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Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

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Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#61

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

schnevets wrote: post #26

Fake news has always existed, and society builds up an immunity whenever it evolves into a new medium. I don't see the illegitimate Wordpress-based sites that peddle lies as any different than the National Enquirer-esque print tabloids or radio conspiracy theorists of yesteryear. Folks who didn't grow up with the internet may have trouble telling the difference, and even Millennials constantly fall for biased social…

Do you have evidence that historical forms of fake news and propaganda became less effective over time?

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#62

Post by saemil »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #57
dmurray wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be. People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.

Then you notice it's dark outside... ;)

And then see that a solar eclipse was predicted for today.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#63

Post by dTal »

theoh wrote: post #39
ebg13 wrote: post #12

There's always something magical about the naïveté of thinking that technology can solve people. Bill Gates understood business and technology. Terry Pratchett understood people. Gates is literally arguing in favor of filter bubbles here without the clarity to realize that those bubbles go both ways.

I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful, but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an expert on sociology. Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a free-for…

And I think you're being a little unfair to Terry. Sure, he wrote humorous fiction, but his grasp of human behavior is the source of much of the observational humor of his books. They are, essentially, spoofs of society.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#64

Post by pjc50 »

afandian wrote: post #53
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

Does the clock show today's date as 30th May 2019 or 24 Ramadan 1440?

I'm not sure what line of reasoning you're following here, other than that time is socially constructed?

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#65

Post by dTal »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #46
chongli wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

children's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHa…

I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should th…

If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? Speaking personally, they were all fairly over my head when I was a child. As an adult, they sparkle.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#66

Post by antihero »

gregmac wrote: post #31
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct . If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem. However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to fi…

And if your friend has not verified the watch, and you set it against theirs and tell your friends this time which you believe to be correct when asked, you are now unknowingly propagating incorrect time.

In fact, if you get a bunch of people who, say, want to get up a bit later, they can band together to set their time deliberately wrong and influence as many people as they can to synchronise with their incorrect time (whilst all along pretending it is the correct time), and soon it becomes hard to know which groups are telling everyone the correct time, and which groups are disseminating the wrong time to achieve their political ends...

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#67

Post by haberman »

I think they both missed the mark.

Pratchett says: "there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up." But that's not really true. It's not hard to evaluate fantastical claims by cross-checking them with other sources.

What I think both men missed is that people would be happy to believe fake or misleading news without cross-checking it if it reinforced their world view.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#68

Post by techntoke »

Reminds me of that time I worked at Microsoft and they grabbed datasets from social media to be processed by GPUs to ensure that their brand reputation was strong.

TLDR: Microsoft uses bots and other means to try to control narratives and opinions on social media.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#69

Post by inflatableDodo »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #5
inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

Children's comedy novelist?

One of the best children's comedy novelists to have ever put ink to paper, in my opinion.
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