You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way
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People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology that was never before available in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and desktop publishing software.
Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.
Moderation isn't going to change any of this.
No, that's wrong model.
Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.
What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.
> That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology
Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way.
You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available.
There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable.
What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.
The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.
I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree.
This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."
> No, that's wrong model.
> Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.
> What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.
I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.
Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.
With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view.
Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.
Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)
Society is built on trust.
Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed.
Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.
Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1].
Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-...
[1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.
Are you claiming that I set up and knocked down a strawman? Please do elucidate. This should be interesting.
Sure. I don't actually know a plumber who wants to perform coronary bypass surgery on me. In fact, I don't require such surgery, at least not at the moment.
My comment was more "reductio ad absurdum"[0] to make the point rather than a strawman.
And that point being that "expertise is not an illusion" in many cases.
While it's true that there are folks who claim to know some things better than other folks, there are many areas (like medicine and a variety of other fields) where credentialed expertise is not only valid, but essential.
I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation.
When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station.
When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods.
When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome.
The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls...
Which erodes trust in authorities.
And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.
... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not Polish people :)
Those are the raw data from polls (an estimate of the popular vote), not the predictions from them ("who will win" - which is what the original commenter refers to).
Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...
I.e. a couple weeks before James Comey announced a reopening of the investigation into the email issue?
I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data, but I think this is a bad example because the "facts" on the ground changed significantly in the time period.
I did not say this.
I'm illustrating the original poster's comment about these forecasts being guesses of likelihood.
Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself.
Yet I'm sure all of us knew folks who had opinions riding on the 85%+ forecasts, and then losing faith in the predictions as they wildly changed over the course of weeks.
As you say, "88% chance of winning" is not "expected to receive 88% of the vote".
The 538 model attempted to weigh the reliability (recency, reputation, magic pixie dust) of polling data and project a range of outcomes.
And even with a "perfect" model, it can take a while to absorb exogenous events like the Comey surprise.
The causes of 538's prediction error might be unknowable. Or, to be fair, if it was even an error! Would we expect probability to approach 100% in the moments before polling opens? Maybe in some fields, but 538 did not attempt this. IIRC they ended at ~70/30 Clinton. A single roll of a die (1d6) will frequently come up 1 or 2.
Why is that not an indictment of the model? Stuff happens in politics. Things change.
A month out you should ordinarily have much less certainty than a day before. But their predictions were the opposite, where certainty was falling. Sure, there can be reasons for that kind of inversion, but usually it's just arrogance and neglecting the long tail of black swans.
"FBI Director going rogue the week before the election" isn't something you could factor into a prediction because it just hadn't ever happened before. It'd be like trying to factor in "What if an asteroid hits Kansas the week before?"
And the way statistics work, a 90% forecast is truly a 90% forecast - they weren't wrong with this. It's just people think 99% chance of winning basically means "they won". But that's not how it works. So the idea that these numbers are misinformation is incorrect, it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.
Isn’t that a clear case of disinformation?
It is probably impossible to have the complex dialogue sufficient to inform people both intelligent and willing to put in the work in a way that is not apt to either be misunderstood accidentally or more frequently on purpose.
Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.
If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.
It is funny seeing this here because it is a great example of how it is hard to fight misinformation.
What you said is technically correct but it is extremely misleading. There is no reason to use 538's projection a month out from the election when you could be using the one from the day of the election which had Clinton at 71%. You seem to have chosen the moment in which Clinton's odds were the highest to suggest the projection was wrong. Your comment is just as factual as if I said "538 was one of the few outlets that had Trump favored a few months before the election". That would also be technically true but it glosses over the fact that they only had Trump favored on a single day out of the several months they did projections.
Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538? Is this just run-of-the-mill bias? Is this an honest mistake? It this specific date chosen intentionally and your motive is just being misunderstood? There is no way for a third party to know the definitive answer to these questions, but if I was 538 I would certainly feel a little attacked by your comment and might jump to calling it misinformation.
That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well. It's not irrelevant (Oct. median was 85%), and calling my providing a link misinformation is pretty bizarre.
I suspect this is not the first time you've felt obliged to stick up for 538 but you're purely wielding a strawman in this case. I've expressed no judgement.
Anyway, we're talking about the general populace's sentiments around the predictions. Why would we possibly talk about the predictions made the day of the election – those numbers had done no work in shaping that sentiment.
No, because that 88% was basically a prediction of a prediction because as other people pointed out that occurred before news that changed the makeup of the race. You can't blame them for not knowing the news ahead of time.
It would be like if I predicted the Rams win the Superbowl this weekend, then we find out on Saturday that 10 players will miss the game due to Covid. I might then revise my prediction to the Bengals winning. If the Rams win wouldn't you say my prediction was wrong because of my final prediction? My initial prediction might have been right but that was made with less information and I revised that prediction once I got more information.
Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information. As they got more information their predictions became more accurate. It should be obvious that they weren't changing their model in a vacuum to push the odds towards Trump. More information was coming out that improved Trump's odds and the model reflected that.
And to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation. I used it as an example of why it is hard to categorize misinformation. Some might view your comment as misinformation and some might not. The only value judgement I made was that it is "extremely misleading" and I stand by the categorization regardless of the motive behind your comment.
It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.
> to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation
Earlier:
> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?
You were trying to correct someone who was defending the accuracy of the general industry predictions. If you were not directly criticizing 538, the criticism was certainly implied.
>> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?
Are you familiar with the concept of scare quotes? I specifically used quotes there to indicate that I was not directly calling your comment misinformation but was instead using that term with some detachment.
They were wrong though, multiple key polls in battleground states were far outside their margin of error, indicating methodology failures or bias. As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.
I also don't think anyone needs to misrepresent research and science, since huge swathes of it are fraudulent anyway. From the reproducibility crisis to outright fraud and lies, trusted institutions have been desecrating their reputation for years.
The CDC now enjoys a trust rating around 50%, because of incompetence and lies. News media is worse, because they lie more than they tell the truth.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/po...
Your link says 2.5% margin of error and not statistically significant. What am I missing? Ironically the comment appears to be misinformation.
>Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support
The end result was roughly Clinton: 48%, Trump: 46%, which is right at the margin, not "far outside".
For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge of the country and there was never any accountability for the policy and military failures.
Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was just to run him down in the press for several years? If they didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for years?
Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change - we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too much to talk about stuff going wrong.
I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?
Voters are not reasonable, and the media fans those flames.
Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.
So much theater for so little security.
The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration necessary.
You mean the outcome of the withdrawal plan that Trump agreed to? Biden was damned if he did and damned if he didn't:
- The US is weak for withdrawing
- The US doesn't stick to its agreements
Not droning innocent civilians and then fibbing on the way out would have been nice as well.
Maybe not left so much heavy equipment and arms?
US resolve is non existent that much is true. It has little to do with Trump or Biden for that matter. When Obama let Assad use gas Putin took notice, everything else comes from that.
About Afghanistan.. it was not the withdrawal it was the laughable way it was done. Abandoning Bagram.. what dumbfuck thought of that? We DO know what idiot approved it though.
* Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from providing services that people want. They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
* Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever.
* Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its land, or its resources. They merely get to control the state for a short period of time. That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever
Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play between the two systems.
> Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they" meaning the government). The government earns money by demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you disagree?
> Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever. > Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate executive is generally compensated with shares in the company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such incentive whatsoever.
The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the civil rights movement.
The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the Church Committee in the 70s.
> High Confidence:
> - Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
> - We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.
> - Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
> - Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Iraq_NIE_Excerpts_2003.p...
> On the other hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002 “fact sheet” on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the charge in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would become notorious as the “16 Words.”
If they knew it was a lie, and repeated that lie to Congress, pawning it off as just 'Bush lied, people died' (which, not saying that was your position, but that's what your comment initially came off as, hence my reply) absolves the CIA of the blame they justly deserve for their part in Iraq. But you're right that they certainly were not a rogue agency.
The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment, and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't control the intelligence services, the legislative branch doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence services have their own secret courts. There is no sense in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how they spend their budgets
They also have the power to take out a democratically elected president. For instance, they could've published the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or Trump's cabinet to remove him.
The intelligence services are a perfect example of the unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who violate American rights and ignore the law. They are incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they outmatch on paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
>> To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.
Your certitude here is making you look quite ignorant of history.
