorous views on the opposite side.

This is a feature, not a bug. The purpose of internet censorship as well as the entire "misinformation" discourse is to make sure the propaganda from your side wins.

That seems too provocative to me. It seems simply that the "elite", social media activists, and FB/YouTube employees are guilty of just the same kind of non-rigorous thinking. They think misinformation posted online causes a phase-shift of rational people into irrational/"mentally ill" people, and feel a responsibility to "limit the damage"; but human crowds have never been rational, period. Another comment in this thread says: "Sloganeering is actually critical for mass movements for political change", which is completely true, and I think proves my point; practically all discussions online are filled with complete misinformation, yet often aggregate around reasonable conclusions (and occasionally, unreasonable), whether it's on healthcare reform, privacy, medicine, whatever.

It's not just "sloganeering", it's an attempt to enforce a narrative and crush the opposing narrative. It's coercive.

This is particularly important when you have a grievance culture -- it very much depends who is getting the sympathy. The lens of concern needs to be focused with laserlike narrowness on the approved victims, and not on other victims, and outrage must be focused on approved perpetrators. This is a key part of Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model in Manufacturing Consent

Take the very different coverage of Antifa, BLM and Capitol riots. All three attacked government buildings and two of these were nationwide and resulted in multiple deaths. One of them caused billions of dollars in property damage, mass arson, etc.

But the coverage was very different. No one called the Capital riot "mostly peaceful". If they did, they would no doubt be accused of spreading "misinformation". So to merely call this "sloganeering" is to hide the coercive nature of the misinformation discourse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com