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Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

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Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#21

Post by pessimizer »

csnover wrote: post #19
vorpalhex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions. The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.

Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing gro…

> telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.

That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#22

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

csnover wrote: post #16
dgrin91 wrote: post #2

This stuff makes me REALLY nervous. Its one thing to have a discussion about the here and now and debate what is true or not. There are plenty of very good fact checkers to help with this. Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decid…

Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development. Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you migh…

I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#23

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

pessimizer wrote: post #18
taxicab wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earn…

> and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. Do you see how this turns into editorial really fast? The WaPo and Politifact are particularly trash "fact check" brands. They're pure editorials. edit: To hopefully ward off reflexive political downvotes: my politics are the opposite of rayiner's, I have the opposite opinion on what tea…

For the record, I agree with the general point of your comment - my concern is primarily that calling things "trash" tends to degrade the quality of discussion.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#24

Post by csnover »

pessimizer wrote: post #21
csnover wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing gro…

> telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.

Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#25

Post by barry-cotter »

taxicab wrote: post #9
rayiner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the “context” is never fairly applied. I want a little bubble that lights up every time a Democrat says we’re cutting school funding and teachers are under paid. It would just be a chart showing that school funding has tripled since I was a kid and showing American teachers are paid higher than the OECD average. This is a bread-and-butter Democrat assertion that’s made literally everywhere, but fact checkers…

I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earn…

> the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it

I am not aware of any other profession where the statistical impact of training is not reliably distinguishable from zero so this is a thin reed to hang any argument on. If we’re going to reward people for the length of time they’ve been in training without regard for the value of their skills or outside demand that seems unjust. If no one wants to pay someone to be a minister or theologian after doing a Master’s in it that’s fine. Equally if someone is dissatisfied with the salary they earn, whether as a teacher, librarian, lawyer or bin man they are free to find other work.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#26

Post by pessimizer »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #23
pessimizer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. Do you see how this turns into editorial really fast? The WaPo and Politifact are particularly trash "fact check" brands. They're pure editorials. edit: To hopefully ward off reflexive political downvotes: my politics are the opposite of rayiner's, I have the opposite opinion on what tea…

For the record, I agree with the general point of your comment - my concern is primarily that calling things "trash" tends to degrade the quality of discussion.

I only say it because I mean it. It's important to distinguish "fact checks" that are bad because the "fact check" label is bad from "fact checks" that are intentionally misleading and usually contain more misinformation than the statements they're purporting to correct.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#27

Post by pessimizer »

csnover wrote: post #24
pessimizer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.

Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?

Because its not a bad faith argument to point out that even people who are obviously wrong think of themselves as the sources of truth. I actually thought it would be a little aggressive to point out that "telling people the truth and warning them about false truths" is not what education is. Education is a lot more complicated than that. What that is is a literal description of propaganda from the perspective of the true-believer propagandist.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#28

Post by pessimizer »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #22
csnover wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development. Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you migh…

I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.

I also own a lot of books that contain a lot of falsehoods. I wonder if there will be an inspector.

Re: Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

#29

Post by vorpalhex »

csnover wrote: post #19
vorpalhex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions. The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.

Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing gro…

I do not have to trust my teachers on what the answer is to a math problem: I can check it. Likewise for history - I can refer back to the sources they are quoting from. One lesson we've learned in the West is that often times our understanding of an event evolves - much of what I learned in history class we consider to be incorrect today.

Education is not telling someone what is true or not true, it is to train the methods of discovering truth and disproving lies. It is critical thought.

A fact check, and more egregiously censorship directly is against critical thought. It tells us that most humans are not fit for handling complicated problems or balancing sources - that instead we must trust some other authority to do that. It does not require a long search through the history book to find egregious mistakes by every journalistic outlet running today - including those purporting to be fact checkers.

If humans are unfit to engage critically with diverse information than so are the fact checkers. There is no human who is so trained and intelligent as to be unerring in their judgements and fact findings.

History doesn't repeat, but it has it's tropes. The well-intentioned erosion of freedom of speech and the subsequent censorship is not new. It will get worse before it gets better.

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