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The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

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Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#271

Post by inglor_cz »

feurio wrote: post #222
inglor_cz wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not exclusive to the woke, no. "I am a better parent / patriot / Christian / anti-racist / Aryan / communist / whatever than you." seems to be remarkably universal. Some people just love to create ladders of virtue and vice. But at certain times, one of those prevails. IDK if you were alive immediately after 9/11. That was a period of unabashed jingoism. Now, 20 years later, this fever has long subsided, but th…

Indeed. And alive immmediately before 9/11. And in the 90s, and the 80s. And the 70s. Jingoism subsided? Really? MAGA, America First, The BNP, Britain First. Its really not gone away. And surely an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding is to be welcomed. Unless your definition of woke is something else - no-one who is "anti-woke" will actually tell me what they think it means, just vague insinuations that…

Compared to levels of 2001-2003, the jingoism knob was definitely turned down. Even the popularity of "America first" is an indication thereof: people are no longer interested in forcible export of democracy and American power abroad. The Zeitgeist of the Bush era was one of empire building. The Zeitgeist of the current era is one of de-globalization. This is a huge difference. The former one was certainly more bloody.

As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)

Tell me how destroying an old man's career over a 33 years old article [1] can be labeled as an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding.

Or running a Twitter death gauntlet on a random Mexican driver [2].

These incidents embody "wokeness" to me, not a nicely sounding definition that was constructed to make the movement look better than it actually is.

You seem to put a lot of trust into nicely sounding definitions. Always look at practice: do those people practice what they preach?

Anyone can put together nicely sounding definitions and theories. In theory (= the Constitution), the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, where I grew up, had solid protections of personal freedoms and human rights. In practice, it didn't. It was a totalitarian state that just didn't want to state "we rule you and we will crush any dissent" in writing.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation-idUSKB...

[2] https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#272

Post by feurio »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #226
feurio wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would I go onto Twitter and say that, unless I was a massive racist? And why, as a doughty protector of free speech would I not be perfectly fine with anyone using their own right of freedom of speech to reply to me? Robustly. Is it just that you want freedom without consequences? Because you're a racist? No accusing - just "asking questions". You gave me one link - to Wikipedia, which you then seem to have a…

Ok, I'll bite. Google "Grievance studies affair". It provides a chilling look into how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda. Is this example sufficient for you?

OK. So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!

This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.

I think that it's common knowledge that there is a bit of a crisis with peer review and reproducibility in science in general, and humanities/social science in particular. If sure that the follow-up studies which were properly conducted and controlled will confirm your suspicions. There are properly conducted follow-up studies, right? Right?

I shouldn't be churlish though; let's put prank papers about, eg., butt-plugs, on the board for now. Lord know's it the only thing we have so far.

If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob which stormed the seat of goverment in an insurrection and called for the hanging of the vice-president, then maybe have a rethink.

It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.

The whole thing just smacks of McCarthayism, or the satanic child-abuse hysteria of the 80s.

No doubt that there is a kook somewhere demanding paid hibernation leave for Furries, or some such nonsense, but if you claim that a weird outlier is actually representative of reality will have you finding reds under the bed everwhere and grotesque caricatures of "woke" in every wallpaper pattern you see. It is hysteria.

You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"?

So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#273

Post by feurio »

inglor_cz wrote: post #271
feurio wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And alive immmediately before 9/11. And in the 90s, and the 80s. And the 70s. Jingoism subsided? Really? MAGA, America First, The BNP, Britain First. Its really not gone away. And surely an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding is to be welcomed. Unless your definition of woke is something else - no-one who is "anti-woke" will actually tell me what they think it means, just vague insinuations that…

Compared to levels of 2001-2003, the jingoism knob was definitely turned down. Even the popularity of "America first" is an indication thereof: people are no longer interested in forcible export of democracy and American power abroad. The Zeitgeist of the Bush era was one of empire building. The Zeitgeist of the current era is one of de-globalization. This is a huge difference. The former one was certainly more blood…

OK, I dont think that I concur with your taking of the temperature of jingoism - cerainly here, but different countries maybe.

> As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)

Because practially everyone I know, I would not consider "anti-woke". They are reasonable, not vindictive, anti-racist, feminist. I don't know if they would consider themselves woke, but certainly anyone who deploys woke as a pejorative would consider them woke. Woke has become the go-to term to demonise anything that you disagree with. the right wing headbangers in the UK will refer to our PM as woke. He really is not woke. At all. He literally has ministers out waging a "war on woke". It's a meaningless culture wars smoke screen to distract from the latest scandals and incompetence.

If you are a comms director and you become the story, it's generally accepted that you resign. He wasn't fired. Given that the role is now vacant again for the fourth time in three years it suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Given the 737 MAX crisis I would not be at all suprised if he was looking for a way out anyway.

