In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important • Hacker News Board

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#51

Post by hearsathought » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #46

hearsathought wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Who is we? I nor anyone I know never lived in such a world. Maybe there was a time when I was naive and brainwashed enough to believe we lived in such a world. But such a world never really existed. > Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their p…

In the US, from at least 1950 through at least the 1970s, there was such a thing. You had, for example, the editor of the New York Times who, knowing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately steering the editorial policy to the right, trying to have the net result be unbiased. He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight." Was it perfect? No. But it tried. I have lived through it ending.…

> In the US, from at least 1950 through at least the 1970s, there was such a thing.

Is this a joke?

> You had, for example, the editor of the New York Times who, knowing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately steering the editorial policy to the right, trying to have the net result be unbiased.

Who is talking about editorial policy. We were talking about news. Right?

> He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight."

Wow that must mean it is true. That reeks of overcompensation. Doesn't it? But you are right, the NYT is not biased at all. Never has been... Fox News said they were "fair and balanced". If they said it, it must be true right? Believe the branding. Hey, the Truth Social platform has the word "truth" in it. So that must mean it was created to push truth to the public. Right?

> You see that in the distrust for the media.

There have been many periods of deep distrust of media.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -- Thomas Jefferson

Through the yellow journalism years. To the ww1 and ww2 years. And beyond.

> When you say that, are you sure that you haven't bought someone's narrative?

I'm sure.

> Or is that a narrative that you are deliberately trying to create?

It's not a "narrative". It's the truth. It's basic history and reality. What do you think newspapers and media were created for? What do you think they exist to do? Do you think Rupert Murdoch created fox news to push "truth"? Do you think a banker created the NYTimes to inform the public of "truth"? Do you think politicians created the nypost and washington post to expose "truth"?

You are trying to push a narrative. I'm just telling you what the news industry is. It's an obvious fact anyone could see if they just took off their politically driven blinders.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#52

Post by mallowdram » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

analog8374 wrote: post #47

mallowdram wrote: post #31

Claiming to imagine a workaround like "virtue" will solve the embedded primate bias inherent in our lossy signaling like words and narrative/causal statements is worse than wishful thinking, it's uniformed and positivist/idealist. Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a l…

2 solutions. A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge. An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.

Cant's solve narrative distortion with another sci-fi satire narrative. Solve the words or go extinct.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#53

Post by mallowdram » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

progval wrote: post #27

mosura wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true Indoctrination. Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.

Do you have examples of lies that the majority was indoctrinated to believe?

Any mythic/causal statement (lightning causes fire) is a lie of folk science.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#54

Post by analog8374 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

mallowdram wrote: post #52

analog8374 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 solutions. A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge. An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.

Cant's solve narrative distortion with another sci-fi satire narrative. Solve the words or go extinct.

Well they're semiplausible

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#55

Post by analog8374 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #19

analog8374 wrote: post #17

Consider the "truth level" of things. Things you personally see = 10 Things you heard from a friend = 9 Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1 Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10 Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.

You missed things you see on the internet/news. We all "saw" the World Trade Center towers come down. Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.

We've always known that this machinery of "text and images acquired from remote sources" is profoundly thin and flimsy. Now it's just becoming obvious.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#56

Post by cyanydeez » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

Eh. As a headline, this is probably ambiguous. QAnon demonstrates whats more important is a lack of bias when seeking sources.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#57

Post by xboxnolifes » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #21

zkmon wrote: post #4

Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You get flooded by info that you never need in your daily life or in near future. Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood. This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world. Because people feel that thei…

> Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You could have stopped there. I don't think we (in the U.S.) get too much international news — to the contrary in fact. But to be sure we are not getting enough local and relevant news. For example, just opened Google news and saw "Joy Behar calls out “The View” cohost's revealing outfit: 'Where are you going in that dress?'" (Of course it's easy t…

In general, I think the average US citizen gets too little global news, too little local news, and far too much "other state" news. I don't understand why so many people have formed strong opinions about states or cities they have never been to.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#58

Post by mallowdram » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

analog8374 wrote: post #54

mallowdram wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant's solve narrative distortion with another sci-fi satire narrative. Solve the words or go extinct.

Well they're semiplausible

The idea is just ancient hierarchy reimposed in a decentralized, horizontalized info grid. About as plausible as Santa Claus becoming ruler.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#59

Post by mallowdram » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #56

Eh. As a headline, this is probably ambiguous. QAnon demonstrates whats more important is a lack of bias when seeking sources.

QAnon is simply a hack of narrative, and though it's crude conspiracy nonsense, it demonstrates a future form where info is non-linear, modular. If we had more complex modules and not this messy symbolically built info, there could be perception from external memory. Current external memory is junky, cheap.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#60

Post by mallowdram » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 12:47 PM UTC

Applejinx wrote: post #24

JKCalhoun wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"HyperNormalisation" was interesting but gave me tinfoil hat vibes such that I kept everything they claimed at arms length. But there we are, in a "post truth" world you have to be skeptical of everything. (At the same time, I am conflicted because I tend also to be skeptical of skepticism itself and try to maintain a dogged optimism.)

I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails. If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps…

He makes cause and effect statements and posits them as definitive. This person does this and that reaction occurs. These are the causal illusions we build history from after the fact. It's a kind of game that becomes addictive. He happens to have a skillset that makes it more addictive then the usual History channel offering. Our problem though, is that history as we design it, is not really there. Sayyd Qutb going to a sock hop no more caused 9/11 than a chance encounter bin Laden had with a courier in 1977. There are thousands of factors, mistakes, etc that lead to 9/11. Designing a casual narrative out of it is an illusion.

That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.