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The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

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Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#21

Post by sieabahlpark »

redmaverick wrote: post #18

Ted Bundy's mom Louise refused to believe her son was a murderer despite all evidence to the contrary. Her son admitted that he was the culprit and only that made her come out of her denial. In a lot of third world countries it is pretty common and even expected that the average Joe will vote for whomever appeals to their emotions. Every sin of the politician is forgotten and forgiven even if the said politician has…

I think what's important to this statement is that regardless of political opinion everyone is susceptible to it.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#22

Post by SiempreViernes »

pjc50 wrote: post #15

Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech. If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check . The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.

No, that's overreacting: there is like an entire industry about reporting false statements made by Trump so its not that bad. Of course, there is also a industry dedicated to reporting how the false statements can be interpreted as almost true...

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#24

Post by rosser »

smitty1e wrote: post #6
dqpb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.

The spectacle of seeing a nominal fact-checking site go after an overtly satirical one has been an astounding result for our day. I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge. #Whoops

See Brandolini's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#25

Post by SiempreViernes »

mieseratte wrote: post #16
pjc50 wrote: post #15

Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech. If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check . The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.

Reminds me a bit of “peer reviewed” vs. “reproduced.” One would hope those journalists would employ some type of standards on what they choose to report, and how deep they investigate it to avoid confusion.

Peer review can be pretty shit too, and should be viewed as a spam-filter more than anything. There isn't really a fast way to know if some work is good and reliable if its about something new.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#26

Post by SiempreViernes »

leggomylibro wrote: post #8
Reedx wrote: post #2

> "A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the spread of fake news and real news on Twitter in a 2018 study published in the journal Science. Looking at 126,000 tweets of news stories over the previous 11 years, they found that fake news stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories . Real news took about six times as long to reach a benchmark audience of 1,500 people as fake new…

"A lie can run 'round the world before the truth has got its boots on." There's a novel called The Truth that pokes fun at this idea through a story about the birth of daily newspapers and tabloids in a fictional city-state. The quote that I have in mind is a little long to format here, so I'll pastebin it: https://pastebin.com/T2YjtTN2

Praise Terry! Hallowed be thy name! And that hard drive got what it deserved!

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#27

Post by dredmorbius »

The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy.

That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves.

My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. The idea that a media channel, editorially controlled, AI heuristics driven, or "wisdom-of-the-crowd" determined, can act in complete disregard (or open opposition) to the truth and reality, and fail to be held to account, is a key problem.

To those who respond with "but who then would determine the truth": these institutions are already determining at least the perception of truth, through what they promote. Repetition, as the WSJ article and its cited research show, create impression of truth. And whilst not all ground truths can be known, some can be well established, as can be deliberate campaigns to obviate and obscure truth.

Dante's deepest circle of hell was reserved for the betrayers of others. But immediately above this was the circle reserved for the bearers of false witness. An arrangement in an age where virtually all information was conveyed through witness, either oral or spoken testimony. Much of the social, religious, and communications institution of the time was devoted to establishing the importance of truth, and the consequences for falsehood, where independent verification was difficult or impossible.

Advances in information technology have offered increased opportunities for verification, but also broken down many of the foundations of trust in individuals and institutions. Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally.

We need to reestablish trust, adherence to trust, accountability to trust, and institutional trust. Information technology to date has worked in the opposite direction.

This ends poorly.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#28

Post by dredmorbius »

dqpb wrote: post #4
Reedx wrote: post #2

> "A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the spread of fake news and real news on Twitter in a 2018 study published in the journal Science. Looking at 126,000 tweets of news stories over the previous 11 years, they found that fake news stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories . Real news took about six times as long to reach a benchmark audience of 1,500 people as fake new…

I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.

Fake news isn't bound to the limits of truth.

Fake news can be generated with far greater volume than truth.

Fake news can be specifically engineered to appeal to various cognitive biases promoting virality.

Truth serves reality. Falsehood can, and very often does, serve specific partisan interests who have a hand in promoting its spread.

These are four powerful factors favouring falsehoods and their dissemination.

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#29

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #27

The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy. That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves. My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institution…

[deleted]

Re: The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

#30

Post by dredmorbius »

smitty1e wrote: post #6
dqpb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.

The spectacle of seeing a nominal fact-checking site go after an overtly satirical one has been an astounding result for our day. I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge. #Whoops

I'm increasingly convinced that what I call "naive fact-checking" misses the forest for the trees.

Facts matter, yes. But a false narrative, even, or especially where constructed at least in part on true facts, is vastly more significant.

A characteristic of virtually all Big Lie Narratives is that they contain, often major, nuggets of truth. But the arrangement of narrative amonst these, and eventual insertion of false (or at the very least, unverifiable) facts, eventually proves these out.

A classic example I've run across is "It's All a Rich Man's Lie", an epic 3h 40m YouTube conspiracy yarn which, at least in its first hour or so, sticks largely to the domain of underlying truths: yes, there are "secret societies" at Ivy League schools, yes, many major US industrial firms maintained operations or divisions in Nazi Germany, etc. But no, actually, Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech (mentioned about 20 minutes in) was not about the Yale Skull & Bones group, but instead about the Soviet Union, and its practice of leveraging unflattering or inconvenient reporting from the US itself against the US.

(The question of whether or not Kennedy was right in asking for self-restraint on this basis is a matter for another discussion.)

Often the individual elements and false narrative become apparent by pulling back ever so slightly from the presented story, and looking at the greater context of facts offered. A few paragraphs of surrounding context from the Kennedy speech ("catnip for conspiracy nuts" according to one source) make painfully clear that its topic is not what the conspiracy nuts would make it to be.

The fact that such checking is expensive and takes time makes the fabricators' job all that much easier, and the debunkers' harder.

Another interesting case is the "J.P. Morgan Bankers' Manifesto" hoax, by one Thomas W. Gilruth, first published in 1892, and still making the rounds on social media over 120 years later. I'd run across it by way of an meme whose message appealed to me, though thinking it might be too good to be true, I dug deeper.

To my knowledge, this is the most substantial debunking of the Gilruth hoax ever published:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

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