In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[28][29] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".[30]
I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame everyone else for their problems, demand instant results, get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about style over substance...
Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking heads.
Not exactly true, two important things intersect:
1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I struggle to get across to people as a small-government proponent, but the people in power physically cannot understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the pulling achieves. Most of them aren't even numerate and the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad incentives.
2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a different and much simpler creature from anything that turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to deal with that swing voter rather than do what the politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible results).
It's not your fault it was poorly edited and paced.
Looking like there may be a sequel and probably a spin-off.
Your list of failures, among others (homeless industrial complex), make much more sense through this light: they're all wealth transfers to political friends.
I mean, sure, if you don't think pollsters have any responsibility for due diligence. The polls were an accurate representation of what people were willing to admit to planning and doing, but a lot of people weren't willing to say they were voting for Trump. Popular culture and media spent months telling those people they were isolated deplorables who had no chance, but in the voting booth nobody can shame you. Asking people over the phone whether they were going to vote for Trump was like asking them if they liked being spanked in bed.
A bit of a tangent, but polls don't make predictions, people make predictions based on the polling data. Some people predicted Hillary with 99% chance, and 538 predicted Hillary with 66% chance. When dealing with probabilities it's not as simple as "wrong" or "not", but if people were betting then those that bet 99% would have lost a lot of money, and 538 only a little. As a result I trust 538 a lot more now; that's the nice thing about people making specific predictions, you can over time learn who to trust.
Anyhow this tangent ultimately agrees with your point, as you and I know that if a talking head makes a "99%" prediction, it's got at best an 80% chance of actually happening.
Or about how Omicron defies statistics. No, it doesn't.
People just don't fucking understand statistics.
They use numbers to come up with probabilities, but there are a lot of baked-in assumptions about things like turnout, various sampling errors or biases, etc.
They have reasons for their assumptions, such as using information from previous elections. But the current election may violate those assumptions, but it's hard to say how much and with what probability.
I trust 538 for the most part. But it's just models and those models have assumptions and it's quite possible the assumptions were just wrong in 2016. We only have one data point, so we'll never really know.
The worst part of figuring out the trustworthiness of a source is putting in the time and effort to comb over all of its output and comparing it to reality, an effort that can take a long time.
Which lends me to ask: how can you say that you trust 538 if you also say there is only one data point? Because there shouldn’t be: 538 made big news during the election of 2008. 538 has been around since 2008 so you should have a lot of polling predictions to comb over.
I actually don’t have an opinion of 538 as I haven’t put in that work.
"The p value and the base rate fallacy" https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/p-value.html
"Misinterpretations of Significance: A Problem Students Share with Their Teachers?" "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heiko-Haller/publicatio..."
They actually invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea.
I mean, the possibility of an invasion is not exactly far-fetched.
Andrew Gelman just wrote about the difference between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/03/epistemic-...
And it sounds like you're confusing them here. "Sometimes chance comes out that way" is something that applies to aleatoric probabilities. But major elections are not uncertain in an aleatoric sense; they are uncertain in an epistemic sense, and the polls were correct to worry about why they were wrong.
I think because people are more comfortable believing what they want to believe.
Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out.
Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore.
And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.
So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc.
At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.
Do you want to get rid of the internet?
I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust.
That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me.
People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist.
I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters.
Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
Of course. That’s what allows us to talk about the foibles of People in this thread as if we were Martians.
We don’t go all the way to first principles on every topic, so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We tend to trust people like us. When there were still gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by engagement-focused algorithms.
Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities. Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly trusted in recent years.
I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:
People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe.
Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1].
The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority.
> This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority.
Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.
Far more complicated than this, sorry. I agree with that observation if you gleen your evidence from portrayals in the media...and to some extent this is true but the populist power base in aggregate is far smarter and more purposed than this. What you described in the above quote could also be attributed to flatly thumbing their noses at the evidence because they want a certain outcome and they know they can get it by chaos. You create chaos by appearing to believe outrageous bullshit and acting on it within an approved political arena. It's protected chaotic behavior that serves the populist agenda.
For atleast some of the judges, one can clearly have predicted how they would have voted. The justices might have just taken a vacation on the beach and just call in the vote...
Or perhaps by politics you really mean culture war leanings.
To clarify: I am talking about the reception of authority, not the innate linkage of authority itself to the authority figure's politics, but the linkage of the authority figure's politics to the politics of the people deciding whether to be receptive or not to that authority.
Yeah, it certainly seems like there are groups pushing to make everything political.
This. The CDC could do well to hire some conservatives to help with their outreach. Put them in positions of power.
Both political parties should do this rather than engage in destructive and polarizing brinkmanship.
I'm afraid focus on the short term and on "winning" makes this impossible, though.
No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust problems aren’t fixed by political stance (eg. Trump advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government, anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks the left in these characteristics. And pro-conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts simply won’t break through to some people.
The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. It:
- failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first weeks,
- failed to allow many US labs to import and work with COVID samples, and
- has continuously given dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple.
Also, the problem I see isn’t that the CDC doesn’t hire conservatives. It’s more that conservatives don’t enter lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism, science, art are dominated by liberals because conservatives don’t encourage their kids into those fields because modern conservatives don’t value these jobs. That and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It’s hard to be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a Young Earth Creationist). It’s hard to retain a literal interpretation of the Bible after learning about other religions and myth stories.
Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them.
I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.
It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.)
The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.
Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people.
That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.
This is what Roger Stone and Steve Bannon we're looking to do with Trump. Slam dunk.
This all arises from deep, deep mistrust and a perceived lack of representation on the part of the establishment toward the unwashed.
The establishment is on the ropes right now.
Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not secondary.
Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems likely many people aren't learning the lesson about institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the institutions themselves.
that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about.
that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.
In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they aren't working.
That's in an environment where people demand simple and concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for something and receive a full service for it has become the norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a result, services and the information on cutting edge are not spotless.
the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks actually do anything or not, this was deliberate misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen people on this very website admit that they are aware of this fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although they were deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So With Righteous Intentions, So It's Okay.
once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the Authority says going forward is the Truth?
For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our right wingers often import American propaganda and it's death giveaway when they start talking about something that some American politician like dr. Fauci said.
In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In fact, the health ministry showed better than the average competence and just as they start building some trust, they were exposed to be lying shamelessly.
Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere.
Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation happens when people try to digest very complex information beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person who is actually in control of the complex information tries to simplify things to the layman.
If physics were more mainstream, we would have people misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those. It's just that those people are not marching on the streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build around layman misunderstanding things and building alternative realities over oversimplified scientific topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and when they speak publicly they commit the sin of oversimplifications and best guesses presented as clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the universe.
All the major religions are alive and well, and have billions of believers who care very, very much about what their authorities say.
The Catholic Church is the largest sect of Christianity, the largest religion. Protestantism (typically a smaller, more local organization) is actually a smaller branch, but has many megachurches.
Whoever they follow, those are their authorities.
"That's why no issue is ever resolved by their authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the time."
They fight because their authorities tell them to.
It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning.
See:
“Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study”
The majority isn't always right, but instinctively going the other way isn't better.
Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like Marcuse and Derrida.
"As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the circumference of the shadows surrounding it. That is not an endorsement of ignorance, but a warning that our philosophy and socio-politics must expand in proportion to our technologies."
When you monopolize commons into private things you get this..
Yes this is a rehash of a former Presidential candidates own arguments, some of you may remember his law works such as the CC mark.
Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.
Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls the information.
Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument is simply over who gets the power to do it.
People never trusted authorities outside of the first world. The Western governments were hiding their true nature much better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit the same problems people living outside of it are used to. Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy for a century.
Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong to and support them. Typically your government is your worst enemy, not some foreign dictator.
Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive you to extinction.
Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we really have no idea what they are blathering on about.
Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able] assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well.
To quote a terrible movie[0], in the case of the comment you're replying to "the only winning move is not to play." IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc.
As such, I recommend backing away slowly.
In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth.
I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue.
>Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis.
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...
I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on power and control… and reality for that matter. They reject reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural order and life, and it will always fail eventually.
Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the perception that the "authorities" have a different set of values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.
