121–130 of 297 posts
> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content
> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content
... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.
This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is very poignant. Perhaps people should drop the pretense of unbias and wear their bias on their sleeves? It’s not like that’s too far from the current meta. Everyone is biased to all hell while saying on the tin “fair”, “unbiased”, “balanced”, or other weasel words
That's not my point. Everyone is unbiased until pointed out where/how they are biased. Maybe that is every action of every person on the planet, but in my biased opinion some are clearly less biased than others, and it's not that hard to compare.
If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless.
In order to mislead with a "true" fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).
The essence of "lying by telling the truth" is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.
Fortunately, It's much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.
Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.
Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with "true" implications.
I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn't teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).
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…
For instance, right wing hacks love to point out the flaws in NYT over and over on thier quest for "media is bad", while ignoring:
* they too are media
* there are just as many examples in their own organization and almost every other
*choosing to play dumb that they choose the examples as part of a targeted smear campaign
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it didn’t. You may choose to follow old traditions that don’t make sense any more, but that is something you choose. There are very few jobs today where physical strength make a difference, and before the industrial revolution the fathers were mostly at home and played important parts in raising the children.
If you look at birth and death rates, you will see that more boys are born, but mortality for boys is higher[0]. Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference. Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/infant-death-rates-by-cau...
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…
Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.
Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the jobs are less valuable, not due to who's doing them but due to the market (i.e. all of us) seeing them as less valuable. Teachers and nannies aren't paid a whole lot because they're easily replaceable, not because they're jobs dominated by women. Doctors used to be exclusively men. Have salaries gone down now that women make up a significant percent of the number of doctors?
The jobs are viewed less valuable once women start working them. As in, a profession that was male-dominated starts paying less once it becomes the opposite [1}. It isn't really fair to use doctors as and example since it is still a male-dominated profession, with over 60% being male [2]. I'd also mention that obviously, teachers aren't that easily replaced, considering the shortage that has only gotten worse during…
from the second link: One of the steadiest movements has been the rise in women as a percentage of the physician workforce: It rose from 28.3% in 2007 to 36.3% last year, according to the AAMC’s Physician Specialty Data Reports from 2008 to 2020:
2007 — 28.3% 2010 — 30.4% 2013 — 32.6% 2015 — 34.0% 2017 — 35.2% 2019 — 36.3%
the above growth rates are not domination unless you're talking about women being dominant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it didn’t. You may choose to follow old traditions that don’t make sense any more, but that is something you choose. There are very few jobs today where physical strength make a difference, and before the industrial revolution the fathers were mostly at home and played important parts in raising the children.
If you look at birth and death rates, you will see that more boys are born, but mortality for boys is higher[0]. Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference. Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/infant-death-rates-by-cau...
> Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference.
Is your argument that since there seem to be a correlation between mortality rate for boys and higher salary for men, that there is some kind of causation that make it good? You really have to expand on that if you want to make it comprehensible.
> Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.
Here you reveal that you don't understand natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for what is beneficial for society at all. Often what is good for the gene is bad for society, and the other way around.
Natural selection works on time scale much longer than the industrial revolution, and most factors are probably older than agriculture. It would be rather stupid to let what was useful behaviour 100k years ago control our lives today. We live in very different environments, in very different societies, and faces very different dangers.
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…
Misrepresenting facts in this way is still a form of lying. Speaking technical truths doesn't change that. Most lies aren't complete fabrications, honestly, even when they do contain a few.