Now they look more like prophets. That world is increasingly the world we live in. The question becomes, how can we stay sane in that world? How can we find enough actual truth (truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is) in order to function? To function as individuals, and to function as a society? How do we deal with this?
(Lets call this approach digital villages for the sake of argument).
We have lots of examples of digital villages working - forums, subreddits, chatrooms, MUDs, etc etc. Maybe it's a case of worse is better? Or maybe everyone who implements web of trust immediately tries to jam crypto in there and turns off all the normal people? What do you think?
I tend to think lots of social spaces have been engineered by engineers, not people. The tech has been more important than the value it can bring in a human context. (Exaggerating for emphasis here, it’s not black and white but functionally true)
Big fan of the Six Idea’s (M.J. Adler) for meaningful life that is fairly universal: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty - the ideas we judge by; and Liberty, Equality and Justice - the ideas we act on.
I feel a food online social space should strive for high marks in these areas.
I think the point of the postmodernists was that was always the world we live in, it's just that the Internet has made it much more visible and we can see the fraying and the contradictions. It's just that, for a fairly narrow window of time and societies, there was enough of an honor culture about being caught lying that the discourse-reality matched fairly well the actual reality. But even in the 20th century that required hiding a lot of perspectives, or only slowly and begrudgingly acknowledging them.
There's a distinction of degree but not of kind between "presenting the version of events most favourable to yourself" vs "presenting an entirely fictional version". I don't know how we get that back.
I’ve never considered the post-truth perspective as having anything to do with intentional misrepresentation, but rather relativism (which is dangerous in other ways, imho). Outright lying has been used by authoritarians, but it really seems like we need a term to describe societies controlled by blatant, obvious lies (which is where I would consider the US at the moment). People like to use fascism, Marxism, etc., but those used similar techniques, for very different ends.
Agitprop.
It's not just blatant, obvious lies. It's lies *designed to agitate people". I mean, the goal is "media engagement" (and secondarily, "political engagement"), but that comes downstream from getting everybody stirred up.
Edit: Literally took 5 minutes for the first downvote, despite not mentioning a single "issue". What's that old phrase? QED?
Live a little. Go ahead and share your perspectives. The maximum downvote damage is -5 points. You'll survive. I'll upvote you even if I disagree. Unless they're just the standard talking points from one side or another on some contentious topic, which is too boring to upvote.
Again, this is just an example, not my personal agenda. What I want to point out is that we've normalized that there are a handful of forbidden topics that you will get punched for if you approach them with anything but a pre-formed opinion that matches the status quo.
Edit: And just as a turn of the screw, I'm going to say that the COVID vaccines are pretty shit compared to ones like smallpox, polio, and rabies vaccines, which actually (and sometimes retroactively) prevent you from getting the disease you were vaccinated against. Oh heck, I'm not allowed to say that thing that we all know. I mean if you take a high level view of it, they take the edge off the problem, but they still kind of suck.
Here we go, as requested:
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/16/world/europe/ukraine-cris...
> One voter, Grigory Illarionovich, told CNN, “I’m for restoring Crimea to Russia. Returning what Khrushchev took away.”
> Another voter in Perevalnoye, Viktor Savchenko, said he would never vote for the government in Kiev. “I want us to join Russia, and live like Russians, with all their rights,” he said.
> Victoria Khudyakova said she also had voted to join Russia, which she sees as being “spiritually close” to Crimea. “For me, Russia is an opportunity for our Crimea to develop, to bloom. And I believe that it will be so,” she said.
[...]
> CNN analyst and Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner similarly stressed that Sunday’s vote was in no way staged. “When you look at the celebrations, you can’t doubt that these people really are very happy,” he said.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/06/591266939/how-people-in-crime...
> DEMID KUPAYEV: (Through interpreter) I witnessed how babushkas came up and said, thank God the time has come for Crimea to return to its historic homeland.
> KIM: Kupayev says international sanctions have made finding work in commercial shipping harder. But like many Crimeans, he calls economic hardship the acceptable price of joining Russia.
- Two dead, 23 wounded in a Russian strike on a Ukrainian medical clinic
- Ukraine secured military aid, including advanced fighter jets, at the G-7 summit
- Zelenskyy arrives at G-7 summit in Japan as leaders ramp up pressure on Russia
- Russia attacked the hometown of Ukraine's Eurovision band just before its performance
Fair and balanced reporting, right there. The first and last bullet points aren't at all the bald-faced examples of atrocity propaganda that we've just accepted as part of our daily feed.
Next, they're going to be raping nuns on tables[1] and throwing babies out of their incubators[2].
