How do you solve a problem like misinformation? | Hacker News Reader

How do you solve a problem like misinformation?

science.org

41 pointstrutannus78 comments

Teaching critical thinking at schools would solve this problem instead of spending huge amount of resources on censorship algorithms.

Would having 99% of the country immune to conspiracy theories somehow suddenly make gore and crazy political ramblings friendly to advertisers?

I think financial security for the 60-70% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's hard to think critically or rationally when you're barely floating. Misinformation offers them respite when they're given scapegoats for their problems.

Unfortunately we're at the point where this would count as indoctrination. Crazy people want their kids to have the same beliefs as them.

No, it is the other way around, current indoctrination is intentional and the powers that be would not allow such a switch. Edward Said mentioned this once, he delivered his plans to overhaul the English curriculum in oil rich gulf countries, yet upon the authorities refusal for his plans to include critical thinking, cultural contexts,and values for schools,they explicitly said the target of the English we need was to produce people able to answer calls and do transactions. He said such indoctrination was universal.

It doesn’t have to be indoctrination. Logic is a mathematical concept, and can be thought in the classes, along with common logical fallacies.

Yes but what I'm saying is that even a class of pure logic will be unfortunately met with opposition in this day and age since logic can harm the fragile belief systems some parents try to instill on their children.

Too true. Texas GOP, 2012:

> Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas...

Honestly this is a huge reason why I’m opposed to public schooling… as crazy as that may sound.

First, I don’t mean to say I’m opposed to accessible and free schooling. Second, I don’t really have a better alternative.

However, I’ve said for years - growing up in Texas - that the temptation to use school as a political tool is too great. It makes no logical sense, in a highly competitive political sphere, for lawmakers not to try and foment ideology in state-sponsored curriculums.

That said, I was also home schooled for the first part of my life - not weird home schooling I promise, just I had immigrant parents who were shocked when they came to the USA about how rude and intellectually incurious kids were - and it was really great. Critical thinking was a big part of what we did, not so much the accumulation of facts. As it turns out, it made me not so good as a student - i did not try very hard for good grades - but paid of fantastically in my experience with learning new subjects and applying them, especially later in life.

Ultimately, I wish there was a silver bullet. I really like the platonic ideal for schooling, just without the infanticide..,

Did you mean, "infantilizing"?

Haha no, at one point he suggests a form of eugenics for the “philosophy king class” in the form of discarding some of the babies

How is teaching anything at all to under-18s going to solve the problem of conspiracy theories among the over-65s? Or is the plan to wait 47 years?

This is the detail people miss in these conversations. The problem could only have been solved a decade ago. The current worst offenders of spreading misinformation are at retirement age.

A stitch in time saves nine, but doesn't do anything for those whose garments have already unraveled.

But it's still very important to exercise prevention.

Students learn plenty of critical thinking skills by the time they graduate from high school.

People aren't vulnerable to misinformation because of a lack of education, they embrace information (true or false) because it backs up what they believe.

You can teach critical thinking, but you can't make people use it in the way you want.

That's an interesting argument, we tend to use 'belief' to mean 'uncritical acceptance' though? I am also skeptical about how much critical thinking is imparted in typical US curricula - there's a ton of rote learning, and a lot of socialization to encourage you to follow instructions, work in teams, etc. (which is of course good training for the workplace, where there's even less room from critical thinking, typically). But there's no doubt that the more traditional and conservative a student's background is, the less excited their family will be about them asking tough questions. For kids whose families will let them (and can afford it) that freedom tends to happen in college.

I see critical thinking as a voluntary process. You have to be willing to violate your worldview - not just entertaining the idea that you are wrong. Additionally, the tools for critical thinking can just as easily be used to reinforce one's own worldview. I see the issue as an mindset problem rather than a lack of education problem.

Sure, I see your point, I guess I'd say it strikes me as sort of hardare-and-software problem. Education can introduce you to the techniques, their application (or non-application) is up to you. But if you haven't ever been introduced to them, the chances you will spontaneously develop them are small.

When you see or hear something that makes you think "that person lacks critical thinking skills", how often are they 18-25 year olds? For me, I associate generally with older people.

I think young people today are pretty media savvy.

