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The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

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Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#161

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

dang wrote: post #80
BitwiseFool wrote: post #23

I've also noticed that the term "willful ignorance" gets thrown around a lot more nowadays. There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced that what they believe is the absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.

Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.

I wouldn't equate them.

I would label a statement that is technically true but highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is technically true, because you can still get COVID despite being vaccinated. However, it's misleading because the statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting it, while also significantly reducing likelihood of hospitalization and death. The statement isn't a lie, but it's certainly disingenuous.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#162

Post by dang »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #102
dang wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.

I think “lying” as more of a “your claim is outright false” while “disingenuous” lends itself to more subjective forms of misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as “violent” on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or hundreds of thousands) were violent, I’m not really lying but I’m certainly misleading people by way of my characterization.

Yes—there are subtle distinctions between these words ("dissimulation" is another, but that one hasn't become internet-popular). The aspect they have in common, as pvg points out, is that they all imply intent to deceive.

Since internet commenters basically can't ever know that about each other, they're not allowed to direct those words at each other here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#163

Post by lnxg33k1 »

feurio wrote: post #152
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just come forward and say that you're a trolling woke this thing about freedom of speech and governments is like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares? Governments are people elected by people, not coffee machines elected by coffee machine so I can also be a supporter of freedom of speech within people and their neighbours outside of the boundaries of the law, also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants,…

> this thing about freedom of speech and governments is like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares? Anyone who cares about reality? Because that's all freedom of speech is. If you break ToS, tough. I don't follow the coffee machine bit, sorry. > also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a mainstream platform which helped alienating people towards their circle Glad you agree that Twitter can d…

I was not on Twitter before the explosion of woke culture, but every now and then I go to read without an account and there's a lot of verbal violence

The coffee machine bit: Governments have regulations that protect freedom of speech, and government are made of people and elected by people, if we let woke culture go ahead in their ideas that freedom of speech is ok to be limited when some ideas are expressed, how long since a enough number of politicians get elected and put that into law/change the law? So yeah freedom of speech as-is, is from the government, but it has to be protected also between people as people have the power to form ideas that change laws, because we don't elect machines

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#164

Post by PathOfEclipse »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #159
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow... In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see not…

I don't really see how that applies to a well documented history of voter suppression? Yes, in theory, you could have a color blind system and some random change could have a negative impact on some group randomly. That's not what happened in reality though. "In theory, I might not have killed him" isn't a great argument for someone found standing over a body with a knife, you're generally looking for something a bit…

Similarly, I don't see how "a well documented history of voter suppression" applies to increasing election security. I don't see that phrase in your first link, but I found it here: https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-govern....

From there I found a link to the evil Brian Kemp who dared to purge voter rolls! https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-s...

Many believe that one of the greatest opportunities for fraud come from outdated voter rolls. We need more effort to purge them, not less. Again, I am not hearing a single thing from you that convinces me laws like voter ID laws are more harmful than beneficial. If this weren't a deeply partisan issue for an insanity-driven culture of divisiveness, there would be little argument against voter ID laws in this day and age.

Lastly, it is very partisan to focus on efforts of republicans to suppress democrat votes while ignoring democrat efforts to continuously game the system in their favor, like:

* Making Washington D.C. a state, which makes zero sense unless you just want to win.

* Stacking the supreme court, which, again, makes zero sense unless you just want to win.

* Abolishing the filibuster, which completely undermines the purpose of the senate. The founders of the constitution purposely did not set up a pure democracy and they had many good reasons for it.

* Federalizing election laws, obviously in ways that favor democrats, even ignoring the complete unconstitutionality of the law. if anything is obvious about the democrats, they see the constitution as an obstacle more than as a founding document.

* Purposely not enforcing existing immigration laws (this should be illegal and Biden should be in jail for it), and then fighting to allow non-citizens to vote (this is already legal in NYC), or to grant citizenship to illegal entrants. Fortunately, the Hispanic vote seems to be shifting right, so we can hope this evil strategy will backfire against the democrats.

* Gerrymandering that rivals or exceeds republican gerrymandering efforts. But, when it's the democrats doing it, the corporate media like to call it "redistricting".

The democrats have long ago made it clear that they will fight as dirty as possible to win. If anything, Republicans need to start fighting dirtier back.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#165

Post by dang »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #158
pvg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is intentionally misleading when they might simply be disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed, etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree with online.

If you call someone disingenuous, then yeah, you're being offensive. But if you call the idea disingenuous, then it's much less offensive. If you phrase it like, "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common ground or at least identifying the locus…

Ideas can't be disingenuous because they don't have intent to begin with. Therefore, if an internet comment calls an idea or an argument disingenuous, it's calling the idea-holder or argument-maker disingenuous. It may be a little more indirect, but it's still an attack.

In my observation, that word has the opposite effect of 'finding common ground', so I'm surprised to hear you say that. If finding common ground is what you want to do (which is great), there are other words that should give you even better results.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#166

Post by fortuna86 »

epgui wrote: post #148

> I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better [...] This kind of framing makes…

> If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past

[citation needed]

more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website called "slowboring.com"

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#167

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

rhino369 wrote: post #101
scarecrowbob wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sm skeptical on that number as well. I looked for the source. In the 10 minutes that I was willing to spend on it, I only found this: "A July1970 poll found 30% of Americans declaring Apollo 11 to be a fake." https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_millions-still-believe-1969-mo... Couldn't find the original source. It looks to be something like US 6% of the population at the moment (Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/…

Another issue is that polling is often fucked around with by the respondents, especially if the poll wasn't well written.

On average, about 4%.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#168

Post by dang »

xyzzyz wrote: post #104
dang wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.

That’s not quite true. Lying is typically understood as actively saying something untrue. What is more typical, especially in media, is selectively sharing true information, but obscuring other true information, which would present the narrative in completely different light. This way, one can manipulate people to have misconception about the reality, without actively saying a single lie. It is still disingenuous, th…

I agree, and should have known better than to post something so brief about a somewhat subtle point. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350820.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#169

Post by president »

Have you noticed that people that label a position or argument misinformation never want to have a discussion about it? The pattern always seems to be:

1. Call something misinformation 2. Ignore any counter claims (so they cannot be proven wrong on the record) 3. Call for others to "cancel" it (use power in numbers to perpetuate misinfo claim)

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#170

Post by truffdog »

engineer_22 wrote: post #122

Misinformation has always existed. I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic. The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no, democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes, how do we LIVE with that?

Is it even scaled up, or is it just more legible to elites because they can see what the masses are saying?
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