This all reminds me of this book I read years ago called How To Lie With Statistics. It was originally published in the 1950s and still holds up very well. And it really showed that the average American has no idea how to read and interpret data, especially with how percentages work. I believe that you can make the average American believe anything with mathematical sleights of hand, as long as it view their pre-existing worldview. That's why I now roll my eyes when I see "studies show" or "data says" because data doesn't mean anything in a vacuum.
Edit: Also, I got a notification saying that someone "liked" this comment. How is that possible?
This is why I (a mathematician teaching at universities) would like to strongly advocate for some sort of "interpreting data and numerical results" type course to be taught at whatever school I end up getting a permanent job at. Honestly, it would be a much more important part of those students' mathematical educations on the whole than most of the content in course topics I'm passionate about like multivariable calculus and linear and abstract algebra.
I agree. I was assigned the How To Lie With Statistics book by a very logical thinking teacher in high school. In senior year, we could choose to take Human Reasoning (his class) or take Calculus. I chose Human Reasoning because it sounded a lot more interesting and less work. We learned so many interesting things: the prisoner's dilemma and iterations, logical paradoxes, social engineering techniques, Milgram/Zimbardo conformity experiments, the ethics of eugenics, etc. One of my favorite classes ever and shaped how I think now.
If anyone else here happened to have Mr. Brooks at Stuyvesant HS in NYC, you'll know what I'm talking about.
'Humans are bad at reasoning on their own, but your average high school teacher will be expected to be so good at teaching human reasoning that they will be able to overcome this shortfall and dramatically improve the reasoning of their average students.' Well at least this position is consistent with the first half of the proposition.
That's too high of a bar. It's enough if the teachers are able to slightly improve reasoning in student sometimes, in areas where people generally think badly.
In particular, that seems more useful than other subjects that are taught today.
Ha, I'm a high-school logic teacher (both formal and informal reasoning), and I'd aspire to be the sort of teacher Sheluyang describes!
However, I'm quite skeptical about the value of logic / human reasoning on its own for helping people identify misinformation. My favorite way of teaching logic is to pack it with Harry Potter references, the Lord of the Rings, and the Lewis Carroll Wonderland books. Students learn amazingly quickly how to reason, despite their examples all being about jabberwocks and hippogriffs and moons made of cheese. They can spot valid arguments and fallacies and cognitive biases almost anywhere, based on their exercises with vorpal swords and bandersnatches. And it all works because validity and unbiased reasoning, themselves, are not guides to soundness or truth.
Our reasoning processes are truth-independent. Logic teaches us how to reason consistently GIVEN our prior starting points. If our priors are false, our rigorous use of logic will only make our conclusions false, or else accidentally true for the wrong reasons.
One of the few ways to break free of priors is by looking at opposing arguments backed up by good evidence. But logic doesn't teach what counts as "good evidence." Evidence is discipline-specific. We have to take physics classes to figure out what counts as good evidence in physics. We take history classes to figure out what counts as good evidence for historiographic theories. We take law classes (by which I mean "the rich kids who can afford them take law classes") to figure out what counts as good evidence in a court of law. Ditto for the med students figuring out what counts as good evidence for vaccine efficacy. By the nature of the case, no general class on reasoning or data interpretation fits the bill. To identify misinformation in our priors, we'd have to become specialists in a hundred different areas.
I'm not sure what lesson to draw from this exactly. As a logic teacher, I think it's dreadfully important to know how to reason validly. But it's also important to know that reasoning is not a silver bullet.
A very interesting comment, but let me disagree a bit with the paragraph on what constitutes good evidence: we don't need to take physics classes to know what counts as good evidence, we need to do physics *experiments*. And that doesn't take pre-requisite education in algebra and a skilled instructor with a PhD -- kids do experiments in physics all the time, by running and falling and throwing and catching things. They learn an enormous amount of basic mechanics by the time they hit double digits -- no formal classes or study required.
This is one reason all of us actually do have a somewhat reasonable instinctual feel for what constitutes good evidence in at least some physics problems, e.g. if I proposed that I could build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean for some modest sum, or that a certain very strong man could throw an apple across the Mississippi RIver, few would be sufficiently credulous to buy that, no matter how many charts 'n' figures accompanied my claim.
With history it's definitely more difficult, because there's no such thing as experimental history. But a lot of history has to do with what people do and choose, and I would say just living among people for a few decades gives you a reasonable starting point for critically evaluating historical claims. (It can of course be taken too far, and often is, when we judge the past by the shibboleths of the present, but this is sort of a mistake of overshooting rather than complete ignorance.)
In medical education it's definitely the case that clinical experience trumps most every form of hyphothesizing, however well informed. This is why clinical experience is so heavily emphasized in medical education, and why medicine is one of the few broad social activities in which we strongly emphasize evidence and measurement.
And arguably mastering even one of these fields gives one at least a starting point for evaluating evidence in general: you insist on duplicated measurement, you prefer "blinded" studies, you insist on perusing as close to original sources as possible, you are highly aware of the possibility of alternate explanations, you look for unexamined assumptions and uncontrolled variables -- all the paraphernalia of any experimental empirical discipline. So I don't think the problem is insoluble at all, although without doubt there are difficulties, and the associated problem of when and how to trust expertise is not removed.
I really enjoyed this comment and agree. I do think however, that while it is very difficult to teach people how to find truth, you might be able to teach them defenses against some common tricks. It's worthwhile to avoid being misled, even if that doesn't directly help you find the right path.
I think most employers value critical thinking,bat least if they want valuable employees. I'm sorry if your experiences have led you to believe differently though.
Only for a tiny minority of supervisory employees, and usually only at the very top. Much of the premium for college education is because it is a signal for conscientiousness and conformism.
Have you got concrete examples of this, as it reads like a media narrative rather than a real-world likelihood. The question I ask is simly why would you pay good money for an employee who doesn't add value?
Depends on your definition of value. As Gloria Steinem showed way back in the 1970s, car companies preferred to remain sexist (refusing to advertise in magazines read by women, though more than 50% of spending on automobiles was controlled by women) to making more money.
Most jobs do not require serious critical thinking, even white-collar ones (like the tax preparers at H&R Block, America’s largest if seasonal white-collar employer). Conscientiousness on the other hand is very valuable. I’d argue critical thinking may even be seen as a negative if it’s associated with challenging authority.
Agreed. Can't give examples because NDA, of course. Critical thinking is "valued" as long as it is within the orthodoxy, but if someone above you feels threatened you are out. Okay, I'll give the example. The workplace I was at stated their mission that year was "Equity" in the DEI sense (in student outcomes in US public education). And, there was a lot of talk about "moving the needle". As a Data Scientist, I refined their very aspirational definition of Equity, sticking to its spirit, and constructed a metric to measure, not Equity, which is a state, but rather Inequity, which is distance from that ideal state. Similar analyses challenged their claim that their system had not done harm to students of color. Management, all Authentic and Vulnerable and all that, did not like any of this, and made my worklife impossible until I left.
My reading of this was heavily biases by the NDA being mentioned. If your employer is so bad that an NDA is required to cover the reason for you leaving, I'd regard them as dysfunctional; obviously an NDA regarding your output for them may be reasonable, but if it covers why you left as well then that speaks volumes about your management. So yes, you clearly had management whose tolerance for critical thinking was limited.
And I'm now hoping that no-one is going to tell me that such NDAs are normal practice in the US, as it won't alter my prior on bad management but might alter my priors on the future of the global economy...
Depends on what is meant by "critical thinking skills." If one means "ability to rapidly comprehend one's social surrounding, so you can get along well with co-workers, work cooperatively, get shit done with a team with a minimum of fuss and drama" -- then you bet, this is valued in every worker, from the bottom to the top. If one means means "ability to critically evaluate one's own job, and figure out how to get it done faster and better without requiring some giant revamp of protocols or eight other people to revise how *they* get their jobs done" -- then again, certainly, valued from top to bottom.
But if one means "evaluate from some elegant theoretical perspective how an entire division could (theoretically) be more efficient, and propose expensive and complex reorganization to achieve it" -- yeah, this would not be super valuable in a line worker. It's the kind of thing that a consultant might be hired to address, if there was some clear problem and the old hands had already been asked what might be done.
And if one means "critique the overall purpose of the firm, measure it against social goals one was taught in a freshman seminar to cherish, and propose vast sweeping re-organizations of the firm in order to accomplish these" -- then....mmm...yeah, that wouldn't be very valuable in a line worker, or even a middle manager. Arguably it might be interesting in a CEO, if the firm is otherwise floundering and the board thinks drastic measures are appropriate.
You’d need to come up with some way to score critical thinking (it doesn’t fit within the Big 5 model, and while correlated with analytical skills is not the same thing), then perform a regression to assess the impact on earnings or likelihood to get a job offer.
I'm dubious about critical thinking being unitary. It's my strong suspicion that an "all topics" appropriate measure of "critical thinking" not only does not exist, but cannot exist for humans. (There might well be possible designs of AIs that could have such a measure.) I feel that thinking is so biased not only by priors, but also be desired conclusions that critical thinking can only be done in domains where the effect of the desired conclusions are weak...and that this varies a lot from person to person.
Unfortunately, I can't come up with any SMALL example of why I believe this. The examples all have a huge context.
I think that you could get most of the way there by splitting it into two distinct skills:
1) ability to think critically about blergs (i.e. abstract toy models with no emotional valence) - I expect this to correlate strongly with fluid intelligence - and
2) ability to think in an unbiased way about something which one has strong feelings about - this one I don't expect to correlate particularly with intelligence, though personality traits might show interesting correlations as to whether the 'too emotional to think' topics are the common CW ones or some niche personal bugbear.
I teach a class on critical thinking. I have units. Clear writing, use of logic, use of stats, use of science, recognizing cognitive traps, paradox... there are recurrent themes, but I also think critical thinking is a toolbox, not one skill.
> Critical thinking is not a skill valued by politicians or employers
So true. Many politicians think it a dangerous fault in voters, and a critical thinking employee is often considered a liability by their boss! Loose cannons and all that. :-)
There is no skill of critical thinking. There's critical attitude towards specific ideas. A person who blindly buys into one idea is critical towards other, and vice versa.
Even getting an understanding of Bayes’ theorem, which doesn’t require anything but grade-school arithmetic, would do wonders. Our brains are the product of evolution and terrible at estimating probabilities.
I've never seen a curriculum or textbook at the K-12 level that teaches the scientific method in anything that even approaches accuracy, let alone usefulness.
The best I've seen are the few off the beaten path curricula that encourage kids to play outside and build stuff, without any particular accomplishment required by any particular date. This actually encourages children to experiment, hypothesize, test their hypotheses, and gain respect for the daunting gap between theory and reality.
But even when kids do experience that curriculum, it rarely lasts past 3rd or 4th grade, before the inevitable round of standardized testing and teaching to standards takes over, and there's no more time for play.
Mind you, I'm not saying a certain amount of standardized testing and teaching to a standard is bad. We do need educated citizens who have commited a certain big chunk of what is known to memory, so they can work efficiently and cooperatively, and there just isn't time in the standard 12 year education period to have each individual rediscover in his own way any substantial chunk of knowledge about the real world humanity has wrung out over the past 4000 years.
But it's a shame we *entirely* abandon the natural and valuable instinct of children to explore, play, and discover on their own how stuff works. It probably makes for more frustrated and narcissistic rising generations, who are more detached from reality and therefore a bit more fragile.
I don't know who that was asked of, but I'll volunteer as if it were me. :) Yes! How to Lie with Statistics; Science: a Candle in the Dark; Lewis Carroll's logic puzzles; The Righteous Mind; Orwell's "On Politics and the English Language."
Are you sure you're not seeing the problem as a nail because you have a particular hammer (mathematics education) at hand? I'm myself kind of doubty that the main problem with people credulously accepting "studies" or pigheadedly rejecting them is....a lack of the requisite math skills. If they were truly *interested* in determining truth by objective mathy approaches, I daresay they'd figure out how to do it reasonably efficiently.
I taught research paper writing for many years and invited students with knowledge of statistics to comment on the statistical methods and conclusions in the papers they read. They did no better, and often worse, than students with no such knowledge. Probably an issue of being less interested in the context.
Over time and in discussion with math and logic professors I’ve come to the conclusion that students who are overly focused on math or absolutely uninterested in math are unlikely to develop critical thinking skills useful for assessing the veracity of what they read. There has to be interplay between formal logic and their own observations of their world.
Having tried to teach college stats I'm not convinced this would help and very likely could hurt. The more rules you stuff into people's heads without understanding the more chance for manipulation.
Look, the problem with most required math courses is a huge part of the class doesn't want to be there and doesn't like doing the work and no one can think creatively in those conditions. This leaves instructors two options: give students rote techniques they can memorize or deal with a bunch of upset students who put in tons of time and did badly who then complain to admin and parents.
The more ppl remember testing for p< .05 or whatever the more that seems like a trustworthy statistic. Better if they've never taken a stat class and just have a generalized distrust than to have taken one but not understood the material.
It's a nice idea for an optional class but that won't reach those who need it most.
Don't get me wrong. I could imagine a different system where this worked but you can't just erase 8 years of being taught math is that awful memorizing rote rules thing.
Personally, I'd rather see us totally eliminate the whole memorized routine stuff. We have CASs now so if you don't understand what you are doing it's better to trust the computer.
Require math only to the point where you can make change and calculate percents then make it conceptual and optional (so you don't have to keep giving studious students who hate it too much to think creatively good grades) and make CS courses required. All the students who stick in math do psuedo-proofs from that point on (don't have to be real proofs but point is they face problems designed to require creative solutions not selections from a list of 20 standard problems).
I mean have you ever asked adults in non-STEM careers how much math they retain? For most of them (even in high powered careers like lawyer) the answer is nothing after percentages and reading a graph except a deep-seated fear.
We made them miserable for years of their lives and at the other end they have pretty much nothing to show for it. Indeed, they may be worse off than someone who at least didn't learn to hate the subject.
I think we need to be honest about our success rate and admit that the goals of making people understand mathematics and making it required are incompatible. We aren't succeeding at making everyone understand so lets try and not make the people who won't miserable and help those who want to be there actually understand.
(to be clear the barrier isn't intelligence or mathematical ability...it's simply dislike of the class and the feeling that they are bad at it. A good teacher can help with that on the margin but you fundamentally can't overcome the fact that to convey understanding you need students to want to figure it out -- and after our HS system many of them not only don't but feel it's unacceptable not to be taught a rote algorithm.
Sadly, alot more of these students would understand the material if that was the only way to do well. But as long as you have to give good grades for rote work they'll take that option. Thst leaves making the math truly optional or failing a bunch of ppl out of college who would make good lawyers and writers etc...)
I think you're not understanding the point you're making.
E.g., I taught myself tensor calculus because I was trying to follow Einsteins' construction of Relativity. I did it because I wanted to. But I had no use for it afterwards, and these days I don't remember any of it. I think I could still reconstruct the theory of limits, but I'd need to work at it.
I had no use for the stuff after I graduated, so over the years it slipped away. I also can't remember the proofs from symbolic logic...and I use that stuff all the time as a programmer. But I don't use the proofs. I work with integers, if tests, hash tables, files, that kind of thing. And what I remember is how those interact. I'd even have to look up how to properly invert a matrix.
So whether you want to learn something of not *is* important, but it doesn't determine whether you retain it. You retain it if you KEEP wanting to retain it, e.g., if you use it. If you stop thinking about it, it slips away.
