The Evil is in the Fuzz: Misinformation as the root of disorder | Hacker News Reader

The Evil is in the Fuzz: Misinformation as the root of disorder

medium.com

3 pointsironmagma10 comments

> BEWARE those who seek to undermine what seems obvious to you.

Can’t really say if the author is trolling the reader here!

Thanks for reading. It's an impassioned art piece / blog post.

This. Problem is exactly that two parts of the people are now firmly living in separate realities and opposite things seem obvious to them. And both are delusional. There's no way "fighting misinformation" can fix this.

There are many things that people disagree on that seem obvious to both parties. However, there are also many more things people agree on that seem obvious to both parties. Time after time, new doubt is injected by Fuzzers, and that is what we need to fight. Each year there’s something new to be uncertain of that we were certain of before.

It only means that the system will naturally self-evolve in direction where opinion of people who can be easily manipulated will weight less and less. I can only see it as beneficial. It may improve the general level of the politicians' personalities at least to where it used to be in the Good Old days, perhaps better.

When incoming information is so fuzzed that it is indistinguishable from random noise, no amount of discernment or wisdom can help you.

Well, the elites can make decisions based on objective data, gathered using noise-free sources it controls. It should be enough. I haven't seen much politicised nonsense on a Bloomberg terminal.

> objective data

> noise-free sources

These things do not exist, or at least the effort required to obtain them is effectively infinite. Economic data is provisioned on a “best we can do given the constraints” basis, similar to everything else. It’s just that there’s a little bit more resources available to accuracy. Even the strongest water filter can’t remove chemical pollutants.

I think the fundamental problem is the characterisation “misinformation”. As a reasoning device it is useless and in fact, counter productive. “Misinformation” as used now is a dog whistle for stuff that does not agree with one’s world views. This leads to search for “experts” who are arbiters of facts and this system is always abused.

IMO, a reasoned discourse involves stating hypotheses that can be disproved and providing evidence that disproves them.

I agree that is the ideal. However there is still the realm of unprovables (and undisprovables). Further we learned during COVID that the burden of proving or disproving something can be extremely high, and sometimes a heuristic is the best that can be done, especially on a short deadline (do I mask or not mask? It takes weeks to do tests and I need to decide now).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com