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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)

#301

Post by pdonis »

robomartin wrote: post #275
pdonis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we ought to demand more from the press The problem is the first word: "we". Who is "we"? Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.

> Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded. Agreed. Absolutely correct. Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?

> Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?

Why do you think education is the solution to this problem? Education by whom? Trying to answer that question just creates the same problem we have now. (In fact, if you look at how public education works, and what the explicitly stated objectives were of the people who created that system, education is the same problem we have now. The media is just another branch of the education system.)

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

#302

Post by princeb »

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…

> he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it.

i cannot even be sure that my version of truth is the truthiest version of the truth out there. i cannot say much more about the people i know, even those personally affected by various events around the world. every time i feel confident about my beliefs, i remember rashomon.

everyone is affected by bias. the only way to avoid bias is to avoid observation.

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

#303

Post by fortyrod »

I think you can still extract a small amount of useful input from todays media. I usually go with the "inverted axe-grind" metric that upvotes info that goes against an outlet's normal bias. So, anything good CNN says about Trump or anything positive that Fox says about Obama. Those are bad examples as you would wait a while for anything to leak through. Someone needs to point their magic NLP / sentiment thingy at this and automate it. That will give the SEO optimizers something else to work on, anyhow.

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

#305

Post by tcgv »

elihu wrote: post #298
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…

> There is not a technical solution to any of this. I don't quite agree with that. In general, our best means of knowing with reasonable confidence whether some event being reported on is true is our confidence in the person telling us of the event. If it's someone we know personally, that's best. In a world of billions of people, that's not possible for most world events, so we can think of trust as being transitive…

> Supposing you have a directed graph of every human who is willing to publicly vouch for the credibility of some other human, you can run something like PageRank on that to determine the degree to which you should trust some random reporter.

I'm not sure that would work particularly well. People are often subject to Confirmation bias and Authority bias which lead them to put too much credibility on people who say what they want to hear or who hold a position o power.

Your idea would only work in a context where we can trust participants to make accurate judgements of credibility.

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

#306

Post by phobosanomaly »

TheDong wrote: post #299
phobosanomaly wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regard to the first point, I meant those particular religious texts you cited. I'm a huge fan of nonfiction books in general. When I open NYT, Politico, and WaPo I see: > Justice Dept. Plans to File Antitrust Charges Against Google in Coming Weeks > Justice Department expected to file antitrust suit against Google > The Justice Department could file a lawsuit against Google this month, overriding skepticism from…

Ah, yup, on the first point I misunderstood what you meant. Apologies for reading your comment in a poorer light than it was. We agree in some broad strokes, but seem to disagree on other points. The original comment I wrote was contesting the idea that averaging multiple points of view necessarily mean that you're getting closer to the truth. It can mean that, but it doesn't have to if there's a shared underlying bi…

In retrospect, when you look at that particular example I gave, I'd maybe have to say you're right.

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

#307

Post by lmm »

acqq wrote: post #149
ardy42 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a…

> 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…

> 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 the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.

Really? My memory is that the media reports made it very clear that the "weapons of mass destruction" narrative was false; that was what the whole David Kelly affair was about.

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

#308

Post by humaniania »

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…

Probably because what happens on a single city street or block isn't reflective of the thousands of other streets and blocks in the city and the dozens of people involved aren't reflective of the thousands upon thousands who are peaceful and justifiably angry about the current state of policing in the USA.

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

#309

Post by macintux »

kortilla wrote: post #288
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…

But you still don’t know what’s going on in the world. You just know slightly more superficial coverage of the topics du jour that NYTimes, WaPo, etc care to push. It’s worse to read the news and think yourself informed than to be ignorant and know it.

I've found that most people who recognize their ignorance are those who've tried to defeat it.

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

#310

Post by cortesoft »

princeb wrote: post #302
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…

> he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. i cannot even be sure that my version of truth is the truthiest version of the truth out there. i cannot say much more about the people i know, even those personally affected by various events around the world. every time i feel confident about my beliefs, i remember rashomon. everyone is affected by bias. the onl…

You can't avoid bias, but there are certainly mitigation techniques.
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