Your argument is a special case of this more general argument. (Paragraph of context and exceptions deleted.)
We generally don't teach math to everybody in the hopes that a middle manager at Chrysler is going to factor quadratic equations every day on the job. We teach it so that (1) people know math exists, and what can and can't be done by it -- that it's neither mappable onto common sense nor some kind of black magic that can do anything -- so they have a basis for evaluation when technical experts, hucksters and politicians say "This was done by math! Believe!" -- and (2) so that people practice a certain kind of rigorous and empirical thinking, e.g. "I got a root of negative a billiion, maybe I'll just pop that back into the original equation to see if it works," since we have found that rigorous and empirical thinking is valuable, but doesn't come naturally to human beings.
That's why it doesn't actually matter that much what *kind* of math we teach, only that it require clear and logical thinking and mental self-discipline, and that it relate at least somewhat to the kind of math that *is* used in technology and science today.
I think the primary reason so many people fail miserably at math is the same as the reason why they fail miserably at learning a foreign language, or learning to play an instrument: It's one of those things that you just have to commit yourself to doing every day if you want to become proficient at it, and most people--even as kids-- just won't commit to that.
As an example, both of my kids have (or will, my daughter's only in 10th grade) 'taken Spanish' every year since kindergarten, and I wouldn't trust either of them to order off a menu in Guatemala. And I don't think it's because the teachers sucked, or the curriculum sucked, or anything like that-- I just think it's down to only doing it 2-3 times a week, which is simply inadequate.
Tying this in with math education, most people realize by the time they're 12 that they can slither through by only engaging with the course material 2-3 times a week, because most math classes are moving so slowly by then that daily study isn't required. Which is great as a kid, but it does lead us to the point where your average 18 year old is going to stare at you like a dachshund who just shit on the rug if you ask them to divide two fractions.
I've seen this argument all my professional life, and in my experience of people, it's deeply flawed. Those who memorize nothing and look up everything are very rarely creative or show genuine understanding, they are completely at the mercy of their sources. It's like Internet commenters who know zilch about a subject except what they can glean from rapid googling and reading through a Wikipedia article. They have a surface familiarity -- can use the jargon, and repeat the conventional wisdom, maybe even paraphrase it creatively -- but they lack any deeper understanding.
Conversely, people who *do* exhibit a deep understanding not only very often have vast amounts of the useful data memorized, at their mental fingertips, they often have emphasized memorizing key points and data all through their learning[1], because it allows them to reason about problems in the field for quite a long way before they need to look anything up. That allows them to fully develop their own reasoning structure, better integrate it with their instincts and typical reasoning paths.
I wouldn't know what aspect of the human brain is responsible for this, but it's what I see. Maybe the problem is that when you have memorized almost nothing, what you have in your head is essentially a bunch of verbal/social scripts, since you lack the "data" anchor points to which you might otherwise have attached chains of intuitive (and nonverbal) understanding.
Another way to look at it: we all know experience teaches better than any amount of lecture. If you want to know how to rip a 8 foot 2x4 on a table saw without taking your fingers off, actually doing it once is worth about infinity hours of lectures, or even watching videos, on it. You just take in far more from your senses when you *do* it then when you watch it. Similarly, when you actually do math problems you learn way more than when you watch a teacher demonstrate them on the whiteboard. But this all suggests there is some necessity in human thinking to have some kind of experential anchor points for solid learning to take place. And that points to memorization, to the incorporation of factual data as the anchor points.
Of course, one can go to far, and require memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up and probably should be. In college I once took a chemistry class that required me to memorize the *entire* Periodic Table (as it was then), and this was clearly too far. What value can be found in knowing without looking that tellurium is next to antimony?
But I don't get the feeling that this is what is most usually meant (although cases like that are often served up as justification). Unfortunately, what I think is too often meant is that people are complaining that learning is itself hard, requires a lot of practice and memorization, and shouldn't there be some kind of nice shortcut? Can't you just learn to wave your hands and parrot the established conventional wisdom and that be sufficient? Increasingly, the social answer has become "sure!" and the consequences in terms of declining productivity and invention, not to mention adult credulity and innumeracy, are already manifest.
----------------
[1] I'm reminded of Feynman's recounting of how he memorized all the common square roots, because he found it useful to do little calculations mentally to quickly check his reasoning as he was noodling along working out some theoretical new path. Having to stop and get out a calculator would've derailed the train of thought, or more likely he would've just skipped the quick check, with an impact on the eventual rightness of the new path.
I think maybe the rote learning helps with "chunking" concepts or otherwise frees up working memory? A thing you looked up has to be mentally stored and transferred to where you need it, something you 'just know' doesn't take the same resources.
On the other hand, rote learning like this tends to be very topic specific and will happen for whatever a person actually specialises in, and probably doesn't need to happen for the sort of broad learning one does in school
Or it helps you to build an initial mental framework for a problem quickly, because it’s easier to see how a new data point might fit into the larger structure. (Carl’s note about Feynman is relevant.) Then, once you have your framework, you can rapidly develop hypotheses to test and make sure you’ve understood the problem correctly.
If you’re building the framework from scratch each time, you’ll be slower and you’ll miss important components. So, your hypotheses will be weaker.
Why doesn't it need to happen in school? Heavens, the whole reason we sacrifice the valuable labor of young, strong, healthy people aged 12-22, and instead let them loll about all day studying books -- at a staggering cost to the rest of us, who have to work harder to make up for letting the kids be grasshoppers instead of ants -- is because we think they'll come out the other end way more qualified to do sophisticated work, and the quality of the work they do in their late 20s and early 30s will more than make up for their missing decade of contribution.
I mean, if school is only meant as some kind of aristocratic finishing school, where people learn good manners, how to elucidate the social shibboleths eloquently, and the modern equivalent of being able to produce an apt quote of Cicero in a genteel argument -- we can't afford that for everyone. If everyone is going to spend his late adolescence and early adulthood being idle, he damn well be getting some very valuable practical skills out of it. If he ends up needing *more* training, on the job, to actually know how to do something useful, then school is a gigantic waste of public resources and should be reserved for the aristocracy, who can pay for it themselves.
I often tell people that I've taken two really important classes in my literally long life - typing in high school (to have a class with my girlfriend) and entry level statistics in college (to satisfy my math requirement).
It equates the average life expectancy today with how a child born will do in old age, which are two very different concepts. Covid and fentanyl effects on life expectancy are horrible, but are also unlikely to be the cause of death for babies born in 2021.
Journalist seem as helpless as the average Joe to interpret numbers. My local newspaper rarely manages. (And as a language-teacher without massive dyscalculia I noticed: many a colleague and textbook-authors share this.) - The average journalist (without a strong background in STEM or economics) is unable to lie with statistics. Cause they are unable to understand them in the first place.
True. The "journalists" today have never had a job until they signed on with some publication somewhere out of college. They have no math or science, and what little history they might have studied has been so corrupted they might as well not even bothered.
That as may be, but they're doing great at their actual jobs - nothing described above is a failure of journalism, it's a failure to understand what journalism is and is meant to do. Ladeling out this slop without even understanding it well enough to signal dishonesty is the point, as is the point of the 'press secretary' we all have in our own minds. Journalism is one of those irregular verbs: I'm a fearless truth seeker, you are honest but misled, he is both a liar and an ignoramus.
Thomas Sowell has a good angle on this, saying that the intellectual class have a greater ability to believe what they would like to believe by having the facility to invent complicated theories and choosing not to test them. "A little learning is a dangerous thing" as the saying goes
True, they are not lying per se, but they are lying about their ability to provide useful information to their readers. And are so insufferable about it at the same time.
Although I am very confident that journalists are insufferable I don't think they know enough about statistics and advanced logic to assess their own ability in those areas. This is the key problem that we need to get out there to accelerate the end of the Late Pre-Truth Era (hat tip to Scott's tweet)
Actually, "life expectancy" data are very difficult for anyone not specifically educated in demography to interpret, because the life expectancy of someone born today is not an expected value in the statistical sense. It is basically the average age at death of people today, which may have little or nothing to do with deaths in 2100 (which is roughly when a child born today is likely to die).
Dyscalculia is an interesting idea. What percentage of the population is so helplessly challenged by math and formal explicit reasoning that they will never be able to grok stats at a sufficient level to not be easily duped? An experiment on replacing calc with intro stats sounds good but I could easily imagine it'd backfire by giving people overconfidence.
I assumed, by analogy, that dyscalculia was a visual processing issue with *reading* maths, rather than an inability to do it (much like how dyslexics are fine with spoken words)? One can develop tools to work around visual processing issues if it is that, though I can trivially see how they'd make a conventional school curriculum near impossible to follow
Maybe that was what was meant, but I meant a strong inability to process formal mathematical computations rather than anything sensorily driven. I believe this affects the majority of the population, although it's unclear how much of it is due to a lack of effort and poor training and how much is truly due to innate cognitive faculties. How much of an issue would this be for the rationalist movement if a substantial portion of people couldn't calculate stuff? I guess not too much for things like "donate to these orgs and not to these ones" and "recognize qualitative cognitive biases in yourself" but for things like "forecast events in your personal life via Bayes law and probability theory [i.e., recognize quantitative cognitive biases]," I'm not hopeful.
More generally, the entire field of behavioral economics is built around detecting these biases with questions like "which sequence of coin flips is more probable: HHHHH or HTTHT?" Each sequence has equal probability of occurring, but only people who think in highly technical terms even approach the problem in this way. The 95th percentile of adult (even college educated ones) does not think this way and instead is answering a different question than the mathematically formal one that was intended: "which sequence is qualitatively more similar to a typical sequence in the information theoretic sense?" which is totally valid for everyday reasoning and so they answer the second sequence. But behavioral economists interpret this as evidence of "bias" rather than the correct interpretation, which is that adults simply don't think I'm this way. I'd guess 98%+ of adults do not think either formally or quantitatively. One interesting question is how to characterize non-formal thought patterns. We frequently think about this in terms of biases, i.e., how far from "rational" is a person but less commonly in terms of "anti-biases": what is a person trying to positively capture or represent in their thought processes. This is inherently hard and psychology has a wildly hard time addressing this because it's hard to effectively control cognitive strategies as well as observe them directly.
The point of a journalist is to probe - that's why the cliche is wearing out shoe leather. Just sitting there retyping the press release does not add value. If you can't understand it, you ask questions of people until you do.
Of course, not many news organizations will pay for this - most of the stories in newspapers don't require it (must fill those column inches). So when there's a story that requires this, there's no one left to do it.
"Journalist seem as helpless as the average Joe ..." -- I swear, journalists are worse. I've seen front-page articles in the Boston Globe get numbers off by a factor of 1,000, numbers about things that the typical Boston Globe reader would notice are far away from plausible. But neither the reporter nor the editor caught it.
"Subhead to WaPo article from this morning seems pertinent to lack of statistical knowledge and media misrepresentation: 'An American child born in 2021 could expect to live to 76.4 years, according to the latest government data'"
"Life expectancy" reporting is one of my hobby horses!
Most of the time I don't think the problem is either:
a) A lack of statistical knowledge, or
b) Media misrepresentation
I think the problem is that people *think* they know what 'life expectancy' means and the way the government data works does not line up with their definition.
I only sorted this out for myself when I saw some claims like this, knew (roughly) what the extra covid deaths looked like and then thought to myself, "This can't be right...."
But it *was* right ... given the calculation they were applying and the data they were using. Unfortunately, this isn't what 99%+ of the population thinks is being reported.
Corporate "earnings" are another one of these ... AOL Time Warner reported an annual loss of almost $100 billion in 2002. It didn't mean that AOL's treasury was short $100 billion ...
Ah interesting, so I guess I am in the cohort of people confused by the statistic.
The header from the data ( https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/65 ) matches the subheading I was complaining about. I guess I can't fault WaPo as much as WHO. The definition seems misleading? I don't understand why that is called "Life expectancy at birth (years)" and not something like "Average age of death" for a given year.
Idk how WHO defines it so maybe I'm off on the wrong track here.
But... life expectancy (per the CDC) isn't "average age of people who died this year". It's "for each age cohort in year X, calculate the fraction of the population who died that year. Then if a person lived their whole life under those age specific mortality rates, what would their expected age at death be". For example, if a plague killed 10% of people in each age category in year 2030, but 2031 returns to normal, then life expectancy would dip to 10 in 2030 before bouncing straight back to normal in 2031. Aka the "lived their whole life at these age specific mortality rates" doesn't apply very well to pandemics etc that cause a one off shock to all age groups - someone 30 today won't have the COVID death risk of 2020's 70 yr olds in 40 years time.
Yea that's a good explanation, my attempt at renaming it "Average age of death" would be misleading too because it's missing the condition on age-specific death rates. As you point out, the part that is misleading (per my original comment) is the notion that it can predict the future.
What you said is exactly right, but "average age of people who died this year" comes closer to a plain English interpretation of "life expectancy" than "number of years a child born today can expect to live."
"I don't understand why that is called 'Life expectancy at birth (years)' and not something like 'Average age of death' for a given year."
What Aristophanes said about the definition.
Another example of this definitional weirdness is "mean time between (or before) failure" for electronics. You can find examples of mechanical hard drives with MTBFs of 2.5 million hours. This works out to around 285 years. But no one expects a given mechanical hard drive to have any chance of still being operational in 285 years.
The way to interpret the statistic is that for the near future (a few years? 10 years?) the chances of the thing failing during any given hour are 1 in 2,500,000.
But that isn't what the phrase "mean time between failures" implies ...
Great example of the error in extrapolating measured and estimable short term failure rates to orders of magnitude beyond. No measurement in the short term (unless they conduct artificial aging or usage experiments) can possibly tell you anything about when the other end of the bathtub curve is going to hit.
Yet another example is the misleading media use of “record profits”. If inflation is some positive number then even a stagnant business with no real growth will report “record” profits/earnings every year.
That is really annoying with films cause it would be really easy to count ticket sales instead of $$$$ but they don't cause they want the bigger number every year.
Here I think a significant part of the problem is the fact that non-technical writing tries to avoid repeating the same word or phrase, and thus substitutes things that *sound* like paraphrases, but actually mean quite different things!
It's a flaw in humanities education that we try to teach people to express themselves both accurately and stylishly, and perhaps don't stress the importance of using the first objective rather than the second when they come into conflict. Although Law has gone that way and routinely produces work that no-one who is not a lawyer can really grasp due to an insistence on a hyper-accurate but often obscure grammar and vocabulary as a result. So there's a danger that the targeting of the humanities student mind on accuracy would just produce unreadable prose (cynically, this actually happened with a lot of modernist writers in the mid-twentieth century), which isn't really what humanities are about. Recognising you are using a technical term is however important and is perhaps not generally taught enough, other than perhaps in archaeology and linguistics (and if we could employ only archaeologists and linguists as journalists, the world would be a better place?).
I don’t think this is true of humanities education generally. I think any specialized academic humanities education gets to the same sort of insistence on proper use of technical terms (or jargon, if you want to put it negatively) - this is where we get many of the worst excesses like “Latinx” and “phallogocentrism”.
But writing for a general audience aims for style, and intro composition classes try to teach that, which advanced humanities education needs to teach out of you.