I am sure you can find lots of uncritical middle-aged folks, but media savviness strikes me as a ways from critical thinking mastery. Partly I don't think there's much institutional enthusiasm for introducing a principle like "cui bono?" or the Hegelian dialectic to high schoolers, so if they absorb them it happens in college (but it'd be great if it was sooner!)

The term cui bono may not be known, but follow the money is.

I know nothing about Hegelian dialectic but from reading Wikipedia it sounds like the opposite of a good faith argument.

'Follow the money' is a good starting point for sure, though obviously we know that lots of people young and old are happy to 'pay' for 'free' products like FB / IG / gmail etc. by being surveilled (and I think it's fair to say that's fairly uncritical of them, or at least fatalistic). I like Cui Bono a little more, since there can be other kinds of motivations besides purely monetary ones. As for Hegel, I don't know that anyone really uses the dialectic 'out of the box' but the practice of trying to formulate the antithesis of your naive argument, and then incorporate it in an improved version is potentially very useful (and counter intuitive).

What if misinformation leaks into the class room? ex. creationism

The problem is fractal in nature, it's the same at any scale.

Having critical thinking is better than not, but even experts in one field aren't always eligible to do expert level analysis in another field. Further it doesn't solve the problem that bullshit can be made faster than it can be reviewed.

Having a trusted authority is essential for truth.

Our last secretary of education was quite literally the heir to the largest MLM scheme in the United States.

Do you really think they wanted any of their potential future clients “thinking critically” ?

This proposed solution strikes me as overly simplistic. Many people don't want to learn critical thinking, and doubly don't want their kids to learn it. Many people who produce and/or consume misinformation distrust public schools and so fight to divert resources from teaching anything at all in schools, and especially things that would undermine their worldview.

I'm not saying critical thinking shouldn't be taught in schools – it definitely should – but (a) it's a solution that would take generations to have an impact, (b) many people don't want to or are incapable of learning it, (c) it's a threat to current power structures and so current power structures will fight against it, and (d) no amount of critical thinking will save you from the actions of people who don't learn critical thinking.

Saying "if they would just teach people critical thinking" is like saying "if they would just teach people not to drink alcohol, there would be no need for DUI laws". Sure, if everyone learned that and practiced it, the problem would be solved! There's just that one tiny flaw in the plan: people.

An interesting study would be to compare quality of public education in a given country, as well as the prevalence of conspiracy theories, or the breakdown of trust in verifiably correct information. How does the spread and proliferation of nonsense in Norway compare to somewhere like Germany? To American and Canada? This could give some interesting insight on what exactly we can tune up in a given system to improve critical analysis skills.

What if the official curriculum included exceptions for government mandated beliefs?

This is already happening in our schools. "Critical thinking" can be twisted to mean what anyone wants it to mean.

>"Teaching critical thinking at schools"

This is everyone's go-to answer, probably because it seems like an obvious magic-bullet solution. If only we taught critical thinking, people would actually act intelligently as adults!

I must ask, is it really the case that critical thinking isn't being taught in schools today? The idea of teaching people how to think critically isn't some revolutionary new concept, this has been around since antiquity.

I suspect the answer is that despite trying to teach critical thinking skills, we are all still human and fall back to relying on our cognitive biases. I sense the problem of "making" critical thinkers is just as hard as teaching kids to be healthy. "If only we taught children to eat healthy and exercise in schools"

Yes; it is. Teacher tells students something. Student is physically restricted from continuing on their life path until they memorize and repeat it as a belief, over and over again.

Critical thinking would be like: - how can this be disproven? - what is inconsistent about this story? - what physical evidence would exist if this were true? - what sources can you find that contradict this explanation? - is [historical character] a believable person? Could this have happened with the normal people that you know today?

But this is probably not what they have in mind. It seems they want everybody to accept what is written in their textbooks, and ignore other sources. Unfortunately, nearly everything in them is objectively untrue, greatly exaggerated, or over-simplified.

How do I know this? Do I know the ‘real’ truth? I don’t, and that’s precisely why it works, but somehow every expert in every field will be the first to tell you that the textbook got it completely wrong for their discipline, and of course it was correct everywhere else. Oh and by the way, the other experts from the slightly-differentiated field are even more wrong.

Teaching your children about absolute truth, rhetoric, logic, propaganda, and so on. Don't farm it out to schools. The schools in the United States have unilaterally failed to preserve any kind of rational thought. Feelings prevail, the math doesn't have to be "right", only social justice has to be served [0].

