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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#251

Post by iconjack »

kilna wrote: post #151
innocentoldguy wrote: post #120

Earlier 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…

That's a good one, but my all-time favorite is this one: Hillary Clinton used a hammer to smash her mobile phone during an FBI investigation.

Mixture: It was not just one phone, but many, and it was one of her aides, not Hillary herself, who did the smashing.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#252

Post by cf141q5325 »

bjoli wrote: post #67

This inevitably makes me think of a video about how meat consumption is not as bad by "things I've learned" on youtube. Search for that name and "meat" and you will inevitably find it. I thiught the claims in the video sounded too good to be true, so I read the study most of the claims in the video were based on. They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans h…

Thats an unfair summary. The video also cleared up some simple facts that are often missreported and unjustly simplified in favor of a feel good frame.

Like grazing sites being interchangeable with farmland. So something like https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets which pictures almost everything that isnt a forest as possible agriculture land.

Same with what types of calories are fed to cows especially. As in for humans indigestible byproducts of industrial agriculture. For example, this is the "corn" we speak about in this context. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissilage Used in both cow and pig feed. Here a picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Sonsbeck... Its the shredded plant. The stuff that gets also used in biogas plants.

Calling these lies by omission out is not something that needs stricter "factchecks" that are less focused on facts to protect people from unwanted conclusions.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#253

Post by brutusborn »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #121

Tangentially, some years ago I recall reading a few articles about the problem with 'misconception busting' articles [I may try to find such an article later]. Apparently, content formatted like... > Myth: Spinach has a high iron content > Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content ... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers. This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is…

I first heard this on the Sam Harris podcast. If I remember correctly he explained it as a function of our memory saving the myth and _then_ the "fact". It is easier to recite the 1st part of the memory so some people forget the "fact" and thus beleive the myth more strongly.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#254

Post by defaultprimate »

ComradePhil wrote: post #199
defaultprimate wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

The entirety of the scientific method's pursuit of truth is built on Popper's philosophy of science and inquiry and has been highly effective at establishing objective truth.

It's kinda funny because you're making conjectures that are explicitly addressed in the book.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#255

Post by ouid »

brutusborn wrote: post #184
ouid wrote: post #160

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.

It depends on the (and I will use the term loosely here) "category" of interest. ie which kinds of implications you are talking about. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for mathematical propositions (constructive), these things do exist, and almost certainly surprisingly, they tend to be implemented as libraries of functions over a particular type system (constituting a less loose use of the word category).

For more statistical propositions, such as those that occur in science. Those exist but they're very flawed, and it's a tremendous effort to get anything useful out of them, on account of them dying when we try to look inside. If you haven't caught on, I'm talking about humans. We have yet to replicate such things automatically. You're certainly welcome to try though :).

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#256

Post by tablespoon »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #243

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 genuin…

> 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.

No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that.

> 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).

The biggest marketeers of "Propaganda" are those that claim they have access to the capital-T truth. If it feels like you have access to capital-T truth, you're almost certainly trapped inside an ideological construct.

That said, ideological constructs aren't necessarily bad things, since society simply could not function without the shared "truth" they allow for.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#257

Post by throwaway0a5e »

pydry wrote: post #247
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Your comparison is ignorant of the realities of managing creative output (be it engineering or writing). There are only a few ways to cook a McDonalds Burger to spec. There are many ways to write passable articles or design passable widgets. Stuff like "don't publish stuff that embarrasses our investors" is easy to validate. Stuff like "can we focus more on leading readers to conclusions we like" is far more nebulous and requires either substantial and continuous effort or actual buy-in from the staff to make much effect. Considering that the conspiracy theories about big media trying to lead us down a particular path have been more or less unfounded the only option we're left with is that the changes in journalism are a reflection of the thousands of individual actors in that profession.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#258

Post by sebastianconcpt »

tablespoon wrote: post #256
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #243

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 genuin…

> 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. No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that. > In other words they want to be marketeers of a s…

You pointed out details that I actually share.

I have no solution for the culture war.

Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certain individuals in certain epoch of history.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#259

Post by kilna »

Aunche wrote: post #204
kilna wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Bernie's support of Clinton is something that a non-trivial number of his supporters did not agree with him on, I include myself in that number. Regardless, droves of Bernie supporters showed up at the polls to vote for Clinton, at a rate greater than prior Obama voters.

Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.

You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#260

Post by mistermann »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #258
tablespoon wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that. > In other words they want to be marketeers of a s…

You pointed out details that I actually share. I have no solution for the culture war. Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certai…

> Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certain individuals in certain epoch of history.

This seems like a fairly ambitious claim, is it a formal idea in philosophy or some other field, and does it happens always/usually or only sometimes?

And also: is it Actually True?

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