171–180 of 359 posts
I don't understand how we as a society turn a blind eye to being surrounded by lies and misdirection. It's well known to be a folly and well documented that governments the world over abuse their position of first hand knowledge to redirect and re-cast truth, and manipulate public opinion in their favour[1][2]. Perhaps at my age I have come to see patterns and have come to understand that pretty much everything I don…
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Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this. TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment. The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
I don't feel that way. Social media circulates a lot of weird takes. For the many, many hot topics of 2020, I hear a lot of opinions that are something like, I'm bored of this so it's not important and it's all fake news anyway so I can make up my own story. That's a take that sounds like it should be quiet but it's instead really noisy. Not really a replacement for quality journalism.
The trouble (in my opinion) is that major networks don't really offer much in the way of "quality journalists."
They've mostly devolved into getting hot takes from pundits and "rah rah our team is great".
I listen to (and donate to) NPR (Iowa Public Radio specifically) because I think they are about as good as you can get for "quality journalism", but even their work devolves into garbage as soon as politics or culture come into play.
It probably doesn't help that a few years ago they redid their program structure to focus less on news and more on "think pieces" [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2018/08/16/6392099...
The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…
The human brain is surprisingly good at this. The brain is constantly doing this with our various senses. None of those senses is perfect and they are fooled easily yet by examining the overlap we are able to create a surprisingly accurate picture of reality.
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Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out. edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of…
Yes, the protests are 'mostly peaceful' and any violence is due to reactionaries.
If fewer than 50% of protestors engage in violence, wouldn't it then be accurate to describe the protest as 'mostly peaceful'?
It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that the…
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> IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. > Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously. You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There'…
I think you might be misunderstanding me. ">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters. I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech. Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Inte…
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> I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel. I think the authors intended to prevent the Government from being able to declare by fiat what counts as "lies, deceit, and libel". That some people will use their freedom to do wrong is the price we pay for freedom. It's still preferable to the alternative. You actually describe the right way of dealing with lies, deceit, and libel in a free…
What I didn't describe was the non-trivial cost, workload and time it took to deal with a very simple libel case. When you have publications, major TV networks, where almost literally every single piece they publish is filled with lies and manipulation it becomes an impossible task. A couple of years back I decided to highlight such lies to a group of people I was in regular online conversations with. Friends and peo…
Any court case will involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. Even legal matters that never make it to a court involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. My wife and I had a condo association threatening us with fines and litigation for something we hadn't done and had shown them proof that we hadn't done; we had to hire a lawyer and spend quite a bit of time, effort, and money just to reach a stalemate until the condo was sold.
However, you can't fix that problem by just passing new laws, because the whole problem is that the way the court system functions does not respect the spirit of the laws to begin with. And it's that way because we citizens have allowed it to get that way, because most people don't have enough dealings with the legal system to (a) see how messed up it is, and (b) see the impact it has on ordinary people who are unlucky enough to have to deal with it.
> The problem with the press engaging in constant lies and manipulation is that the vast majority of the population (I'll guess 99%) consumes without questioning any of it.
And you can't fix that problem by passing new laws either. (I actually don't think the percentage is as high as you say; but I'll agree that it's high enough to be a problem.) The only way to fix it is for enough people to realize that they are being lied to and manipulated and stop consuming the media that is doing it.
> I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough.
Who gets to decide what a "truthful" press is? Why, the same legal system that we've already established is a mess. So the "truthful" press will end up being...the same press we have now: whoever has enough money to prevail in any legal fight.
The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…
I think the best solution is to cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, and then look for correlations to narrow down on the truth. The human brain is surprisingly good at this. The brain is constantly doing this with our various senses. None of those senses is perfect and they are fooled easily yet by examining the overlap we are able to create a surprisingly accurate picture of real…
Is it, though? Confirmation bias is a pretty big factor in how we parse incoming information. I try to read a variety of sources and see where different folks are coming from, but I wouldn't delude myself to think that I'm some ultra-rational arbiter of truth.
We need only look as far as the growing(!) popularity of the flat-earth conspiracy to see that the population at large is no better at this than I think I am.
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>Sometimes I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough. IANAL, so I don't know how that could be detrimental. As a lay person it makes complete sense: >"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,…
> establish a Ministry of Truth I know this isn't simple. However, there are things that are simple. Things like taking statements out of context or editing videos/audio to distort what was said to fit a narrative. What I would like to see are articles with a full list of references and sources for the reader to dig into. In other words, if you can't provide backup for your claims, don't publish it. The TV equivalent…
The problem is the first word: "we". Who is "we"? Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations…
Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.
The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.