[1] http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/ComeingU...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony#:~:text=In%2....
I was expecting something controversial. :)
The counterargument of course is that the region was annexed by aggression, which is dangerous to legitimize. Letting the bullies win is a recipe for creating more and bigger bullies.
But sometimes there are no good answers. I don't know any trustworthy sources of information from that area (only expats and news reporting which are all various degrees of clueless and biased).
Avoiding inflicting war on a reluctant people sounds humane. Restoring national sovereignty to a conquered people sounds noble. Impeding the spread of territorial aggression and natural resource theft sounds righteous.
Personal opinion, pragmatic I think: You can't retake Crimea without obliterating Russia. You can't obliterate Russia without horrifying consequences. Don't retake Crimea, but draw a very clear and public line, and allow no concessions regarding the next Crimea (Ukraine). This turns out to be very close to the foreign policy of most of the world.
And Crimea is strategic. Look at a map. Without it, the Ukraine and its ports are always under threat from the whims of Russia.
It’s probably true that you can’t crush Russia without serious consequences. Unfortunately, you can’t let it win territory without very serious consequences either.
This follows its own tragic logic now and you (we) can’t wish for a nice solution that has no consequences down the line. Letting Russia off the hook is a terrible precedent.
We were asleep when Russia took Crimea, and unprepared to react with anything more than stern words. We were not ready for Putin. He obviously saw the opportunity, took the risk, and he won.
It would be tragic to return to a world where aggressive expansionism is the norm.
But fighting back through Crimea would be tragic also. And it's not clear we would have the support of the locals. That's courting disaster even before you contemplate that the opposing leader is mercurial and nuclear.
My opinion is that we have to take the L on Crimea, but make it clear that the world is not sleeping any more, and that Ukraine is not next on the menu.
Syria is an important example. US bluster doesn't carry much weight in the world these days.
But the situation in Ukraine is very different. It astonishes me that there's political disagreement on Russia's aggression toward neighbors, but if we fail Ukraine it will be squarely the fault of one group of people, and it will be incredibly damaging to US interests in the world.
Leaving Crimea to Russia is not just appeasement, it’s strategically unsound.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/15/why-crimea-is-...
(The Guardian is pretty much pro-Ukraine, pro-war in general.)
There's nothing controversial about saying that it'd be better if the COVID vaccines were better!
The COVID vaccines we have are measurably better than not having a COVID vaccine, and people had worse health outcomes if they believed (acted) otherwise.
Some narratives allow nuance and some do not. Public health communication is a very problematic place for nuance, and the natural nuance of science was weaponized to serve an agenda (which was sometimes blatantly dishonest) -- so avoiding nuance became a pragmatic approach to achieving better outcomes under existing circumstances.
If you felt cancelled for holding out for the complicated nuanced reality, I can sympathize with that feeling. I can also sympathize with those who believed that focusing on the nuance would, broadly, harm people!
I’m hoping at this point we can agree that the efficacy and function of the available vaccines was overstated and the pressure campaign to take it may have been some of the most intense propaganda inflicted on a western nation in recent memory.
The best information available was being provided by epidemiologists and doctors and statisticians and researchers. It was messy and contradictory and confusing sometimes, especially in the beginning. Like science.
Other information was being provided by politicians and radio hosts and religious figures and somebody's uncle. It was speculative and invented and delusional and manipulated and dishonest sometimes, according to the whims of famous personalities and media outlets. Like gossip.
Given those options, "trust the science" is a pretty reasonable message.
Not "trust the science to have all the answers immediately and with complete accuracy and no amendments", because that is not science.
More like "trust the science over the gossip".
But I take your point. People don't understand science, so it's very easy for them to feel betrayed when science does its usual messy science things.
And of course there were stochastic parrots on either side.
That said, the "trust the science" parrots had better health outcomes than the "impeach fauci" parrots. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence -- and as a blunt social influence tool, it's reasonable to conclude that "trust the science" was the better choice of intense propaganda, if not as persuasive as we all would have liked.
It's hard to find balanced discussion on something like the status of Crimea. Which is complicated - as you say the locals are largely Russian. Then again Russia signed an agreement recognising it as Ukrainian, then invaded and used it as a base to launch war on the rest of Ukraine which they show every intention of repeating if they can.
I think the internet has other effects like amplifying niche ideas.
If you were a conspiracy nut before the internet, your local friends will set you straight and either the conspiracy theories fade from your mind or they remain stagnant.
With the internet on the other hand, you can find other likeminded people, people who will accept your conspiracy theories and share their own which you will eagerly consume, and down the rabbit hole all of you will go.
