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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)

#351

Post by macintux »

kortilla wrote: post #349
macintux wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t take an attempt to learn about heart surgery techniques to recognize that you can’t perform or have any meaningful opinions about heart surgery.

People who don't follow the politics or news regularly often believe that complex problems have simple fixes, hence the popularity of soundbite politics.

The only computer person I've ever met who was confident he knew everything there was to know about computers had never strayed outside building desktops.

The more you know about something, generally the more you recognize how much more there is to it that you don't know. A first-year medical student almost certainly is more keenly aware of how complex open-heart surgery is than someone whose knowledge is limited to watching it on Scrubs.

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

#352

Post by nswest23 »

ardy42 wrote: post #213
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…

> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Honestly, I think the standards you seem to be setting for yourself are too high. As far as I know, none of us are God, so it is completely impossible for us to know what's going on in the world. > according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material int…

It sounds like you're suggesting that it is possible to get unbiased factual information about the world? Am I correct in that assessment? I think that's what the parent comment was saying is not really possible to do and I think is the salient point and something that I agree with.

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

#353

Post by elihu »

Rayhem wrote: post #300
elihu wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wouldn't this directed graph endorsement approach just devolve into more followers = more endorsements? There's nothing built into the system to ensure quality whatsoever.

That's why I mentioned anti-endorsements. Pure PageRank doesn't have any notion of negative reputation, so by itself it's more of a popularity metric than a quality metric.

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

#354

Post by Craighead »

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…

Your comment will be used in the future to explain what comment gaslighting looks like.

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

#355

Post by whiddershins »

Nasrudith wrote: post #316
whiddershins wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone was peaceful all day and then commits murder, maybe the murder only takes 5 minutes, or 30 seconds ... would you proceed to characterize their day as mostly peaceful? I mean, mathematically yes, but it points to how this word ‘mostly’ is what journalism teaches is a weasel-word. It renders the statement meaningless.

Well there is your problem - you are literally treating a large collection of very different people like a single person or hive mind. Seriously pause and reflect since that usually comes up with very severe bigots and is pretty far down the dehumanization ladder.

Not at all, I am protesting an abuse of the language that makes for a nearly Orwellian level of nonsense in thinking and speech.

‘Most of the protestors were non-violent’ is an intelligible and probably accurate statement.

‘Mostly peaceful protests’ first of all intrinsically refers to the protest as a singular entity, not addressing the individuality. That’s not my doing, that’s in the phrase, making the protest the subject, as opposed to the people.

Secondly if you reread what I wrote, my main complaint is that the word ‘mostly’ is what journalistic editors refer to as a ‘weasel-world’. Weasel words make a statement that sounds descriptive but in fact could apply to almost anything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

Moving past semantics, it is worth noting that the violent protestors would be completely ineffectual without masses of nonviolent protestors to hide among.

Anyway, I would love it if this writing falls on receptive eyes, I am concerned that the implication you made: that what I am writing is bigoted, could indicate you are not very interested in what I actually mean.

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

#356

Post by kortilla »

macintux wrote: post #351
kortilla wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t take an attempt to learn about heart surgery techniques to recognize that you can’t perform or have any meaningful opinions about heart surgery.

People who don't follow the politics or news regularly often believe that complex problems have simple fixes, hence the popularity of soundbite politics. The only computer person I've ever met who was confident he knew everything there was to know about computers had never strayed outside building desktops. The more you know about something, generally the more you recognize how much more there is to it that you don't…

People who read the NYTimes/WaPo are the ones who enjoy sound bite politics. Whether it’s a 8 paragraph article or a 20 second sound bite, they are the same class of understanding.

Someone who is ignorant and understands what not knowing something means eschews sound bite politics and any other simplifications due to all of the biases that come with any reduction.

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

#357

Post by abbub »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #263
margalabargala wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is claiming the protests are 100% peaceful. The question, then, is how much violence occurs relative to total protest activity? If fewer than 50% of protestors engage in violence, wouldn't it then be accurate to describe the protest as 'mostly peaceful'?

It gives a false impression. If even a few percent of 10s of thousands of protesters is looting and rioting that can do enormous damage.

So the ‘few bad apples’ argument is valid for police force that they’re protesting, but not for the protestors?

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

#358

Post by mitchdoogle »

KoftaBob wrote: post #212
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…

The vast vast majority of news isn't actionable in our daily lives, at all. At the core of it, we read the news to satisfy our human curiosity. Once I came to realize this, it was like a weight was lifted off me. For the last few months, I've only been reading news regarding specific topics I'm genuinely interested in (new gadgets, tech/startups in general, new skyscraper projects, etc). This way, it's like I'm readi…

As they say, "Ignorance is bliss"

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

#359

Post by robomartin »

pdonis wrote: post #301
robomartin wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

When I went to high school --in a third world country-- I studied logic, philosophy, read the Greeks, learned and practiced how to take apart and understand arguments and, generally speaking, learned about things that have escaped US-based educations for decades (I also attended elementary and high school in the US...it's a long complicated story of a family moving around too much). A simple example of this was that I could draw and name all of the capitals of every nation in the world on a blank map of the world (literally, the perimeters of each continent and nothing else on the map. The same for major mountain ranges, peaks and rivers.

The point isn't that finding Aconcagua and Everest on a blank map of the world prepares you for life. The point is to say that our 18 year old leave school without any real marketable skills, unable to think and analyze arguments, engage in real critical thinking and are utterly ignorant about almost everything outside their home town, not to mention the world.

It should come as no surprise that professional manipulators are able to do as they please with an audience steeped in ignorance and unable to exercise critical thinking. The simplest example I have of this is the unimaginable, unthinkable reality to anyone who has lived in any one of, say, two dozen countries, that you have US universities and US college students and graduates actually believing that Marxism, Socialism and Communism are good things. I mean, I can't think of anything more ignorant than that very, very real condition in US education.

It is laughable beyond description to anyone who has lived in almost any country south of the US border, a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe and a bunch of other countries in Africa and Asia.

And yet the young in the US are graduating from high school without skills in logic and critical thinking and then enter college to be pumped with precisely what millions of people who emigrate to the US or aspire to emigrate to the US are escaping.

If that's not the foundation for disastrous results I don't know what is. And it is all centered around a horrible derailment of our system of education.

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