251–260 of 342 posts
Logical fallacies should be taught in school: we also start with simple arithmetic before we move to more complex topics. (A course in formal logic seems overkill, it should be an applied course.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Care to elaborate?
We're here, so there was some advantage to our irrationality. Hating outsiders helps our children survive for example. I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.
The other issues is international, before this year US elections, US used these so called social media to "export its kind" of democracy to other part of the world, call it Arab Spring and rest of the events in middle east and recently in Turkey. It was perfectly legitimate to use them as under cover agents of democracy.
History has taught a lesson to American( sensible ones) who were closing their eyes/or unawre of world events specially and how they affected the people around the glob using "Democracy" "Freedom of speech" "human values" while violating the exact same thing at the same time.
Their bigotry has revealed in a strange way, but its too late for lots of people, for Americans and for the rest of the World.
What are the alternatives:
a). Free media the ways it should be, main stream media is polarized itself already and dictated by high in the Govt. offices.
b). Accept that democracy does not work sometimes if its helping hands are already chopped off e.g participation of civil society, feed media etc ..
c). Do not spread democracy for the sake of democracy if its more evil than dictatorship.
I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…
Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%."
Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else."
Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403730
The first comment nailed it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that "post-fact world" is even a thing is frightening.
Is the world so radically different in this regard now? I'm not disagreeing outright, but I still think that lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time. Remember the chain e-mails that were oh so popular prior to social networks? And before that, before electronics, there must have been a lot of bullshit that was spread in the written word on paper and b…
In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.
Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.
Simple answer: don't use social media. I don't understand why this is controversial. If you don't approve of the way they do business, don't use their products. I use no social media accounts and my life is plenty-full of engaging, useful discussion.
Alright, but who should people rely on? From an article posted earlier today on HN: almost all the media is colluding with Clinton/Dems: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ook1v2... Site is down so giving google cache.
All this "collusion" also didn't stop e.g. the NYT and WaPo to thoroughly report on Clinton's email server.