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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#241

Post by papandada »

I get the feeling this article was written by very smart people with noble intentions coming from backgrounds quite similar to mine.

I found it tremendously unsatisfying.

This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)

If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.

My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as "love thy neighbor as thyself."

There's a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#242

Post by Clubber »

pphysch wrote: post #114
ncmncm wrote: post #31

The 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…

I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions. > Th…

>I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment.

This is easy to prove. What do the intelligence agencies / government do to a person who leaks? Snowden, Assange, Winner, Manning. We know what they do. Why are there so many articles coming from "anonymous national security sources," where there is no attempt to punish the leaker? It's because it's an intentional plant/leak by said agency.

Any time you read an article sourced by "national security anonymous insider," or something to that effect, it's what the government wants you to think. There's a lot of this regarding ramping up military intervention support, among other things.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#243

Post by sebastianconcpt »

From that article:

Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.

It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.

Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#244

Post by native_samples »

naasking wrote: post #186
bigodbiel wrote: post #174

I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information. Anyone who wants to stick to their priors, can. Anyone who wants to delegate has an array of choices to choose from. And those who want (and have the time) to chase deeper comprehension themselves can do so (still delegating some here and there, recursively). This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have…

> I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information. "Information" is not "knowledge". Information can consist of many falsehoods, knowledge should contain few if any falsehoods. We want a decent signal to noise ratio in our information, which requires some base of reliable knowledge. So I think there's a place for fact checking. This used to be the domain of good reporters…

Because many fact checkers are ex reporters!

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#245

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

pstuart wrote: post #177
_ea1k wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't Snopes also a renowned "fact checker"? I think some scandals regarding their founders came to light recently, but I don't remember the details. Yes, and despite this, snopes is still one of the better ones. Their articles are well sourced and easy to verify. I'm sure they've made some mistakes, and there've been a few cases where I disagreed with their conclusion or approach, but overall they do a good job.

Trust but verify comes to mind. I expect bias in all sources (including myself), but the key thing is to be prepared to be wrong in one's assumptions, as well as being able to update one's understanding of things as new data arrives.

I guess a system of enemies trying to debunk each other might work better than sources trying to be neutral. Enemies might work harder at finding flaws and errors.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#246

Post by zepto »

mbesto wrote: post #240
WesternWind wrote: post #223

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead. Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public spor…

> but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".

Surely that is true of all professions.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#247

Post by pydry »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #230
pydry wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you blame journalists rather than media owners? Do you believe this is a change brought about by journalists themselves?

Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion. Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect th…

Managers manage. Nobody nudges a McDonalds fry chef into making you a burger with subtle hints of approval. They either do it of they are fired.

Journalists also do as they are told with the resources and time they are granted by capital.

It just turns out that once print newspapers died out it wasnt very profitable to engage in deep, thoughtful or investigative journalism so journalists rarely get paid for it - no matter how valuable it would be for the public.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#248

Post by zepto »

How about they apply their own theory to the framing of ‘information warfare’ that they simply assume as a factual part of what is happening but make no attempt to investigate?

Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.

But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#250

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nradov wrote: post #190
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, you see no difference in the goals of "shaping public opinion" and misleading people (with or without facts). I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top. And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with th…

I would recommend reading Bari Weiss' resignation letter from the New York Times. They have really stepped up their efforts to mislead people https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Bari Weiss' resignation letter is primarily about the NYT no longer publishing op-eds that she thinks they should (and would have) published. If you want to interpret that as "misleading people", be my guest.

Weiss has her own problems with misleading people too, and I for one was glad to see her leave the NYT and make her positions clearer than they had been in a number of her op-eds for the paper.

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