I disagree (as a humanities PhD and sometimes lecturer). The terms you describe are derived from the social sciences, which generally do in my experience seek to maintain terminological accuracy over style (one reason their proponents are so insistent on having the right to define their terms in public debate). The humanities, whilst being capable of producing really bad and jargon-laden writing, especially under the influence of social or hard scientific theories, actually aim to have a default readership style that the interested intelligent layman could follow the argument (if pressed, I'd say a holder of an undergraduate degree, subject unimportant). Whilst the actual content is often idiosyncratic, it's legitimate to criticise a humanities paper in review for the style being difficult to read (l have done this) and even in reviews to complain that an author has made the subject boring (not actually done enough in my opinion).
There are of course exceptions to this. But get to the root of this outside and you'll generally find an academic or department subscribing to a social-scientific school of thought and seeking to apply this in a fairly doctrinal way. The classic example would be the mostly unreadable dross about modes of production that many Marxist academics produced in the early 1980s, in a technical conversation amongst themselves based on accepting as given a model that was in reality starting to collapse in reality and in the social sciences where Weber, Foucault and their ilk were becoming the terms of reference.
Thanks. I'd argue that the classical style is the intent in humanities education with the exception that you show your workings, generally through foot/endnotes (the latter being an abomination unto the gods of good writing in my view...). The ideal work, if read aloud, is a persuasive polemic but one that can on review be checked.
It's a reflection on the uncertainty of the future. It's unlikely for opioid deaths and the primary opioid being consumed to remain static for the next 70 years. Fentanyl's devastating effect has been within the last ~10 years as an example.
I think people actually have developed a healthy intellectual immune response to this. It looks a lot like saying, "I don't care about your studies, I know what I know!"
Now, this has the downside that it works against both good and bad evidence. But the prevalence of charlatans makes it important that most people have a heavy status quo bias against changing their minds.
You aren't going to convince the average American about something truly absurd. You might get them to smile and nod after being badgered for long enough (so you go away), but they won't flip their positions after a few math tricks. They also won't flip their positions after lengthy correct analysis. People don't change their positions, generally speaking.
This. I think people who think critically dismiss news that disagrees with their common sense (per Einstein, the set of beliefs acquired by age 18). But those who do NOT think critically fall into one of two camps: they agree with the news story if it fits with their beliefs (and dismiss it if it doesn't) or they conclude, "Huh, I guess it must be true, since they can't lie".
There's a lot of people who believe obviously absurd things because they've been told them, actually.
See also: People who think that race is just a social construct, people who think gender is non-biologically determined, people who think that the 2020 election was stolen, people who think that vaccines are killing vast numbers of people, people who think that everyone who isn't a member of the 1% is poor, etc.
I think it is more likely that people will believe absurd things simply because:
Sorry, I was unclear. People absolutely believe absurd things.
What I meant is that 'you' (literally the person reading this) are not going to convince many folks something that those people would find absurd before you started talking to them.
I think your points on when folks believe absurd things largely checks out, even if I might quibble that in many cases that fall into (2) the people involved don't actually believe the absurd thing, but they know what they're supposed to say to make their tribe happy.
I think the idea that race is a social construct is actually pretty defensible. The notion of different identifiable populations with different frequencies of various genes is very real and our popular notions of race do bear a relation to that, but very badly and not close to anything yo'd come up with looking at actual population structures.
Like, we consider native Irish people to be "white" but native Gujaratis and Japanese to be part of the same "asian" race which is obviously crazy. As is considering an Ibgo, a Masai, a Khoisan, and a San all the same "black" race despite the differences there being generally larger than between "white" and "asian". We say that the descendant of a "white" and a "black" person is "black" but we say that the descendant of a "white" and an "asian" person is "mixed." Also we've taken to saying that an Argentinian of pure European ancestry, a Mexican of mixed European and native ancestry, and a Dominican of mixed European and African ancestry are all of the "hispanic" race and not actually "white" for explicable but also absurd reasons. And this is even before getting into how racial categories change between time and place, like the first Portuguese explorers categorizing Indians as "black" and the Japanese as "white."
So the racial categories we popularly use are indeed absurd social constructs that bears about as much relation to actual population genetic structures as Aristotelian physics does to real physics.
Similar: rightist criticisms of Black culture get called racist by leftists, though these are (at least nominally) about culture not ancestry. "Black" refers to both an ancestry and a culture, which don't always align (recent immigrants from Africa having the former but not the latter, and Macklemore and Iggy Azalea having the latter but not the former).
I'm curious about your name. I know one Chinese girl with the unusual official name of "Langyingzi Lu", 吕郎英子, whose name is that way because (a) her father's surname is 吕, (b) her mother's surname is 郎, (c) her parents wanted to give her a hyphenated surname, (d) the Chinese government refused to recognize a new double-character surname [I asked her once "what if your name were 司马?", and the response was "that's different"], and (e) some problem specific to America must have arisen that stopped her official surname of Lü from being represented either that way or in the common Chinese vernacular of "Lv". (Chinese people call her Yingzi, which is what her name is supposed to be. Prefixing the Lang is purely an artifact of official forms.)
I would remove the word “American” in all these contexts. It’s unclear that there is any national population that is substantially better at interpreting any of these claims than Americans. (It’s quite possible that there just haven’t been relevant tests done to identify whether Finns or Koreans or San Marinoans do better, but my expectation is that even if they do, it’s not by a lot.)
Presumably the author is familiar with the situation in America and less so with other countries. I read it as a clarification to where the statements are known to mean to apply.
If someone tried to carry these claims over to very non-western parts of the world, the surrounding social structure very likely is different in important ways. As the author has specified they mean an American context, the reader can now make their own judgement call how similar/dissimilar that is to other locales.
There's more to that story than meets the eye. The author's name was Darrell Huff, and he did a very good job convincing people to be more skeptical of statistical claims. Ten years later, he testified before Congress on that very matter, brought the story about storks and birth rates and many others, and concluded that it was precisely the reason why there was no real link between smoking and cancer. Apparently, he was paid by the tobacco industry, and was also working on a follow-up called "How to Lie with Smoking Statistics".
I like Tim Harford's "How to Make the World Add Up", where he tells this story in the introduction and warns that, like there is a continuum between providing no context and providing all context, there is also a continuum between believing everything you read and believing nothing. It's not clear to me we, as a society, are closer to the first one than to the second.
People are generally not good with relative proportions. The (non paradoxical but unintuitive) "Potato paradox" demonstrates this: A cucumber made up of 99% water is twice as large as the same cucumber with 98% water. Very useful when trying to misrepresent how many X..
> I got a notification saying that someone "liked" this comment. How is that possible?
I've seen that once or twice, and wondered the same, as no thumbs up or down icons or like counts appear against any comments (mine or others'). I assume these are available and visible only to paid subscribers.
Tim Harford wrote a whole book because of he loved How To Lie With Statistics so much as a kid. Darrell Huff does not come of well, but Harford's book is highly recommended.
When our kids were about ten and seven we had them read that book. There was a presidential election after which someone on the losing side claimed that there were nine states where the election results were worse for his candidate than the exit polls, clear evidence of cheating. We told our daughter about it and her immediate response was "how did they choose those nine states?"
Pravda rarely lied. It just didn’t tell the whole truth. Factory production was up in Minsk when the Ukraine starved but only one of those truths was written.
Yeah, at this point any claim about widespread vaccine side effects or long COVID survives or falters on this point. If it's frequently caused by <vaccine or COVID> it just has to be more common now.
It looks like total number of US miscarriages didn't increase much in 2021, which means COVID vaccines can't cause much of an increase since so many people got the vaccine. I think this means the most likely story is that people reported their post-COVID-vaccine miscarriages to VAERS in a way that they didn't report their post-flu-vaccine miscarriages because side effects from the COVID vaccine seemed more report-worthy since it was new. I've edited this into the post. Interested in hearing from anyone else who knows more about this.
Yup, although "new" is perhaps less relevant than "COVID vaccine side effects were a big part of cultural discussion" (arguably because everything about Covid was polarised and a big part of the cultural discussion).
Pregnant people are also advised to get TDAP during pregnancy, because it passes antibodies to the baby. Don't know what % of bad things that happen after that get reported, either.
Can confirm. I've been pregnant a lot, and they always want the Tdap and flu shot. I don't keep an immune response to pertussis or something, so they always want me to revaccinate. I've miscarried three times, always had some vax or another during pregnancy, never reported or even vaguely considered reporting it to anyone.
That said, I'm not sure either of those sources can rule out that the VAERS data here is a signal of real harm. That's because the signal here is very small. There are about 4 million births in the US, per year. The graph you posted said that 3,500 miscarriages were reported in VAERS in 2021. Only about half of VAERS reports are actually US data, the rest are foreign. So, maybe that's less than 2,000 miscarriages in the US.
Even if all those miscarriages were really caused by the vaccine, the rate would still be very low -- on the order of 1 in 2,000. Or likely a bit higher since not all pregnant women got vaccinated, or did so during the first trimester.
The natural rate of miscarriage is about 15%. So we're talking something like 700,000 miscarriages in a normal year. Adding 2,000 more is just going to look like noise in any population level data.
None of the vaccine trials had enough pregnant women to detect a 1 in 1,000 risk, or even a 1 in 100 risk.
And follow-up studies probably weren't large enough either (I think the largest one I've read followed 2,000 women).
We've only recently seen studies confirming that there's an elevated risk of developing dysautonomia (POTS) after a covid vaccine. The odds for that appear to be about 1 in 1,000. Patients have been complaining about that for 2 years now -- some develop symptoms resembling long covid after getting vaccinated.
There could be multiple reasons why VAERS reports surged in 2021. Heightened concern about the vaccines and heightened awareness of the reporting systems is definitely a big part of it. But it's also possible that the covid vaccines do cause more problems than other vaccines.
Yes, it's annoying when people dismiss crackpot theories of what VAERS shows by saying "there's 100% nothing there! guaranteed! we did Phase III trials and all..." This just helps feed the paranoid because it's far too dismissive in the other direction.
The right response would be: "The VAERS data definitely do NOT show a giant effect -- and we already pretty much knew it wouldn't from the Phase III trials and the early deployment -- so if you're arguing it's some kind of Death Jab you're entirely full of shit. However, it's *also* undeniably true that this vaccine was approved quickly, and it was simply not possible to assess risk factors down in the 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100,000 probability range (depending on how rare the demographic slice is), and so it *may be* that the vaccine does have some unfortunate, even deadly, effects on a very rare basis. We'll find out, by and by. Indeed, this is *why* we collect the VAERS data -- to eventually discover even these tiny risks.
"But do bear in mind that new medicine is *always* a trade-off between demonstrated benefit and risk, both known and unknown. There is no such thing as a medicine which is both (1) effective and (2) risk-free. So we have to balance these things: the vaccine will save X lives, but maybe cost Y. What is the relationship between X and Y, and what relationship should we insist hold? These are worthwhile and sensible questions to debate."
Sometimes it's worth nothing that when the polio vaccines where approved they *knew* the vaccine would cause a certain amount of polio, because the manufacturing just wasn't good enough to 100% disable every single viral particle. But the judgment was made: this amount of iatrogenic polio is worth saving this other number of lives from wild polio. And the public knew this, and accepted it. It's unfortunate how much more hysterical we are than our grandparents.
There may even be evidence that the vaccine trials didn't monitor side effects thoroughly enough. If there's a 1 in 1,000 risk of POTS, there should have been 20 extra cases diagnosed in the vaccinated group. I'm not sure if Pfizer noticed or reported that.
There's also some indication that severe reactions went unreported. Brianne Dressen claims that her reaction was unreported and she was excluded from the AstraZeneca trial, perhaps because she was sick enough that she couldn't get a second shot.
There's also no indication that any of these reactions are common, or worse than what would have happened had any of these people gotten infected with covid without the vaccine.
As the pandemic continues, it's worth having an on-going, rational conversation about the risk/reward profile, evaluated by age, by booster number, by virus strain. Instead, we've mostly been left with another culture war debate, with polarized camps thinking that vaccines are either incredibly safe or incredibly dangerous.
Our grandparents, or at least contemporary judges, were hysterical enough to hold the manufacturer of the vaccine liable for damages due to someone getting polio from the vaccine on the grounds that it did not itself make sure that everyone who got the vaccine knew the risk — they told the medical people giving the vaccine, left it to them to inform the people they were vaccinating. Also innumerate enough to compare the chance of getting polio from the vaccination to the annual chance of getting polio if not vaccinated instead of the lifetime chance in order to conclude that someone informed of the risk might plausibly have declined vaccination as a result.
I think that's a valuable nuance, so thanks for that. I agree our grandparents weren't all levelheaded cool cucumbers -- people are still people. But I don't think it vitiates the main point. If you are referring to things like the Cutter lawsuites, let us bear in mind there were genuine significant mistakes made, and genuine significant harmful outcomes. That's not in the same category as people suing -- and winning $billions -- because they think baby powder caused their ovarian cancer, or the autism-MMR hysteria.
When people were seriously freaked about polio, they generally accepted the risk of vaccines. These days, serious infectious disease among the young to middle-age is so rare there is no general appreciation for its innate threat, and therefore we lack competence to measure the tradeoff between the consequences of disease and the costs of its treatment (either personally or socially).
This was borne to me forcefully by the amazing levels of hysteria and flailing about -- in both directions -- during COVID. We acted like a species that had never experienced infectious disease before, and had no general principles on which to tackle it, so we were just ad-hocking it all the time, lurching from one idea to another. God knows what would've happened to us had some well-timed new biotechnology not come along.
Yeah I was going to add that a large fraction would get the TDAP shot as well, and often reasonably late in pregnancy. The issue with VAERS is far more likely to do with the very incomplete and opt-in reporting rather than just the denominator.
TDAP is administered in the third trimester, usually after 27 weeks, when a baby could plausibly survive outside the womb, when miscarriages are in general uncommon. I got TDAP and the flu vaccine and a COVID shot during my pregnancy.
Outcomes for my baby and myself if I got any of the TDAP diseases, flu, COVID in 2021 seemed far worse than any vaccine risk.
Scan the mommy-webs for a while and you’ll find women who believe all sorts of things caused their miscarriage. Lemongrass. Cold medicine. A bumpy ride on a bus. Given that my *pharmacist* admitted she suspects the COVID vaccine caused her breast cancer, I assume there is no shortage of women attributing miscarriages that typically would have gone unreported as caused by the vaccine.
Miscarriages are very hard cases, because (I'm assuming) the majority of pregnancies nowadays are planned, so the baby is wanted and expected, and when a miscarriage happens it's very painful for the mother. If there isn't a clear reason as to what happened or why, then it's natural to look around for "I did this and then it happened". 'I'm healthy, the pregnancy was progressing fine, my doctor never said anything about any problems, then I took lemongrass/cold medicine/a bumpy ride on a bus and had a miscarriage' at least gives *some* explanation, rather than "it was random chance and we don't really know what happened, try again!"
Re: the bumpy bus ride, old wives' tales about inducing labour included things like taking a lot of exercise - or that miscarriages were caused by things like eating certain foods or having a fall. See this site:
> Miscarriages are very hard cases, because (I'm assuming) the majority of pregnancies nowadays are planned, so the baby is wanted and expected, and when a miscarriage happens it's very painful for the mother.
I'm not wholly convinced planning the pregnancy out of overt desire for a baby makes the miscarriage any more painful for the mother.
I watched the following sequence of attitudes in a friend:
1. I don't want children. Why would I?
2. I didn't plan the pregnancy, but I feel that it is a gift from god.
3. (enthusiasm)
4. (miscarriage)
5. I need to find a job that will allow for another pregnancy.
6. I don't want children.
7. No, I never wanted children. Why would I?
The lesson I tend to draw from this is "a lot of people have no idea what they want".
