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Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

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Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#241

Post by phobosanomaly »

icelancer wrote: post #237
phobosanomaly wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I…

>> Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Consider that maybe them ingesting news from the President and other "news sources" are the reason they think this. Not because they are ignoring the world. If they ignored the world around them, they wouldn't have an opinion at all. So in that case, how good is the consumption of information? This is a lot like…

I don't mean to be dismissive of your argument. I'm trying to follow it. However, your argument seems to be for a country of passive, ignorant sheep that let whoever is in the White House do whatever they want?

The problem in '03 wasn't that people were reading too much, it was that they had no idea what was going on. The more you read, the more news from the President becomes contextualized, and you can have a more nuanced opinion on it. If the President says "Iraq bad" and you don't know anything about Iraq, it's hard to go "well, actually, it's a little more complicated than that."

Edit: I have a masters in international affairs. But, when I want to talk international affairs, the person I call up is my buddy with a high-school diploma, not people from my cohort. My less-formally-educated friend reads widely, and has a much more grounded take on everything going on around us that sometimes makes me stop and rethink my own opinions. The power of reading widely and often is pretty spectacular in my opinion, and can sometimes trump a formal education in a subject.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#242

Post by throwawayinfo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #240
minimuffins wrote: post #117

The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…

> Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist. But now the people they were gathering the facts from are connected to the internet. Local newspapers often had a police blotter publishing the police reports in the locality. Now you…

This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of data out there is increasingly important. As such, the need for these megacorp publishers is going away.

Edit: Just look at the BLM movement. Lots of people believe these are peaceful civil disobedience and lots of people believe they're communist race riots. Right now, the question is basically "who do you want to believe?" I don't claim to have an answer but I just hope that the right ideas will win in an open space with small creators.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#243

Post by acqq »

ardy42 wrote: post #166
acqq wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history." Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about th…

>> I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold. > Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source…

> to criticize it for not being perfectly accurate is to misunderstand what it is.

I gave example where the news were completely and utterly false compared to what the real truth was -- that's not just "not perfectly accurate" but completely opposite of the truth.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#244

Post by iagovar »

minimuffins wrote: post #117

The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…

Specialized publications. But you have to pay for them, and they typically aren't really the news, and use some jargon.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#245

Post by mekkkkkk »

chongli wrote: post #234
snarf21 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best approach is to read a story from a left, right and centrist source. The intersection of "facts" is probably all true and the things that point far one direction or the other are probably in the middle somewhere.

This is the argument to moderation [1] also known as the golden mean fallacy. If one person says the sky is blue and another person says the sky is yellow, by taking the middle position you would conclude that the sky is green. This is clearly not correct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

That's such a stupid example though. I'd assume the sky was looking in such a way that it could be interpreted as either. A nice sunset gradient perhaps? Averaging the color spectrum values or hypothetically mixing colors is ridiculous.

If you have reason to assume atleast some measure of good faith, I think it's reasonable to try to cancel out biases between sources to get closer to the truth.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#246

Post by unethical_ban »

blhack wrote: post #78

It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that the…

To be clear, it is not that bad, which is the point. Many cities protested without these issues. Most protesters are nonviolent. Most cops are not directly evil (murder, assault, intimidation).

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#247

Post by ledauphin »

kaesar14 wrote: post #150
ledauphin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to think this proves the point. Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of peo…

Saying things like, "look, it really is better!" when wages haven't gone up in 50 years as college has gotten twice as expensive in the last 20 I think is really missing the point and being overly dismissive of people's life experiences. Price gouging because kinds of healthcare most people weren't really getting a few years ago? My best friend was billed 1100 dollars for an ambulance ride and 4000 dollars for a rece…

not intending to dismiss real challenges! merely pointing out that often news media talk about these things like society is crumbling, when they really aren't indicative of that.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#248

Post by bromuro »

minimuffins wrote: post #117

The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…

It is your perspective, similar to “The World as Will and Representation” by Schopenhauer:

> Schopenhauer argues that the world we experience around us—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself (i.e. independently of how it appears to the subject’s mind). Our knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves.

I like to think that the recent physics discoveries are crossing the same line.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Repres...

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#249

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #125
blhack wrote: post #78

It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that the…

Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out. edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of…

[deleted]

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#250

Post by NortySpock »

iagovar wrote: post #244
minimuffins wrote: post #117

The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…

Specialized publications. But you have to pay for them, and they typically aren't really the news, and use some jargon.

"The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free..."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalle...

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