It’s like a bunch of anorexic teen girls encouraging each other and sharing tips on how to starve and throw up. Very quickly you will have a bunch of dead kids.
If it does, it will be our fault for not progressing fast enough in terms of knowledge.
There is no world in which we could, or would want to limit our growth in terms of scientific knowledge. Not to mention the fact that to do so would mean ceding full totalitarian control.
Even the concept of progress as a goal seems misguided and risky. We shouldn't assume something is better simply because it isn't what we had before. "Not worse than what we had before" is a great goal but one that requires effort and focus, it isn't a given law of the universe that all change is good simply because it's change.
Or we could try to progress everywhere, including in areas of safety from technological risk.
There will always be people looking at any advancement and figuring out how to leverage it to expand their personal capability to project power. Nothing is immune to it. Even primitives of decentralization can be leveraged in a way that defacto centralization is the inevitable outcome.
You don't research things that can't be centralized. You just don't centralize. The cost there though. Is then you have to accept certain things just ain't gonna happen.
Newcomers to the technology clamoring for it to be more centralized is a daily occurrence. It seems almost entropic, the push towards centralization. It seems to require constant effort to keep it decentralized.
True decentralization and censorship resistance requires taking the bad with the good. I'm the case of Mastodon, if I can't be censored for sharing my views on technology, politics, or sports then the person wishing to sharing illegal photographs of threats that may be illegal in some jurisdictions can't be censored either.
It raises the very interesting question of whether freedom of speech is an all our nothing concept. Very few people would support the idea of being able to say literally whatever you want, but can you really have freedom of speech at all if someone else gets to draw the bounds with which your speech much stay?
As we start to build trust economies (which really may only be the way forward), we have to start valuing integrity and discretion, or... as you say, all or nothing.
I think this has something to do with Jefferson's "the cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate", and maybe, just maybe why they insisted on educating it. I wish they'd have made it a constitutional right, along with the right to free speech.
(edit: Bing chat says, "It is true that some of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, were strong advocates of public education and believed that it was essential for a democratic society. However, they did not explicitly include it in the Constitution, perhaps because they faced opposition from other delegates who favored state sovereignty or feared federal interference. Or maybe they thought that it was implied by the preamble, which states that one of the purposes of the Constitution is to “promote the general welfare” of the people. In any case, the lack of a clear constitutional right to an education has left room for debate and controversy over the years, and has resulted in significant disparities and inequalities in the quality and accessibility of education across the nation."
That's really all that postmodern thought says really. Naturally, for a government to be right or wrong, requires that citizens be critical of it, almost actively antagonistic in their demands for reasons, evidence (be it empirical or otherwise) and clarification. Postmodern thought is a critical tool. So that's not that different than what we have right now (most of HN for instance is hyper-critical of nearly all government truth claims), only the demands on citizens are likely outpacing their resources and abilities.
It's not just "nothing is real", which is just intellectual laziness. It's noting that we always interpret the world; we can't avoid it. Ordinary interactions usually arrive at similar interpretations, but people have a remarkable way of being influenced in that judgment. And sometimes that can lead to some really bad outcomes. It's important to recognize that the potential is always there even in things that seem obvious.
Not to me. They just look like another group claiming grand and sweeping theories of truth.
Social media companies notoriously blocked users from sending a story to each other in DMs a couple of years ago. It's not a stretch to go from there to deleting past messages in order to memory hole something. And the companies may not even be doing it by choice if they're being pressured by a government.
They can't do that if your data is yours and they can't read it, instead of the only copy being on their servers.
What someone like Herbert Marcuse would claim is that there is something like a "definite negation," or Jacques Derrida would call a "trace;" that is, there, sitting behind every signifier (of de Saussure's structural linguistics) its negation of another signifier that defines its position in an ordered chain or a symbolic network. They would not argue that things are relative; rather, social life is regulated by these vast signifying networks that one becomes "subjectivated" in (begins to understand oneself as a subject), where one's "agency" also stands at the limits of this intelligibility: as they say, everything you "decide" is already pre-conscious; every notion of what is "possible," is limited by what is already "intelligible," i.e. what operates in the social-symbolic function as it, like an algorithm, constantly moves and exchanges its various symbolic orderings in what we call the "economy." To be a true agent means to do something which radically restructures this network and radically redefines all its terms: Foucault's "fearless speech," Badiou's "Event." The latter thinker actually explicitly rejects relativism (and is in some ways a platonist--actually many so-called "postmodern" thinkers, Whitehead among them, are considered platonists.)