Yeah, but it's important to emphasize the values aspect, because I think that's where the emotional energy comes from. IMHO, that energy is fuzzy, resentment against one authority in one area transfers to a different authority in a different area, just as long as they're perceived being alike in some vague way. For instance, I don't think there'd be so much distrust over COVID response if there hadn't already been a bitter culture war where medical authorities sometimes take sides.
One: The media aspired towards neutrality
Two: The media was consolidated and Overton window kept so tight average people couldn't find contradictions.
1. The post-2010 media has been as consolidated as it ever has been--around coastal elite / woke left ideologies and Democratic activism (I say this having only ever voted Democrat in POTUS elections for whatever that's worth). Granted, social media provides a diversity of opinions--even still, there are other factors.
2. The post-2010 media unanimously and widely publishes high-profile, objective, and trivially verifiable falsehoods (a few from memory): characterizing the Google Memo as an "anti-diversity screed", the coverage of the Nicolas Sandman still photo, the coverage of the Rittenhouse saga, the coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, etc. Note that all of these errors support the same woke left viewpoints (as opposed to random errors). There's also a long tail of more subjective issues ("why does the media keep bringing up racial disparities in police shootings without exploring obvious follow-on questions?").
3. The post-2010 media landscape includes reporters and entire publications who rather proudly consider themselves activists, who insert themselves into their stories, and who loudly broadcast their biases (typically woke-left biases) on social media. This is a stark departure from the 20th century journalistic ethos.
4. The academic fields which became openly activist have similarly experienced a degradation in public trust, while the more objective fields have retained much more trust. This mirrors what we're seeing in the media.
All of this seems to boil down to a failure to pursue neutrality in my view.
I suspect the tight 20th century Overton window was a result of 20th century epistemological institutions' pursuit of neutrality. The institutions were much more fact-based and opinions began to converge around facts.
Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists".
Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab. The Chinese authorities certainly didn't release any more data, the only thing that changed was the presidential administration. How can this be explained? Why would the “authorities” try to initially divert attention from the evidence pointing to a lab leak from China?
This is true.
> because authorities time and time again have misled them.
But is this? Here's a chart of U.S. public trust in government since the late 1950s: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...
Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident?
I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."
Remove the discussion and give the power to decide what is truth to a company and what you get is the consensus within that company. Naturally that won't be fair, reproducible or representative. Give the power to governments and you get similar results, just with more police and military, through with the slight bonus of people being at least being elected. Still a pretty pointless exercise unless discussion and transparency exist.
I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about misinformation in an article that has value to special interest groups with media leverage.
Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia.
The real world doesn't work like that.
Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive topics.
If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering) rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.
The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world.
I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify.
I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?
On the contrary, I think the belief in a universal Reason is the root what makes it a ridiculous ideology. Way to go putting a postmodern veneer on Plato.
"Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's not an aim at facts or truth.
Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer engagement'.
Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in counter-factual directions.
Middle grounds are a slippery slope.
Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it like that is a very US-centric way of going about it.
Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics should really take a stroll trough the self-declared conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which features some of the most delusional content I've seen on the web.
Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might be?
In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal representation."
In a broader context, "equal representation" would include the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz, actual Nazis, etc.)
There are examples of parties from the broader political spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party, American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.). Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party system.
Pretending that the major US political parties represent the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at best, and willful deception at worst.
For example, the headline picture is from a normal prison in Xinjiang that houses convicted criminals of various Chinese ethnicities, not a "Uyghur Concentration Camp". Yet it is misused as representation of "Uyghur Genocide"?
Nayirah level nonsense.
Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it.
Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues.
I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels (allegedly)
It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".
It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against.
It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs.
Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign.
And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?
Why do people say “there is no evidence of X” to mean “the evidence that has been presented of X is not sufficient to make me believe that X is more likely than not to be true.”
I mean, I get that it sounds stronger to an audience that has no exposure whatsoever to the debate, but to otherwise it seems mostly to be credibility-killing.
But that's not the point. USG doesn't give a single F--- about distant Muslims, much less Chinese Muslims.
The propaganda effect is the point. And Wikipedia is an important tool for that.
Evidence has been provided specifically to the internationally accepted legal definition of genocide. [0] If that doesn't convince you, that's fine, but there is not “no evidence”.
[0] for which, see https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Please link this "evidence". The actual primary evidence.
https://eagle.bchigh.edu/features/2021/04/26/the-uyghur-geno...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xinjiang-detective-tort...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Consent = manufactured
Have you tried?
And mods there will listen to well crafted arguments, and commonly do.
Yeah, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_ci...
> "Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible.
Of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability_not_tr...
At least there's a method to their madness (:
I'm tired of this censorship bullshit where companies play gatekeeper between me and my own friends. Even WeChat in China doesn't censor this much. Almost always if I post something on WeChat my friends see it in their feeds within seconds. But on Facebook, nope. Their algo stands in-between and decides whether or not it should be censored from each friend.
I can count multiple posts on my newsfeed in the last 48 hours on both topics, for better and worse.
Whatever it takes to have something cross a threshold where it doesn't show in newsfeeds, it's definitely something more than words like "covid" or "election."
And no, I don't care that disclosing specific moderation rules "helps the bad guys." That's another pernicious modern trope, and another example of online services confusing their problem with my problem.
But for friends, if I mutually added someone as a friend, I want to see 100% of their content by default, with an option to mute their content if they get annoying.
I don't want an algorithm deciding this for me.
I have COVID experts in my friend circle and I most certainly want to see 100% of their posts, for example.
I'm sympathetic to the problems of algorithms mediating what's seen; I'm often annoyed at the ways feeds are put together myself. I'm especially annoyed that the former feature enabling you to look at a feed of specific lists of friends seems to have fallen by the wayside.
That's distinct from the issue of whether FB is systematically demoting / hiding posts by keyword, and there's evidence that they're not doing it based off the keywords you specified.
Unfortunately unless the algorithm is disclosed to the public (IMO it should) nobody will know with certainty.
Facebook very deliberately removed the option to get a raw feed, and a lot of people have never forgiven them for it. All sorts of totally mundane stuff you post won't get seen.
"I want" doesn't translate directly into value for everyone. Heck, it's fairly rare for you to even know what you actually want.
I do grow weary of the constant, "But I want it!" attitude that seems pervasive on the Internet. You aren't entitled to the perfect-for-you feed from Facebook.
These platforms got users by providing that service, and only remove them later once they want to exploit us
Sure, Twitter and Wechat do mostly what I want in terms of not censoring content between friends.
Yes, that's what we all want - but it's what Facebook aggressively phased out and then outright removed years ago. It's not coming back.
It really likes to show covid stuff though, since that drives their engagement and advertising bits. You have to click an extra button to see the post in the end, but you're still notified that the post exists
I'm even able to share things with those friends, believe it or not.
Or perhaps, we see everyone else around us has their passwords in plain text, but we haven’t yet checked our own.
It’s easy to call out low hanging fruit like QAnon or /r/superstonk but harder to personally introspect which major, identity-defining beliefs that I have can be attributed to the global hive mind, and in which ways that made me subject to strange influence by motivated actors.
It helps that my political beliefs are unorthodox enough that I can agree with most groups about something, though.
Common ground is key to understanding.
TL;DR: Tribal people have mores. That's how tribes, people, and mores work.
It sucks that our Tribe can't be 7 billion people. It really does. But we should see it as a positive and a war of _benefit_ instead of a war of _ideas_. What _benefit_ does believing in QAnon offer? What _benefit_ does being apart of Group A have over Group B?
Each community is responsible for its own truths and policing them how they see fit. We should be arguing over how to make our _benefits_ better than theirs, not trying to force our ideologies onto them.
When that tribe has externalities to their behavior that harm members of my tribe, is when it gets rough. (I want you to stop putting mercury in my drinking water, endangering my drinking water with your oil pipeline, I want you to wear a mask to reduce my chance of infection, etc etc etc.)
In my perfect world, it is Mutually Assured Destruction between tribes that keeps us not putting mercury in any drinking water outside our own, etc. I know that isn't going to work but that is the most _fair_ to me.
That's my hot take.
Our current best-worst solution to tribalism has been a small number of sovereign nations with large populations and democratically elected governments. Everyone admits the emergent qualities are suboptimal but they are still better than all the other options we've tried so far, as the saying goes. The solution to online tribalism is likely to look very similar.