[edit] I should expand this. Critical thinking isn't enough. Public debate is the second part. The ability to haul out an idea and flog it mercilessly until there is nothing left of it is how the US wound up with the Constitution it has. Men got together and debated until they all agreed.

We have a distinct lack of debate in the US, and free speech (especially "hate speech") is sequestered to the backwaters of the internet where it festers, grows, and gets increasingly radical. If we had public debate (not the name-calling propaganda you see in national cable news) many of those ideas would fizzle and die, people would abandon them and move on to other things.

Expose ugly ideas and they die. Conceal them and hide them away and they grow.

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/15/california-wei...

The editor of Breitbart admitted their coverage was intentionally dishonest in order to achieve their political objectives.

This is the very definition of misinformation.

Naturally we'll get a Breitbart citation to "prove" that black is white and up is down in a thread about misinformation.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/the-ong...

I'd like to know more. That link is from 2017, and the article I posted is from 2021. Do you have a link to the retraction?

Retractions are generally published by news outlets that make mistakes while honestly trying to get it right.

Purveyors of intentional misinformation rarely publish retractions.

So when you're searching for reliable sources of information, the ones with the most retractions are generally the most trustworthy.

> "So when you're searching for reliable sources of information, the ones with the most retractions are generally the most trustworthy."

you imply a gradient of trustworthiness that correlates directly with the number of retractions, but that's highly unlikely given the large number of other variables affecting trustworthiness and retractions (confounders). also, such perspectives promote deceit, giving papers an incentive to increase retractions to enhance perceptions of trustworthiness without actually doing the hard work of being trustworthy.

see how easy it is to misinform?

> [edit] I should expand this. Critical thinking isn't enough. Public debate is the second part. The ability to haul out an idea and flog it mercilessly until there is nothing left of it is how the US wound up with the Constitution it has. Men got together and debated until they all agreed.

> We have a distinct lack of debate in the US, and free speech (especially "hate speech") is sequestered to the backwaters of the internet where it festers, grows, and gets increasingly radical. If we had public debate (not the name-calling propaganda you see in national cable news) many of those ideas would fizzle and die, people would abandon them and move on to other things.

To me, this is THE elephant in the room, that no one can see (naturally, because it isn't there to be seen, like the dog that didn't bark).

Problems that I see (there are surely many more):

- 95%++ of the public would/may need some substantial training in multiple domains (logic, epistemology, psychology/mindfulness, etc) - although, 100% participation is not required, even 5% would be fantastic

- no platform exists for conducting high quality, adequately complex debate (and if one was created, the odds of the founders being "pure" and uncompromisable seem not good)

- this may be not to the advantage of various people in positions of power, so it may not be ~allowed to happen

Additionally teaching probability and statistics. Many things are not deterministic and not strictly true or false. They have a chance with a confidence interval. That background needs to be used in conjunction with critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is taught in schools. The issue is it's rarely applied. Critical thinking takes a lot of mental effort and often boils down to who do you trust.

A group of flat earthers designed an experiment to test their belief. Performed it and showed the Earth was round. Then dismissed the result.[0]

When your priors say the probability is nearly 0 then no evidence is strong enough to change your belief. It's why science sometimes only advances when people die.

[0] - https://brain-sharper.com/science/flat-earthers-tried-prove/

A very famous philosopher who wrote a book on critical thinking has demonstrated that logic and critical thinking are not enough. You need to be aware of your own motivated reasoning, and your fears. What are you afraid of thinking? Which groups are you afraid of offending? If you get past that, then you have to ask yourself if you're willing to risk your good name and your career for the sake of truth and honesty.

You can't teach critical thinking if the textbook has creationism.

The real problem isn't the existence of misinformation (whatever that means): it's that powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too.

They want the masses to unhesitatingly believe whatever propaganda they're fed (Politician Y says X and therefore X is true, Independent Fact Checkers Say Y is true so no further investigation is needed), but not trust whatever naughty conspiracy theories they read. That doesn't work. If you're tuned to believe whatever you read is true, you can't just suddenly shut off that impulse.

You could solve misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain."

We all know that nobody with any bit of power is ever going to say anything like that.

> "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain."