The position you claim is from "post-modernism":
>"claims of truth are just assertions of power"
finds its origins in Nietzsche, who famously claimed that truth, morality, beauty, etc. were invented by the weak because they feared the powerful and they were jealous of the fact that they couldn't kill their enemies, eat fully, and have sex all the time (Master Morality, which was just doing whatever you wanted). So they rose up, took over, and invented these categories and systems of valuation in order to justify a new regime of power where nobody was able to do what they wanted, and everything was regulated by vast systems of control justified by these metaphysical notions (he refers to this as "Christian Morality.") He claims that Christian morality, after centuries of struggle, has finally won out in the Bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, but now "God" has been subordinated to "Science" while retaining all the metaphysical baggage of christianity "truth, beauty, morality," etc. This is from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, the argument from which was expanded in Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (the most widely read book from what most people would call "postmodernism").
>truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is
The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy. Truth has always been, in logic, a category: a value, specifically a boolean value. One can make claims about the structure and order of logic and the relation of that to psychological, social-processes (as Frege, Husserl, and many other "anti-psychologists" of the 19th and 20th centuries did); but to claim that language, a signifying act, somehow directly corresponds to the physical objects that it categorizes, can't really be valid: as Shakespeare said "a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." There is no reason why the words we use have any correspondence to experience--even if there is surely some reason why words can evoke experiences, emotions, like when one hears the name of a past-lover. But that can be attributed to what the "postmodernists" claim: the name evokes an entire symbolic structure and brings it to the surface of consciousness.
So in your understanding of academic philosophy, how do you account for the critical difference between the two statements below?
“Earth is flat.”
“Earth is a spheroid.”
I don’t see what is fallacious about accepting the second statement as corresponding to facts and dismissing the former for not corresponding. If it’s merely a matter of semantics regarding the words “correspondence” and “truth”, an alternative verbalisation of the critical distinction between those two statements must nonetheless be available; and it should be prioritised in discourse.
Perenially underappreciated in online discussions.
Very nice summary.
Basically I rely on my own observations and experiences: don't trust and verify, to adapt the old saying.
Second I limit myself to trusted sources of information and if I can't find one then I just don't get information on that topic: no information is better than false information.
In practice what this means is no algorithmic news feeds, I'm still looking for a good news source for my local city (haven't found one yet, I moved recently), I think a lot about incentive structures and how that might bias an information source, I (try) to apply skepticism to what I read, I block as much noise as possible (for example I don't pay attention to surface level political news because its all noise and virtually no signal), I focus on long term trends rather than "points" in the timeline.
This is far from perfect but its what has evolved as my approach over time.
Diversify your information sources.
Some doors were maybe better left unopened, we opened this one. Let's see how it goes.
A couple weeks ago when the Patriot Front had a white supremacist rally and march in front of the Washington Monument (now of the "red bike guy" fame), many prominent right wing Twitter talking heads tweeted that it must be a left wing conspiracy to make conservatives look bad and that the marchers were federal agents, despite 0 evidence of this, and indeed despite plenty of evidence that they were just actual Patriot Front members. It was difficult for me to tell if they actually believed that fairy tale, or of they felt that it didn't really matter because they knew if they shouted "fake news" loud enough they could get enough like minded people to upvote it.
It's a tactic to call everything a false flag, even your own ops. It requires virtually zero time, effort, or education to get everyone on your side doing it. Liberals fall for this trick frequently because they are obsessed with being seen to have to correct answer, so they invest for more effort in debunking than the liars did in making their claim.
Excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my head.
Whether "liberal" or "conservative", some of us still care that facts matter. And honestly I would never have worried so much about calling out so much bullshit in the past until I saw so many of my fellow (voting) citizens actually believe this BS and take it to dangerous extremes. For example, when QAnon first came out, I just smiled a bit and laughed - "This doesn't even reach the level of bad fan fiction" I thought. Yet, lo and behold, significant swaths of the US population believe this, and I find that frightening.
I realized Qanon was going to be a problem from when it first appeared, but that's because I've spent about 20 years paying close attention to mis- and disinformation and political influence groups. What I'm pointing out here is that the time costs of lying vs debunking favor liars, especially when aggregated across communities.
I know my good good friend Conservative Fearless Leader will never let me go to jail or die of preventable disease or banish my rites when I want defending.
oops... too late. at least I didn't need to be right.
It's like "Chinese whisper". I can't count the number of times my partner tells me when I come home "have you heard, there is this horribly stupid law that is coming into effect next month". Then I check, and it's not a law, but a proposal, it hasn't been even accepted to be discussed yet and the details are completely different too.
I understand, not many smart people these days go into "traditional news reporting". It's a pity, because good news reporting is a prerequisite of a well functioning democratic society
It will only get worse, as revenue from traditional news drops they'll be more and more dssperate to make money the only way they can, by increasing the emotional load of the stuff they report. Everything has to be extreme, outraging, horrible etc.