Considering that the externalities of these internet-based tribes cross over into the physical world (such as the drinking water/oil pipeline examples above), I suspect this leads to a likely future where internet tribal communities end up overlapping with traditional national boundaries (eg, China's great firewall).
To be clear, this isn't the future I want but it's starting to seem like the most likely outcome. I admit my past optimism for a truly "open" internet is being tested these days. I don't want a closed internet anymore than I used to - but it might simply be the only practical option if society wants to continue functioning.
One tribe has a list of things they are demanding the other tribe do.
The other tribe just wants to be left alone.
Sure, one tribe wants to live free of societal consequences, but they still want to participate in society.
Else every serious libertarian would actually go live alone and grow their own food. That doesn't happen. In reality, they go buy groceries alongside everyone else.
The consequences I was referring to are things like spreading COVID-19 because they are careless about it, etc.
We've barely gotten to a stage where that is even considered a viable and realistic idea, just because it's not instantly a smashing success does not translate to an ultimate failure.
Particularly as many such big ideas had to go trough their "growing pains" before ultimately working out.
If we were to have a Tribe of 7 billion people, we would need to come up with "facts" that can be agreed upon by 7 billion people. We cannot get 7 billion people to agree that the earth is not flat. I don't have any hopes that we can get 7 billion people to agree on human rights or other things that can be described as "us vs them".
This may be my anarchist/extreme leftist ideologies that I personally hold bleeding into what I think is possible/should be done. I have a very hard time separating those feelings from "facts" and I think that makes this point even more clear!
That goes contrary to my personal experience with a www that wasn't mainstream yet, but most certainly already had larger groups of people.
As tired and lame as it might sound, imho the biggest culprit is social media and what kind incentives it has set.
Social media does not thrive on facts and information, it thrives on emotions, but dry boring non-sensational headlines and information don't make people emotional.
What makes people emotional, and interact with your platform, are the crass headlines and claims, the dramatic stuff. So that's what gets pushed to people, and they react accordingly by liking it, and at that point it's already a self-reinforcing loop with increasingly more sensationalist and crass claims that constantly need to top each other to stay relevant.
It also directly affects what kind of content people contribute and most importantly how they do it; All the big "influencers" spend quite some time and effort in optimizing their content for that extra reach, along with that come certain behavior routines to sell the content, which then get normalized.
And because traditional media struggles to keep up with that, and stay relevant, they also get colored by this, not only by having made social media their new source of reporting, but also by making their own reporting more in line with these trends.
Too many just chasing the dopamine kicks from the "likes" and "karma", it feels like mass-hysteria that's steadily increasing in intensity.
And maybe show some humor about it. Say, tag the COVID-fiction stuff with "This content is cool and getting really popular, but it seems pretty weak in the Facts Dept. If you enjoy it, you might also want to check out Night of the Living Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Shadow of the Vampire, and The Andromeda Strain. Sign up for Horror Classics now, and get your first month free with discount code 'COVID'..."
When something doesn't make sense, check your premises.
All throughout human history we’ve tried to figure out what actually is. The key component of that is figuring out what information we can trust.
We can never simply throw our hands in the air and say “it can’t be done” “it can’t be fair” or any othe cop out. We all do it every minute of every day. We can do it better, we must!
If we must, then why we must?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081223091308.h...
But IMO that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
It's not perfect, yup, mistakes will be made. I don't buy into the idea that you thus shouldn't do it.
But yet that's what's happening. Trained virologists are getting strikes for daring to talk about things that aren't strict CDC narrative.
I think banning things like say ISIS recruitment and things that are dead pan, unarguably and immediately dangerous is tolerable censorship. Outside of that, it seems like a political tool.
Right but I'm reading it like you don't seem to have a concern about accountability and how wrong these organizations are currently getting it. At what point do they get it so wrong so often, it's better for society that they stop trying. At what point does getting it so wrong so often turn from "curating misinformation" turn into "silencing political opposition."
I know this is over the top, but if 20% of death penalty cases were, "oops we got it wrong," it's time for them to stop trying to implement the death penalty.
The death penalty has the convenience of having very good other options and generally resources dedicated to a few events. Personally I see no reason for the death penalty considering the alternatives.
Nobody is actually targeting misinformation. (How much are flat-earthers censored?) What they're actually targeting is speech we don't like. We might say "harmful" instead of "don't like", but I'm not sure how sharply that division can be drawn; if you don't like certain speech, you can find reasons to claim it is harmful.
And you could argue that the lab leak hypothesis was harmful. It was leading people to mistrust scientific experts at a time when they really needed to listen to experts, when not listening to experts was causing definite harm, including a lot of death. The lab leak hypothesis was also almost certainly false... until it wasn't, until it became at least reasonably plausible.
So I was all ready to say that it's just speech we don't like, and censoring speech because we don't like it is not an acceptable thing to do... and then you mentioned ISIS recruitment videos. That is speech I don't like. It's speech that is harmful. It's speech that probably contains a number of statements that are provably false.
So I'd really like to draw the line where the lab leak hypothesis is OK (even when almost everyone thought it was false), and ISIS recruitment videos are clearly censorable. But at the moment, I don't see how to do it, other than my intuition of what's OK and what's not. And my intuition doesn't work when someone other than me is doing the actual deciding.
Can anyone state a clear standard here? (The more objective, the better.)
I suspect the vast majority of the time the misinformation removal is accurate as well. People tend to post the same dumb stuff over and over.
For example, things in the US have moving and TV ratings based on the type of content. People can opt-in to watching things at that rating level knowing the types of content in it. They can do it for themselves and their children. Some TV stations only have certain types of content and remove others.
With social networks some will say that certain types of content isn't for that network. It's the same idea.
What these channels and networks aren't doing is telling you what is misinformation or not. They aren't making truthy statements.
Modern social media is making truthy statements. booleans. Not about what content is allowed in the network but about what is true and not as a whole. That's different.
But the politicization of that whole field, trough FUD about "social bots" and "fake news", made that very difficult to keep up.
Case in point; Liveleak is now gone, with it at lot of content that's now hidden away in private archives of data hoarders.
Now, one can handwave that away as just a bunch of snuff and gore porn, but there was so much more there than that; Controversial livestreams that were deleted from the original platform also serve as evidence, war footage, all the things authorities and governments often don't want people to see.
Like footage from the Syrian civil war on YouTube; Google scrubbed massive amounts of that, possibly including evidence for war crimes [0]
By now it's reached a point where even documentaries about certain wars get an automatic age-lock from YouTube, the only way to watch those is to confirm your real identity with Google.
On that end the surface web has lost so much of its "bite", it hardly feels like the web anymore.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights...
We should get away from thinking that moderating perfectly is the goal. There is no way we could even decide what perfect moderation is, let alone carry it out. Our goal should be "mostly effective", or something like that.
The founders didn't trust themselves with the power to censor political speech. The idea that such dangerous power should invested in unelected, unaccountable tech barons is, frankly, so absurd that I struggle to believe that anyone advocates it in good faith.
Given that the reality of reality is beyond the grasp of certainty, a platform owner still is able to make choices about what is and is not acceptable within their community. This is well understood in indie game community management; nurturing nurturing communities involves removing bad actors, and making _subjective_ calls about whether people are acting in good or bad faith.
More seriously, even though there's no "closed form" solution, it seems like each publisher can take a reasonable subset of what they can stomach. If "good information" is an amorphous, moving blob floating in a sea of "bad information" we can draw simple polygons that are more/less inclusive of "good information" while allowing more or less "bad information" to be included.
https://twitter.com/dnunan79/status/1491073564447244288/phot...
It is interesting, how the concept of misinformation is bound to time. Imagine 1 year ago, somebody would say:
"if you are vaccinated, you are still able to catch covid and spread covid", or "cloth masks don't work", or even the first "misinformation" from the whole pandemic "covid was leaked from a Lab in Wuhan"
All those 3 "misinformation" and many more were policed pretty hard until 2021.. Today 2022, they were either proved to be true or have high probability to be true.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and that once that proof was evident, it was then safe to assume it was no longer a case of disinformation.
Of course there are two sides to this: What if the 'covid leaked from a lab in Wuhan' datum was so angrily suppressed that the requisite extraordinary proofs were never unearthed, or worse, destroyed... then the probable truth may have never seen the light of the day. Thankfully, in this case, that didn't happen.