More sympathy for the driver. Seems like a conditional warning ("if you did do it for that reason we take a dim view - please don't do it again for any reason") would have been more than sufficient. Of course, I'm sure that you'll agree that better employment rights for US workers would help to prevent summary dismissals like this, which can happen any time for any reason.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#274

Post by native_samples »

fortuna86 wrote: post #166
epgui wrote: post #148

> I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better [...] This kind of framing makes…

> If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past [citation needed] more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website called "slowboring.com"

The article itself is the citation, and provides plenty of evidence and arguments for this.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#275

Post by native_samples »

Tuckerism wrote: post #56
HPsquared wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical deduction. Where people differ is the fundamental "beliefs" which are treated axiomatically (taken on faith) on which the logical superstructure is built. Edit: people also assign different "comparative value" to different things. Most value judgements involve comparing apples and oranges, but one person might have a preference for oranges and someone else m…

I've always used the terms "lens" or "worldview" to describe that starting point, and I think the most fruitful conversations with people I don't agree with usually stem around understanding that we do our personal calculus differently, and that doesn't make them a terrible human being. We both certainly believe that we have the correct view (or we wouldn't hold it), we're not diminishing that there is a reality wher…

A more rigorous version of this can be found in the book, Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. What you're calling a lens or worldview, he calls a "vision". He precisely defines two visions that are at opposite ends of an axis and which differ only in a single assumption: an intuition about the span of human nature. He then proceeds to show how this single intuition leads by logical extrapolation when combined with unambiguous facts to lead people to opposing policy preferences.

It's really a very powerful analysis, because it's Occam's Razor compliant. The theory is simple yet has great explanatory power.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#276

Post by native_samples »

standardUser wrote: post #198
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow... In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see not…

This is just a weak attempt at re-framing the issue. There is a much simpler way to approach suffrage - are governments making it more difficult or less difficult for voters to lawfully cast a ballot in elections? If you apply that simple question to the scores of voter suppression laws being proposed and passed all over the country, it becomes painfully obvious that these laws are by and large making it more difficu…

No, the goal of the laws is to make it more difficult for non citizens to vote. Claiming otherwise is, um (re-reads up thread), disingenuous.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#277

Post by native_samples »

sjtindell wrote: post #263
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just one word, actually. And, as we are learning now, Hillary Clinton's team paid to infiltrate into whitehouse servers as part of efforts to delegitimize Trump's election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-pa... We also know now that the russian collusion hoax was entirely fabricated by Hillary's team: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-cre... I don't agree with w…

You are literally pushing one side of a flame war topic using biased news articles on an article about misinformation. Unreal. Your lack of self awareness makes the quality of your opinions self-explanatory.

The irony here is the other way around, actually.

The article is about how people have become better informed thanks to the internet, and how increasing political polarization is due to people making political choices based on more sophisticated ideological alliances and deeper held beliefs, rather than ways they might previously have done so. Part of why people are better informed is that the internet makes it easier to bypass 'elite consensus' in a handful of media outlets, and also, easier to link to sources to cite them in arguments.

PathOfEclipse is demonstrating this in action: he is citing sources for his beliefs, including sources from different partisan factions like the CBS poll he quotes at the end.

In response, you're taking a pre-internet approach. Dismissive and without intellectual merit, your post simply asserts that none of PathOfEclipse's sources should be considered legitimate, not even the (hopefully somewhat objective) opinion poll made by a left wing news outlet, that shows widespread bipartisan agreement by voters on the question of what happened on January 6th.

PathOfEclipse clearly wins this round. He uses the internet in the ways people hoped in the 90s it would be used - to cite evidence for calm, level headed beliefs and arguments that boil down to "cool it folks". There's nothing wrong here.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#278

Post by shadowgovt »

native_samples wrote: post #276
standardUser wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a weak attempt at re-framing the issue. There is a much simpler way to approach suffrage - are governments making it more difficult or less difficult for voters to lawfully cast a ballot in elections? If you apply that simple question to the scores of voter suppression laws being proposed and passed all over the country, it becomes painfully obvious that these laws are by and large making it more difficu…

No, the goal of the laws is to make it more difficult for non citizens to vote. Claiming otherwise is, um (re-reads up thread), disingenuous.

How does criminalizing providing food and water to people standing in line support that goal?

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#279

Post by native_samples »

shadowgovt wrote: post #278
native_samples wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the goal of the laws is to make it more difficult for non citizens to vote. Claiming otherwise is, um (re-reads up thread), disingenuous.

How does criminalizing providing food and water to people standing in line support that goal? https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...

It's amazing that in every democratic country other than the US this stuff is uncontroversial, yet has to be explained here on HN. You can't have partisan activists hanging around outside voting booths all day and "helping" people no more than you can have votes being cast by having voters step up to a loudspeaker and announcing their preference to the crowd. I live outside the US and was honestly quite surprised to learn just now that such practices are tolerated outside of Georgia?!

Voting is meant to be a private activity free of all external influence. The solution to long queues is to set up more voting booths so the queues are smaller. The solution to getting thirsty standing in line is the same as for any other queue - bring a bottle of water with you. The solution to people not having ID they can use to prove citizenship is to get them that ID, not eliminate citizenship requirements for voting. This is, like, Intro To Civics level stuff.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#280

Post by VMG »

dathinab wrote: post #59

The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook Whatsapp and their recently target telegram. I don't think that's right. Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it. In my experience (i.e. people in my env…

This 100% my experience in Germany as well. Thank you for articulating it so well.

There is zero political skill of anticipating counter-reactions in the government.

The perfect example of this phenomenon was the discussion around vaccine mandates. In 2020, mainstream politics dismissed all mentions of vaccine mandates as dangerous misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracy theorists.

In 2022, mainstream politics is in favor vaccine mandates, and brands mandate opponents as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a complete disaster.

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