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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#221

Post by Cthulhu_ »

emmelaich wrote: post #166

But what context is important or relevant or true? It's turtles all the way down. What we need is humility and good faith.

Good faith is part of the problem; you trust that a headline, an article, a summary etc acts in good faith, that you can trust journalists and the like. But they often have an Agenda, pushing a certain narrative or a certain political goal.

I mean, even when an article ticks all the boxes for being well researched, factually correct, neutral in language, even then it can be misleading for not having a counter-point (for example), or its hosting platform to de-emphasize the article.

What has more impact, a headline saying "tinfoil hats cause headaches" prominently posted on the front page of a newspaper in big impact font, or a byline four pages in?

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#222

Post by brightball »

Specific facts when a reader doesn’t know the entire story can frame the story however the author wants. Without existing knowledge of the details, a reader has no way of discerning the difference.

If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#223

Post by WesternWind »

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.

Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.

I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.

As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#224

Post by DFHippie »

It seems to me lying with facts boils down to two techniques:

1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.

2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers are representative and pre-empt the listener's getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#225

Post by pbhjpbhj »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #65
darawk wrote: post #14

I love the idea of this article, but it doesn't address the reason things are the way they are. Facts get checked for literal accuracy because that's what's easy to actually do in a reasonably unbiased way. We stop there not because that's all we want, but because everything after that is too messy to even come close to systematizing. If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextu…

Well, if we talk about the big issue of the past couple of years, we can certainly contextualize in the context of that because we have an end goal for the communication, which is to attempt to convince an individual to take action A over action B. So you can easily show high quality contextualisation - it's showing that the case against is less preferable, e.g. arguing against yourself. For example, Government poste…

>"Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, [...]" //

Couple of problems with this. People suck at maths. They also such at comparative risk analysis.

Also, you fight pandemics at the country/region level. Like some people will vote for whoever reduces their tax bill regardless of the actual outcome, some people will go out and mix with others in a pandemic if their own personal risk is low (or appears to them to be low).

Then you have the problem of trusting government. For example, here in the UK evidence suggests ministers in the Tory party used mask buying to funnel > £8Billion extra to friends and associates by having them pretend to be PPE suppliers and then sending them money for orders that were either simply not fulfilled or were fulfilled with unusable product (did they send it back, no, because it achieved the goal!). Now, you want us to trust those same people bit to lie on posters that modify human behaviour at a country-level?

Epidemiological responders only hope is to simplify and be cautious, try to prevent the government perverting the message to their own ends too much.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#226

Post by cloutchaser »

WesternWind wrote: post #223

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead. Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public spor…

I think we are in a transitional period of journalism which is why it is so crazy right now.

Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.

In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.

But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#227

Post by boppo1 »

brutusborn wrote: post #184
ouid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, by the argument just provided :). Oh alright, but it's not really as interesting as all that. False implications in the logical context are commonly referred to as logical fallacies. Wikipedia has a (non-exhaustive) list of those. One of the more famous false implications is interesting in that it maps between types of implication. A is correlated with B implies that A implies (causal) B or B implies (causal) A…

Thankyou for the illuminating explanation. Do you know if there is a way to encode these reasoning chains so as to assess their validity automatically? Like a knowledge graph with propositions linked in some way? I have been reading about knowledge graphs but haven't seen this kind of application yet, but I think it should exist.

>way to encode these reasoning chains

Symbolic logic. Learn: Truth tables -> rules of implication and replacement -> first order predicate logic -> quantifiers -> second order predicate logic.

Chapter 5 or 6 through 8 of Hurley's intro to logic does a great job imo.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#229

Post by pydry »

WesternWind wrote: post #223

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead. Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public spor…

Why do you blame journalists rather than media owners? Do you believe this is a change brought about by journalists themselves?

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#230

Post by throwaway0a5e »

pydry wrote: post #229
WesternWind wrote: post #223

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead. Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public spor…

Why do you blame journalists rather than media owners? Do you believe this is a change brought about by journalists themselves?

Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.

Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect them from themselves" ideology we've been actively sowing since at least the 1990s.

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