This twitter thread seems defeatist and hand-wavy. The thread does have good intuitions in focusing on uncertainty and nuance. For example, the difference between asking questions and sealioning is hard to tell
Because of that, I agree that a perfect solution probably doesn't exist because of similar trade-offs like in the paper I mentioned, but doing more research at least lets us find out what we are trading-off and what we are willing to sacrifice.
All of this uncertainty is in direct opposition to how large groups of humans behave. There was a HN post recently using MSFT Azure as an example about why executive/C-level communication is so repetitive and basic; you simply can't announce something to a thousand people and expect them to understand context and nuance. The example there was that the execs zeroed in on new features above all else, resulting in tons of bugs. But trying to focus on both features and bugs was a lose-lose, people would find excuses to not do things using whichever focus was more convenient.
Executive Q&As at big companies are another example. I'm not sure why we still do them. It's simply not possible to have a deep dialogue in this environment. You wind up with disgruntled employees tossing up call-out questions, CEOs dodging any sort of concrete answer, and nobody walks away better informed. Let me be clear, I loved these at a smaller company where the CEO actually knew me personally, but they are a colossally cringe waste of time at a 2k+ person company.
The big platforms are also in direct opposition to one of the solutions to this problem, which is breaking down communication to small groups of people that actually know each other, and rationally discussing context and nuance is possible. Twitter is built around having the entire internet respond to a tweet. Of course this results in chaos.
Moderation is the only solution. It doesn't have to be balanced, as long as people stick around and keep using the service.
"The amount of energy needed to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
It can take ~15 minutes to create a Twitter post containing misinformation, but a team of fact checkers can invest hours/days/weeks into the post. The fact checkers research the topic and write a refutation that's well-sourced and hopefully as objective as possible. Meanwhile, there are 1,000 more posts freshly minted with exciting new misinformation.
Sometimes the grossly imperfect solution is still an improvement on no solution at all.
"Don't bother policing misinformation" can't have methodological flaws the way moderating can, because it's just the absence of something. But ultimately what I think most people care about isn't soundness of methodology, but the results, and so the question you have to answer is: is a popular platform that makes no effort to control misinformation healthier for society than ones that do make that effort?
I would argue that the Cochrane Library itself should be considered an authoritative source, but again, that is a problem with application of policy rather than a problem with the policy itself.
The concept of the "web" devolving into a deluge of information ranging from completely false to purely factual that's almost unusable without a moderator. In-universe, moderated streams are available by subscription/hire, with inexpensive "AI" or shared streams with little personalization, all the way up to dedicated moderators that act more like a personal assistant constantly monitoring and updating your personal feed.
It sadly seems like a highly prescient view of what our modern-day internet is becoming. It's taking longer and longer to review multiple takes on a subject to get a full picture and failing to put in that due-diligence makes it hard to shake that feeling that you're just falling into a party-line decision on a subject as more "news" outlets become highly polarized.
Some days I just have to "run dark" on news to get a breather, but then everything seems all the more overwhelming when I get back online and see what new mess has erupted in the news cycle.
Moderation has been working fine for public forums since the internet gained popularity.
The problem here is that no one can moderate a community of billions. That's the unfeasible scenario that Facebook, Twitter, etc. find themselves in.
You can police Holocaust misinformation in a fair, reproducible and representitive way
There is no one on earth who can form a credible argument that 5G spreads SARS because it's fucking lunacy. The evidence for ivermectin improving severe covid outcomes also clearly showed it was only noticeable in regions where untreated parasitic worm infections are common, so yeah, getting rid of multiple other infections led to better outcomes. Various counter-arguments against anthropogenic global warming (even the honest ones) have been thoroughly invalidated for decades.
It's like raising the required work to send spam or spray malware at random internet hosts. It doesn't fix everything, but it evens the playing field between trolls and agents of discord vs people having real discussions. We know this works because high-value discussion forums like the heavily moderated science subreddits do it and there is no mass hysteria -- and reddit should probably be compensating those mods, but that's another issue.
If your commercial platform does not put in the bare minimum content moderation to keep dangerous horseshit out of the common discourse where gullible and naïve people with no ability to serious discern credible statements from well-practiced lies, there should be penalties scaled to the revenue of the business.
Just because Facebook or whomever clearly didn't give a damn and phoned in some half-assed keyword flagging system doesn't mean it's impossible. It means Facebook doesn't care and needs to get fined until they do. If you can't link some credible evidence because of stupid limits on Twitter, maybe Twitter is just a terrible discussion platform.
If, and I do mean if, you can consistently define misinformation. The issue is that, not unlike porn, 'i know it, when i see it' approach to identification is not a great way to gather trust of people you want to impose that upon.
The people saying various vaccines result in significantly better outcomes and shorter infections from SARS have millions of man-hours of testing and evidence backing that up. Anyone can watch a boat come up over the horizon with the top visible and reproducibly verify the earth is, at the very least, curved. That's the opposite of "I know it when I see it."
Arguing over favorite colors has no material impact on anyone. Loudly proclaiming incendiary medical statements on public forums very obviously has had massive impact, and if you can't back it up, that's misinformation even if by astronomical luck it's accidentally correct.
This is exactly why professionals and other serious people give measured, complex answers to questions that don't translate well to in-group signaling grifter gear, and exactly why we need some sort of brakes on the countervailing screeching of slogans on the other side because that train zooms out of the station and picks up idiot passengers left and right before the people who know what they're talking about can finish a sentence. This isn't hypothetical. We've been watching it happen for decades.
Three examples: Formal logic, statistics, and how to detect deception. All of these are general purpose. Teach people about fallacies, what an appropriate sample size is and make them play Diplomacy. Teach about historic hoaxes and how they were disproven, as well as about conspiracies, ones that were successful and others that were uncovered and failed. Tell the stories of corruption and coups.
For technology companies, build un-opinionated features that users love and work so well that people opt-in.
Both of those are misleading half-truths, but that is better discussed in another thread.
What's the fraction of a % of people willing to spend that kind of effort. To learn for the sake of learning, not to prove a point or show others they are right :(.
On many topics people rebel against this attitude, because they see it as a moral imperative to be an activist. But that's not how I choose to live, and I find it is easier to be happy this way.
I believe working (as wisely as we can) in the service of others is important. But we have to prioritize, and being peaceful, & kind & responsible to those nearest us are high priorities.
BUT: I'd really like to know what would happen if we required putting some words like this all over the place (FB, ...): "Please consider: are info sources accurate and reliable? How do we know that?--perhaps based on trustworthy behavior over time of the original eyewitness and all reporters in the chain to us; and corroboration by other such reliable sources? And/or of the organization that employs those people? Do you know who they are, exactly, and their history?"
(I read about some study that I couldn't find later, which said something(?) like that had a useful impact.)
I and my extended family have traveled, read a lot from a variety of sources, gravitate to plainness and honesty and personal growth/learning more than to entertainment, and know people who know people who travel extensively, have personal experience in a variety of fields, etc, and I think many of us are very careful about whom to believe, for what. I think most of us (?) would know, soon enough at least, if we were being duped by digital sources about important things.
Edit: to aid my thinking, here are some interesting other thoughts I got from others' comments here: A significant % of humanity chooses what to believe not based on facts/reliability/truth/honesty/goodwhatevers, but based on things like: ego, group membership, repetition, and what they want to believe (I suppose because it feels more reassuring/familiar/comfortable/safe/simple/easy for them at the time, sometimes due to fears or the other reasons listed above like ego, group..). I suppose rampant addictions (including porn) are major contributing/distorting factors, as people try to self-medicate for their fears and hurts.
Now, how might one best decide whether oneself is susceptible? Maybe we can consider, now and again, what we love the most -- truth, kindness, improvement of self and others, etc, or pleasure/power/attention? I think the first 2 commandments as taught in Christianity are relevant: to love God w/ all our heart, might, mind, and strength (which I suppose is aided by understanding His true nature and the good he offers us); and to love our neighbor (every other human) as ourselves -- treating them the way we would want to be treated, helpfully for their specific situation.
Just a link to the written content doesn't give a lot of context to how reliable that content is.
I think it's very profitable for social media sites to promote hard to verify information though, so it's unlikely to change
I think you have to see it as an iterative process, where moderators, policies and heuristics intended to target misinformation will, inevitably, have both false positives and false negatives. You then have to have systems in place to correct those, and minimize them in the future.