Everyone already knows this in a vague sense, and in fact that's a large part of the problem. If they weren't aware of this they'd at least be more likely to consider both sides, instead they can just say the statement they don't like is the inaccurate one while blindly accepting the statement they agree with is not.

I'd add another sentence to that:

"Understand that even with the best intentions you'll likely still get it wrong."

Objective truth is incredibly unwieldly. It's almost impossible to get right - just considering imperfections in communication alone.

Ever play the game of telephone? One person tells a fact to someone, who tells that fact to another person. Go 3 hops and you're almost certainly going to end with a different fact than you started with.

Each step of knowledge transfer incurs loss - and this applies to all forms of communication.

Information is entropic? Once lost it’s probably hard to restructure it to the original version.

Nice framing. I agree with that interpretation.

I'd argue communication is always an approximation to an ideal, anyways. The original version is going to be incomplete. How adequately can English (or your language of choice) represent a complex event or concept?

Unfortunately, this category of misinformation they are trying to solve for does not appear to include things like p-value hacking, sample bias, n=few, publication bias, obfuscated code and models, irreproducible results that support talking points, working the ref, noble lies, narrative control, blackmail, and diversion and other activism tactics.

There is this game of chicken, where people affiliated with authorities (like the authors) are lying to sustain a narrative, and when you call them on it, their reaction is to shrug as though they are merely a prosecutor advocating on behalf of their just case, and as though they are not being held to standards of truth or civil discourse. The people concerned about fighting misinformation should probably admit they belong to a class of people who have also been complicit in producing it in the first place. I don't think this is a question of science, it's one of reconciliation.

The kernel of truth of every conspiracy theory is that you are being lied to by someone, and it's just a quesiton of whether you think that matters or not. Above a certain level of education, there is a belief that if you just protect the narrative, the narrative will protect you, but for people who can sense when they are being decieved, this is an evil worth courting civil conflict over. I can only assume the talking heads and censors know this and don't care, which of course, exacerbates the conflict, because it just confirms the suspicions of people who know they are being lied to.

The people lying don't think they're lying because that presupposes the existence of truth - a premise they reject, because when all is narrative, power, and perception, it doesn't matter. Maybe they know they're nihilists, maybe they don't. The consequences of this conflict over whether Truth exists at all have only been relatively cold and non-violent because the people being lied to don't want to escalate it, because they understand the consequences, and so they have contorted themselves into believing that the people lying to them are just idiots. The moment they detect the self awareness on the part of the people lying to them, and the utter mendacity can no longer be ignored, it's going to go up in flames really fast.

This article is just an example of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. There is a lot to unpack in what you wrote.

Well said!

It's not a technical problem, it's a cultural one. Society's values simply have to be in the right place and it's takes time for a sophisticated culture to evolve.

Misinformation is pretty hard to define in my opinion, and any work to stop it would likely lead to censorship. The real problem we need to solve is why we have groups of people who live together in a country yet who seem live in different realities from each other. If I was to make some guesses it would be the fact that many of us live in information bubbles created by algorithms and the general lack of good faith augments among opposing views in the media. I think we solve these problems by fostering a culture of openness to ideas even ones that might seem reprehensible to us. I think we all probably hold erroneous ideas/views in some way or the other, but the problem is that many of us are not engaging with others that would help correct these views.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and am glad that the authors bring up a definitional argument. The problem of "misinformation" is so poorly defined that it's hard to even begin addressing. The label includes things like...

* False and misleading facts

* Political propaganda

* Politically skewed reporting (e.g., some would argue the NYT's ad campaign where it specifically labels its work as 'truth seeking' as a form of misinformation)

* Content moderation

These are all separate problems/challenges.

Furthermore, most people read the news for entertainment purposes[1]; they don't want to be corrected.

So distinguishing between entertainment and actual news consumption and then splitting the problems up in a way that can actually enable you to start addressing them concretely is a sorely missing strategy in this space.

[1] I interviewed a few dozen people about their news habits and applied the "jobs to be done" framework to their habits: https://10millionsteps.com/lessons-for-news-startups

>"Politically skewed reporting"

As a side note, have you ever noticed news stories about Joe Biden include photos of him with either a neutral or determined facial expression? Contrast that to all the articles written up about Donald Trump which constantly used pictures of him with his mouth open making the "ch" or "ooo" sound. It would be really hard to 'prove' this bias in an academic sense, but I personally have no doubt in my mind this is intentionally done to evoke either positive or negative feelings in readers.