I agree with your point re timing of TDAP... except if one is being technical the graph in the OP says stillbirths (which are definitionally late pregnancy) and miscarriages. (I looked it up, ~20k stillbirths in the US per year, presumably only a fraction are reported to VAERS).
I was a reporter for the WSJ & Bloomberg News for almost two decades. Here's the dirty little secret: you, as a reporter, hate to lie, and almost never (almost never: I've seen, rarely, reporters lie in print) do it. But you outsource lies to experts. Big time media has a massive cottage industry built around itself, made up of think tank hustlers and various analysts that will take your calls and give you comment for free, on anything you want, in whichever direction you want, just in exchange for the exposure and publicity they get from being published in your media. Those guys ("instaquotes" or "instapundits") are sometimes on call, waiting for you to call them at, say, 2200 on a Sunday to give you comment on a regional election in Germany. And they know very well what they have to say, the line they must take, and in fact are very careful to never stray from what you expect from them. So, if you're the Times guy writing about the school vouchers, you KNOW which instaquote to call so you get exactly the lines you are dying for, be they gross lies or just mere obfuscations. These dudes are not real sources, but if you want your bosses happy and your readers content within their thought-bubble, they are almost as important for you as a reporter.
I cannot recall the name of the course that taught me to recognize certain aspects in news stories, but I can never forget the techniques. Phrases like:
"Experts agree that...." (what experts???)
"Critics claim...." (who are these critics??)
Once you learn to recognize the Sophist rhetoric employed in news and opinion pieces, it sticks with you.
You know, I've had exactly that thought. Would he have remained consistent with his vision of a purer rationality, or ended up down the path of Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, where the political and scientific had no separation between them.
That was a trap that Sagan himself fell into with regards to the whole "nuclear winter" debacle, which he at least expressed some regret over in later years.
Everybody gets stumped by the new biological realities that we are finding out more about every day, I suspect being old school Sagan would unfortunately come down on the wrong side of the cishet patriarchy.
Probably not, Sagan has the same no-nonsense vibe like Richard Dawkins, and we know for a fact that one isn't afraid of calling out the fashionable bullshit. Sagan is perhaps less confrontational and more spiritual, but don't for one second mistake that for willingness to let bullshit and bullies win.
>Sagan is one of my heroes
This jewel in particular is the one I remember him by :
>>>If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
I don't know what happens after death, but I hope it's something better than nothingness solely so that Sagan and a few others like him can enjoy what they deserve.
There is a Great Courses Philosophy class on logic where the professor points out that if someone is going to claim that "experts say" they should be able to name at least one of these experts.
On the one hand, it's good to make people as specific and as concrete as possible in their arguments. It's a sort of "double think" of the human mind to talk about generalities while meaning only specifics, for example I maybe talking about birds while imagining only cute blue animals in my brain, and not hawks or penguins or chicken. I remember this had a name in AI or cognitive science, but I can't nail it down. It's good to challenge and point out this.
On the other hand, abstraction and lossy compression is how the brain works. Close your eyes and try to navigate your own house by memory alone, or even remember the face of people you see every single day. You will be surprised how often you fail, that doesn't mean you're lying when you say you know these things.
"On the other hand, abstraction and lossy compression is how the brain works."
I think there are a few things in play here and I'm not quite sure where you are trying to go (maybe because of lossy compression :-)), so:
*) There isn't (usually) a problem with "birds" because people do agree about what birds are. One *CAN* make a mistake by using a general term when your argument only applies to a specific case. Ooops.
But in the example of "life expectancy" we aren't getting generalized birds mixed up with specific hawks, we are conflating two different things because the NAMES are the same (or close enough...) but the concepts are different.
*) The philosophy class prof. pointing out that "experts say" requires that you know a specific expert was not claiming that you need to present that expert as part of your argument (though it certainly isn't a bad thing to do). His point was that if you make the claim and you don't know any actual experts who "say" then your argument is logically flawed because you can't know that "experts say" if you don't know any experts that "say."
*) Lossy compression is how the brain works, but if getting the correct answer is important then it does become important to define terms. Failing to do so can (easily!) result in circular arguments that never reach a conclusion because the folks involved haven't decided what they are talking about.
A current example from an other site I frequent is a "discussion" about whether strategic bombing has ever worked. The two sides haven't agreed on what constitutes "strategic" vs "tactical" bombing nor agreed on what working would look like. So we get Hiroshima and Nagasaki proposed as examples that worked and these are rejected because they (a) weren't strategic, or (b) didn't work. This isn't going to close because the sides don't agree on what the terms mean so each can be correct using whatever definition they have in mind (but are unwilling to share).
The compression here is lossy, but the lossyness (and/or unwillingness to be precise) means that the discussion can't achieve anything.
Plus the classic principle of correct headline interpretation: If the headline asks a question, then the answer is NO!
That is similar to the technique often used in junk science programs about UFOs or Big Foot and suchlike. They pose a series of questions, as if being oh so open minded. For example, "Could there be alien civilizations living at the bottom of the ocean?", "Could the Loch Ness monster be real?", etc, etc, the answers to which are all again NO!
Regarding go-to experts for the media, I don't want to blacken the man's name by imputing any bias to him, though he's reliably liberal (then again, he is a Jesuit) but for a good while there it seemed like the only Catholic clergyman any reporter had a contact number for was this guy: Fr. Thomas Reese. Any story about the Church in American media, and up he'd pop being quoted for his opinion on it.
"Over a period of five years beginning at the turn of the millennium, Reese adopted various stances at odds with official Catholic teaching on matters such as homosexuality, priestly celibacy, birth control, and the abortion debate.
He resigned from America in 2005. The National Catholic Reporter claimed that Reese's resignation was forced by the Vatican, although America and the Society of Jesus in Rome denied this."
I have so many questions about this. In your experience, what's really going on in the minds of reporters/editors? Are they aware that they're providing biased analyses? If so, how do they justify it? Is everyone in the newsroom a political ideologue who views themselves as fighting for their side, or are they just trying to maximize their readership by cynically appealing to a particular mindset? What happens when dissenting voices within the newsroom pipe up with "hey, that's totally intellectually dishonest"?
My personal theory is that basically all newsrooms have been captured by one party or the other and are essentially ideological echo-chambers and that all intellectually honest "hey that doesn't sound right" dissenters are shouted down faster than a conservative on reddit. How accurate is that?
Every news room has a slant of some kind. It could be right or left, or it could be fiscal conservatism or fiscal progressivism. And then the culture stuff could be untethered from that. "The News" and "The Facts" are entirely socially constructed.
This postmodern take is trivially true and easy to justify, as relativism usually is. But is that really sufficient reason to adopt it, and thus never evaluate one news room as better than another at reporting the news?
Consider the prairie dog. If a prairie dog on sentry duty spots a hawk and doesn't bark, do we say the prairie dog is defective? Or do we say the prairie dog is, according to one particular established opinion, defective? I think we just say the prairie dog is defective.
Now compare the defective prairie dog sentry with a radio station that neglects to report an approaching tsunami. Why should we now say it's just an opinion that this radio station is bad at reporting the news?
Is the difference because humans are metaphysically different from prairie dogs? Is it because of something about the human use of language, i.e. that language only ever refers to itself? Is it because the complexity of civilization makes it impossible to figure out all the ways that events can effect humans? I am not a philosopher, so I would be grateful to see the full rationale spelled out.
The standard for the prairie dog is uncontroversially universal, so there's no question about it not fulfilling its role. But there's no universal standard for what the media should be. Or rather, there is, to be on the same side as you politically (the obviously correct one), but few people are honest and self-aware enough to admit this. Tellingly, they tend to be outraged only by misinformation favoring the other side.
This answer broadened my question from whether one particular thing (the tsunami in the area) is or isn't a certain sort of news, to whether there is a universal standard for what the [news] media should be, which would imply that all information can be classified into one of two categories (and excludes e.g. a spectrum model).
Let's get specific with your controversy/consensus distinction. Is there actually more controversy around a radio station not mentioning an incoming tsunami than there is about a prairie dog not barking at a hawk? They sound uncontroversially universal in equal measure to me.
So what is the actual source of the categorical difference? (And when, in the tens of millions of years separating us from our distant cousins the prairie dogs, did it emerge?)
Or else, why aren't we postmodern about prairie dogs' roles as sentries too?
Sure, I'll grant that the failure to mention an incoming tsunami by the local radio station is an uncontroversial error. However, this sort of thing doesn't really happen in practice, and it's not the kind of problem that people are bemoaning when they talk about the crisis of trust etc. They are generally upset about the postmodern stuff, or tribalistic in other words. See the reply by Carl Pham below for elaboration of the role that the media plays, especially on the national level: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11349942
This comment wasn't helpful in the least. Every halfway intelligent adult is already aware of these vague truisms. I wanted specific insights from someone on the inside.
Good thing you wasted even more time replying to it then, big brain stuff. Your theory of course is on the same level or even lower in effort/quality, perhaps why OP didn't respond.
Let's be charitable. People are only in a few rather narrow cases willing to fork out good money for genuine unbiased information. If you want to know whether to buy this house or that, say, or if you want to know the best restaurants in Paris for a trip. And in any such case, there is a profit-making industry that specialized in providing accurate information for a fee.
But general news is in a different category. It's mostly not actionable, at the personal level. It doesn't really change what we *do*, for the most part, only what we yammer about on social media or on blog comment sections. It bears more than a slight resemblance to scholastics and bishops fiercely debating theological arcana circa AD 1600.
What general news really is, is a certain form of entertainment. It tickles our prurience or cupidity, it gives us gossip to repeat, with glee or rage, it gives us tear-jerker or heartwarming or outrageous stories so we can have a nice cathartic cry, smile, or yell at the clouds.
Since the "news" is really a branch of entertainment, it's not the least bit surprising that it caters to the tastes of its subscribers, and that varying news sources fight over certain demographics. There's a typical New York Times subscriber for whom the Times editors and reporters write, and they know pretty well what he wants to read. There's a typical New York Post subscriber who wants to read different stuff, and the editors and reporters of the Post provide it. There's what the Economists subscribers want to read, and the subscribers to Scientific American, and to Nature, too.
That doesn't mean any of them can't write the truth. It just means that expecting that to be their #1 goal is naive with respect to human nature. They will print gospel truth when it's either sufficiently entertaining or there's no more lucrative option.
At some point Scientific American shifted from being "science for the intelligent layman" to "purportedly scientific articles that support left of center views." Do you interpret that as due to a change in who read it or what readers wanted, a recognition that its readers didn't actually want what it had been providing, or a rare exception to your description, an ideological takeover.
That's a very good question. I subscribed as a young adult and loved it, and its demise (in the way you describe) was shocking to me. My hypothesis at the time was twofold: first, that the rise and rapid growth of other pop sciencey magazines in the 70s and 80s persuaded the owners that a great deal more money could be made by broadening the appeal by making the rigor more shallow and the tone less cool and detached, and second, that the available demographics changed, that amateur science and engineering just became less interesting to a mostly male mostly 19-45 readership.
That demographic stopped tinkering with their cars, building model rockets, taking apart or building radios, grinding telescope lenses, buying home chemistry sets and making invisible ink, et cetera, so a lot of the nuts 'n' bolts "Here's how shit works" material just became less interesting. Fewer readers were interested in being amateur scientists or engineers. Give us big bold mind-blowing ideas instead, sort of "Cosmos" in print, which we can just admire and discuss, without actually *doing* anything. (Climate change is a big bold idea. It may be completely wrong, or greatly exaggerated, but the *idea* that burning oil and coal can totally rework the climate of the Earth is a great big and bold idea for sure.)
I don't know why that happened. I might've said computers, given that today's young men pretty much spend all their spare time and mental energy screwing around with computers, building and operating fantasy worlds. But the change seemed to happen well before that, already in the late 80s and 90s. So I don't know. But...some kind of broad slow sociological change, which I'm tempted to say mostly altered the ambitions and focus of young men.
Having the electronic equivalent of a rolodex full of think tank phone numbers enables reporters to get a lot of decent work done fast, with a couple of "experts" offering the article's thesis and one "expert" offering the antithesis. Reporters seldom (but occasionally) come up with a synthesis creating an overarching explanation of how both warring sets of experts' views can be true at the same time.
Which point of view gets to be the thesis tends to be fairly arbitrary, with political bias or a new study or favor bank logrolling all perhaps playing a role in determining which set of experts gets to be the protagonist in the article.
also, it's in bad taste to quote the same instapundit every time (you look lazy) so you must shuffle the cards, so to speak, and keep all of them engaged and ready to take your call
During the few years I worked as as a reporter a couple of decades ago, I found that academic geniuses Noam Chomsky and David Hackett Fischer ("Albion's Seed") would graciously answer my not particularly highbrow questions. E.g., for my utterly disposable article on the general topic of "What to Look for on Election Night 2000," I recall Fischer pointing out for me that Delaware had an impressive record in the 20th Century as a swing state that went with winners for reasons, according to Fischer, with deep roots going back to the 17th Century.
If I'd stuck with reporting, I likely could have recruited a wide roster of brilliant professors to provide me with quotes about current events. Fischer, for example, was pleased that I'd carefully read his magnum opus "Albion's Seed" and that I asked him intelligent questions about the latest news relevant to his life's work.
My view was: Why doesn't every politics reporter ask the great David Hackett Fischer for his view on the upcoming election?
Similarly, Tom Edsall's columns in the New York Times in the 2020s largely consist of him emailing contemporary questions to highbrow academics and posting their answers.
Yup, same thing happened to me while covering Iberian political infighting. I used to call the very famous and gracious historian Stanley Payne, who was always kind and informative. Other reporters thought that Payne, who wasn't always highly critical of Generalissimo Franco, was a Fascist who shouldn't be entertained. In the end, I found that such important people are often smart and complicated and they often don't give you the exact quote that you need, or take ages to do so. Instaquotes, being faster and nimbler, work much better for the Internet age, and they always have the perfect pithy quote ready for you.
It sometimes happens. Stephen Glass is an oft-cited example, but there are many others. But you have to make up the source completely. In big time publications, editors will check with the original source of the quote when there are doubts or questions, if they can find it. The instapundit may also complain, of course, they have a business & reputation to protect, they're players, not dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
What about lying by omission? For example, don't report something even though it is clearly newsworthy, because it makes you or your news business or the politician / party you like, look bad?
That's sort of the trivial case of misinforming via lack of context. Or perhaps misinforming via lack of context is a particular case of lying by omission.
Lying by omission is still possible. I think the argument here is more Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice [in this case 'lying', whether by omission or no] that which is adequately explained by stupidity [in this case '*misinterpreting context'].
All true. It's very, very difficult to report honestly on something you have strong partisan feelings about. Even if you try.
I'll add what anyone who's ever been quoted by a newspaper, or who has had the experience of reading a newspaper story about an event one witnessed firsthand knows - reporters just get things wrong. A lot. They misquote, paraphrase in a misleading or plain incorrect way. They report some facts, and omit other equally important facts. And omit critical context. They fall for plausible narratives from biased parties. All this, just via incompetence and ignorance, with absolutely no intent to deceive.
This happens all the time, to a far greater extent than those who haven't witnessed it imagine, even without any intent to report anything but the purest truth. This is just human fallibility.