Currently that system is basically just public outcry or boycotts, because the companies assume they got it right or don't have to do more, and that they can apologize their way out of it, or give 100 million to a charity and keep it, or whatever.
But we deserve not just better systems, but also continual work to make those systems better.
Without it, I believe the best thing you can do is public outcry, and moving your content or your subscription.
1) Slavery is immoral
2) Black people should be allowed to vote
3) Women should be allowed to vote
4) Bacteria exists
5) The earth is round
6) You can question the church
etc. Now that is not to say that "vaccines may carry more risk than is being reported" is correct, and should be placed next to "black people should be allowed to vote". However, if the anti-misinformation crowd is allowed to reach their conclusion, then we will never be able to challenge the orthodoxy again.
As a side note; is this all the result of people not learning philosophy in school? It's legitimately horrifying to me that so many people have no concept of what it means for something to even be true, or how we could reach consensus on that. What does it mean to "know" something, what is the purpose of dialog, etc.
They seem to so desperately want the world to be flat that they will come up with any argument that whatever conclusively disproving new evidence they just looked at to prove their idea was somehow manipulated or in some other way confounded.
Surely when others hear their sincerely delivered explanations some will also conclude that the world is flat.
Is there a cost-benefit analysis we should perform here?
What are the costs and benefits of policing misinformation about other subjects?
This week I was reading about how cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry 60% of the time. They have a financial interest in the studies going their way and those studies do. Yet, many studies not funded by them go a very different route.
Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
The other day I was listening to an edge theory on something. I didn't know I would be hearing one when I first took the time to listen. The theory was based on evidence, the case was logical and well reasoned, and what was different was assumptions. The conclusion was not the majority. Is that misinformation?
We don't tend to go deep anymore so how can we tell where misinformation really exists? Who decides what's a kind of hard that needs to be stopped?
There is so much depth to this topic.
The lipid hypothesis used to be a theory. A significant portion of the 'science' has been revealed to be illegitimate. Cholesterol had a 'scientific consensus' that it was evil causing virtually all cardiovascular disease. Used to...
So what happened? In 2005 you now have to declare your conflicts of interest. Dieticians suddenly started falling bigtime to conflicts of interest. Virtually all of them publishing that cholesterol was evil had conflicts. They were funded heavily by the cereal companies. Science started looking at the lipid theory and it's all fraud.
Cholesterol is no longer a boogy man. The lipid hypothesis has been downgraded to an invalid hypothesis. If you're taking statins, go talk to your doc and get off them.
>Is it misinformation when you speak out against them?
When the statin patents expired in 2016. It's not a surprise that the keto movement reformed in 2017. That cholesterol became a hypothesis and we found out what's really going on.
Ancel Keys much later in life acknowledged that dietary cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with blood cholesterol.
The even more interesting since the conflict of cinterest change. People have been trying to understand what the actual real data says. Cholesterol may be real problem, but why? You'll notice... this was also published in 2017.
https://blogs.webmd.com/from-our-archives/20170710/how-sugar...
Sugar in your diet damages cholesterol and makes your body struggle at cleaning it up. They found however, sugar isn't exactly the culprit. It's refined sugars and mostly candy and related high sugar things that are causing the problem.
>The same can be said for a lot of things. You need to dig into the details to have an understanding of what's going on.
Censorship is hard. Anything being labelled misinformation is immediately considered something that must be evaluated.
>Science started looking at the lipid theory and it's all fraud.
I'm sorry, but even the most cursory of google searches indicates that this is not at all correct.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis
In fact, the lipid hypothesis having used to be a theory and being downgraded to hypothesis probably makes it far less than a hypothesis.
The wikipage uses a single source for this 'consensus' and look again that magical date of 2017.
What does this 'consensus' really conclude?
>Consistent evidence from numerous and multiple different types of clinical and genetic studies unequivocally establishes that LDL causes ASCVD.
The 'consensus' is that LDL causes illness. I dont believe that's in contention. What we are discussing is what causes LDL to cause illness and we are discovering decades of bad science.
Drug companies wanted to sell people on statins so they funded studies. Egg companies want people to eat eggs that are high in cholesterol so they fund studies. It's a mess of advertising.
High cholesterol is know to lead to atherosclerosis[1]. It's one of the things that is involved in forming the plaques that build up in arteries which lead to forms of heart disease.
What caught my attention was the long term studies around the people of loma lima. There are many vegans and vegetarians there who have been involved in long term studies. They have the same jobs as others in the area, live in the same area, and have many of the same habits of others with different diets. This has been great for looking at how diet affects things. Through those studies they've learned a lot about how diet affects cardiovascular disease.
The problem was both side I'm sure. Cereal corps on one side, eggs on the other. One trying to counter the other.
The beauty is that since 2005, that changed. It's not 100% but it was pretty effective. We can now see what's really going on.
Ancel Keys himself has admitted and even pushed way later in life that dietary cholesterol doesn't matter. So the egg industry is innocent.
>High cholesterol is know to lead to atherosclerosis[1]. It's one of the things that is involved in forming the plaques that build up in arteries which lead to forms of heart disease.
Sure but what causes this is what matters. As explained in that webmd link I provided is that this is caused by sugar. Primarily refined sugars. I must admit I don't understand how sugar damages ldl
>What caught my attention was the long term studies around the people of loma lima. There are many vegans and vegetarians there who have been involved in long term studies. They have the same jobs as others in the area, live in the same area, and have many of the same habits of others with different diets. This has been great for looking at how diet affects things. Through those studies they've learned a lot about how diet affects cardiovascular disease.
That's the problem when cereal companies discovered they were the cause of so many diseases. As the saying goes, 'it's always the right time to do what is right' but they didn't want to be out of a job. They did the wrong thing. Afterall, Kellogg the man was an absolute scumbag responsible for the deaths of millions.
All of the egg-industry funded studies which try to show that "dietary cholesterol doesn't affect serum cholesterol" are doing extreme mental and linguistic gymnastics. That statement, which can sometimes be shown to be true, only applies to dietary cholesterol in isolation from any other food, including cholesterol in isolation from the rest of the egg. Dietary cholesterol with saturated fat, which is the most common way that dietary cholesterol is consumed, does more to raise serum cholesterol than any other food. Oh, and also high cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease.
I must admit this goes against what I know. Lets look into it together; nothing older than 2005 will be allowed.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
Harvard ought to be a good source:
>The biggest influence on blood cholesterol level is the mix of fats and carbohydrates in your diet—not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food. Although it remains important to limit the amount of cholesterol you eat, especially if you have diabetes, for most people dietary cholesterol is not as problematic as once believed.
So exactly what I said.
What's important as well, 'especially if you have diabetes' because as I said, as did my webmd link say. It's sugar that is doing it.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/dietary-cholesterol-doe...
Healthline fantastic source because they source their sources. Literally the title says exactly what I said.
>The amount of cholesterol in your diet and the amount of cholesterol in your blood are very different things.
I could probably steal healthline's sources but I'll just leave it here.
>All of the egg-industry funded studies which try to show that "dietary cholesterol doesn't affect serum cholesterol" are doing extreme mental and linguistic gymnastics. That statement, which can sometimes be shown to be true, only applies to dietary cholesterol in isolation from any other food, including cholesterol in isolation from the rest of the egg. Dietary cholesterol with saturated fat, which is the most common way that dietary cholesterol is consumed, does more to raise serum cholesterol than any other food. Oh, and also high cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease
As I believe I conclude above. This 'egg-industry' boogyman is untrue. In fact, your body will continue to produce cholesterol for you if you eat a low cholesterol diet. It's obviously not sufficient, we are evolved to be on a high cholesterol diet. What a low cholesterol high sugar diet does is hide the huge dangerous spike in ldl that the sugar causes. This is a tremendously unhealthy approach to take when the correct approach is no sugar.
Let's discuss what cholesterol is used for. Testosterone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Biochemistry
If you eat a low cholesterol diet. Your testosterone will be tremendously low. So for example about the same time this all came to light is some youtubers(try guys) went and got their testosterone checked and it was so low that they are either 100 years old, castrated or women. Virtually all those guys are probably incapable of having children and their doctors should be putting them on supplements to fix this asap. Huge health risks like osteoporosis is near certain.