Fox News is a master of this tactic. Any time they showed Obama, it was with a terrible, distorted, mid-expression face. Any time they showed George Bush it was a perfectly lit portrait of him in the Oval office or something. This is not a new technique, and Trump is hardly the first victim of it.

Misinformation looks a lot like being wrong. And we can't solve "being wrong". We're going to be wrong a lot before we're right.

The problem stems from the fact that we have to allow people to be wrong to get any sort of progress. If we must be 100% correct before pushing forward, we'd never push forward. Sometimes, it has to be "just good enough".

From the start, we thought the Earth was flat and all that ever was. We were wrong.

Then we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around it. We were wrong.

The we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around the Sun. We were still wrong.

Fast forward some time.

Now we think the Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting a medium sized star in an arm of a spiral galaxy traveling away from the point of origin. We are likely still wrong about this.

But less wrong than yesterday. And that's what's important.

It's not "critical thinking" we need to teach. Such a loaded concept to begin with. We need to teach people how to be wrong. That it is ok to be wrong. That wrong often leads to right. We can't become so entrenched in our ideas that we can never move from them. Don't wait for the other guy to budge on their ideas. And don't concern yourself with them. Unless they're incredibly lucky, they'll spin their wheels while you eventually get to right.

Misinformation is different from doing our best to understand how the world works and getting it wrong.

Misinformation is understanding perfectly well how the world works and intentionally spreading lies and half-truths to achieve a political goal.

Yes to both the parent and some of the grandparent comments. We need people to have the freedom to be wrong, but that gives cover to intentional liars.

Yes, and what those intentional misinformers have learned is that once you plant an idea in most people's heads, that's now their locus. No one wants to be "wrong" and everyone wants to be "smart", where smart is defined as always being "right". So being wrong is seen as being stupid. And this is a concept that is being pushed.

That's the problem. We need to push back on the concept that being wrong is a bad thing.

Once we allow ourselves to be wrong, misinformation finds less purchase. Because you're allowed to change your mind.

Don't be concerned with getting it right the first time, be wrong so fast no one notices.

Part of the cause of misinformation is that people want to believe in misinformation because it allows them to be part of their social group. The problem is that belief in certain facts will include you or exclude you from your social group and that some ideas in some social groups are not even allowed to be questioned. It's like all the bad parts of a religion that I hated: dogma, excommunication, blasphemy, and witch burnings.

- Dogma, a list of things you have to believe in to be part of the group.

- Excommunication, rejection from the group if you don't believe in the dogma. Depending on where you live, it's like killing a person.

- Blasphemy, the idea that some things are not allowed to be said out loud or even thought about.

- Witch burning, blaming a single person for all the problems of the village and then a mob of people attacking and killing that person.

Part of the solution is to stop treating social/political groups like a 16th century religion. Don't excommunicate people. Don't burn witches. There should be no such thing as blasphemy. It should be okay to ask hard questions without being accused of something horrible. Above all, groups need to embrace and celebrate a well proven proof, even if it contradicts the dogma.

The problem is not misinformation. It’s whoever gets to decide what is “misinformation” and what is not.

who decides and why should it be a single institution ? everything on earth was built by humans with their own observations, let’s not undermine the value of federated wisdom

ultimately I hope we evolve to a system where each person's vote is weighted differently, based on factors of merit.

we'd never grab 10 people at random and let them vote and have these rando's majority choice be what surgical procedure to perform on a loved one. and yet we're doing that with democracy in the US at least. and enemies are exploiting it, increasingly.

I for one have concluded the stakes are too high to let that kind of madness continue.

I don't think "misinformation" is as clear cut as we think it is. For any subject with more than the most trivial complexity there are always multiple ways to view the information.

We could say, "Man stabbed another person in the neck. That man is bad", but what if the stabbing in the neck was for a tracheostomy? Now apply this to even more complex situations.

I think it really comes down to a statement like "there is no truth there is only consensus". How much in this world is objectively true? And before you answer that go back in history and look at what we used to think was objectively true and it turned out not to be.

How topics are approached is important. Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants. If you ask in reverse, do you believe illegal immigrants should receive government services/benefits. Most people will say no. It's not a left or right wing thing. Bipartisan support depending how it's phrased.

