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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#271

Post by pydry »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #257
pydry wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you ever talked to a journalist? You cant do much investigative journalism when you're doing the same number of beats 3 people did before and are pressured to produce the same output.

The economics of writing have changed. This was something done to journalists not by them.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#272

Post by Aunche »

kilna wrote: post #259
Aunche wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 shoul…

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

It's not contextual. It was an entirely separate answer to another question on a matter that has nothing to do with whether Hilary called Bernie supporters basement dwellers. At this rate, you might as well include the entire corpus of everything Hilary ever said.

No matter how you put it, this is a cut and dry fact. Again, the question wasn't whether Hilary is condescending. It was whether she used those particular words which she did not.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#273

Post by Rury »

tablespoon wrote: post #234
Ambolia wrote: post #216

Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.

> Most of the times "fact" wars or "culture" wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most "facts" will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power. No, I don't think it's that simple. Take the classic culture war issue: abortion. There's genuine, widespre…

I'm afraid I don't follow your reasoning. In your example, isn't the "covert interests" simply: A group of people who is "interested" in having abortions, and a group who's "interested" in preventing abortions?

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#274

Post by _ea1k »

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 agree, and that's one of the reasons that I respect Snopes. Even the few times that I've disagreed with them, the article was well sourced enough to use the article to reach contrary opinions.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#275

Post by croon »

inglor_cz wrote: post #212
croon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't focusing on guilt. I pointed out the logical fallacy in you stating the burden of proof was on the fact checker.

You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased. This is not the same as "not beating your wife". Vast majority of people are indeed innocent of such crimes, so there is no problem treating them as innocent by default. I would personally be happy if the medium didn't try to prove its absence of bias, which would indeed be hard, but at least tried to prove that it gives platform to s…

> You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased.

Again, it's not about being default, it's about not being possible to prove, which you asked for in your original post. The number of people or publications being 1% or 99% is irrelevant. If someone is biased, it's trivial to point out how, and if they're not, it's impossible to prove so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

> Note that we speak about "real world" proofs (preponderance of evidence etc.), not pure abstract mathematical logic which cannot be applied fully in real, messy human society.

This I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. Logic is basically a flow chart where things either follow or don't. It's absolutely applicable to real world messy human society.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#276

Post by motohagiography »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #233
motohagiography wrote: post #57

Faster heustistic is to check not whether the facts are true, but if the implied conflict that connects them is real. The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash…

Hi - where is that "dog bits capitalist oppressor" from btw? Google only has this comment. While I've been developing "news/internet literacy" for decades, I found it insightful to focus not just on facts but the spin and intent of fact presentation. Would love to read more if you've got some thoughts/links :)

Thanks! All of my comments are original content, unless I have plagerized them from much smarter people who tolerate my company.

It's more than spin, the basic unit of a story is a conflict, and you decorate it with facts. The question is whether the conflict is real, or produced by the logic of a presupposed idea (an ideo-logy). Instead of marxism in the example above, let's take the idea that the world is under the influence or control of evil forces, and you have been selected by God to thwart them, which seems bonkers from the outside, but it's also the theological basis of Christianity. (this is friendly fire) In that view, "dog bites man," becomes, "God smites man," because it has told the story using a conflict that originated in the logic of that idea. This premise that ideology can manufacture conflict that gets decorated with facts to produce stories probably scales pretty well. The decorative facts remain true and even legitimately associated, but the conflict that yields the story might have been fabricated.

Most of us believe that our ideologies are some version of the substrate of reality or the most encompassing set of intellectual abstractions. As I get older, I think the only reliable source of qualitative truth may be laughter because it's involuntary, but even then, that's mostly sentiment. Anyway, thanks for the prompt. Fun thoughts.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#277

Post by _0ffh »

clairity wrote: post #269
_0ffh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When parents can freely choose who schools their children, the ones that place a premium on how well they are schooled are free to invest relatively more than those who do not. This gap between value creation and value capture can be bridged by foresight.

ah yes, if only we had perfect foresight...

Congrats for that fine strawman of yours! Perfection is not required, your analysis is faulty.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#278

Post by anamax »

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…

> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed.

Journalists themselves do NO say that "keep the public informed" is their primary responsibility.

The dominant "why are you a journalist?" answer is "to change the world."

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#279

Post by ncmncm »

dolni wrote: post #158
amelius wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't we make a law around it? I'm tired of politicians weaseling themselves out of difficult situations by saying "oh, I forgot about that". It's your job to bring important, relevant information to the table, damn it.

A law to do what, exactly? Criminalize the omission of facts from a statement? Criminalize ignorance? Who decides when a fact was omitted? Was the fact pertinent (note: there's a lot of wiggle room here)? How much investigation has to be done to uncover whether there was a lie by omission or actual ignorance? What would the penalty be? Thinking you can legislate your way out of this is hopeless idealism.

It is physically impossible for anyone to express all facts in finite time. Every expression is, at best, a selection among the facts of that which is adjudged relevant. Legislating what would be relevant in every situation is likewise impossible.

Demonstrating that a fact is omitted with dishonest intent is tricky business. That doesn't mean we can't guess, but the law does not go by guesses.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#280

Post by mistermann »

ouid wrote: post #160
afro88 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super interesting. Do you mind giving a concrete example?

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…

> A is correlated with B implies that A implies (causal) B or B implies (causal) A (note that this is false, with a plethora of different types of counter example).

I think it's even worse:

implies:

- strongly suggest the truth or existence of (something not expressly stated)

- (of a fact or occurrence) suggest (something) as a logical consequence.

Unless your "implies (causal)" is a reference to a domain specific variation of the word (which laymen won't know anyways), your false conclusion is actually incorrect.

After googling, this seems to be the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

>> In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means suggests rather than requires. However, in logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a sufficient condition for".[3] This is the meaning intended by statisticians when they say causation is not certain. Indeed, p implies q has the technical meaning of the material conditional: if p then q symbolized as p → q. That is "if circumstance p is true, then q follows." In this sense, it is always correct to say "Correlation does not imply causation."

> This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.

True, but then it's extremely easy to find large quantities of people on the internet who speak as if (I infer this from the surrounding text of their statement) correlation rules out the possibility of causation.

I would love to know the magnitude of confusion/harm the (typically unrealized) ambiguity and other issues of the English language causes in the world, especially considering how causality links so many things together (often in ways beyond our awareness).

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