Did you know that fertility clinics is an amazing industry profitability wise. Customers lined up around the block waiting for months.
Have you ever had your blood cholesterol tested? You know how they tell you not to eat beforehand?
It's trivial to see the effect of foods on serum cholesterol. It's not some unknown part of science that statistical analysis can only partially shed light on. Person eat egg; person cholesterol go up.
>Harvard ought to be a good source
"Harvard" isn't disagreeing with me here. The author is saying that dietary cholesterol with other fats is what determines disease risk. High dietary cholesterol with high saturated fat increases risk of coronary heart disease.
>>The amount of cholesterol in your diet and the amount of cholesterol in your blood are very different things.
>I could probably steal healthline's sources but I'll just leave it here.
The egg industry claim is that "high dietary cholesterol doesn't raise serum cholesterol". The word "serum" means in your blood. We are concerned with what foods raise your blood cholesterol (because high serum cholesterol is a necessary condition for heart disease). While it might be the case in some studies that high dietary cholesterol IN ISOLATION FROM OTHER FOODS doesn't raise serum cholesterol, high cholesterol eaten with the foods it's most commonly eaten with does cause high serum cholesterol.
>...Your testosterone will be tremendously low...
The reason this is all relevant is because people's cholesterol is way too high and heart disease has become a leading cause of death in developed nations.
As a Canadian, I find this source acceptable. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications...
Which this source and others say the opposite. That the problem is getting better.
Keto's re-emergence was in 2017 or so. So not really included in the data. Keto is also not a widely accepted diet, so impossible to account for in wide data like this.
>which seems to coincide with the craze in keto type diets. Sugar consumption has declined slightly over that same time period.
Take this for example: Again 2016... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5040825/
Or a more recent one: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30549-0/fulltex...
Modern science is very clear that it's sugar that is causing cardiovascular disease.
I don't think it's "clear" that sugar causes cardiovascular disease. I think what is clear is that obesity plus inactivity are overwhelmingly the main causes at a population level. Obesity can result from eating lots of sugar and/or from eating lots of fat.
But just about every population level study shows that consuming red meat increases cardiovascular disease. We'll have to check in a decade or two from now to see what effects keto-style diets have on cardiovascular disease but as tasty as they are, I'm not going to take my chances with one. Everything in moderation.
EDIT: We did this for ages. Remember in the 90s how the only place you read crackpot weirdo outlandish conspiracy theory garbage was Weekly World News and Nexus Magazine?
One bot's info is another bot's entropy.
No one has a monopoly on the truth. No one is omniscient. No one actually knows how life works, or the fundamental nature of the universe.
So how can any of us presume to define for everyone else what is true or not?
The most we can do is have our personal understanding and beliefs. This makes all information subjective. In the eye of the beholder.
To think otherwise is megalomaniac insanity.
And functional institutions not only have a responsibility to try and establish some kind of reasonable consensus about the truth, they basically can't operate without doing so.
When courts make rulings, they can't do it without establishing facts of a case. That's not "presuming" so much as it is simply functioning. There's a process for arguing details out... and an end at which details are accepted as established. Potentially subject to review, but not arbitrarily.
Regardless, people are not using the term "misinformation" in that way. They are using it for phenomena we cannot all readily observe for ourselves, and for which there is a claimed, but not actual consensus.
800 years ago it was "misinformation" to claim that the Earth orbited the Sun. Today it is "misinformation" to claim that germ theory is incorrect or that vaccines are not always "safe".
But the people using and spreading the "misinformation" meme are human and have imperfect knowledge just like everyone else. Indeed, they seem closed-minded and intolerant of others' opinions. For me, if a person uses that term, it is a clear signal that the person is wedded to a particular worldview and it is pointless to even engage them in conversation on the topic in question.
In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard? Brandolino's law comes to mind.
https://twitter.com/JermaineLong93/status/149108386670644838...
Then you can ask, "Of the qualified people, what were they saying at the time?" And if you care to dive deeper, "What evidence were they using to support their opinion?" and "What is the earliest that credible information arrived that should have changed their position?" and "Did their position change, when enough new evidence came in?"
Is there some better set of questions you can think of than mine?
Some of that's excusable by "the best information at the time was wrong" and some of it's not even wrong but the usual thing I've seen a lot of the last couple years, where some people take a limited statement as absolute or saying more than it is and then claim the original was wrong (when it wasn't) but a good deal of that compilation appears to be indefensible.
Fast forward to today. The general consensus is the vaccine typically prevents serious illness and death in most cases for the common variants. It doesn't do a great job preventing infection.
One of the mistakes those in charge made was never admitting something like the following when new, solid information was understood:
1) We were wrong. 2) This is something we've never seen. 3) We're learning as we go. 4) It doesn't do what we said or thought it would do, but it does this.
No one in real power ever says anything remotely like it. They speak in absolutes and it has gotten so bad they are choosing to misrepresent studies to suggest following a path they think is best versus admitting the studies just suck.
Misinformation flagging for something like covid was never going to be practical to implement as there was so much changing on a such a limited timeframe. Toss in politics and the governing structure of the USA and it was never going to work.
And therein lies the problem. They presented it as absolute undeniable fact, but there were no definitive studies to back up their claims at the time.
Okay. How did they come to this conclusion? We'll never know, because we're in this asymmetric war about information, where dunking on your political enemies is more important than just being transparent. Showing us how they came to that conclusion, and then going through your points 1-4 would go a long way to restoring that trust (partially), but alas they won't do it.
If someone is making an argument from bad faith, that's intentional and it's a waste of time to correct them or engage them at all.
All the "fact checking" links that are displayed now when you post about controversial subjects on social media platforms do very little to change minds and only reinforce the idea that there's some global narrative that's controlled by a cabal. They merely only serve to make people who already agree with the positions that are being linked to as fact checks better about spending time online.
... But it's difficult to get a person to care about a subject that they believe themselves to be capable of buying their way out of/ignoring the consequences of. Nothing matters to a nihilist, and they will smugly point out that we're all wasting our breath over nothing.
Our healthcare system, for the population as a whole, was awful before COVID. Hospitals that weren't at peak operating (read financial) capacity were shut down all over the country, which forced their patients to go to already overcrowded hospitals. The costs are/were off the charts. I don't think misinformation was the cause of it.
We've been dealing with this for over two years now, yet our healthcare system hasn't increased even temporary capacity in a meaningful way to account for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/06/texas-butter...
These seem to have real results.
It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few areas:
> Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”.
What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.
>In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl clutching before?
In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving into this old news story. I guess my point is that there is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a good justification for policing misinformation as strongly as some people want.
Funny how that keeps happening! I keep getting news stories that confirm my per-existing biases that the world is mean and we need internet moderators to make it all better again.
Honestly your first line kinda describes your theory here...
I don't have much reason to think that story is fake, but if a few sentences are enough for you to just write it off I'm not sure it matters what I say. There are other stories on that issue.
One of the reasons why I say this is because there absolutely was a coordinated effort to stymie the construction of the border wall and one of the proposed tactics was to use the EPA and threatened species as a foil to prevent it's construction. Cards Against Humanity employed a similar strategy: "It was revealed that the creators had purchased vacant land along the wall and "retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built." So in that sense, this isn't some unique stochastic attack on the noble butterfly center. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_Against_Humanity)
But going back to my sense that something isn't quite right, the laundry list of associations is what stood out: Bringing up QAnon, bringing up Pizzagate, bringing up Steve Bannon, and bringing up anti-maskers. If I was a propagandist, I would end up writing a story just like this. Especially because you can report that wonderful institutions like National Butterfly Center and The Children’s Museum of Denver are victims of all of the above groups. Again, not to dismiss the story entirely, but it seems to hit all the right notes.
I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual consequences of misinformation.
>Bringing up QAnon....
That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted.
How so? I am skeptical, but what actual negative consequences have resulted from this?
>"That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted."
Do you likewise feel the urge discount any story that brings up Antifa? I do. It is because in the minds of most partisans they loom larger than their real life impact. While QAnons and Antifa are completely different, they are utilized as boogeymen by ideologically motivated reporters. Still, the mention of these two groups only serve to raise my skepticism level rather than make me outright deny everything around their mention.
That part of the story is comparatively easy to check - the audio is available if you follow the link in the article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes. The quote is “I’m sorry you’re ok with children being raped.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/pblodlr/status/148758898845411328...
