Elite misinformation is an underrated problem | Hacker News Reader

Elite misinformation is an underrated problem

slowboring.com

29 pointsbschne24 comments

Why not institutional misinformation? Or better yet, institutional deception? Elite misinformation sounds like elites who believe in misinformation. This concerns elites or institutions who don't believe the false info, but they're spreading it for cynical reasons.

Propaganda, basically?

Yes. They are trying to inform the unwashed masses of complicated topics so they often have to resort to word games; this is what they tell themselves. I believe this is a mistake. What I also believe is a mistake is framing issues in monetary terms. Words like "carbon tax" and "subsidy", in people's minds, mean nothing.

More concrete framing would be metrics like: numbers of deaths per year due to pollution from fossil fuels. How many homes are at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels. How many acres of arable farmland will be lost this year due to rising temperatures.

I'd rather see two animated maps: global heat map and global sea level map. This should speak for itself.

YES!!! Many people understand statistics and could help explain things to their friends and family, but when they simply refuse to include statistics, everything becomes a meaningless sea of guesses and fluff.

Yes and no. Propaganda is an interesting word. In the US it's tended to imply totalitarian style messaging, but in other parts of the world can apply to advertising as well. I quite like the neutral sense of the word, in which it's simply understood to be something that all organizations - governments, corporations, etc. engage in and you'll do well just to not be suckered in by it.

That said, propaganda isn't necessarily deceptive, but can simply be strong rhetoric.

A small niggle: I think the author misses the point on carbon tax. Not having a carbon tax literally acts as subsidy. It is not a metaphor. In polluting, you are exploiting a resource you do not own, and not paying for that exploitation is quite literally a subsidy under a just and fair economic system. It is an intervention from the baseline of a properly functioning market (one that stops people selling things they do not own).

They also seem confused, each country should pay roughly for its own global emissions impact. The coordination problem is that if one country pays but the others don't, then the paying country's industry might be outcompeted by other counties industries (who don't pay this just tax).

Those are both explicitly arguments that the author made in the article, how is he missing the point?

He didn't say the lack of carbon tax acts doesn't act as a subsidy. He agreed that it does. His point was failing to distinguish between that lack, versus literal direct payments from a government budget to fossil fuel projects, is confusing and misleading. Which is true, because while both are effectively subsidies, the incentives and challenges in addressing them are wildly different.

Subsidy does not solely refer to direct payment. It can also refer to not taxing certain goods. By that standard definition, it is literally a subsidy to not tax carbon (as in a just market it would be taxed).

Quoting Wikipedia "Subsidies take various forms— such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."

I think the author has a narrower definition of what subsidy means. They seem to think direct payment is a subsidy and other forms are "effective" subsidies. But this is a false distinction, and the fact that they project that narrow definition onto a standard economic term, does not make the initial communication false, which by the way, is from the international monitary fund, and likely directed towards an audience of the economically literate. In such a context, using the word subsidy is far from misleading.

I believe the author's point is that twisting definitions to mean something the majority do not expect, hurts credibility. In other words, adopting unusual meaning of words like "subsidy means they are not imposing a carbon tax" makes people less trusting of you.

Yes, this. I didn't know this before reading TFA. It's really bad to redefine common word usage like this.

It's not redefining the word. It literally is a subsidy to not tax carbon, according to core mainstream accepted economic principles.

Whether you agree or disagree with carbon taxes, it is simply true that not having them is a subsidy.

But the international monitary fund is talking to economists who will understand how not having a carbon tax meets the definition of being a subsidy.

There is no misuse or twisting of definition. It is an economic term being accurately used in communication with an audience of the economically literate.

Economists know this definition, yes. But, as the parent hints, this is separate from the phenomenon that the use of epistemic language that does not match the common use of a term undermines legitimacy/trust in the institution.

> There is no misuse or twisting of definition.

The denial of such perceptions in the general population will presumably have little influence on the perceptions of the general population. At worst, it will merely lead to further polarisation.

I can fully understand the desire to defend the definitions of one's own discipline, but it doesn't help with the question of how third parties perceive it.

We need to remember that outside the epistemic community of economists, giving something to someone (a subsidy) is not the same as not taking something from someone (not taxing) - and I'd guess that no amount of academic writing or passionate insisting is going to change that in the near future.

what about the implication that the people who work in institutions are "elite"?

There are a few definitions for an elite - most of these people aren't elite in terms of money by comparison to the owner of a car dealership, but if your definition is in terms of societal influence or how powerful their ideas are, then they are much higher than the dealership owner.

I wouldn't label the typical car dealership owner as elite, either. People who can buy senators or run short squeezes, those are elite: having an influence on the administration of policy definitely rivals having influence over the policy of administration.

Elon Musk still can't sell his cars in like 15 different states due to laws car dealerships put in place, so while the individual car dealership owner might not be elite, they're higher up on the totem pole than a random ivy league grad student.

I remember when this got posted before.

It's core message is in fact misinformation.

They discovered more preventable maternal deaths by looking at a wider time period. That's important new information.

It's like getting a detailed bug report of a problem you weren't aware of by a new approach like fuzzing and saying "well even though we just learned about this bug we know the bug existed before you filed the issue so I'm not going to do anything about it".

I'm not sure what you mean. The linked article on maternal mortality refers to headlines such as "U.S. maternal deaths keep rising" and "Why Maternal Mortality Rates Are Getting Worse across the U.S.", which are misleading at best if the change is solely due to looking at a wider time period. If you introduce a new fuzzing technique, and it discovers a bunch of bugs, I would also call it misinformation to send a memo asking why there are so many bugs without mentioning the fuzzing.

The guy they specifically called out wrote a big piece on it with the headline:

Despite New Manuscript, Incontrovertible Evidence Proves the Unacceptably High U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate

And the content mentions exactly what happened:

> The authors have created discrete categories to discredit the pregnancy checkbox, which, while somewhat flawed in its implementation, was not created to fabricate a problem. It was created to address an existing one. It is one of multiple sources of data we have—each with its own pros and cons, showing different aspects of maternal health outcomes—that help to provide information so that we can create actionable solutions.

> “For instance, data that come from maternal mortality review committees are broader and more in depth and reflect a longer period of time. These multidisciplinary committees examine maternal deaths well beyond 42 days postpartum and instead look up to a year after pregnancy—a critical time. Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, approximately 30% of pregnancy-related deaths from 2017 to 2019 occurred from 43 to 365 days postpartum because of several factors, including ones that the authors have discounted, such as mental health conditions, which include suicide and substance use disorder.

So their claim of unapologetic misinformation from a specific named elite is actually a couple of shitty headlines written by other people?

I would categorize the last paragraph as misinformation. I understand why it's not as simple as "pregnancy-related == cause of death is directly due to pregnancy", and the 42 day period they describe makes sense to me. If a woman dies 320 days postpartum due to a mental health condition, that is not a pregnancy-related death as any normal person would understand the term.

The most dangerous delusions are high-status delusions.

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