Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thankyou for the illuminating explanation. Do you know if there is a way to encode these reasoning chains so as to assess their validity automatically? Like a knowledge graph with propositions linked in some way? I have been reading about knowledge graphs but haven't seen this kind of application yet, but I think it should exist.
How to Mislead with Facts
191–200 of 297 posts
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#192The 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…
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#193The 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…
In case anyone is curious, one can read the following front page article from March 8, 2003 to see how the NYT discussed reports from Blix and ElBaradei: https://archive.is/EdUCX
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#194I love the idea of this article, but it doesn't address the reason things are the way they are. Facts get checked for literal accuracy because that's what's easy to actually do in a reasonably unbiased way. We stop there not because that's all we want, but because everything after that is too messy to even come close to systematizing. If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextu…
As a stop-gap, it may help to aggressively denounce things taken out-of-context as being out-of-context. In usual communication, we focus on fact-checking things in the context in which they're most valid, with the presumption that any contextual ambiguity'd be understood/resolved. In such scenarios, it can make sense to fact-check something literally, in the context in which it's claimed, then handle the contextual-…
People already try to do this on Twitter and it's always rejected (sometimes with hostility.) I think you're underestimating how bad it is on there. Almost everyone one there is engaging in bad faith, many knowingly, and I'm not really sure how much that specifically even has to do with the platform (other than maybe it encourages tribalism.)
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the "fact checking" sites I am aware of are heavily biased. It seems very unlikely that they actually try to be unbiased in their checking. It already starts with selecting the facts they check (cherry picking).
Fact checking has poisoned discourse because it has an underlying assumption that preferences of one sort or another can be proven true, when in fact they cannot because they are by definition preferences. People would hope to just recognize that they have different preferences about how others should behave, some of those preferences get condensed into laws and some are argued about indefinitely.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#196Earlier 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…
I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).
https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/10/02/sanders-agrees...
>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):
Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.
IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#197One big reason for the rise in both far right and far left extremists is that mainstream media has mastered this practice a long time ago. This is why people don't inherently fully trust mainstream news that is mostly bought and paid for aka submarine PR. Catch & kill and China buying articles in the MSM weren't revelations, they were just confirming everyone's suspicions.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It isn't really fair to use doctors as and example since it is still a male-dominated profession, with over 60% being male 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…
Do you have some alternative version of "dominated" that I'm not privy to?
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr#:~:text=See%2....
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#199Slightly different perspective: facts are completely unimportant, because: - what seems like a fact may not be a "fact" at all, it may be a misunderstanding - knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don't know the facts you don't know If certain truths are probable, the facts known tod…
You should read Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. You can be open to new evidence defining what objective truth is without dismissing the existence of objective truth due to unknown unknowns.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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. I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. S…
That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.
Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.
CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.
> Why should it be?
Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.
And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.