When there are strong partisan feelings or moral outrage, so much the worse. Even when the reporter is genuinely trying to be fair (which I suspect isn't as often today as it used to be - journalists once felt a professional obligation to at least try to tell the truth; that has recently broken down).
There is no fix other than multiple voices with multiple viewpoints, and critical crosschecking of facts.
I was in a meeting detailed in the NYTimes. It was sort of a radicalizing moment for me. They quoted exactly what an executive said accurately, in a meeting that actually took place and they managed to get the entire context exactly backwards.
On the other hand, it's a bit too convenient if every time a wider context made you look bad or reflect critically on a cherished belief, you just - wonder of wonders - get it wrong.
If someone has absolutely 0 problem with arithmetic, but every time you lend them money they suddenly struggle with fractions and mistake 1/4 for a quantity greater than 1/3 ("coincidentally" in their favor), you would be understandably skeptical.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
The Houston Chronicle ran a front page story about my Rice U. college bowl team in 1979 with a lot of quotes from me as the team captain. The reporter didn't take a shine to me so he made me look bad, but in an utterly fair way: by not cleaning up the quotes I gave him over the phone but instead by quoting me absolutely verbatim, including a grammatical mistake I made talking to him, leaving in all my "you knows" and "uhs," and letting me ramble on like an idiot.
I was initially peeved, but my ultimate opinion quickly became, "Well played, sir, well played."
So when I read people complaining about how reporters quote them, I recall how often reporters pass up the chance to make them look bad by quoting them precisely, and instead the reporters polish up what they were told into respectable written prose.
I love everything about this post except for the conclusion, because it's not at all clear to me that an unmoderated free-for-all would produce better results than what we're getting right now, and on priors I would expect it to perform worse. Just because there's no biased central authority in your system doesn't mean you don't end up with bias - but it does increase uncertainty about the direction and magnitude of that bias considerably.
"Different biases will cancel each other out and truth will prevail!" Not impossible, but again no reason to expect that on priors. The socially dominant strategies will generally win and have no binding commitment to the truth.
Again, the problem you're describing is real, but there's no argument for why the proposed solution would work. It's like when people say we just need to abolish capitalism. Yes, it would be great if we could solve all of our coordination problems and optimally harness all available resources for the betterment of everyone, but getting rid of the thing you're pointing at does nothing to further that goal, and in fact throws away a lot of very useful social infrastructure that could otherwise be used for exactly the goals you're aiming at.
The problems are real and complicated and will not be at all helped by getting rid of the giant central thing that makes any of it work at all.
I find the concept that the "truth will out" or the "truth will set us free" to be very unconvincing.
The real argument for free speech, perhaps the only meaningful one, it that censorship by its nature requires an act of force against another, and there are very few circumstances where an matter of speech should justify such an action.
Speech most certainly isn't violence, but censoring it certainly can end up requiring violence to implement it, whether under force or arms or color of law.
True (LOL), but in the meantime, there may be suffering caused by the suppression. I'd always rather avoid the suppression to begin with. Not always possible, of course.
I love everything about this comment except for the...
Wait, I just love everything about the comment!
I will also add that I tend to actually think that free-for-all *would* produce better results, just that the I don't think it follows from the arguments made in Scott's post.
In the absence of a Press Accountability Office like the GAO to fact-check articles, the solution is to read foreign news sources that are not as conflicted, although the culture wars have gone global. Nikkei News from Japan is a very useful corrective, for instance.
I don’t think there is any source that is “not as conflicted”. The best you can get is “differently conflicted, and perhaps in a way you more clearly recognize as conflicted”.
Read Nikkei’s coverage on China, for instance. As for US politics, most foreigners see little daylight between the two parties (apart from historical anomalies like Trump) and are far less likely to be sucked in by US tribal affiliation. The one exception is English ones, who usually transpose US battles on British soil, and many of them are owned by Murdoch anyway.
Foreign news is rarely well studied and even more rarely "neutral". They are often focused on aspects Americans don't care about, sure, but neutral? Nah.
Reading about the US in British newspapers, or the UK in American newspapers, is a really good way to grasp another common journalism problem of drastic oversimplification, to the point where it becomes factually wrong. Sometimes this will be biased, sometimes not in any obvious way.
Everywhere else in the world, the story will sometimes be biased to use as a casus belli/shoehorned parable; more often, it's just so wildly, absurdly wrong that it's not worth reading.
I think you need to separate British (English is not really accurate for most of our major media, for all Scotland has it's own media ecosystem) media which aspires to be global, notably the Guardian and the Mail, and that which is still essentially focused on the British isles. The former is likely to adopt culture war issues in part because they are competing for US voters, whilst the latter tend to not fight the culture war so much, unless one of the issues becomes relevant to it's readers. So you'll find very little discussion about abortion (and a lot of horror at how backwards the US is on this...) in British-focused publications, because the target markets for the internationally-focused publications are not supportive of a ban and there's no real religious constituency pushing a ban in the UK. You will find a lot about transgender issues because that's an actual issue in the UK, with the Scottish government passing fairly radical laws to allow self-ID, whilst the service to support young people with gender issues in the NHS was found to be ideologically-driven and ignoring safeguarding. We're not just echoing the US discussion, but having our own about issues relevant to us, or seeking to contribute to the US one in some cases.
I used “English” rather than “British” purposefully. Some of the pathologies of the UK media like their largely rabid anti-EU stance are a specifically *English* pathology.
Abortion is a special case. It’s only been legalized in Northern Ireland three years ago, and that was against the wishes of the devolved local assembly.
And yes, self-ID is one of those culture-war issues you will hear of in anglophone media but not in French or German language ones.
What rabid anti-EU stance? If you mean my decision to vote to leave due to the democratic deficit and the fact that I saw more future in a world where we could partner with the energy of India and Indonesia (I made my mind up how to vote during a visit to the former) than in the current moribund state of Europe, I suppose I'm guilty, but I guess you're not referring to considered viewpoints here. The rabid anti-EU thing is a media talking point. As for the English thing, are you aware the majority of Welsh voters also voted to leave? The nations were evenly split (as you'd probably expect in a vote with such a small margin of victory), not aligned England versus the rest.
It's interesting in relation to the Northern Irish abortion issue quite how small an issue this was in the British press (sidenote here for US readers: British/Britain should not be used to refer to Northern Ireland, the most distinctively disparate part if the UK, because it is not on the island of Britain). I didn't see a single piece supporting the ban though; admittedly devolution supporters in the UK tend to be left-wing and generally liberal outside of Northern Ireland itself.
As for the transgender issue, I'd expect that to appear in continental discourse over the next few years as people either seek to make transitioning easier or start to identify 'men' in women's spaces (going on the two main drivers for debate in the UK). I'm not sure how to explain the fact that these tensions haven't appeared sooner on the continent?
Edit: corrected my description if Northern Ireland from "desperate" to "disparate", with apologies to any very quick Northern Irish readers.
Yeh the guardian has totally become a US offshoot. A seachange for a newspaper that used to be hostile to US foreign policy, to the extent of slightly defending 9/11
Isn't what we have right now an unmoderated free-for-all? And isn't the argument instead that a moderated free-for-some would be worse because it is impossible to censor for truth because (generally) nobody is lying so you would by necessity be censoring for something other than truth?
What we have right now is absolutely NOT an unmoderated free-for-all. I'm focusing on Covid specifically, about which there has been coordinated global censorship and suppression backed by lots of money. Like TNI.
Your second sentence, which I'm trying to disentangle, is what we do have, and it is worse.
When faced with the choice of censoring anything* versus censoring nothing*, I feel like I have to come down on the side of censoring nothing. Because otherwise somebody is going to put their finger on the scale. Of course with the free-for-all there's a whole lot more noise to wade through. I don't think there's any easy answer.
* with the pre-existing exceptions to the First Amendment regarding things like child pornography.
I would argue that using censorship to fact check will tend to increase the magnitude of the underlying bias. For example in the 1970's there are at least some well known headlines projecting catastrophic global cooling from sulphur particulates. Possibly it was typical for climate change headlines in that decade. And in the 1970's I have heard that 90% of published climate papers predicted future warming from CO2
Consider how strong the social and journalistic narrative bias towards a coming catastrophe must be if both of those things are directionally true. Now we have that underlying catastrophe narrative running in the same direction as the 90%+ of published papers predicting warming. So can we expect mainstream fact checking to moderate this bias?
In the case I know of Facebook censored posts that were factually true regarding how many heat and cold deaths occur each year, and the reason was that the posts went against the grain of the catastrophe narrative. They did not succeed in showing factual inaccuracy in their fact check, they generally just stated "this is opposed to the important dominant narrative"
Interestingly it was not an internal Facebook group doing this moderating but an activist climate concerned group which Facebook had outsourced to. Why would they do that? Because the underlying dominant narrative can, often, include the belief that the underlying dominant narrative should be reinforced. It's obvious that in a climate emergency it is reasonable to outsource your climate censorship to a group who is interested in the issue and believes there is a climate emergency. Regulatory capture, meet narrative capture
Agreed that censorship will only increase bias, in addition to innumerable other damages. It changes the incentives of the politically motivated from misleading by leaving out key facts or statistics to seizing control of the levers of censorship and wielding the institution against their opponents. It makes an suboptimal situation terrible. Censorship is never the answer.
Coincidentally, I just started my own blog and my first post, Epistemic Arrogance, touches on this topic a little bit. Especially the bit about facebook censoring because it goes against their preferred narrative, rather than out of any sort of respect for truth.
My understanding is that disclaimered posts are also throttled, this was a common feature in the twitter file reports and is functionally the same as censorship in most cases. The disclaimer blocks your view of the Lancet graph about temperature mortality with an overlayed link to the fact check unless you unblock it
The fact check has a decent element of reasonableness and impressive thoroughness which ultimately serves to disguise the basic flaw in the counterclaim and that no attempt was made to find a quote that makes a case for the original post's argument
"The issue with Lomborg’s argument is that he is using cherry-picked data that may be compelling in isolation, but belies a firm grasp of the science, which makes clear that unmitigated climate change is a disaster for human health and welfare, even if we may, in the near term, see reductions in cold deaths." https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/posts/375952123889797/
IE: maybe the post was basically accurate but fails to uphold the important dominant narrative. The fact check makes a reasonable point that the Lancet temperature death trend study did not identify whether man-made climate change was the actual driver, merely that cold deaths have reduced far more than heat deaths have increased
However they go on to cite studies which make the specific claim that climate change has in isolation increased heat deaths while playing a bit of a magic trick on the reader and themselves that in their other hand there is no attempt to identify whether any study has looked at whether increased temperature has reduced cold mortality. In this way they basically engage in the same argument they say is invalid. It wouldn't surprise me if there is no peer-reviewed article asking the question of whether increased temperatures have reduced cold mortality - I think this in itself is good evidence that there is an underlying dominant narrative driving the public discourse as well as affecting the literature and they succeed in reinforcing that narrative moreso than making an honest fact check
I'm not sure - what do you mean by Scott's "proposed solution"? As far as I see, he doesn't really *propose* anything, he just says that there's no obvious way to censor falsehoods since, generally, there aren't any. My guess is he plays the ball back to the "pro-fake-news-blocking" camp, saying it's on them to explain how exactly they would define "fake news".
“Fake news” had a clear definition: pieces that appear to be news stories but which are in fact fictional.
What made fake news profitable was the ability to monetize it on Facebook, where readers would get a mixture of real and fake news. As a result, once Facebook and other social media sites cracked down on fake news, it essentially disappeared. This does not mean that social media should no longer ban fake news, any more than the fact that almost nobody gets measles today means that we shouldn't vaccinate children for measles. But it does mean that if you look at the material currently being removed by social media platforms under their disinformation policies, essentially none of it is fake news.
“Fake news” no longer has a clear meaning for much the same reason that the word “literally” is often used to mean “figuratively.” Fake news stories were mostly targeted at people on the right because attempts to write fake news that would appeal to people on the left didn't attract enough readers. Probably because of concerns that this made the right look bad, people started accusing left of center news organizations of producing “fake news.” When the New York Times, with its legions of reporters, is accused of producing fake news, the term “fake news” loses its meaning.
I think that, when Trump accused the media of producing "fake news", he meant it in the original sense - that they deliberately made up things they new to be false. I agree that it evolved to often mean anything wrong now, though.
Which giant central thing? The one that claims to enshrine "free speech" in its founding document? I haven't noticed Scott proposing to get rid of that just yet.
This is great. I agree that the media rarely lies. I've been studying this space for the past year, and there are multiple levels to the way media influences their readers:
1. By and large, the topics that an outlet chooses to report on is the most important factor. (10 facts on the border vs 10 facts on climate change)
2. The next biggest is slant, focusing on a specific set of facts for a story, they will make the reader feel a certain way
3. The final is misinterpretation of the data, which you've expertly documented. Most stories don't have such quantitative data around it, but when it does come up, it can have drastic consequences, since the reader can point to the data as an established trust indicator.
I've been documenting this for the past year and publish a weekly newsletter on 1 & 2: https://topdown.substack.com/
It provides a map for seeing what the topical focal points are for each side (left, right, international, etc.) as well as detailing some of the slant for each topic
I can boil it down further. Selection and emphasis. Every writer alive does it. Every single person has a point of view. Every employee of a news org knows their particular Overton window.
My line on this is "Very few people lie, most repeat the lies they tell themselves". It's extremely uncomfortable to encounter reality without a pre-existing internal model of how things work and why. And so it is very easy to report that things are occurring according to how your world model predicts without a lot of motivation, effort and understanding of how to read and overcome your own bias
The current media financial landscape is the cherry on top where your organization will tend to have a very strong need to affirm the world model of their most motivated readers who are the most likely to pay for a source of news that regularly fits their expectations
Following up here, we just released a website https://useclarity.com that automates the analysis of distilling multiple views into one place, and highlights when one side over-indexes on or minimizes a certain topic.
Many times, things are reported incorrectly because the reporters make a mistake, or because they don't really understand what they are reporting on. This is especially prevalent in issues where statistics are involved; since COVID started, the general public's misunderstanding of how to interpret raw data has become quite apparent.
In cases of genuine mistakes, honest disagreement can usually be sorted out if free debate is allowed. What angers me is not writers making mistakes--it is the ongoing attempt to intentionally mislead.
I think this is the key point - general shoddiness is a much bigger problem with the press than intentional partisan deception. The two sometimes combine, but it makes newspapers close to worthless as a source of information for anything other than the vaguest outline of current affairs, and slightly more detail (although I wouldn't oversell this) for politics.
Did you miss out on the past couple years, when there was a ton of straight up lying? Lying about fraudulent votes? Straight up lies about the vaccine killing people? Straight up lies about covid being less dangerous than the flu?
Sure there are examples of misinformation lacking context. But there are also examples of straight up lies. And way too many examples of them over the past few years.
Edit: on reflection as to why I am so adamant about this, I remember all of the straight up lies that have been shared with me by friends over the past several years. They didn't get them from nowhere. They got them from right wing media. Sure, they also shared half truths with me, as have left wing friends of mine based on mainstream media. But there were a large number of straight up lies that have been shared with me over the past couple of years. Maybe you are lucky enough not to have friends who have been sucked in to that nonsense.
in particular, you use infowars as an example of only lying by missing context, when they just lost a major court case for making up *blatant lies* and sharing them.
Sure the NYTimes rarely lies other than by being misleading, but Infowars in particular lies all the time! Sometimes by being misleading, as you found, but sometimes by making lies up from whole cloth!
