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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#151

Post by kilna »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #120
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, wa…

I have a friend who used to work for Snopes. The organization absolutely engages in what you describe. The sad thing is, it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s what humans do naturally and subconsciously to shore up their cognitive dissonance… particularly when faced with uncomfortable facts pertaining to establishment systems, organizations and identity politicians they supported.

The Snopes article that made me take notice of this bias was the one letting Clinton off the hook for equating millennials to "basement dwellers" while speaking to wealthy donors during the 2016 election.

Clinton never used the exact sequence of words “basement dwellers”. Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision. The cherry picked position of asserting that "basement dweller" specifically wasn't used... is fundamentally meaningless, and is exactly the same sort of straw-man you were describing above.

She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

“And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”

There is no way to read that statement without it dripping with condescension. Without full context, what Snopes advanced was patent misrepresentation… and then on top of that to call the “basement dweller” accusation untrue…? Bullshit. It’s “mixed” at best. Any intellectually honest person with full context would recognize her statements for what they were.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clintons-basement-dwellers/

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#152

Post by BitwiseFool »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #146
BitwiseFool wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. The NYT is chock full of partisans who seem to have little to no apprehension about framing "the facts" in whatever way helps to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. All the while presenting themselves as some beacon of objective truth and journalistic integrity. And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?

Apparently, you see no difference in the goals of "shaping public opinion" and misleading people (with or without facts). I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top. And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with th…

I sense debating my choice of the words "shaping public opinion" is going to be tangential. While what you said "If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?" is true, that isn't the heart of what I was getting at.

If the NYT is going to brand itself as some paragon of journalistic integrity, I would expect them to be dramatically more consistent with how they choose to cover and editorialize things.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#153

Post by blueflow »

hunterb123 wrote: post #150
blueflow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more arguing his post. In hindsight, i think he interpreted the "have no physical equivalent" part differently. I meant it more like, that what the words are referring to, the concepts behind it. Not the words itself. I'm still saying Nietzsche is right with the quote. That he is right does not forbid to mentally work with the concept of objectivity. See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of e…

> That he is right does not forbid to mentally work with the concept of objectivity. Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. The quote taken directly makes it wrong as it conflicts with objectivity, any other interpretation makes it edgy, fanciful, and pointless, as GP pointed out. > See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of everything. That's what everyone already does when they reason through something…

I disagree, my interpretation of the quote is different.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#154

Post by BitwiseFool »

jimmydoreornot wrote: post #148
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, you see no difference in the goals of "shaping public opinion" and misleading people (with or without facts). I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top. And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with th…

I concur that the term "shaping public opinion" is more accurate in many cases, but not in others. There are enough stories where the author clearly understood something about the story and attempted to convey something else to the reader for political/cultural effect. For example, not reporting on the race of a black perpetrator but always reporting on the race of a black victim. There is a less activist way of pres…

The most noticeable example of activism at work is the difference in coverage (and condemnation) between January 6th and the CHAZ/CHOP event. While both events included the occupation of a government building, one is seen as an insurrection and the other is more of a protest. I don't want to start a tangent comparing every aspect of the two, but needless to say, there are some big commonalities that are covered in a very different light depending on one's partisan outlook.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#155

Post by amelius »

zaphar wrote: post #58
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most effective form of lying is lying by omission. It's harder to detect, easier to defend as just ignorance, and is perhaps more effective than outright false claims.

Why don't we make a law around it? I'm tired of politicians weaseling themselves out of difficult situations by saying "oh, I forgot about that". It's your job to bring important, relevant information to the table, damn it.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#156

Post by innocentoldguy »

kilna wrote: post #151
innocentoldguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wa…

I have a friend who used to work for Snopes. The organization absolutely engages in what you describe. The sad thing is, it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s what humans do naturally and subconsciously to shore up their cognitive dissonance… particularly when faced with uncomfortable facts pertaining to establishment systems, organizations and identity politicians they supported. The Snopes article that made me take no…

Yes, exactly! I read that article on Snopes and know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for offering another example of it.

My hope is that we'll all wake up to these tactics and stop letting politicians and media organizations lie and manipulate us for their own gain. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything anymore, regardless of who says it, unless I see a full, in-context video of the event. Even then it can be iffy due to editing that isn't obvious.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#157

Post by flavius29663 »

Ma8ee wrote: post #93
drran wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why it is mostly women who reduce their work hours while the kids are small and why not more men do the same. Because evolution did this decision for us. Woman stays with children, while man risk their lives, because those, which did the opposite, lose evolutionary competition.

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.

I would say there are A LOT of jobs today where physical strength makes a difference. And a lot of them are high paid jobs too: oil rigs, ships, linemen, construction, mechanics etc. There are a lot of these examples. Sure, there are women in all of these fields, but because of the strength difference, the balance is tilting the other way. This can at least in part explain some of the pay gap: there are 7 million construction workers alone.

Compare a similar education man and woman: one does construction, the other is a cleaner.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#158

Post by dolni »

amelius wrote: post #155
zaphar wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most effective form of lying is lying by omission. It's harder to detect, easier to defend as just ignorance, and is perhaps more effective than outright false claims.

Why don't we make a law around it? I'm tired of politicians weaseling themselves out of difficult situations by saying "oh, I forgot about that". It's your job to bring important, relevant information to the table, damn it.

A law to do what, exactly? Criminalize the omission of facts from a statement? Criminalize ignorance?

Who decides when a fact was omitted? Was the fact pertinent (note: there's a lot of wiggle room here)? How much investigation has to be done to uncover whether there was a lie by omission or actual ignorance?

What would the penalty be?

Thinking you can legislate your way out of this is hopeless idealism.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#159

Post by msla »

chasd00 wrote: post #132
stirfish wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection, I've found that a lot of people think of the masks like a gas mask - supposed to keep everything bad out. They are more like the breath guard at the salad bar - keeping you from exhaling droplets six feet in front of you. Bob's mask protects Alice more than it protects Bob.

i've stopped wearing a mask period. risk isn't declared const

Enjoy your Herman Cain Award.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#160

Post by ouid »

afro88 wrote: post #137
ouid wrote: post #124

This conversation isn't formal enough to be meaningful. 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 .…

This is super interesting. Do you mind giving a concrete example?

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 (note that this is false, with a plethora of different types of counter example). This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.

It is easy to leverage this false belief into new false beliefs with true facts. If I want to sell coffee for example, I must convince someone of the buying coffee implies (causal) utility fact. All I must convince them of is that coffee is correlated with a thing that implies (causal) utility. Say for instance, that people with heart conditions have those conditions exacerbated negatively by taking coffee or drinking stimulants, and therefore don't. It follows then that drinking coffee is probably correlated with much better heart health. I phrase my findings as "People who drink coffee tend to have much better cardiac calcium scores", and just watch as people draw the incorrect conclusion about the utility of coffee from this fact, plus their fallacy (plus the additional assumption that better cardiac calcium scores probably don't cause coffee consumption).

I should note that It could very well be that coffee does have utility to you. So as a fact it might still be "true". So it turns out that what really ends up mattering, is not the facts, but the chains of implications that lead you to them.

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