It's certainly not the only source of error, but I find that the answer to my first question ("What, where did you read about that?") is almost always "Facebook".
It's become a running joke in my household. It turns out though that some people read news as entertainment, and don't really care if it's particularly true. This is probably fine, but it breaks down when the evoked response is outrage instead of a laugh.
Just do your best.
Think fake instagram accounts with images, coercing and shaming victims for personal revenge. Shady companies selling fake stories supported by fake pictures of "satisfied" users. Influencers and celebrities making themselves look younger, prettier, fuller.
you see anyone who wants to spin a web of lies, AI as a tool makes it easier, possible and in som cases unavoidable.
The truth came out this time. To borrow from Ozark: this isn't the only time they doctored photos, it's the only time they got caught.
The obvious end state of this all will be news channels customized per-person. It's already starting with the custom-tailored Facebook/Twitter feeds. If you personally believe A, Y, and C, but not X, B, or Z, your news reports will be customized to show A, Y, and C as factual and ridicule X, B, and Z. Someone else will get presented an entirely different set of facts. Once the algorithm knows your beliefs, AI can produce an unlimited number of articles confirming those beliefs, complete with photos, videos, sources, fact checks, official reports and references.
The WSJ, Forbes and the National Review were what I considered reliably conservative sites that I use to be able to quote to conservative friends. Once they turned against Trump, they became part of the untrusted “mainstream media”.
Then when FoxNews called the 2020 election fairly, then they became sellouts and people started flocking to NewsMax. Whatever I thought of FoxNews over the years, I always thought their election night coverage was straight down the line.
RedState kicked out all of their neverTrumpers because they were losing readers.
Then conservatives started criticizing NewsMax when they would slightly push back against the “election was stolen” claims.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
We're likely going to see a few cases like this that take off while people are adapting, but this naivete won't last forever. There will always be a few gullible people, but, just like with Photoshop, we'll get to the point where most people understand what's possible and adapt their reactions accordingly.
Before that media was written text and everyone knows anyone can make up anything they want in that domain. Before that most people were illiterate so it didn’t matter much. Media wasn’t even much of a thing.
We are headed for the post-media era when any arbitrary piece of media depicting anything can be created for little or no money by anyone with a computer. Nothing can be believed unless you were there or hear it from a known reliable source that was there.
There’s going to be an ugly transition period when we have tons of people who haven’t gotten this memo yet. These people are going to be manipulated en masse with tremendous effectiveness. The push to deplatform misinformation is largely an attempt to stop this, but I think it’s futile. People just have to learn that media is dead and they can’t trust anything anymore.
Hunter Thompson was ahead of his time. The only journalism worth doing in this future is individual gonzo journalism where you go and experience and tell the tale directly to your audience. That of course is vulnerable to spin by the teller, but so are all tales. It’s the best we have. Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.
From what I gather, Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico was pretty much fanfiction (had somebody write?) about himself. This problem may be older than I thought.
(There is also the sad business of the 1932 Pulitzer https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty )
Bill Watterson had a series of strips about this in Calvin and Hobbes in 1992 [0].
> CALVIN: This is what I like about photography. People think cameras always tell the truth.
> CALVIN: They think the camera is a dispassionate machine that records only facts. But really, cameras lie all the time! Select the facts and you manipulate the truth!
> CALVIN: For example, I've cleared off this corner of my bed. Take a picture of me here, but crop out all the mess around me, so it looks like I keep my room tidy.
> HOBBES: Is this even legal?
> CALVIN: Wait, let me comb my hair and put on a tie.
[0] This is the one I quoted, but the one before and after it are related: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/09/17
That is easy enough. What is difficult is to teach people they cannot just trust the people who tell them what they want to hear.
> Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.
The odds of that are basically zero. There is no reliable way for people to know whether someone's tales are first hand or not, nor whether they are honest or not. If people stop consuming mainstream media and turn to gonzo journalism, powerful interests will manipulate information channels to direct eyeballs to the journalists they buy. The audience will not notice.
This is also about as long as we’ve had popular democracy. (Something like a fifth of Indians are functionally illiterate [1][2].)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363173220_LITERACY_....
It will require a significant mental shift to now question practically every single piece of audiovisual content.
Maybe _you_ do that, but I would not generalize, and I would not necessarily think I’m always capable of doing that myself “by default”
Instead, they will have to learn to identify good explanations and rule out bad explanations.
And that's nothing new. We have been lying since we figured out how to talk.
The sky is not falling.