I tend to be very skeptical and have a good sense of whether somebody's feeding me bullsh*t. I'm genuinely surprised by some of the things I see those around me just blindly accept. I hope when I'm a parent, I can instill a healthy sense skepticism in my child.
The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#52The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy. That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves. My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institution…
You make some excellent points, but your dig at Murdoch undermines your point. The fact is that we live in an age of pervasive advocacy. Everyone has a side and everyone musters the best arguments for their side. It’s something we expect of lawyers—to make whatever arguments on behalf of their client that can be made within the threshold requirements of good faith and plausibility. But now we see it everywhere. News…
You are grouping lobbying organizations with what were traditionally considered news organizations. So sure, I agree that is an appropriate description of the end result of the fourth estate arbitraging its trust away. But it doesn't really address the general problem with that trust having been sold off.
If everything in mainstream media is modulated by advocacy for one commercially-expedient policy or another, then a person might as well throw a dart and choose a random authority on the web. At least there is a better chance that the wrongness will be uncorrelated (flat earthers) rather than deliberately malicious in support of some corporate agenda.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#53The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy. That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves. My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institution…
> Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally. This analysis reverses the causality. The point of privacy systems…
Eliminating reliance on trust, hence, eliminating trust, is a stated aim of Bitcoin:
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's taken me most of five decades to pick up the skill. That bodes poorly for generalised skillsets. There's a generalised rebuttal to calls for greater intelligence / education as a solution to problems: All the children aren't above average. And if your solution to some circumstance is to make them so, or pretend that they are, you are going to be having a bad time. I'm not against education. I'm against having it…
I dont know man, taking almost 50 years to learn basic rhetoric skills that should have been taught to you during high school english seems like a knockdown argument in favor of education.
I may have been a particularly poor student, subject to a particularly poor education.
Signs suggest neither lagged the median by much.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally. This analysis reverses the causality. The point of privacy systems…
Eliminating reliance on trust, hence, eliminating trust, is a stated aim of Bitcoin: What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Sure, but it is only a selling point if people desire that property for preexisting reasons.
Before Bitcoin every other digital payment provider was either shut down or forced to move to reversible identity-based transactions. People were forced to trust them to transact, only to have that trust repeatedly betrayed - eg Paypal horror stories.
So I wouldn't say that Bitcoin itself is responsible for "[trusts] removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally", but rather that it's filling a niche created by traditional institutions' destruction of their own trustworthiness.
A destruction that ultimately came about because those institutions were unable to refrain from trying to police customers' business, after said business became more legible (no longer opaque) due to the rise of computing technology. Concretely, there would be much less demand for Bitcoin if say government et al didn't corrupt the banking system in an attempt to stop individuals from altering their own state of mind. But alas they couldn't resist pulling that lever, and when they didn't get the full result they wanted, they kept trying to force it until it broke.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eliminating reliance on trust, hence, eliminating trust, is a stated aim of Bitcoin: What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Sure, but it is only a selling point if people desire that property for preexisting reasons. Before Bitcoin every other digital payment provider was either shut down or forced to move to reversible identity-based transactions. People were forced to trust them to transact, only to have that trust repeatedly betrayed - eg Paypal horror stories. So I wouldn't say that Bitcoin itself is responsible for " [trusts] removal…
The question wasn't selling points, but design foundations.
The principle of technology reducing trust is a general one I'd first considered a few years ago. Bitcoin is a specific instance, as are numerous other surveilance, manipulation, and scoring systems. Shoshana Zuboff beat me to the punch by a good three-to-four decades with her three laws of automation and information, in The Age of the Smart Machine (published 1988, based on research in the late 1970s):
1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.
2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.
3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machi...
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but it is only a selling point if people desire that property for preexisting reasons. Before Bitcoin every other digital payment provider was either shut down or forced to move to reversible identity-based transactions. People were forced to trust them to transact, only to have that trust repeatedly betrayed - eg Paypal horror stories. So I wouldn't say that Bitcoin itself is responsible for " [trusts] removal…
The question wasn't selling points, but design foundations. The principle of technology reducing trust is a general one I'd first considered a few years ago. Bitcoin is a specific instance, as are numerous other surveilance, manipulation, and scoring systems. Shoshana Zuboff beat me to the punch by a good three-to-four decades with her three laws of automation and information, in The Age of the Smart Machine (publish…
Without the selling point, it wouldn't have been adopted and we wouldn't be talking about it.
I think we're talking past each other, and perhaps I didn't make my original point clear: Attributing a lack of trust to specific technologies themselves is a red herring that obscures the deeper cause for the trend. In fact I'd go further and say that the usual pattern is the adoption of insecure naive technologies, with demand for security features only occurring after bad actors arrive. (Interesting link, I'll have to check it out)
I think the bigger picture with transaction systems is that such trust was never scalable in the first place. Businesses took computing technology and naively tried to scale up the old way of doing things - knowing a limited number of people by face. Hence national ID numbers and surveillance databases with [social] credit scores - to keep it hard to "run away" as running away was becoming easier.
And that worked for several decades while that network was effectively small so nodes on it could be trusted. But rather than ever rearchitecting for the realities of the new environment, they simply attempted to fortify its fundamental flaws (hence "identity theft"), and now creative destruction here we go.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#58Earlier 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.
Wouldn't we just assume "fake news" is optimized for virality, being a contrivance in the first place.
Yes. But the follow-up question is how is this news optimized for virality, moreso then factual news.
I'm suggesting that it has a general information theoretic advantage.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't we just assume "fake news" is optimized for virality, being a contrivance in the first place.
Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x according to https://justpublishingadvice.com/is-writing-non-fiction-more... , which is about the effect size of the Twitter study.
>Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x
That stat refers to money spent buying new books and ebooks, I think. It excludes e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines, and online reading, like blogs and special-interest websites, doesn't it? An extremely large majority of which is non-fiction, I'm guessing.
Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s way older than that. This is just one I know off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many other, older, examples. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-...
Yes of course; but it's the earliest one I remember being a purely online phenomenon that suckered people in.
Besides, of course, the stupid lists of factoids that used to get emailed around - duck quacks don't echo etc.