Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 181 posts

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#71

Post by pdpi »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #46
chongli wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

children's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHa…

I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should th…

That description seems more appropriate for, say, Roald Dahl than it does for Pratchett.

Pratchett was, for the most part, a comedy fantasy author. Most of his writing was appropriate for younger audiences (with exceptions, like Monstrous Regiment), but I wouldn’t call it children’s books. The fact that his Tiffany Aching books are specifically aimed at the Young Adult market suggests that he agreed.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#72

Post by dmos62 »

pjc50 wrote: post #58
gregmac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct . If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem. However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to fi…

And a stopped clock is right twice a day. So all the stopped clock merchant has to do is wait for the clock to line up, then shout from the rooftops that they have the right time. It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to b…

Clocks are a great analogy. As pointed out, the problem is in verification. Say everyone has a clock and they're all showing different time. How do you actually get to the ground truth? Observe and measure planetary motion? That's too much hassle. This is where the analogy cracks a bit (or does it?). What you want is for your clock to show the same time as others' clocks do, so you join a group where you synchronize your watches. Other people join groups too, possibly with different synchronizations. Fact has become convention, subordinate to localized social utility.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#73

Post by astazangasta »

coldtea wrote: post #33
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

> Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks. It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same…

Fake news is neither about the availability of multiple perspectives, which have been around for millenia, nor about the power of the Internet, which has been around for decades, nor about misrepresentations of fact, which have been instrumental to every war the US has prosecuted in the post-WW2 period.

The term "fake news" appeared, along with an obsessive need to "fact check" and censor, following the election of Trump. It is the result of the inability of the establishment (i.e. liberal capitalists and Washington) to control narratives. Electing Trump signaled a grave threat to the control of this establishment and thus a need to tighten its failing grip on narrative.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#74

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

loceng wrote: post #34
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

I like the clock analogy - especially when tying in the solution of having digitally transmitted clocks from a source we trust, and so points to solutions that we must each decide which source(s) of trust we subscribe to. The issue then becomes funds being allocated to support this - and I like Andrew Yang's solution relating to supporting democracy (and countering impact of larger contributions by individuals or org…

The clock analogy really hit me pretty hard. At some point, even those of us who question everything ascribe authority to things that we consider to be trustworthy. When you start to look at the world through that lens, it's easy to see how so many people believe things that others find ludicrous.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#76

Post by astazangasta »

krapp wrote: post #48
coldtea wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks. It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same…

The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites. The implicit (and arguable unjustified)…

After two years of Russiagate this claim is hard to swallow. I seek out alternative news specifically because the mainstream is full of shit.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#77

Post by ryanmcbride »

hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

This is such a good analogy.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#78

Post by gdubs »

There’s a great book on the counterculture roots of personal computing and the internet by John Markoff. [1] Arguably we are in some ways living through the end result of a thought experiment conceived by a bunch of LSD tripping hippies in the 60s: “what if we wired a billion brains together? That’d be far out, right?”

Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum.

Just interesting to think about in historical context.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#79

Post by kgwxd »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #38

If you read the interview, Bill Gates rightly predicted the rise of sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading and what isn't. It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations--it's just human nature to be predisposed to confirmation bias. But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is…

One other problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'news' is different.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#80

Post by krapp »

XCabbage wrote: post #52
krapp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites. The implicit (and arguable unjustified)…

But is it equally unjustified? I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there: * If they report…

I think it is equally unjustified.

If people tended to do their due diligence about sources, then fake news wouldn't be a problem, and verifiably false and incredulous memes wouldn't have any social or political influence. But they do, because people mistake cynicism for intellectual rigor, and don't believe they need to check the sources for the alternative media, because it's enough to simply mistrust the mainstream and assume the alternative is probably correct, provided the story it tells is sufficiently cynical. As a result, any valid alternative criticisms by the alternative media are just drowned out by the racists and crackpots going on about QAnon and gay frogs.

Perhaps a lack of providing direct links to credible sources is a problem for the mainstream media, but that doesn't necessarily justify an implication that the mainstream media does so in order to protect attempts to mislead people with false information, and that, therefore, the degree of falsehood is on par between the mainstream and alternative media.

The alternative media, meanwhile, often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so. And voicing any opposition to the alternative narrative just gets you called a tool of the establishment, leading to exactly the sort of echo chamber mentality that it tends to criticize elsewhere.

Post reply on HN