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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#421

Post by deltree7 »

cycomanic wrote: post #154
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much more expensive would it be to have "explainers" instead of "fact-checkers". We all have heard about "the same lies being repeat over and over". Well, if these lies are indeed all kinda the same, then it should be relatively easy to (1) gather a proper, extensive set of facts that disprove the lies and then (2) hire an army of war hamsters to introduce these facts into discussion - following the guid…

But that has been done again and again. Let's not talk about Covid, but climate change (which interestingly never attracted the Facebook et al fact checkers even though it is a much more existential crisis for humanity). There are many sites that debunk the arguments like "it was warmer in the middle ages", "warming can be attributed to sun activities", realclimate.org is a great resource for instance. Still the same…

'existential crisis' : citation needed backed by actual model of the universe and human behavior.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#422

Post by NoPie »

srcreigh wrote: post #417
NoPie wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that proper investigation was not done. We need more transparency and this is not what is happening. What happened with the data from these researchers? There are no indications that they were removed from the study analysis. If the problems with this one researcher is swept under carpet, how do we know that there are not number of other researchers with different problems? Without this vigilance how do…

The BMJ article, near the end, reports that the FDA actually did investigate and did find issues with the trial. > An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19. Of course, this comes after insinuating earlier that there is a complete lack of oversight. > “There’s just a complete lack of oversig…

I don't know what FDA review memorandum involves but it doesn't sound that the FDA did investigation. It could be simply that the FDA checked submitted documentation from that site and concluded this because the CRO hadn't provided any test results.

Sorry, I don't see any inconsistencies. The box clearly explains what they mean by complete lack of oversight – doing inspections many months after the trial and even then just checking the paperwork.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#423

Post by zhrvoj »

LaputanMachine wrote: post #405
zhrvoj wrote: post #374

I'm happy that Nikola Tesla didn't lived in such world. Fact-checkers are dangerous option, especially when backed-up by capital and/or politics.

I'd rather live in a world with fact-checking than in a world with gene-checking: »The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct ... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to…

This is another subject, about old NT mind before he passed away, different from theme here, and it's not to discuss further. I'm reffering to his productive days. You can take any free minded, stubborn man instead, whose ideas changed the world.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#425

Post by lifeisstillgood »

So I have a theory (wild conjecture actually).

AI needs good training sets - that is large corpuses of data about a domain, which have been accurately labelled so the AI can learn safely. Curated content basically. Image recognition software is suffering from this as all the large corpuses are basically the same three or so.

When we move into the realm of knowledge about the human world, economics, politics etc. then having a corpus is easy. Just download reddit, twitter and 4chan. But having a labelled corpus is really hard and trusting one. I mean 4chan might be able to teach an AI but you would not want it to date your sister afterwards.

Journalism is basically a means of labelling the corpus of "everything" - and it is only trusted because "most people" trust what WaPo or NYT say. And the new generation of non traditional journalists (err, Captain Disillusion?) are doing something similar.

But there is no real means to decide what is a correctly labelled corpus or what is not. We have a long process of discussing the hard stuff - from flame wars to editorial letters to courts and scientific papers.

Ultimately if we think AI is going to help us manage the flood of information (and I am not sure how else) we need to put effort into training it - and that basically means journalism. Proper Nournalism.

It's not Facebooks job to decide truth. But is it the governments job? Is it everyone's? how do we build this labelled corpus at scale public ally and with trust and verification?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#426

Post by a9h74j »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #179
goopthink wrote: post #46

In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presentin…

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…

This will be some snark in this comment, but against my own country and not you and yours. I invite a cross-cultural comment on competence.

Are the partisan fact-checkers in Spain at least competent enough to write grammatical, parsable sentences and titles?

From the BMJ OP: > It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”

Like the BMJ apparently, I first read this with a comma or mdash after 'Disqualifying' -- hence a broken sentence. With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored' -- in which case they might or might not be fact-checking a straw-man claim.

A negligible point perhaps, but the one fact-check I recall Dr. John Cambell on YT examining also included a broken sentence. (Small sample size, I know.)

To me, this speaks to the qualifications and processes of the fact-checkers under debate here, attempting as they are to adjudicate in scientific debates.

Attempting as they apparently are to define truth.

(Or perhaps Meta does A/B testing by breaking sentences in search of more engagement.)

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#427

Post by asteroidbelt »

standyro wrote: post #194
deadalus wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that BigTech funded 'news' organizations will bad-mouth and deplatform these new and different platforms as soon as they pose any threat. Their domains will be seized(Dreamhost removed Parler), infrastructure will be taken out(Cloudflare removed 8chan, Amazon banned Parler) or they will be removed from app stores(Gab was removed from both Playstore and Fdroid).

Parker and 8chan were pretty adamant about supporting literal hate speech from white power Nazis, (I say this as someone who had a Parler account and grew up with 4chan) on top of having terrible infrastructure for content moderation. I agree that free speech is important, but private businesses can decide to pull the plug if the want. It’s a consequence of speech. I’m not a fan of app stores though. Google and Apple…

> Parker and 8chan were pretty adamant about supporting literal hate speech

Parler (?) did not support (!) it. They moderated hate speech. Maybe not 100% efficiently, but in response to some examples in media Parler AFAIR posted similar hate speech examples on Twitter, which Twitter failed to moderate out.

Not fighting literal hate speech was not their policy. And no moderation is 100% efficient.

What you are saying about Parler is false (and defamation).

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#429

Post by asteroidbelt »

dado3212 wrote: post #278
thepasswordis wrote: post #208

How do we keep getting this so wrong? No central authority on truth. Not twitter, not Facebook, not the King, not the church. The fact is that many of the “facts” that twitter, Facebook, and google “checked”, they were wrong about, and they are doing j told damage to our society. Facebook is a company which, remember, performed psychological experiments on their users without their consent. Twitter has an opaque algo…

There were like 10k articles written about how FB is spreading COVID misinformation and causing people to not get vaccinated. You can't have both of these, which is the greater evil?

> which is the greater evil?

In the short term the greater evil is people not getting vaccinated.

In the long term the greater evil is erasure of free speech.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#430

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

AlexandrB wrote: post #304
ospzfmbbzr wrote: post #200

Fact checking is the business of publicly labeling as false those narratives that people with real power already viewed negatively. It becomes necessary when you lie all the time. The whole notion of fact checkers is laughable -- who pays them? Do they still get paid if they 'fact check' their benefactors? There is no debate. There is no invitation for refutation. It's propaganda.

This all sounds good, but if I assert that the earth is flat on Facebook why shouldn't that simply be labelled false so others can avoid wasting their time trying to refute a ridiculous assertion? And if you agree with that, all we're arguing about is where to draw the line between "obviously false" and "disputed" facts. > It becomes necessary when you lie all the time. There are plenty of people lying and/or griftin…

>This all sounds good, but if I assert that the earth is flat on Facebook why shouldn't that simply be labelled false so others can avoid wasting their time trying to refute a ridiculous assertion?

The particulars aren't the issue and never have been. The issue is, there's no "authority" you can trust to decide for you what is and isn't true. The particulars are of what's being discussed is a red herring.

Facebook, youtube, twitter, and reddit, all think they know better and you should trust them. It would be far less alarming if they didn't all agree with each other all the time. There's no significant political dissent between them. The present a single face. Aka fascism when they agree with the government, which they currently do.

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