I'm having trouble telling whether you're taking the side that the media was lying because vaccine deaths and voting fraud did exist vs. didn't. Based on you being against Infowars I'm assuming you're on the side that they didn't. If I'm wrong about that, ignore the rest of this post since I'm misunderstanding your concern.
I looked through Infowars for a while and couldn't find great examples of this. I'm interested if you can - go to infowars.com and tell me which of their articles seem like straight-up lies and not the kind of stuff I included in II.
My impression is that the "vaccine killing people" stuff was overwhelmingly along the lines of my first example of vaccines causing stillbirths, and the "fraudulent votes" was overwhelmingly along the lines of my second example with Kari Lake (which I edited in later, it might not have been in the version you read).
If you look on the infowars website now (site:https://www.infowars.com/ "sandy hook"), they don't have this story any more. Probably cuz of the giant lawsuit and all.
The story you link is cleverly written to not include any lies. If you read the headline and skim the text you might think it says that the Sandy Hook shooting didn't happen. But its actual claims are:
-Recently-released FBI crime statistics list zero homicides in the town of the shooting in 2012 (true)
-"Internet sleuths immediately took to the web to stitch together clues indicating the shooting could be a carefully-scripted false flag event" (trivially true with an expansive definition of "clue" and "could")
-"national school safety consultant Wolfgang Halbig was visited and threatened at his home by homicide detectives" (true as far as I can tell)
-etc.
This is how it all works! You read a news story and come away thinking that the story claimed X. But instead it claimed that some expert claimed X, or claimed that people are worried about X, or that there's a lawsuit about X, or that someone's investigating X.
In the comment above, Tony Saunders wrote "Did you miss out on the past couple years, when there was a ton of straight up lying? Lying about fraudulent votes? Straight up lies about the vaccine killing people? Straight up lies about covid being less dangerous than the flu?"
Saunders didn't link to the news articles he's concerned about. I bet that if he did, they'd mostly be carefully crafted to not outright lie.
Yes, I agree that print media is less likely to have outright lies in it. But Alex Jones on Infowars specifically lied about Newtown shooting not happening. I'm not going to subject myself to listening through all of it, but here is a NYTimes article that reports quotes. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/politics/heres-what-jones-has-said-about-sandy-hook.html. Some of those are weasel-word half truths, but some are just false. Indeed, a jury found him guilty of defamation, which means intentional lying.
Are you suggesting that there is no blood clot side effect of the vaccines? Based on your definition of an intentional lie, that would be an intentional lie as far as I can tell
I am well aware that you probably forgot about blood clots in the moment as you were motivated to find a particular example, or you didn't forget about blood clots but are aware that they are generally much less of a concern than for instance blood clots caused by getting a severe case of covid and so in your mind if someone were to write a headline about vaccines causing blood clots that would be misleading in terms of the overall picture and therefore intentionally untrue because that overall picture is well established. It's also possible you don't know about the side effect at all because your news sources wisely don't report heavily on it as they know that it would be misleading as to the overall pros and cons of the vaccines
There is one way to lie, nine ways to not tell the truth, 12 steps to not being aware of the difference and one answer (42) to it all
Are you serious right now? You are strawmanning the hell out of me.
That article doesn't say "vaccines can cause clotting in some rare cases" it says thing like "vaccines cause clotting on contact" and "all the rats in the studies were killed by the vaccine"
You made all sorts of assertions about what I was saying to paint me in the worst possible light while bending over backwards to read Infowars in the best possible light. Give me a break.
I made numerous assertions about how you were probably being entirely honest but interpreted a report that given context is certainly wrong as an intentional lie because your standard for saying someone is lying is broad enough to include your own example
Now if your claim is specifically that Infowars carefully vetted their source of information and are aware that all the rats did not die and are intentionally stating otherwise then you do not meet your own standard of saying something knowingly untrue, I will agree. I should add, not knowing, it's quite possible that the study used a massive dose that would have killed all the rats with a large number of otherwise benign substances
I stand by my assertion that you are being entirely honest in either case and I have virtually no doubt that Infowars actually believes that vaccines are bad and that they were reporting a true example of that
I think you could consider the pathologist story to be an instance of this:
> Or articles about “EXPERT SAYS X!”, where someone who could be charitably described as an expert (an MD or PhD) really did say X, even though X is insane and all other experts disagree.
Jones is summarizing what the pathologist said, and appears to summarize him accurately. Dr. Cole does appear to be a real, licensed doctor. The problem is Dr. Cole's views are crazy.
To be picky, no jury has found that Alex Jones committed defamation re Sandy Hook. Both the TX and CT cases were default judgment, entered after Jones failed to comply with discovery, etc. The juries only decided damages, not liability. Also, liability for defamation does not require intentional lying. Even under the higher standard for public figures, reckless disregard for the truth of the statement is enough.
It seems like your examples focus on things that liars have said in other formats, rather than lies printed as news stories. That all of your links are to news stories about the lies rather than news stories packaging the lies as truth makes your complaint seem off-topic to this article.
Now it may be reasonable to complain that Scott's focus was too narrow, and that lies are spread so effectively outside of written news that his defense of news here is irrelevant to the larger issue.
Sure maybe I would like to say that his focus is too narrow. And maybe I'd like to say that when the news stories repeat lies that others have told that that is more problematic than Scott is admitting. That is very close to lying even though Scott categorizes it as technically true.
Scott, it would be clearly useful to calculate the percentage of dubious articles using the criteria you have described for each of these sources.
For many of us a subliminal comparison over an extended interval of this percentage for Infowars with respect to NYT and WaPo is the Bayesian prior that is used to assess the relative plausibility of a particular article. You may miss the rare occasion when Infowars is not misleading, but this heuristic saves the time and effort required to read an awful lot of bullshit. The converse is true and you will, of course with some effort as you have shown, find egregious examples where NYT and WaPo generate nonsense.
Scalia did spend his last hours in the lodge of a creepy secret society whose members wear green robes and are currently led by Grand Master Imperial Highness Archduke Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen.
People really have been linking the real Bohemian Grove secret society to the Illuminati (another real secret society from 18th century German people have been misinterpreting and taking out of context for centuries) for decades, long before Infowars entered the picture. For example, here's a 2011 movie about the connection ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2004180/ ). It seems like whoever wrote this article is just quoting Alex Jones talking about it, and Alex Jones probably saw a lot of documentaries like this one and is just repeating what's "common knowledge" in the conspiracy sphere.
So I repeat, basically none of this is made up. They're combining true facts (taken out of context) with credulously believing fake experts (the people who talk about the links between Bohemian Grove and Illuminati). I don't want to watch whatever original Alex Jones piece they're quoting but it wouldn't surprise me if he cited his sources in it. Those fake experts, in turn, are making incorrect inferences out of weird facts and past generations of fake experts, all the way back to the people who first worried about the Illuminati (though some of them were pretty crazy and probably did make a lot of it up, especially the 1800s people).
This is the first of your links I looked at but I'm betting the others have similar stories.
I'd take that bet. I find it convenient you respond to my weakest example. Have you looked at the article on the birth certificate? I guess outsourcing to "Infowars computer experts", if they exist, may count as quoting an expert, but I would consider that an outright lie. The Clinton Kill list may technical be a true list of people who are dead, but associating their deaths with Bill Clinton is an outright lie.
Or check out the magazine link I posted, where they claim "The NDAA gutted the Bill of Rights and turned America into a bonafide police state, with no due
process, no Fifth Amendment, and no Bill of Rights. It authorized secret arrests, secret kill lists of American citizens, and endless secret prison detainment without ever being charged with a crime, among other things. It signified the complete
destruction of the Bill of Rights, and Obama signed it in secret." This too is much more outright lying than lack of context.
I looked at this one because my Notifications list put it first because it was the last one you posted. In the spirit of the exercise, I will interpret your conspiracy theory about this point as a misinterpretation rather than a lie.
The Clinton Kill List is a true list of people who are dead and tangentially connected to Bill Clinton, with their deadness and degree of connection generally described accurately. It then makes the argument that this is too many suspicious deaths to be coincidence, and the best explanation is that the Clintons are killing people connected to them. You may agree or disagree with this argument (I disagree), but it is no more a lie than "look at all these diplomats getting Havana Syndrome, surely that many illnesses in the same embassy can't be a coincidence" or any other "it seems unlikely that all these correlated events are a coincidence" argument.
"Still not convinced that there's a magnitude of difference between Infowars and NYT?"
I specifically said I wasn't trying to equate Infowars with NYT in the article. My exact words were "This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits." Please stop lying about - sorry, incorrectly interpreting - my post.
Nitpick: Jones did an "investigation" of Bohemian Grove in 2001 in which he went there and secretly filmed. I expect he did explicitly lie about what he saw and would be happy to bet on it if we had some way to verify.
We do! Jon Ronson went with him and describes it in one of with books, though I don't remember offhand which. He describes Alex as lying about the sacrifices.
> in particular, you use infowars as an example of only lying by missing context, when they just lost a major court case for making up *blatant lies* and sharing them.
As far as I heard, they lost the court case *by default*, which means there was no judgment on the merits of the case.
IANAL: I'm pretty sure that a default judgement is considered an assertion of truth. "We don't have the power to make you comply to give a fair trial, but your behavior is more or less incompatible with innocence, so you are legally presumed to be liable."
Also pretty sure punitive damages indicate the jury finds the defendant extra-liable.
I can't see a defence of them (in particular, "we genuinely believed it was true") that doesn't apply to Alex Jones. Jones is an odd, paranoid guy, but an honest mistake isn't a lie.
Moreover, convincing yourself that a lie is true does not make something not a lie.
The NYT repeated something that was not true.
But the idea that that is what caused the war is a lie. Indeed, the idea that the Iraq War was even over WMDs is a lie. It was not. While WMDs were part of the justification, there were a large number of justifications for the war, as Iraq was in violation of a number of UN resolutions.
And the macrostrategic reason for getting rid of Saddam Hussein was that he was a genocidal dictator who could be gotten rid of and replaced with a democratic regime in the Middle East to show that a majority Islamic Middle Eastern democracy was workable, thereby setting up a domino effect of people overthrowing their authoritarian dictators.
Additionally, the claim that the war killed 650k people is extremely suspect; body counts indicate a number close to 500k less than that.
No, as nasty a character as Saddam Hussein was, the main reason for getting rid of him was that Cheney and his fellow neocons had been choking on a sort of perverted coitus interruptus ever since G.H.W. Bush made the decision not to go all the way to Baghdad and remove Saddam in 1991. As for replacing his regime with a "democratic" one... that hasn't worked out all that well, has it? And oddly enough, it didn't work in Afghanistan either!
Yeah no. I was there, and Hussein was seen as a serious potential regional, if not greater, threat. *Everybody* agreed on that, that's why the original Iraq War was wildly popular, and even Round 2 started out popular enough that almost all major politicians from both parties supported it (necessitating some artful backpedaling among Democrats later). The whole "this was a scam pulled on the American people (or certain politicians who came later to regret their participation) by that dastardly Bush 1/Bush 2/Dick Cheny combo for squalid private reasons" is just so much convenient retconning that could only work on someone too young to remember it for themselves.
You can certainly argue that the threat of Hussein was hugely overestimated, but that is nothing new in assessing foreign threats. Right up until the moment it collapsed, the general assessment of the establishment was that the USSR was a powerful and stable empire that could go on for generations. For a while Iran was the Big Threat. ISIS kind of took a turn, too. Russia comes and goes. China's been fairly steadily growing.
Perhaps this wasn't true but I remember that at one point it was doing the rounds that Iraqi mortality rates were lower on average under the occupation including the war than during Hussein's reign. ISIS screwed that up I believe
Part of the reason for the high mortality under Hussein's rule was that he used up all his weapons of mass destruction on the Kurds, which is why we know he didn't have any
The key problem with the occupation was bright eyed belief, which I shared, that Iraq just needed a democracy vaccine and they would get the kind of civil society that in many cases evolved over centuries. WMD never existing is a just so story in my opinion
Without taking a position on the underlying facts, please note that you are conflating "what caused the second Iraq War" with "what justifications were proffered for the war at the time", as well as with "what justifications would I make today". People who really want to go to war can find justifications, and people who don't want to can ignore very similar would-be justifications.
That NYT article is carefully crafted to report on what the Iraqi defector claims, rather than to report on the content of the claims.
"An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells" is true.
("Iraq has secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells" would be false, but the article is careful not to make that claim.)
The article makes claims about the defector's claims:
-He "gave details of the projects he said he worked on"
-"The experts said his information seemed reliable and significant."
-"Separately, Mr. Saeed had told representatives"
-"To support his account, Mr. Saeed provided copies of contracts"
"Mr. Saeed said" occurs 7 times in the article, and "he said" occurs 33 times.
I wish people understood that this is how such things work. Sometimes the journalists are cackling gleefully, knowing they're creating a misleading impression (like Alex Jones, who then got sloppy and told actual lies), but I don't even blame the NYT in this case. They repeatedly allude to the fact that these are claims: "American intelligence officials...were trying to verify his claims", "If verified, Mr. Saeed's allegations", etc.
When "expert says" claims are disprovable with a phone call or a Google search, I blame journalists more for reporting on them as possibly true, but these claims seem hard to check. Ideally the NYT would provide a quick media literacy primer at the start of such articles, warning that readers should pay attention to whether the article says "X is true" or "John says X is true".
Losing a libel case can motivate a stricter approach to the facts.
It was precisely because the National Enquirer gossip sheet got sued so much that it soon had better fact checking systems than, say, The New Yorker, if "Bright Lights, Big City" is reliable.
In an absolute sense there’s a lot of that, but it still likely only makes up about 1% of publications on Infowars! (I’m just making up numbers here and this definitely bears more detailed study. But my main point is that something like 1% can both be a lot in some important senses and very little in other senses, including our ability to objectively detect. Like a 1% fatality rate.)
Agreed 100%, but none of this implies that censorship is net bad. You talk about the the negative side, but not the positive side :)
The question is how much damage is actually prevented or caused by real-life censors, say on twitter or Facebook. You can go "marketplace of ideas" all you want, but it won't be very convincing if people were routinely dying from preventable diseases due to "misleading" information about vaccines.
How many dead children are worth the free speech principles? I don't mean this as a gotcha, I mean this as an honest question. Suppose the (admittedly biased) censors ended up saving net 1000 children a year -- are they still net negative due to the value of free speech? And if it were 1 child a year, or a million? Is the answer to the question independent of the number of dead children, or is there a threshold?
Well how many died because of a lack of free speech? Such as the belated recognition that the risk of injury from a mandated product that you’re not allowed to criticize is worse than the risk from the disease it was said to prevent? The argument here stands. You don’t have perfect information. More speech is better. Then the errors have a chance of correction.
I think you’re missing a step in the jump to “More speech is better”. Errors have a chance of correction with more speech, but they also have a chance of amplification. You have to actually know something about the dynamics of the system to know which way things will flow when you reduce the friction.
I think there are some general principles at work that result in the usual direction being toward "correction"; without putting in too much effort, I'll gesture vaguely at it and hope someone links Scott's post about this from way back.
--------------------------
The idea, in this case, being that censorship is symmetrical in effect, equally potent for both true and false ideas: you get the power, you get the... uh... censorship... pen.
(There's a term I'm not remembering, here, I feel like.)
A censored true idea will never win out by merit; and even if *your* guys are in charge now and censoring the *right* stuff which no sane individual could ever disagree about, there's no reason that those with the power to do so will always agree with you; and, hence, the balance between true and false is set not by merit of claim, but by whim of fate.
