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The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

wsj.com

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Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#11

Post by RyanAF7 »

Not to mention the political advantage of framing your opponents base as having poor judgment or lacking discernment by producing fake stories you know they are more likely to read, share and believe than your own base.

Politics today is far more deceptive because the speed of delivery and feedback for communications allows it to be.

Only going to get worse unless a new platform/network/protocol is created for the future of "trustless" news and publications.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#15

Post by pjc50 »

Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech.

If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check.

The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#16

Post by mieseratte »

pjc50 wrote: post #15

Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech. If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check . The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.

Reminds me a bit of “peer reviewed” vs. “reproduced.”

One would hope those journalists would employ some type of standards on what they choose to report, and how deep they investigate it to avoid confusion.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#17

Post by kibibu »

smitty1e wrote: post #6
dqpb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.

The spectacle of seeing a nominal fact-checking site go after an overtly satirical one has been an astounding result for our day. I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge. #Whoops

Do you remember Bonsai Kitten, and the breathlessly horrified email campaigns against it? People have had difficulty determining real from fake for a long time.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#18

Post by redmaverick »

Ted Bundy's mom Louise refused to believe her son was a murderer despite all evidence to the contrary. Her son admitted that he was the culprit and only that made her come out of her denial.

In a lot of third world countries it is pretty common and even expected that the average Joe will vote for whomever appeals to their emotions. Every sin of the politician is forgotten and forgiven even if the said politician has a history of inciting murder or being corrupted etc.

There is a good chance that people who voted for their candidate made up their minds long before any kind of "fake news" hit their newsfeed.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#19

Post by esmi »

rb808 wrote: post #9

I think I have the opposite problem now where I don't believe anything I'm told. Especially from friends and relatives.

I read through the article and wondered, how did they determine which questions were fake news and which weren’t? That wasn’t really addressed. Oh well, I guess I’ll just believe what I was told by the WSJ...
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