The problem with politics is that it's very subjective and how the topic is approach matters greatly. There is no ability to 'fact check' the majority of politics. What fact checkers really are is just censors. This article is concerned about first amendment because they are calling for censorship.

Now back to the article, how's the approach? The article also very clearly is written in 1 direction. Covid conspiracies like lab leak, climate change of florida being under water right now, and election fraud where Republicans have submitted 425 election bills across 49 states because they see the election as fraudulent. Are those misinformation or just politically inconvenient truths?

Clear political skew on the positions is the approach here. I'm not in the USA, not American but when you label your political opponent's speech as lies/misinformation. Bad things happen and Trump is the tip of the iceberg of bad things coming because of this activity.

>Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants.

These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services.

This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners.

>These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services.

This is the subjectivity of politics in a nutshell. Well written.

>This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners.

Let me even propose more what should the immigration number be? This is a bit of a bigger issue in my country but lets stick with USA.

It's around 1 million new legal immigrants a year.

If I say it should be 750,000 vs you say it should be 1.5 million. There is no way to say what is correct.

What happens in my country? Anyone who thinks we should have less immigration is literally a white supremacist.

Even just side line: https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370?s=20

February 2020, Trump took the plan from Obama's playbook to restrict travel from China. For which he was called xenophobic and fear mongering. Even just looking to stop travel because of covid, not even just reducing immigrant and he's called xenophobic.

Hindsight 20/20 Biden looks very bad here because he himself has now done the same thing that Trump did.

What's the misinformation here? Should we be looking to censor something?

>If I say it should be 750,000 vs you say it should be 1.5 million. There is no way to say what is correct.

Even this would be a vast improvement in over the current debate: is immigration good or bad. At least you can start to have a reasonable conversation about a number, why you support it, and what the results would be. Further, there are different types of immigrants. Some are skilled workers, refugees, and yes, even criminals. Should the number be the same for all?

when someone simply says it is good/more. what does that mean? 2 million, 10 million, ect?

>What's the misinformation here? Should we be looking to censor something?

When there are no details, there is no information, and if there is no information, how can there be misinformation?

Do you know how in school, if you cool and you got a funny haircut people thought you were a trend-setter; but if you were a dork, it just make you even more dorky? This is how it is with adults as well.

People already thought Trump was xenophobic, and Trump himself even played up the stereotype, since it was politically useful; so anything that could be interpreted as xenophobic, was. People don't think Biden is xenophobic, so they look for alternative explanations instead.

>People already thought Trump was xenophobic, and Trump himself even played up the stereotype, since it was politically useful; so anything that could be interpreted as xenophobic, was. People don't think Biden is xenophobic, so they look for alternative explanations instead.

Putting aside the horrendous worldwide result that Biden and friends caused by calling Trump xenophobic. Most likely delaying and or preventing similar travel restrictions until it's too late.

Imagine what would have happened if Biden agreed saying Trump should do more lockdowns. What if Tam and Singh in Canada also didn't call Trump xenophobic and recommended we close the borders. Would north america be a much better place covidwise?

Also yes, trump doesnt play it up persay but simply shows how toxic the democrats are. How many people are simply fed up with being called racist by the democrats over and over and over? Everytime Biden or similar calls Trump names, they lose voters.

> election fraud where Republicans have submitted 425 election bills across 49 states because they see the election as fraudulent. Are those misinformation or just politically inconvenient truths?

Ultimately it has to be determined whether the election was or was not fraudulent. By some process outside of both the political parties, that they are capable of both respecting. If that ceases to happen - once the parties cease respecting court rulings and public inquiries - then the ability to hold free and fair elections starts to collapse and you get power grabs like that.

(IMO the US federal system should simply not let states run Federal elections, they keep having to sue them to ensure fairness)

> Ultimately it has to be determined whether the election was or was not fraudulent.

I honestly think it would be preferable if we changed it to "Ultimately it has to be declared whether the election was or was not fraudulent." To me, this is more palatable as "determined" implies the unequivocal truth is known, something which is plausibly not possible at least under the current design of the system.

My intuition is that conspiracy theorists would at least somewhat prefer this as the possibility of inaccuracy is explicitly acknowledged, although I wonder if normal people would find it unpalatable.