But if ideas can be debated and discussed, there is reason to suppose that correction occurs more than amplification.
I mean, I'd say it just *does*, before any justification on reason — our history since 1500 seems to attest to this, in the main. It isn't always quick, it isn't monotonically increasing, but the process has clearly operated more in one direction than the other.
You say: "But *why* should that be? Also, I'm a hardcore reactionary and I think we're going backwards if anything, so there!"
Because true vs. false, in an open forum, is maybe an *asymmetrical* conflict: where enough relevant data is available and censorship doesn't prevent its airing, the argument for a true claim must be the stronger. We can demonstrate this with a toy example; consider a claim about a set of marbles, Z, such that–...
...well, scratch that, actually; I'm lazy, and surely this is self-evident.
(...*is* this self-evident? I'd hope so, but the Internet has made me cynical. Still, "evidence" and "reason" require this, in order to be coherent concepts at all: if no amount of evidence can differentiate between two hypotheses, either "evidence" isn't a meaningful concept, or the hypotheses aren't meaningfully different. Or! –they might need a shave from Himaldr's Razor! Which is what I call this neat idea I had, about needlessly multiplying entities. I'll explain it sometime.)
Of course, there are many instances where data isn't available, or it's misleading — but as another consequence of free inquiry, this can be remedied; again, more and freer research tends to strengthen true claims but weaken false ones.
The only issue is, of course, that people are dumb, and a bad argument can be *more persuasive*, even if technically weaker to anyone with eyes to see.
But a), this applies also to the beliefs the censors hold, in a censorious society, so we're not clearly any better-off delegating here; however, if we assume that those in power are super smart and accurate, and won't lose their grip on that power to stupider people ever...
...well, then, why not assume that the public will always see reason, *since we're apparently living in fantasy-land anyway?!*
But also, b): from the arguments above — from history and from the principle that *in general* true claims will have the weight of evidence behind them — we ought assume that "terribly persuasive and horribly wrong" will occur less than "terribly persuasive and horribly right".
(That is, first: it doesn't seem like we've fallen into barbarism from the masses of impossibly seductive lies all around; it seems like in general, we do get a clearer picture of reality. And, second, the false-but-seductive idea is at disadvantage from the start: it is strongest when evidence is weakest, which — again, not monotonically, but in general — can only go one way from there, as more data is gathered... and, more importantly, if humans have any truth-finding ability, a true-and-persuasive formulation has a potential audience of everyone, but a false-and-persuasive version will be understood as such by *some* fraction of the population. These won't always be of relevant magnitudes, perhaps, but again — there would be a trend expected.)
-------------------------
Well, so much for that part. Behold now the other argument I see for my vague sense of why it's generally better to err on the side of "let's not prevent people from spreading heresy, because oh boy are we monstrous heretics by the standards of so many, now and past, and they just as sure of rightness":
It also seems to me that plausible worst-case scenarios favor more free over less.
E.g., I can't think of many cases where people being allowed to say what they wanted resulted in an outcome as bad and "sticky" as Best Korea, churchified states as in Europe previously or some of the Middle East now, the excesses of the USSR, etc.
How *much* of their bad outcome(s) can be laid at the feet (lower lip?) of censored speech alone, or how much the freedom to say "hey what if this isn't true / hey this seems to be a lie" would have mitigated said outcomes, can, of course, be debated; but again, looking at it on the level of general principle, the links between "we'll kill/arrest/silence/fire you if you speak out" <---> a population captive to delusion <---> "let's..."—
— "...burn the heretic / execute the counter-revolutionary / support the Great Leader / report suspicious interest in learning / melt our farming implements to smelt steel in the back yard / keep silent about possible improvements as we do about clear injustice..." —
— ...seems clear enough.
"What if some people are fooled by some claims and don't get vaccinated?" is, comparatively, easy to address, and not so bad. So far, anyway.
And even so, here we might turn again to the first argument, perhaps: if you are able to say *also* "vaccines are good actually", then — great, this will *have* to win out! Unless your society has pro-censorship norms which are instituted or co-opted by the "Vaccines = Autism" folks, who will use the same reasoning you initially pondered:
"Well, *we're* right, so this is justified because *prevents* harm. It's those horrible stupid pro-vaccine heretics that we must prevent from trying to 'make an honest case' —as they maliciously whine."
I definitely agree with a lot of what you said here - but I hope you now agree with my earlier claim that your move in the previous post was too fast! And I think there are points in here where we might be more precise and resist the full generality of the argument against any form of “censorship” and suspect there might be occasional uses where it can help symmetrically clear the ground for asymmetric strategies to do their work.
I'm sorry I'm not willing to read your entire long comment, but from a skim, the following point seems relevant and important:
I think a randomly-selected true idea has a sizable natural advantage over a randomly-selected false idea in persuasiveness. Unfortunately, this does NOT imply that persuasive false ideas will be less common than persuasive true ideas, because false ideas massively MASSIVELY outnumber true ones. A tiny percentage of false ideas can still outnumber a large percentage of true ones.
It could be the case that the average true idea is vastly more persuasive than the average false idea, and yet simultaneously also be the case that the MOST persuasive idea is usually false, because you're pitting the best of a hundred true ideas against the best of a trillion false ones.
I think your main argument (in my eyes at least) that "true vs. false, in an open forum, is maybe an *asymmetrical* conflict" can be supported by a simple observation: Given a question, there is only one (or very few, reasonably) true answer, while there is a practically infinite number of possible lies. Therefore free speech is *biased* towards truth, because it's the only signal that gets reliably boosted and all the bullshit is spread across a large spectrum of lies.
This assumes, of course, a free society where there is not enough coordination to boost a lie to the same level as the truth.
I don't follow your chain of reasoning. In order to get from "there are many possible lies but few possible truths" to "therefore the truth will be reliably boosted in a way that lies aren't" it seems like you'd need a premise along the lines of "and the total boosting power is divided between truth and lies in a way that doesn't depend on how many truths or lies are available", which seems like a surprising premise in need of explanation.
(Usually people argue something along the lines of "there's some evidence somewhere, and evidence is more likely to convert people towards truth than away from it, which creates an asymmetrical pressure towards truth", but that argument doesn't depend on how many possible lies there are, so I presume you're trying to make a different argument than that.)
I was indeed trying to make the point that you mention at the end.
If "evidence is more likely to convert people towards truth", isn't this the same argument? I can create an infinite number of lies but no evidence for them. Only another lie that looks more or less convincing like evidence, thereby maybe delaying the finding of truth a little more.
How is the premise that you are missing from my formulation of the argument any different than that?
I think that maybe the premise for both of the arguments is that people are actually looking for truth and have some capability to discriminate evidence from further lies (and this obviously depends very much on what is discussed with whom).
I agree that this doesn't prove it's net bad - I'm slowly trying to write articles to argue against some common points in favor of censorship, with the end goal of making people actually make real arguments for censorship instead of using easy outs like "We're not censoring, we're just banning misinformation" or "We're not censoring, we're just improving customer experience".
How do you decide who gets to censor? Whoever you choose gains a kind of power, which like all power, corrupts unless there is some strong counterforce to prevent it.
And if you allow censorship, how will you know if the censors are lying to you? Who will be allowed to say so?
As with so many things, more important than WHAT will be done is WHO will decide?
The same ways we give every other kind of power to some people. Elections and downstream party appointments for censorship from institutions, free market capitalism for censorship on twitter and facebook, and maybe enacting laws by referendum where you're lucky enough to have them. I don't see the particular mystery. The problem with censorship is that it's a very useful tool to slippery slope into removing other freedoms, not that it's uniquely hard to choose who does it.
In fact, that's also true of the police / monopoly of violence, and also makes it a complicated problem. Depending on your favourite brand of autocracy, maybe even more useful! Yet there's only a handful of people that react to the problem with "eliminate the police". (Funnily enough, a lot of them sitting opposite on the political spectrum to the center of mass of absolute free speech defenders.)
You mean the same absolute free speech defenders who get apoplectic when footballers take the knee?
Someone once said there was never a consensus on free speech in America, just the absence of a consensus as to which speech to ban. That said, institutions like the ACLU that used to be absolutist to the point of defending actual Nazis, have turned away from free speech, in what appears to be a deeply concerning generational shift.
Haha yeah, exactly. But not seeing the mote in one's eye happens everywhere - I can imagine in the States the dissonance is a bit stronger because "absolute free speech(*)" as a political desire is more into the Overton window than I feel it is in e.g. Europe. Where it is mostly acknowledged that limits are part of the picture. ("One right ends where another begins" etc etc.) TBH I think it can actually help in moderation, in the sense that, as Scott says, at the end of the day you have to admit that there's no "evil censorship vs. normal misinformation protection" binary. When I see debates from the States there's very little acknowledgement that what "my side" asks for may be problematic - it's just common sense, I'd never ask for censorship! While the debate in Europe (well, or the places I know) usually starts from a point of "ok, listen, I know this is censorship and it sounds bad, but hear me out because the consequences of not doing it are...". Which I feel is the kind of consequentialist difficult conversation the post is asking to have?
I get apoplectic at a lot of things I hear people say. I will call them all kinds of names, I will point out to my friends the unforgivable thing they said, I might change what products or services I purchase so that my dollars will not redound to their benefit, I would shun them or spit at them if we met on the street. Footballers who take the knee in protest to the national anthem are among them.
But I still believe in free speech. Do you acknowledge the difference?
Sure, the difference is evident, and that's very commendable of you. The problem is that e.g. the NFL initially banned it. The NFL is not a State, but nonetheless holds quite a lot of power over the careers of players. The fact of the matter is that some people had to consider not sending a powerful political message due to a threat to their livelihood. The point we're making above is not that there aren't people like you, is that there are a lot that go apoplectic and in their absolute indignation have to use all power in their hands, no matter how disproportionate, to keep others from talking.
I’m of mixed feelings about the NFL ban. Such an organization has the same desire as, say, the New York Times to decide what image it wants to present to the paying public. I’d have respected them if they had said that they detest and deplore Kaepernick’s action but respect his freedom of “speech”. But not everybody is as nuanced as I. And if he were doing something out on the field that, say, 90% of viewers found disgusting, like, I don’t know, dropping trou and mooning the cameras, or waggling his penis around, would we consider it unfair if they made him stop? Even if he held a press conference to say he had a serious political point he was making by these actions? Would the danger of losing 90% of their revenue be enough justification for a ban?
I don’t know how much of the audience found him objectionable, but I notice you say the NFL “initially” banned it, which suggests that there was enough free speech in support of him that they later found it prudent to unban him.
How do you feel about boycotts, as a general rule? Is it a violation of free speech to participate in one? Is it a violation of free speech for the target to change what it does or says, in response to the boycott? Is it a violation if they are proactive in that change, hoping to nip the boycott in the bud before too many of their customers find alternatives?
You understand that these are employees making their employer look bad rather than people being censored because some authority unilaterally decided that what they were saying is "misinformation" right?
And if we're going to be playing the hypocrisy game, how many people defending social media censorship on the basis of "it's a private company they can do what they want" absolutely, explicitly do not believe in this type of private property rights?
I never understand the violent reaction people show to footballers taking the knee. I'm generally right-wing, albeit not necessarily conservative, and I just can't see why it's worth making a fuss about. When it first started (I'm English but follow 'football' as a somehow fan of the Dolphins...)I thought it was just the typical rich-people-pick-up-university-dogma thing and that it wasn't relevant. It didn't seem to threaten anything, since the US is a country with free speech. Yet it seems to elicit a literal hatred from some people, and I'd like to ask why. Note the only narratives explaining this are (on topic) media ones which place this in a context of white racists feeling threatened. Since these come from writers who are either motivated (they are employed by organisations dependent on funding for anti-racism, or they themselves earn a living as anti-racism commentators) or who I don't trust from experience of reading them and disliking their presentation of facts, I'm not inclined to accept their narrative, but it would be interesting to see the other side of the story.
Neither watch football (either kind) nor care about this, but this is easy to explain. `Taking the knee' is very clearly and publicly taking a (particular) side in the American culture war, and if you see that side as your enemy then you are going to be pissed. All the more so if you see (American) football as belonging to `your' tribe - then the person taking the knee is not only an enemy, but a renegade.
For me some of it is the punching up vs down. I know Kaepernick is black-ish, but he is in a position to broadcast his opinion much more widely than I am. Another is that he is in that exalted position precisely because he lives in a polity that he claims to abhor; the hypocrisy of it fills me with contempt.
He should be able to express this abhorrence. I will defend to the death his right to do so. But I have the right to feel contempt for it and I do not apologize.
That an American football team is a multiracial coalition that works together really well for its common good reassures a lot of Americans that diversity can work. When American football because racialized in a tendentious manner by BLM, it worries a lot of Americans that their optimistic assessment of diversity might be in the process of being undermined by self-interested activists.
Speaking only for myself as a more or less right-wing American and serious "football" fan.
The playing of the anthem before a game is a little formalistic ritual that for many people has associations with the nation's war dead, with the memory of family members' military service, or with -- who knows, really? It's a brief moment of observance that has different meanings for different people, but is emphatically about directing attention away from the here and now toward lives lost, sacrifices made, debts to be paid.
Appropriating such a moment, exploiting its ritual character to draw attention to oneself by a gratuitous display of noncompliance with the expected decorum, is obnoxious, arrogant, infuriating. No matter the urgency of your message, no matter the righteousness of your cause, it doesn't justify opportunistically talking over other people's moment of silence.
I suspect part of the reason is that star athletes are thought of as heroes, people you are supposed to look up to and emulate. That makes it upsetting when they turn out to be supporting the forces of evil.
How do you make an informed decisions in the elections if the information allowed to reach you is censored? How do you decide if the censors made the right decisions if arguments that they decided to censor something truthful is suppressed?
Censorship is unique among policies in that it prevents people from arguing for its own lifting (at least on a case-specific basis). If claiming X is censored, then to argue that it shouldn't be censored because it's plausibly true, you have to make arguments for X, but that's banned. So if we make a mistake and censor a truth, we can't correct it as long as we accept the premise that falsehoods should be censored.
The only way we can argue against the censorship of X without arguing for X and thus running afoul of the censorship is to argue that nothing should be censored, not even falsehoods (as I'm doing here). And then hope that arguing against censorship in general doesn't get added to the list of censored ideas.
Slippery slopes are real. Nobody is EVER going to stop at something as cut and dry as the well studied impacts of a medical intervention. Misinformation is by now a propaganda term, used by the left against potentially anything they disagree with, meaning they cannot be trusted to unilaterally decide what is "true" or not.
Think about how many lives, livelihoods and billions of dollars of wealth would have been saved if all of the BLM propaganda promoted by the media in its three main instances has been censored.
If only there were an infallible, incorruptible source of truth your hypothetical censors could refer to. Because knowing what is true is difficult.
Even with such an impossible oracle, censors would still need to decide how much inaccuracy justifies censorship. Is omission of critical context in an otherwise truthful statement permissible? How much? How can they make such decisions in an evenhanded way, even if they wanted to? (Real humans are unlikely to want to.)
Yes, lives and treasure would likely be saved if everyone knew all the facts and all the context. Unfortunately, that is not one of the options.
Ok, I've thought about it. Now do you care to offer evidence of the magnitude, or even the sign? I don't think counterfactuals like this can ever be estimated with much certainty, but you could at least try instead of just snidely hinting to the choir.
