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The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

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Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#291

Post by tekknik »

bcrl wrote: post #220
fortuna86 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

I would suggest that a slightly better firehose analogy is that you're drinking from a firehose that includes multiple streams of good drinking water, urine and poison all combined together. When you drink from that firehose, what do you think the odds are that you'll just get the drinking water part of the stream?

33.3% if they’re all equal parts. But it’s best to give people a chance to decide for themselves.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#292

Post by tekknik »

epgui wrote: post #210
fortuna86 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Hehe I really love the firehose visual, and I think it's quite apt... Except that there's also a "pollution" aspect to information. If you consume enough misinformation, it doesn't matter who you are or how smart you are, it's going to affect the way you think. Just as in terms of physical fitness, "you are what you eat", in terms of mental fitness, "you are what you read/hear/consume".

So this means we can’t even trust the “experts”, as they would fall victim to the same issue. So listening to experts would be even more detrimental.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#293

Post by tekknik »

fortuna86 wrote: post #239
brianfitz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he was using the source article. One example was a leap in public polling around how our government functions (33% jump in being able to identify the three branches of the US federal government).

Congratulations to us all on the bump in basic civics knowledge. Meanwhile, on more important matters, acceptance of vaccines (which used to be nearly universally viewed as safe and effective) have plummeted. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7... Similar numbers can be found about faith in democracy, views toward fellow citizens, etc. It's not just lack of knowledge, it's the embracing and p…

The COVID vaccine is not the same as other vaccines. One can have hesitancy towards the COVID and other mRNA vaccines and go get the flu shot the same day. If you want to solve the hesitancy problem you must recognize this first, otherwise you’ll be stuck in a loop like you are now, demanding they’re safe just like every other vaccine in history.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#294

Post by tekknik »

aaroninsf wrote: post #174
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…

I wish I could upvote this 10x though I see atm that is not necessarily. A very nice summary of priors and predicates that need to be grokked! To these I myself often add several aspects looking more specifically what "social graph" means and what the so-called algorithm means, with lemmas about "engagement" and its industry... ...and the underbelly of how the algorithm works, the constellation of surveillance tracki…

> These regularly lead me back to trying to find pithy summations of specific paths through this mire, such as "deplatforming is not censorship, it is failure to provide or sell a megaphone," and, "we need to reason about 1A the way we do about 2A," (ie in terms of understood liberty vs aggregate societal harms).

This is one of the scariest paragraphs I’ve seen on HN in some time.

Who exactly gets to reason about these changes? How do we change 1A and no cause censorship? Our political parties have thrown the entire nation into division and one side wants to limit speech while the other doesn’t. So what do we do? Implement a dictatorship?

While we’re here, 2A has not cause societal harms, the humans did. Separate them already. The amount of gun owners vs those shooting up places have a very very very wide margin.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#295

Post by bcrl »

FFRefresh wrote: post #262
bcrl wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I post every so often here on Hacker News, have a look at this ad my elderly father got a couple of years ago just before COVID hit: https://imgur.com/a/Lk85lST . It's a perfectly innocent search by someone looking for help with a problem that directs towards an ad for a phishing site. The worst part is that it's highly targeted. I tried doing EXACTLY the same search from my own phone and laptop and got completely…

Oh totally, that ad seems malicious. I was just curious about the misinformation angle that you mentioned and how you in particular have been duped or had your opinions changed because of a targeted ad.

I don't see those ads. My filter bubble is completely different. Personally, I think it would be beneficial for society if all of us were exposed to information that falls outside of what our individual filter bubble normally shows us from time to time.

Another example that came up in my life yesterday relates to the trucker protest here in Ottawa. One of the news stories from last month about restrictions is being heavily promoted by people sympathetic to the cause. However, in the intervening 4 weeks since this particular story was published, those restrictions were lifted and are no longer being enforced. The people promoting the old article do so because it benefits their narrative, but they are effectively spreading misinformation now by failing to acknowledge that the content is no longer true. That's a problem, and that kind of behaviour is not easy to solve. Maybe someday our web browsers will have the ability to flag content that is obsolete, but that's a pipe dream at present.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#296

Post by tekknik »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #161
dang wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.