I would accept "agreed", but see the 2000 election: quite possibly it was wrongly determined, but the Democrats agreed to concede and largely haven't mentioned it since. Whereas you can already see Republicans "pre-declaring" that an election that hasn't happened yet will be fraudulent if they don't win.

So we have (with my subjective and surely biased interpretations of the meaning & "epistemic status/quality"):

1. [Current Approach] determined - "was 'discovered' to be X, regardless if was actually discovered (as opposed to estimated)" - decision made by bureaucrats/experts &/or courts | Invalid: it is not necessarily possible to discover what is true (under the current system)

2a. declared - "was decided to be categorized as X, regardless of actual(!) ultimate truth" - decision made by courts | Valid: acknowledges that the actual truth is not known, but fr pragmatic reasons a decision is made so we can move on (which is what actually happens now, but we do not speak truthfully about the details, which causes anger, which often has complex, outsized systemic consequences)

2b. agreed - "all parties voted to categorize as X, regardless of actual(!) ultimate truth, with or without (optional) formal complaints*" - decision made by party officials | Valid: roughly, same as "declared", but the decision is voluntary by party officials, rather than decided by courts

What do you think of this way of thinking about it?

I find #1 fairly repulsive, but the exact same outcome recorded/discussed as 2a or 2b I find much less problematic.

>Ultimately it has to be determined whether the election was or was not fraudulent.

That seems to be the problem. We can't seem to say anything that might challenge it. Here's 425 bills in 49 states proving conclusively that the republicans believe it was fraudulent, but literally nobody saying anything

>By some process outside of both the political parties, that they are capable of both respecting. If that ceases to happen - once the parties cease respecting court rulings and public inquiries - then the ability to hold free and fair elections starts to collapse and you get power grabs like that.

Oh no, we went the other direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

So very clearly the republicans believe the election was fraudulent. What is the democrat response? Assert the republicans are attacking democracy. Which is absolutely not the case.

Lets just hypothetical this? Lets say the republicans fail to fix the fraudulent election? Lets say 425 bills are failed and nothing changes. Do you believe the republicans just accept their fate? No, that'll be civil war for sure.

>(IMO the US federal system should simply not let states run Federal elections, they keep having to sue them to ensure fairness)

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Integrity_Act_of_2021

Georgia has passed significant changes. Biden calls it racially discriminatory but I fail to see how that's the case. DOJ is suing and I guess will prove how its racist but I dont see how that works. Georgian republicans very clearly believe the election was fraudulent and the cheating party is calling them racists without any legitimatcy to the claim. Its not like the bill says black people cant vote.

What's the alternative? It certainly means democracy falls if this didn't become law. What's very interesting and I cant wait to see in 2023. Will georgia flip back?

What if instead of trying to collectively, bindingly define misinfo, we simply require(?) or strongly encourage(?) putting something like this next to every ~"share" button:

"Before sharing with others, please consider: Does this come from a trustworthy original source? Is the original eyewitness known enough to be judged by you as truly honest, and competent at reporting accurately what they saw or heard? Is the full chain of transmission to you also similarly known to be honest and competent? Is it corroborated by other such reliable sources?"

That could probably be made more concise, and with variations over time so less likely to be just tuned out. And study the results to improve how it is done, over time. I read about some study or two (unfortunately, I don't think I could find now) that said this made a difference.

Maybe lying is a bad enough thing for society that we could make a law for facebook and such to encourage us all to just stop and consider reliability of our sources -- not government favoring one over another, but encouraging to think.

There are always unintendened consequences, but it seems worth discussion and/or trying.

Edit: maybe something like this could also help prevent governments deceptively propagandizing or subterfuge in others' elections, stirring up contention (i.e., general weakening) by repeating incendiary things on both sides of issues, encouraging attendance at both sides of angry rallies, etc, as has been reported so often as having been done, with respect to recent elections..... And the influence of mass fake accounts spreading unfounded things, etc. It sounds so hard to police -- unless we just systematically encourage everyone to stop and think.

More edits: wording, misc.

With more information.

I think an improvement in this area can be achieved if the rulers are radically honest and transparent. This would breed more trust in the population for the rulers.

I don't think it's in their best interest to fight misinformation though :D

Google “active measures”

Or watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo

We haven't solved the problem of spam, and misinformation (disinformation, really) is far, far harder, because its recipients want it to be true, they are not seeking the truth but reinforcement of their confirmation bias.

You don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com