That’s not a rhetorical trick. It’s an attempt to smear a person or organization by slinging dirt that has no grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless lines of reasoning is part of the problem.
Moderation on say twitter /= free speech violations
I'm assuming your comments are just random from here on out. Sorry if they're not but I"m really not following what you're saying.
I don't think that makes any sense.
I think I've gotten a lot from spending time online... often in situations where there was a moderation system in place.
I would suggest that most of the time, the likely answer is "little to no different". In light of that, how many hours of one's life should be devoted to it? Almost none, probably. If improving the world is the goal, arguing on forums or Twitter is surely a terrible use of time and energy for most people (those with a massive audience, lots of money, fame, or any combination of those things, may be exceptions).
It's similar to keeping up with day-to-day national news. How often is there something actually important and actionable that one learns only by closely following non-local news, that wouldn't have made its way through the grapevine (or down to local news) fast enough anyway? Barring people who need to trade on that information or otherwise need to be very plugged-in for their job, or what have you. Yet some people try to paint following such news closely as necessary for being a good citizen. Is it, though? If I look at it honestly, the difference between checking in on what's happening nationally (or internationally) every day, and checking in once a quarter, is practically indistinguishable, in terms of what I do and what I can realistically affect. Even once a quarter is probably more frequent than necessary to achieve approximately the maximum actual real-world benefit it is likely to provide to me.
Yet people follow pundits on Twitter or read news sites daily or watch 24/7 cable news and seem to genuinely think they're a better citizen for it, rather than that they're engaging in a low-value hobby like watching daytime soap operas or following e-sports as a spectator (which are fine diversions and people should absolutely do those things if they enjoy them, but practically no-one's under the illusion that those are laudible or improving activities)
A rough list of voting one can do, in order of likelihood of it affecting anything in the real world, most-to-least:
1. Voting in local party elections/primaries/et c.
2. Voting in local elections.
3. Voting in state-level party primaries.
4. Voting in state-level elections.
5. Voting in national-level primaries (that is, conducted at the state level but for national offices)
6. Voting in national elections.
7. (Largely as an effect of how US Presidential elections work) Voting for president, specifically.
Note that this is damn near perfectly the inverse of participation rates in and media attention given to these activities, and that people will shit all over you for failing to do #7 while they themselves mostly ignore the lower numbers. Meanwhile an hour a year working with/for your preferred local party may very well be more effective than all of that voting. But "you didn't vote for President, so you don't get to complain and are a bad citizen". Horse-shit.
where's the ego stroking in that solution?
- by understanding more and more deeply, instead of possibly less.
- by having a jumpboard to learn more.
- by seeing where you stand compared to the larger picture. Understanding the opposite side instead of just seeing them as enemy of ones' own opinion.
- by seeing more people that argue similar to you. Requires categorization and grouping of votes.
- by being able to share discussions more easily and not to be bound by a single group for answers.
Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the "Gish Gallop".
In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong, wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're wrong!
Simple Sealioning example:
Sealioner: "Do you have anything to back up those figures for holocaust deaths? I see that thrown around a lot and I'm just not sure" (absolutely being a disengenuous piece of shit who's trying to slyly push holocaust denial, but indistinguishable from someone who is in fact curious, aside from that actually-curious people don't end up in these kinds of exchanges half as often as lying assholes do)
Other person who knows exactly where this is going: "Fuck off out of here with that shit."
Sealioner: "Oh my, I was just trying to ask a question. Now I'm really not sure about your position. You seem very touchy about it for someone who has the truth on their side. Can anyone help me?"
A Gish Gallop of the same thing would be throwing out "references" to holocaust denial stuff faster than they can be debunked (and dutifully ignoring the debunking).
For instance this subject got nonstop coverage on CNN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370
until Donald Trump came along and was better for ratings. Look at the subjects that constantly get flagged on Hacker News, such as:
women just can't get ahead
it's so awful that young people this day don't believe in free speech
The problem isn't with the facts of a particular incident but rather with the emotions that these topics evoke: in either case we all have our frustrations about the barriers we encounter in life and the ways we feel unheard and unsafe.
Conversations like that rapidly deteriorate into people talking about their own personal pain and suffering but with the identifying information (usually) deleted so anything valuable is gone, you might feel compelled to get involved but any of the power that comes out of groundedness is gone when people are talking in generalities, about principles, either from the "liberal" viewpoint of "this situation is fundamentally unfair" or the "conservative" viewpoint that the moral accounting has to be done accurately down to three decimal places.
Why do you care to police speech? Is it ego? It's a fool's errand.
Maybe make it a holiday.
Second to that: Data can change as we gather more knowledge about something. Covid is a prime example - in the beginning, very little was known. Some theories turned out to be mostly true, others didn’t hold up. Some advice was sound, other not. Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn’t do anything.
And some people point back and use the censorship of people who turned out to be correct as an argument that we were way too quick to leverage the 'misinformation' label to suppress the truth.
On the upside, this is one of the more respectful descriptions of the problem space in question that I've seen. It's common to act like "The other person is just a nutter, clearly."
Maybe the human race will eventually sort it out.
I used to be carefully trusty of official sources. I am no longer.
1. Create an account with clear political affiliations (american flags, laser eyes, pronouns, etc in the bio). This establishes group membership.
2. Repeat a basic message over and over and over.
This is exactly what we're seeing.
I'm 100% for allowing free and open debates. I'm not for bot- or state-controlled accounts trying to sway public opinion.
The problem here is that it takes far more effort to refute bullshit than it does to spread it.
With all of the unknowns of many of these current subjects, I would think open debate presenting theories from various sources would help find common ground.
What happens in reality is that whoever asserts greater certainty has the upper hand, particularly in the absence of genuine authority. Science is (correctly) reluctant to make unconditional promises, while con artists have no such hangups.
That's the thing about the age of enlightenment and founding of the USA era. You didn't have the internet or reddit or whatever to steal your attention. You could work through these sorts of things and when you do, you discover tons of wisdom. The founders of the USA provided no exceptions to free speech. Afterall, truly there should never be any. In fact, the freedom of religion is an even larger non-exception. Religion isn't defined, there are no exceptions.
Hundreds of years there were no exceptions and only recently have flawed humans thought up exceptions
I am not trying to be contentious, and can be wrong or stupid at times, but maybe there is an exception (or penalty) for some intentional lying from a position of trust. Like, a hired lifeguard buying insurance then saying "there are no dangers", when he knows the beach is closed due to an infestation of sharks, pollution, and whirlpools, which he has also just seen. Or maybe that is not called mere speech. Still....
John C. Dvorak was fired from his decades-long tenure at PC Magazine after he wrote a column questioning 5G technology. the US was well on its way to integrate Chinese 5G technology into our telecommunications infrastructure, and then that got pulled (I think?). somewhere in there, people made all kinds of accusations about 5G, ranging from "there's potential for ongoing health issues due to exposure, maybe" to "5G gives you covid" to "no wait it triggers the microchips in the vaccines and controls your thoughts."
the 5G rollout is fishy, not least because mild, reasonable criticism and/or asking "why do we really need this, we can already stream 1080p videos to smartphones via 4G, what else could possibly be achieved by increasing bandwidth, given that in order to do so, you need a much higher density of transmitters, maybe that's not the best idea" now lumps you in with "5G is turning the frogs gay" or whatever. you have to be unquestioningly in support of 5G deployment or else you're a Conspiracy Theorist who implicitly believes all the crazy things I said above.
case in point: the image in this post that labels "5G" (broadly!! without even the nuance of addressing any specific accusation!!!) as "outright misinformation". if you aren't the kind of person who thinks critically about these things, but agrees with the content of the post, that we're living in a deluge of misinformation and also agrees that it's impossible to police this misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way... you may come away from reading this post and viewing the associated image thinking "every possible negative thing I've heard about 5G technology is definitely, 100% 'outright misinformation'".
and this is exactly the point I'm making here: misinformation is easier than ever to produce because you don't have to poison the well, you can just dump a load of sewage right into it and then that well is forever tainted, critical thought is suppressed under a load of bullshit, then there's some new story the next day to move your attention onto the next thing.
unless we outlaw smartphones, none of this is ever going away. this is the natural consequence of carrying the Internet in our pockets.