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Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

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Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#101

Post by frabbit »

bsder wrote: post #47
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you think is more likely to develop students into citizens capable of independent thought: a) Sitting at a desk. Not allowed to talk unless called upon. Exactly following a schedule determined by authority figures. b) Being free to move about the room. Able to choose your activity with your peers.A constructivist or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by…

Allocate the same teacher/student ratio and randomize the students in a public school and at a private Montessori and get back to me with the data. Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system. The moment you randomize the students, the private schools drop back to the mean (or, generally, worse). I find this unfortunate, because education i…

Private Montessori schools often have a much higher pupil/teacher ratio than public schools: the age-mixed structure of the class which encourages children more adept in particular tasks to work with those who are less adept makes this metric less important.

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#102

Post by frabbit »

dragonwriter wrote: post #49
bsder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allocate the same teacher/student ratio and randomize the students in a public school and at a private Montessori and get back to me with the data. Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system. The moment you randomize the students, the private schools drop back to the mean (or, generally, worse). I find this unfortunate, because education i…

> Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system. The single biggest factor is that private schools, as non-default choices, automatically filter for parental engagement in education, even before considering the filters they put in place in terms of admissions criteria. Students with parents engaged in their education do better.

> Students with parents engaged in their education do better

IMHO this is the crucial thing. And it is one of the aspects of Montessori that some parents who are simply aspirational-consumers are a bit thrown by initially.

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#103

Post by tareqak »

humanrebar wrote: post #99
tareqak wrote: post #38

There was one idea that came to mind when I read The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public posted here 8 days ago [0][1]. The first part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) requires corporations to keep accurate financial records in order to not be able to hide bribes [2]. If a corporation can be compelled to be truthful in their financial records, then why can't a news organ…

> ...why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news? In addition to the other free speech concerns already covered, it's worth noting that "freedom of the press" is not about The Media, but about written and disseminated speech. Everyone who tweets is exercising her freedom of the press. It would be horrible and impossible for the government to make sure every blog post…

I definitely see what you are saying, but I think it would be similar to the FCAP in terms of who would be affected. The accounting provision of the FCAP applies to companies that list securities in the US. Similarly, news organizations (radio, TV, newspapers) could be held accountable depending on how big their audience is estimated to be.

One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", which is not protected speech [0]. What if a newspaper persuaded people to do just that, but it itself did not do that? Basically, how far can someone stretch the imminent part of "imminent lawless action" such that it does not fall afoul of the law, but becomes operationally reliable to achieve some goal [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

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

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#104

Post by humanrebar »

bsder wrote: post #47
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you think is more likely to develop students into citizens capable of independent thought: a) Sitting at a desk. Not allowed to talk unless called upon. Exactly following a schedule determined by authority figures. b) Being free to move about the room. Able to choose your activity with your peers.A constructivist or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by…

Allocate the same teacher/student ratio and randomize the students in a public school and at a private Montessori and get back to me with the data. Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system. The moment you randomize the students, the private schools drop back to the mean (or, generally, worse). I find this unfortunate, because education i…

> Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system.

This happens with public schools except the mechanism is raising housing prices until problematic people aren't even in the neighborhood.

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#105

Post by nabla9 »

beginningguava wrote: post #86
rrggrr wrote: post #25

The only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power. My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple s…

This is just legacy media trying to regain power. Fake news has been around forever, look up Yellow Journalism. The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population. Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to de…

Fake news and yellow journalism are not the same thing. Yellow journalism is just sensationalism, entertainment and bad journalism.

Fake news is deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes.

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#106

Post by humanrebar »

tareqak wrote: post #103
humanrebar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news? In addition to the other free speech concerns already covered, it's worth noting that "freedom of the press" is not about The Media, but about written and disseminated speech. Everyone who tweets is exercising her freedom of the press. It would be horrible and impossible for the government to make sure every blog post…

I definitely see what you are saying, but I think it would be similar to the FCAP in terms of who would be affected. The accounting provision of the FCAP applies to companies that list securities in the US. Similarly, news organizations (radio, TV, newspapers) could be held accountable depending on how big their audience is estimated to be. One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", whi…

I'm saying anyone with a newsletter, blog, Twitter account, or Facebook feed is potentially "the press". As is any company that issues press releases, which is just about every company. To pick an example, President Trump reaches more people than your local paper. Do we think a Trump will have the same accountability in truthfulness?

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#107

Post by GatorD42 »

stanleydrew wrote: post #88
GatorD42 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some libertarians (such as myself) generally believe corporations already have strong incentives to make non-defective products. Some products that compromise safety for cost provide consumers low cost options they would otherwise not have. Efforts to regulate such products to make them safer can cause more harm than good (by making such products more expensive and therefore unavailable so consumers will use somethin…

Setting aside the barriers to getting a lawyer when you have no money which I think you dismiss too readily, I am more interested in how you would propose to determine whether consumers are willingly sacrificing safety for cost?

People make cost-safety trade offs all the time, the probabilities are so low that they may not explicitly think of them as such.

Have you ever driven a long distance instead of flying? If so you sacrificed safety for price / convenience - over the same distance flying is much safer. Are you driven by a professional chauffeur in an armored S-Class? If not you are sacrificing safety for cost.

You could imagine pushing pro-regulation arguments to absurd circumstances, like making it illegal to drive more than 125 miles (requiring people fly instead) or banning all cars aside from the armored S-Class etc. The side effects of such rules would obviously be very bad, but smaller regulations could have smaller, still deleterious consequences. See the case of unsafe cars in India: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/sa...

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#108

Post by dragonwriter »

tareqak wrote: post #103
humanrebar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news? In addition to the other free speech concerns already covered, it's worth noting that "freedom of the press" is not about The Media, but about written and disseminated speech. Everyone who tweets is exercising her freedom of the press. It would be horrible and impossible for the government to make sure every blog post…

I definitely see what you are saying, but I think it would be similar to the FCAP in terms of who would be affected. The accounting provision of the FCAP applies to companies that list securities in the US. Similarly, news organizations (radio, TV, newspapers) could be held accountable depending on how big their audience is estimated to be. One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", whi…

> One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", which is not protected speech

Referring to Schenck v. US on the bounds of Constitutional free speech is like citing Plessy v. Ferguson on permissible racial segregation.

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#109

Post by harimau777 »

tareqak wrote: post #38

There was one idea that came to mind when I read The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public posted here 8 days ago [0][1]. The first part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) requires corporations to keep accurate financial records in order to not be able to hide bribes [2]. If a corporation can be compelled to be truthful in their financial records, then why can't a news organ…

To play devil's advocate to some of the responses to this post: What if instead of requiring news organizations to report the truth, we instead forbid them from reporting facts that are untrue?

Re: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

#110

Post by throwaway42501 »

apozem wrote: post #97
beginningguava wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just legacy media trying to regain power. Fake news has been around forever, look up Yellow Journalism. The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population. Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to de…

> Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed? Obviously you are implying that Obama voters dislike "big data" and social media because Trump won. This is lazy strawmanning. Perhaps we are unhappy with the role the internet played in the 2016 election for other reasons? Perhaps it is bad when voters are fe…

It isn't a strawman for so long as individuals with a certain brand of politics presuppose their own immunity to disinformation and a tacit monopoly on what is factual and what constitutes being 'informed'.

That the propaganda self-described 'progressives' consume tends to come from sources with a greater degree of social prestige and more subtle ways of misleading through omission and clever rhetoric doesn't make it anything but propaganda.

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