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How to Mislead with Facts

consilienceproject.org

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Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#281

Post by WesternWind »

tablespoon wrote: post #232
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. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.... > I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together. It…

That's absolutely fair; I was overly harsh and blamed journalists instead of editors and owners. I'm sorry.

I also believe journalists, like a lot of middle class folks squeezed by changes in the economy, should be paid and funded better, and I try to spend or send some money towards that, even though I'm between jobs.

If that's not something whoever reads this does, $60 bucks is 5 dollars a month, and if you have a job or enough saved, you might invest in investigative reporting.

Here's a list of some non-profits that produce real journalism. Can't vouch for them all, but ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Reveal are great.

https://mediablog.prnewswire.com/2018/01/17/non-profit-inves...

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#282

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#283

Post by _0ffh »

Ma8ee wrote: post #136
YATA0 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone down when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women. No. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative…

Broken_Hippo dug up some, so here you go: [0] and some of the research behind the article: [1] The article contains quite a few interesting links to research if you are interested to learn more. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over... [1] https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...

Someone posting a recent sociology paper behind a paywall in support of proposition p makes me update my beliefs closer to ¬p.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#284

Post by _0ffh »

powerslacker wrote: post #270
_0ffh wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it morally superior to protect human life?

If we don't make it off this planet, it's more than likely that nothing else will.

"Why is it morally superior to protect life?"

Because I like it. Because it's life's prime directive to perpetuate life and I am a lifeform. Mumblemumblegod. Pick whatever you like. :)

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#285

Post by bjoli »

harpersealtako wrote: post #263
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…

I know the video you're talking about (I also watched multiple rebuttals of the video which pointed out the issues you mentioned among others). It's been a while since I watched it though, I may be misremembering. I found it very useful as a steel-man of the pro-meat side and even after watching the rebuttals I came out with a more complexed, nuanced, and less certain opinion than I went in with. You have a statement…

Well the conclusion that "cows use a lot of water. We have a water shortage. Ban cows" hold today. Because most cows are not pasture-raised on un-irrigated pastures (yes. That's a thing).

And cows eat a lot of imported corn and therefore the the numbers are wrong? Well. At least not completely. The crop using the largest percentage of water in CA is alfaalfa. Feed. Either used locally as feed, or exported as feed.

It is grows all year round and takes the crown of being the crop that uses the most water in CA (out of a percentage of the total).

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#286

Post by inglor_cz »

croon wrote: post #275
inglor_cz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%2…

Try solving any court case with flow charts.

In many situations, you will have contradicting evidence and you will have to decide the case anyway.

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#287

Post by ZeroGravitas »

This gives me an odd feeling.

They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.

The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don't really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying "well, you can prove anything with facts" which feels like it's going in the wrong direction.

Reading all the other comments, there's a strong vibe of "see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers".

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#288

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #45
medstrom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would ask you to please identify the ones to which you apply this criticism, for epistemic hygiene.

I mostly encounter the ones in Germany, so I doubt it would be much use to you. For example correctiv.org or even https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/ which is from the public TV network (government funding). I remember trying to verify the claims about "Trump lied x zillion times" at some US fact checking portal (I think from some major newspaper, maybe NYT or Washington Post), and all the supposed "lies" were al…

And your research let you come to the conclusion that Donald Trump wasn't, even by politician standards, a liar?

Possibly you've commuted in from a parallel dimension, and that's why you are suspicious of these fact checkers claiming "the sky is blue" and other obvious lies.

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

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#289

Post by Tryk »

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.

This is the field of study called Logic. For a good page with resources see:

https://www.logicmatters.net/

Re: How to Mislead with Facts

#290

Post by harpersealtako »

bjoli wrote: post #285
harpersealtako wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the video you're talking about (I also watched multiple rebuttals of the video which pointed out the issues you mentioned among others). It's been a while since I watched it though, I may be misremembering. I found it very useful as a steel-man of the pro-meat side and even after watching the rebuttals I came out with a more complexed, nuanced, and less certain opinion than I went in with. You have a statement…

Well the conclusion that "cows use a lot of water. We have a water shortage. Ban cows" hold today. Because most cows are not pasture-raised on un-irrigated pastures (yes. That's a thing). And cows eat a lot of imported corn and therefore the the numbers are wrong? Well. At least not completely. The crop using the largest percentage of water in CA is alfaalfa. Feed. Either used locally as feed, or exported as feed. It…

You may be correct about that (I eventually decided the topic was too complicated for most people to figure out and disengaged with it). But the argument you present is slightly different and more nuanced than "cows drink a lot of water, we should use that water to grow soybeans instead". There are other solutions if you accept those conditions like "figure out how to get incentivize importing feed from places without drought conditions instead of growing alfalfa during a water shortage" and "figure out how to encourage more pasture-raised cattle farming on un-irrigated pastures". The point is that the extra facts (feed can be imported, cattle farming is possible in some place using minimal irrigation, not everywhere has droughts, water is used in alfalfa farming) change the initial A->B->C logic to A->D->E->C, and maybe there's an A->D->E->F argument that you miss if you don't know that D and E exists (and maybe F is more sound than C, or even directly challenges it). That's kind of the point of the original article.
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