I wouldn't equate them. I would label a statement that is technically true but highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is technically true, because you can still get COVID despite being vaccinated. However, it's misleading because the statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly…

This statement is also disingenuous. Anecdotal but from my experience those I’ve known with COVID that were not vaccinated and we’re not hospitalized.

This is part of where vaccine hesitancy comes from, it seems like you’re injecting something that’s almost useless (I won’t say it is yet) as it seems those who are healthy (read no underlying conditions, known or not) don’t have issues.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#297

Post by feurio »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #286
feurio wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing? I said nothing about Antifa - why are you creating a straw man? Stick to woke. If you would like to propose a new term that encompases the original defintion of woke and something else then feel free - hyer-woke, or something. Why do you want to change the defintion of words? And, are you a fascist?

> What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing? You're pretending to be wholly unfamiliar with the subject of culture wars, when in reality you are very familiar with them. That's disingenuous. The other poster seemed to have endless patience with you pretending "not to understand" and "not know" things which you know and understand perfectly well. I don't know why you…

I really am genuinely trying to understand how woke has become the bogeyman du nos jour. It's become a hysteria - say something is woke and you ascribe some mythical attributes to it that cause people to fall into paroxisms.

Same as a bunch of strange crazes that have cropped up over the years; witch trials, spanish inquisition, mccarthayism, 80s satanic child-abuse.

Say something or someone is woke and it's like yelling "communist" in the 50s.

It's a fantastic distraction mechanism for anyone wishing to deploy it and I'm just staggered that seemingly intelligent people go into a Pavlov's dog response as soon as they hear it.

The amazing thing what I've found is practially no-one can actually put into words what they think it means.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#298

Post by [deleted] »

fortuna86 wrote: post #266
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Willful ignorance doesn't just include lying to push a narrative. It's also an ailment of probably the majority in modern society to both be uninformed about the issues of the day and to have no interest in becoming informed. And no wonder. Being informed is hard work! For any given issue, you have to research a lot, and do it from multiple perspectives and view points, including those you don't agree with. Then you…

> Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake me up. "Red pilling" isn't waking up, it's just becoming a nativist right winger. Although the left wing calls itself "progressive" so I guess the words games are everywhere.

[deleted]

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#299

Post by fortuna86 »

tekknik wrote: post #293
fortuna86 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations to us all on the bump in basic civics knowledge. Meanwhile, on more important matters, acceptance of vaccines (which used to be nearly universally viewed as safe and effective) have plummeted. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7... Similar numbers can be found about faith in democracy, views toward fellow citizens, etc. It's not just lack of knowledge, it's the embracing and p…

The COVID vaccine is not the same as other vaccines. One can have hesitancy towards the COVID and other mRNA vaccines and go get the flu shot the same day. If you want to solve the hesitancy problem you must recognize this first, otherwise you’ll be stuck in a loop like you are now, demanding they’re safe just like every other vaccine in history.

mRNA isn't new (it was discovered in the 90s), and has been arguably studied far more than other types of vaccines. Also, there are non-mRNA COVID19 vaccines available as well, if that is your issue.

Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#300

Post by fortuna86 »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #267
fortuna86 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we can all agree that kind of jives with how DNS works I don't think anyone agrees with that, either in spirt or practice. > The assertion coming from the Clinton camp "Whatabout the Clintons" is not an actual response to my question, it's just deflection. > Knowing those things, I don't think it strains credulity to believe that a nefarious political actor could take advantage of people unfamiliar with DNS…

Serious question: Do you really think it's whataboutism to point out what one of the parties we're talking about was publicly saying on the campaign trail at the time in question? The roles could be reversed and I'd still make the same statement. "Please try and see the blinders you have on regarding nearly everything you've said." is something you said a few comments up. You should listen to yourself more often.

Yes, because i'm not pushing the political partisan talking points of a campaign that ended in 2016. You however are pushing political partisan talking points of a campaign that ended in 2020 (but will never go away because of a single man's ego).
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