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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#531

Post by moralestapia »

premium-komodo wrote: post #506
dqpb wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.

Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.

Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life.

I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#532

Post by Wowfunhappy »

oh_sigh wrote: post #490
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #446

"The boy who cried wolf", comes to mind. If you spout a bunch of nonsense about Climate Change being a hoax, don't be too surprised when a lot of people start ignoring or even deriding the things you say. Even if the wolf does eventually show up.

So this is the fault of the people who were probably right. And it is not the fault of the people who told them to be quiet and that they believed in conspiracy theories.

No, I’m not assigning blame per se. I’m saying that no one listened to a specific set of politicians who had previously cried wolf, and told everyone else not to listen either. And I still think that’s good advice.

But if the information comes from someone I can actually trust, I’ll pay attention. That’s how trust works, in a world where it’s not possible for me to personally be an expert on everything and I have to take others at their word.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#533

Post by ed25519FUUU »

caddemon wrote: post #425
slg wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.

I'm not the one that was originally asking for regulation on the social media companies, I just think there are too many fundamental differences between current social media sites and newspaper editorials for that analogy to work. Personally I feel social media sites have taken some of the moderation too far. I don't have a problem (in a legal sense) with the algorithmic feed downweighting various topics or adding li…

The Hunter Biden story deserves so much more investigation. It’s a huge story that nobody wanted to touch because it might mean Trump wins again. They went as far as banning even discussion of it. A massive editorial failure that’s going to hurt media’s credibility for a long time.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#534

Post by amoorthy »

One of the reporters Matt Yglesias mentions as having done a decent job of reporting on covid-19 in the early days is Julia Belluz at Vox. My startup rates how informative news stories are and we found that Julia was among the top 10 reporters on covid in the early days. https://blog.thefactual.com/credible-journalists-covid-19.

I don't know if all the reporters on our list parroted the same narrative on covid's origins but I suspect they collectively remain a generally reliable source of information on healthcare issues.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#535

Post by Mountain_Skies »

edgyquant wrote: post #301
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

I've been on Facebook since you needed an edu address. I've never had anything I posted flagged in anyway until recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. A friend posted a photo of a person filling up buckets with gasoline. I responded with "An oldie but goodie" and a photo of a woman filling up plastic shopping bag with gasoline. A couple days later I got a notification from Facebook that I was spreading disinformation. The image I posted was from 2019, not 2021 their notification said. As punishment, my future posts for a unspecified amount of time will get low ranked in everyone's feeds. Problem is, I never claimed the image was from 2021. I even called it an oldie. I've never run into trouble with Facebook's truthiness machine before but now I'm in some sort of penalty box for who knows how long. As far as I can tell, there's no way to appeal this or even let them know that their process is flawed. Facebook has labeled me as the spreader of disinformation and that's the end of it. Nothing else can be done. Their judgement is final. These are the people we want controlling the flow of information and this is the process we want them to use to do it?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#536

Post by oh_sigh »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #532
oh_sigh wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is the fault of the people who were probably right. And it is not the fault of the people who told them to be quiet and that they believed in conspiracy theories.

No, I’m not assigning blame per se. I’m saying that no one listened to a specific set of politicians who had previously cried wolf, and told everyone else not to listen either. And I still think that’s good advice. But if the information comes from someone I can actually trust, I’ll pay attention. That’s how trust works, in a world where it’s not possible for me to personally be an expert on everything and I have to…

I think the harmful thing is not that no one listened, it was that you were actively told to not listen by major media outlets, and that they were conspiracy theories, or racist.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#537

Post by edgyquant »

jkhdigital wrote: post #321
edgyquant wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

Because it is? Telling someone what to think is the fastest way to guarantee that they will not listen to anything you say.

I’m simply responding to someone giving an idea that is already out there and doesn’t work.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#538

Post by JPKab »

neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.

Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.

Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.

It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....

Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.

Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.

That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#539

Post by [deleted] »

tootie wrote: post #460
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #297

Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments. They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals. We can provincially argue about who c…

That's a pretty bizarre take considering how incredibly narrow their authority is. The hottest hot takes on this topic all came from elected officials and second-rate professional media.

[deleted]

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#540

Post by Animats »

moralestapia wrote: post #519
Animats wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

>In the intelligence community What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.

The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4.

4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:

- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.

- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.

- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.

- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.

- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.

- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.

- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.

- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.

This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf

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