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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#111

Post by pphysch »

ncmncm wrote: post #91
clairity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i was told growing up that this was the difference between being honest and being truthful: honesty is about telling allcomers everything you know (or believe, with appropriate caveats) to be true, whereas being truthful is simply not advancing as truth things you know (or believe) to be false. in any case, i've watched npr and nyt, two of my mostly former news sources, wrench from simply being biased to being outrig…

Through 200x, NPR was always having CIA flacks on. They seem not to be doing that anymore, since about Manning/Snowden.

YMMV but every time I happened to be tuned into NPR (world) news I get an unhealthy dose of State Dept-curated misinformation on topics like Russia, China, Iran, etc.

If anything changed in the post-Collateral Murder world, its that the Washington's content filtering and propaganda subtly intensified.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#112

Post by stirfish »

mindslight wrote: post #107
stirfish wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get your P100? Everywhere around me has been out of both those and oxygen tanks. It's made welding pretty difficult. Edit: I appreciate your thorough and patient response to the parent comment.

I had them before the pandemic, but I've seen them in stock quite regularly. Zoro appears to have my 3M 7503 half-face piece and 2297 filters in stock right now. For welding you might want a proper vapor filter though (60921?). 3M has some nice pdfs that list all the different options. For pandemic usage when I need to filter my exhale, I disabled the check valves by popping the mask apart, removing all 3 valve flaps…

Thank you. I'd never heard of zoro before, but I'll be depositing my paychecks here from now on. It looks a lot more fun than the bank :)

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#114

Post by pphysch »

ncmncm wrote: post #31

The New York Times mastered all this long ago. It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all. Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any…

I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions.

> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_correspondent#Gulf_War

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#115

Post by Broken_Hippo »

Jensson wrote: post #85
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even bad teachers have to meet the standards, which are usually set by law. A preschool teacher, who often gets paid just over minimum wage, usually requires a 2 year degree (for head start-like programs). A teacher? 4 year degree, with a preference for a masters and in many places, absolutely no pay during the summer months. It isn't like any other industry hires only "good" people, though, so calling out teaching f…

But those standards doesn't mean anything if they are still bad teachers. Would you hire a software engineer with a 4 year degree who can't code? No, of course not. But would you hire a teacher with a 4 year degree who can't teach? Of course you would! You just need them to tick a box, their skill as a teacher isn't relevant, if they have a piece of paper they meet the bar and are hired.

In general, teachers start out with a bit of experience as most schools require teachers to, you know, teach as part of their schooling. In other words, you simply aren't hiring someone that doesn't know how to teach and has demonstrated it in the classroom.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#116

Post by mindslight »

stirfish wrote: post #112
mindslight wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had them before the pandemic, but I've seen them in stock quite regularly. Zoro appears to have my 3M 7503 half-face piece and 2297 filters in stock right now. For welding you might want a proper vapor filter though (60921?). 3M has some nice pdfs that list all the different options. For pandemic usage when I need to filter my exhale, I disabled the check valves by popping the mask apart, removing all 3 valve flaps…

Thank you. I'd never heard of zoro before, but I'll be depositing my paychecks here from now on. It looks a lot more fun than the bank :)

Haha, yes it is. They're the customer-facing brand of Grainger so they've got everything. Their search is okay and some of their product data can be lacking, but their selection is massive. As I alluded to, it's often worth it to go find the manufacturer's pdf catalog and then search by part numbers.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#117

Post by raziel2701 »

I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this:

population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.

And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#118

Post by [deleted] »

ncmncm wrote: post #31

The New York Times mastered all this long ago. It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all. Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any…

[deleted]

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#119

Post by hguant »

pphysch wrote: post #114
ncmncm wrote: post #31

The New York Times mastered all this long ago. It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all. Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any…

I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions. > Th…

US National Security, and the groups moving within it, are not monolithic. Different groups and agencies have very different policies regarding how to deal with journalists specifically.

DoD has been very up front - it's pay to play, as you noted. Stay in the lines, do what we want, keep your eyes on the narrative we're interested in, and opportunities and access with magically open up for you. Step outside the dotted line and whoops, you're in a warzone buddy and you need to leave now, base commander said so, sorry.

Whereas US foreign correspondents were, and as far as I can tell still are, entirely off limits for intelligence agencies to recruit from, work with, or even really interact with. State has put down as US policy that we respect the institution of (US) journalism, so no co-opting them. It's kind of a point of pride. Now, that doesn't mean avoid lying to them, no selling them, or just doing any of the various government tricks to throw a journalist onto a particular path, it just means none of the very obvious "you're going to drink the Kool aid" that DoD does.

Of course this is in abstract, I'm sure there are exceptions and people who broke the rule, but compared to the British intelligence services, who absolutely co-opted any and all foreign correspondent they could get their hands on, both as intelligence sources and to plant stories, or the Soviet/Russian Fed groups, the US has been relatively principled... relatively being the key word

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#120

Post by innocentoldguy »

ncmncm wrote: post #31

The New York Times mastered all this long ago. It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all. Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any…

I agree. The problem isn't just cherry-picked truths either. It is the use of non-sequitur arguments by "fact-checkers" like Politifact, WT.Social, Snopes, etc. to draw false conclusions from various things that are indeed true.

For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."

Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.

This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.

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