Theses and Antitheses, has always worked, but since Covid all those "Experts" & "Scientists" have discarded this essential framework.
How to Mislead with Facts
201–210 of 297 posts
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#202I 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-…
> But Twitter-like platforms destroy this
At least there is the chance that someone providing context on Twitter/etc. will have that context seen by the recipients of the out-of-context info.
When someone on, say, Fox News, InfoWars, OANN, etc. does this, there is basically zero chance those people will see context provided on MSNBC/CNN/whatever because they just don't watch those channels.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#203The 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…
Oddly enough, I see no mention of any specific source in the article, yet the top comment here is bashing the NYT. Is there some reason for this? Does the NYT represent the entire industry? Are they alone in deciding what is news, or its priority? (One would be forgiven for thinking this is, in fact, the primary purpose of a news room).
Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?
If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be 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 t…
>Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.
So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Public school teachers are largely unionized which would eliminate differences in pay between men and women. No, it wouldn't. Why would it?
Maybe I misunderstand how unions work but my understanding is that unionized pay is based on experience levels and not gender.
Being unionized doesn't mean that pay is non-negotiable or anything of the sort. Yes, the union typically establishes a baseline pay based on experience, but individuals can still negotiate their own wages.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not my point. Everyone is unbiased until pointed out where/how they are biased. Maybe that is every action of every person on the planet, but in my biased opinion some are clearly less biased than others, and it's not that hard to compare.
It's closely related if it's not your actual point. Some people actively try to minimize their bias, some lean into it. Also, not all bias is harmful. At some level, it's also an essential component of human existence.
Quite so! The reasoning (or excuse) with some folks seems to be "As I'm likely to be biased anyway, I may just as well be a bald-facedly lying propagandist", which is an even bigger problem!
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I doubt I'll read it because I think it will bore me to death... knowing the fact what George Soros' "Open Society" comes from his work and judging from their actions, the whole doctrine seems to be against exploring potential truths in different ways and having a new form of monotheism which is strictly imposed on the entire world. I believe that is not only extremely dumb but also extremely dangerous. If it succeed…
We need a healthy plurality of world views and the freedom to live them. That is the correct point of view, both from a moral and a consequentialist perspective. If we have a global monoculture then any flaw in that might doom the whole of humanity, instead of just a part of it.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#208This conversation isn't formal enough to be meaningful. If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless .…
Often B is not a well defined statement, but a poorly defined ball of emotions and value judgements.
I'm not good at thinking of these in abstract terms but one fact which we keep have thrust down our throat is that the UK has the fastest growth in Europe post (strict lockdown) COVID. This is a fact but is negated quite fully by the fact that we also had the sharpest fall in the early stages of COVID so had the furthest to regain.
Similarly if I told you I lost 5lb in a week on some new diet it might sound impressive but if I didn't tell you I over-eat and over-hydrated the week before it's not nearly as impressive. Nor if my starting weight was 250lb.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#209I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this: population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a…
Or another one - hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid cases.
Then later on admitting half of those admissions weren’t for covid, but for other reasons.
Re: How to Mislead with Facts
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then you can take another step and ask why professions dominated by women in general are less well paid than similar ones dominated by men, and why it is mostly women who reduce their work hours while the kids are small and why not more men do the same.
Because the jobs are less valuable, not due to who's doing them but due to the market (i.e. all of us) seeing them as less valuable. Teachers and nannies aren't paid a whole lot because they're easily replaceable, not because they're jobs dominated by women. Doctors used to be exclusively men. Have salaries gone down now that women make up a significant percent of the number of doctors?
Being paid less doesn’t necessarily mean your job is less “valuable”! I wish this was the case and everyone would get paid based value of their work but, sadly, this isn’t the reality of the world we live in.