Disinformation and Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Taleb [video]

Disinformation is the buzzword of the day on all sides of many debates, but as far as I have researched the issue, I cannot find a logical and systematic presentation of it as a concept. Mr. Taleb certainly did not do it in this video, though perhaps his intellect and reasoning ability should be adequate for the task.

I cannot grasp what people mean when they say misinformation/disinformation". Since there are several different ways of lies (simple lie, spin, omission, leading statements, assumption injections, etc) and different types of knowledge each with different types of research (empirical research is just one out of many kinds most appropriate in technical knowledge, but wanting when doing history/philosophy/reflection). And, each of us is liable to make a error in logic, judgement, interpretation or perception (of information).

When we accuse someone of disinformation, do we mean that we have researched, weighed and logically derived objective conclusion, cutting though all the different ways information can be interpreted in various context, and the other person made an error somewhere within the chain?

It seems that disinformation seems to be a label generally used as a short-hand for aggressive dismissal with moral overtone (signaling one's own moral superiority) when facing disagreement (in majority of cases, and prolific in media, forums, etc).

I would side with K. Popper (to some degree) that rather than disinformation alone being the real problem, we are struggling collectively of false confidence in our knowledge - fact-ism , scienctism, wrapping them and staking our ego on our opinion. Sometimes we go as far as assuming that information is knowledge (as also reflected in algorithmic dominance in all our spaces we inhabit).

> "Likewise we cannot generalise very easily from what information is given to us by the press or on twitter or on social media. We can generalise [pretty good] with some training, but we are not natually good at it.

So you will have a deficit in our understanding of reality, and that's what disinformation plays on"