"The question is how much damage is actually prevented or caused by real-life censors". Censorship is itself a harm to the entire population, and if people are routinely dying from preventable diseases, that is both simultaneously tragic and on them for not preventing the disease. Having the government step in and enforce a narrative on an entire population is tyranny.
"How many dead children are worth the free speech principles? I don't mean this as a gotcha, I mean this as an honest question. Suppose the (admittedly biased) censors ended up saving net 1000 children a year -- are they still net negative due to the value of free speech?" This is an absurd appeal to emotion. Speech does not kill children, speech communicates ideas through sound waves and electrical signals. Censors do not save children, they violate fundamental human rights.
There are appeals to emotions and appeals to emotions. This one is the good kind. It technically appeals to emotion, but only to highlight the actual point without substituting it. As a test, we can remove all the emotionality from the phrase, getting something like "How much utility is reasonable to sacrifice in order to preserve a specific deontological principle?" and it's still be meaningfull and relevant to the discussion.
On the other hand, compare it with you answer. Phrases like
> Having the government step in and enforce a narrative on an entire population is tyranny.
> Censors do not save children, they violate fundamental human rights.
fail to engage with the point of having to perform a cost benefit analysis to solve a complex real life issue. You just restate "Breaking deontological rules is bad" in an emotional manner. Yes, we already no that it's bad. That's why all the argument is happening in the first place. We want to find out how bad exactly it is in case of this specific rule. You do not bring anything new to the table - just emotional proclamations. Now, this is the bad kind of appealling to emotions. I would be grateful if you stopped doing it.
> Speech does not kill children, speech communicates ideas through sound waves and electrical signals.
I hope I do not need to explain you the idea of causality. If some kind of speech leads to more dead children, this is a problem which could be improved by forbidding this kind of speech. Yes, this will cost us some value due to breaking the deontological rule. It may be worth it, it may be not. If you think that this rule is more important than any amount of children lives than just state it. Do not pretend that your prefered policy has no drawbacks - this is just dishonest.
1. "Before 2021, there were very few reasons for pregnant women to get vaccines, and maybe only a few thousand did each year." -- um, Tdap booster in the third trimester? To me it seems more plausible that many fewer people were aware of the existence of VAERS before it got heavily advertised with the Covid vaccines.
EDIT: this point has also already been raised with flu vaccines.
2. "A few of the articles mentioned a different attempt at urine drug tests, which only a few recipients failed - but didn’t mention that they had the option of not taking the drug tests and that many people (probably including all the drug users) chose to take it." -- chose *not* to take it, I presume?
...imagine still believing in a marketplace of ideas, in CURRENT_YEAR
</snark>
No but seriously, it seems very obvious to me (given the last 10 years or so) that true and/or good ideas don't have more memetic power than false and/or bad ones, and in fact often have less. I don't understand how anyone expects a "marketplace of ideas" to result in anything good.
Yeah, I tried to gesture at that with some of my examples, but to be more concrete:
Most of the time, when some bill or proposition is being debated by the general public, opinions that result from actually reading the bill and understanding what impact it will have, in context, get utterly drowned out by people who are rounding the whole bill off to some very tribalistic notion.
That's not truth or falsehood though, just simplification. Arguably that's the fault of people who create bills that cannot be easily and succinctly summarised and therefore require a level of explanation that is much more open to inserting partisan bias.
This is zero examples. It’s easy to give a description that picks out a true fact that not many people know (the mass of Jupiter to the nearest kilogram; next week’s winning lottery number; etc). The interesting thing is giving the actual fact itself in a way that you are reasonably confident is true.
(But also, Scott presumably meant to include an implicit restriction to the class of widely interesting facts.)
Yeah, I gave categories of ideas rather than individual ideas, because I was concerned that if I gave individual ideas the conversation would become too focused on the merits of those specific ideas and not whether the "marketplace of ideas" phenomenon is real and reliable
Right, and Darwnian evolution came to be as an accepted theory not because a central authority declared it correct, but because a herterodox thinker was able to promote his theories. If someone disagrees with the institutional religion of today in a way analogous to what Darwin did, they tend to lose their livelihood.
Meh. An even greater fraction of Americans are wrong about relativity, too. And for very similar reasons: because it has essentially zero impact on their lives. It's a theory about the far away and long ago that doesn't mean squat for everyday life[1]. Now, the fact that Americans might *reject* evolution where they merely don't know about relativity is interesting -- but probably more the result of a weird choice by the anti-Christian crowd to jam it down every schoolchild's throat in public school as a way to stick it to their religious parents, even though most adults need to know about evolution about as much as they need to know about relativity, which is not much and hardly ever.
--------------------
[1] The interesting exception is with respect to microbial evolution, e.g. antibiotic resistance, which indeed you *do* need to understand as an adult to take competent part in everyday life. And mirabile dictu it turns out quite a lot of people who are passionately "anti-evolution" will carve out a specific exception for what they call "micro-evolution," meaning the evolution of new bacterial species or new viruses in response to natural (or artificial) selection. It's quite likely you could compel every schoolchild to learn about the response of bacteria to evolutionary pressure (e.g. from antibiotics) and leave out men and apes having a common ancestor, or even the much trickier issue of abiogenesis, and get hardly a squawk from even the fundies.
That's far too easy a question. The real test is whether there are any false ideas with >50% penetration (or possibly penetration exceeding their true antithesis; basically no ideas have >50% penetration).
If there are, then the marketplace of ideas has some sort of problem (even if that problem is a thumb on the scales). If not, then that's a pretty robust defence of it (or of the thumb).
Christianity has 63% penetration in the US and is false. 57% of Americans believe in ghosts. Two-thirds of British surveyed don't believe dinosaurs existed. Half think the moon landings were faked.
I think there's little chance that respondents with skin in the game would disbelieve at such a high rate (if only we could figure out what skin in the game might mean here). But setting that aside, the mention of moon-landing disbelief made me think.
With recent technological advances, such as SpaceX's rockets, is the moon-landing-hoax community now split into 'there can never be a moon landing' versus 'the 20th-century landings were fake, but a real one is becoming plausible'?
A majority of Americans believe that intelligence differences between races either do not exist, or if they exist they have nothing to do with genetic differences.
Has anyone ever polled that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it may be one of those things where if you do a survey, the median opinion is miles away from orthodoxy.
<Parenting doesn’t matter> Childhood development appears to be purely a function of genetics and non-shared environmental factors, but I would wager that most people believe that parenting has important influence on outcomes (and not just in extremis, such as abuse etc)
It seems much more likely to me that something like "no parenting intervention leads to significantly better outcomes across the board, because there is a lot of variance in people, but if you understand your situation and your child well you can often pick out strategies that will work for you" is the case than that parenting actually doesn't matter.
I've heard of this research but I don't believe it, because I think this `fact' is actually false, whatever the parenting `research' says. I may not know *what* is wrong with the research (after all, I'm not an expert in the field), but I am confident that something must be very wrong with it. I would feel similarly about research that showed that actually water is not wet, or that the moon is actually made of cheese. I think this is what Scott meant by `epistemic learned helplessness.'
There are also other areas of `research' where I know that a `consensus' exists, and also believe it is pants on fire wrong.
But Humphrey does operate on the basis of his "hunches" and so, mutatis mutandis, do the rest of us. The existence of an apparent consensus on an issue lots of people care about is at most weak evidence that the consensus position is true.
better - school quality in the US isn't a thing and any supposed measures of it do not explain any meaningful proportion of the variance after controlling for student quality
Parenting obviously matters, if parents don't feed their children they die. It doesn't matter past a certain level of competence, but I'm pretty sure that a substantial fraction of parents doesn't meet it.
That the IPCC projection for sea level rise by 2100 is about one meter, which shifts coastlines in by only about a hundred meters — more some places, less other.
That according to the latest IPCC report, some projections of climate change show it leading to the greening of the Sahara and Sahel.
That according to the latest IPCC report the earth is on net greening, total leaf coverage increasing, probably due to increased CO2 concentration.
That increased CO2 concentration by itself leads to increases in crop yields.
That's just from one politically loaded area I happen to be interested in.
Your ideas also come from the marketplace of ideas, so any skepticism of this marketplace should make you more skeptical of the ideas you hold, and more reluctant to censor other ideas.
(1) I am indeed pretty skeptical of the ideas I hold, because I recognize how much my evolutionary and cultural environment have caused me to be the sort of person who would hold them
(2) But also I get to apply epistemics beyond just whatever has the most memetic power
(3) None of this amounts to an argument that I should be more reluctant to censor other ideas
You get to apply epistemics beyond whatever has the most memetic power, but censorship is necessary for other people, without censorship, other people will just believe whatever has the most memetic power? And your skepticism of the ideas you hold does not make you more reluctant to censor opposing ideas?
Memetics is about how ideas spread among the population.
Epistemics is something I get to apply as an individual.
Yes, the population is made up of individuals, but sometimes there is good reason to believe that you as an individual really do differ from the average or typical person. (But yes there is also good reason to be cautious and skeptical of that.)
I certainly don't claim not to be vulnerable to powerful-but-false memes. But I do claim to not be *totally* at the mercy of them.
---
As for the other piece - yes, my skepticism of the ideas I hold makes me more reluctant to censor opposing ideas, in that I acknowledge that some of the opposing ideas may be correct. It's in fact highly likely that at least one idea that I strongly oppose is more correct than my own position.
However, my skepticism of the "marketplace of ideas" phenomenon (that there is some sort of emergent property of the way people share ideas that results in the best ideas rising to the top/"winning" over time, analogous to how market efficiency results in things being priced according to their value) does *not* make me more reluctant to censor opposing ideas. If anything it makes me want to censor opposing ideas more.
" the best ideas rising to the top/"winning" over time" is a straw man of the position. All the argument requires is that it works better than the alternatives.
"Your doubt in yourself comes from your ability to reason, so any doubt about your ability to reason should make you doubt your doubts in yourself, and actually be more confident." Yeah sure.
Meta-reasoning is a nice exercise and all for, say, examining your biases, but when there's a concrete topic , much better to discuss the actual fine print of those ideas. Cf Bulverism.
The concrete topic here is censorship. Censorship presupposes some idea of what to censor. Where this idea comes from is not secondary to this discussion.
If your justification for censorship is that the marketplace of ideas doesn't work, you really have to explain where your ideas of what to censor come from.
If your justification is that your better at reasoning then other people, you really have to engage in some meta-reasoning about this claim.
And if your justification is that other people are biased, you really have to examine your own biases.
I’m not sure why “more skeptical” should lead to “more reluctant to censor”. Presumably reluctance to censor should come from a belief that censoring leads to bad effects, not from low confidence in one’s own beliefs.
True ideas do have more memetic power than false ones, all other things being equal. The problem is all other things are very rarely equal and there are a lot of other factors except being true or false witch correspond to the power of the meme. False memes are optimised to spread, despite being false, after all.
So the "marketplace of ideas" kind of works. Just... not as well as we might have hoped.
I vote for aggressively adversarial anti-reporting. You can get a lot of mileage out of "left-wing mainstream media does <what you describe>!!" on right wing sites, but they then do the same thing themselves -but the skepticism of "mainstream media" wasn't always there, it was built. The goal is (similarly) to create a constituency of "unpartisan context skeptics" that have a social norm of not accepting "context-scarce" reporting that has obvious propaganda goals. Preferably with some way to actual prevent the click-traffic to the "bad" source.
" many people (probably including all the drug users) chose to take it" Scott, I think you mean " many people (probably including all the drug users) chose NOT to take it"
Looking at the first one, its actual claim is "Senior Pentagon official says Russia is running out of precision munitions". I have no doubt a senior Pentagon official said this, so it sounds like it's not a lie.
This may sound nitpicky, but it's my ENTIRE POINT. Journalists often make bad decisions about who to trust and how much to fact-check them, but this is different from clear bright-line misinformation. You can't run a censorship regime that censors journalists who accurately report the words of government spokespeople!
"Senior Pentagon official says Russia is running out of precision munitions". I have no doubt a senior Pentagon official said this, so it sounds like it's not a lie."
Hmmm - as regards religion news, quite often stories appear with "Senior Vatican official says..." and then it turns out to be "random monsignor in the general area of St Peter's Square with whom I had a very nice chat over coffee" and not somebody associated with the Curia:
All due respect to the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life but it's not one of the Top Top branches. Though Francis has done a lot of re-organising, so dicasteries may indeed be higher up the totem pole than previously:
"In the Roman Curia, a congregation is a type of department of the Curia. They are second-highest-ranking departments, ranking below the two Secretariats, and above the pontifical councils, pontifical commissions, tribunals and offices."
The gold standard for "senior Vatican official" would be if you could get someone from one of the Secretariats to whisper sweet nothings into your ear. Or the likes of this guy, who blotted his copybook:
"Giovanni Angelo Becciu (born 2 June 1948) is an Italian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis made him a cardinal on 28 June 2018. On 24 September 2020, he resigned the rights associated with the cardinalate.
An archbishop since 2001, he held several appointments in the diplomatic service of the Holy See between 1984 and 2011, including those of Apostolic Nuncio to Angola and to Cuba. From 2011 to 2018 he was Substitute for General Affairs in the Secretariat of State, a key position in the Roman Curia. He was head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints from 2018 to 2020, when he resigned from that office and from the rights and privileges of a cardinal, including the right to participate in a papal conclave, after being implicated in a financial corruption scandal; he retains the title of cardinal."
So that makes me wonder who exactly this "senior Pentagon official" was - a high ranking guy, or "Major Major who works in the under over upper assistant office of the deputy to the secretary"?
So that colours my interpretation of "unnamed guy who we swear, cross our hearts, is a senior official in the ministry of paperclips" quotes in the newspapers. Headlines work better when they splash "Senior Pentagon/Vatican official" around rather than "guy who works there, sure, but he's about three levels above the janitor".
I agree that this is the point. I think the root cause is that the news stories are told to sway the audience to a particular viewpoint, rather than to present facts. Communication is not the goal, but persuasion instead.
That is one thing I like about this particular blog. You present statements, such as "The media very rarely lies" and then present things both for and against it, searching for an actual truth. The Infowars article started with a premise, something like, "COVID vaccines are bad?" and found a way to demonstrate their conclusion. Or "welfare users aren't more likely to use drugs". Or "Russia must be losing the war".
So I, like probably many others, now distrust the news I receive, even what sounds initially like facts. I no longer consider it news, but more of an entertainment source.
Your leadership seems unusually bright, scott, but often as I move from the body of your text into the comment section I fervently wish that there were some mandatory multiple choice questions at the bottom of each one so that people could prove they understood your point before commenting or even before just moving on with the rest of their day.
I've been enjoying your series on this collection of topics so far, but suspect you'll stop short of the final piece entitled "everyone is wrong and only consuming misinformation, loosely defined".
Also, Russia did start to run out of precision ammunitions pretty quickly in its invasion of Ukraine. Whilst it retained (and still retains to an extent) the ability to launch cruise missiles, it basically stopped using guided artillery, which is the vast majority of precision ammunition usage. This was one of the first indicators that the Russian military was not the fearsome force sometimes portrayed. So I don't think that fact is untrue.
Even setting aside your assertion of fact - perhaps you can provide some evidence - the reality is that any guided missile, cruise missile, etc is a precision munition. They can be artillery, they can be air dropped, they can be missiles, they can be cruise missiles, they can be drones.
The difference between a precision munition and a non-precision munition is precisely the guidance to a specific target. Therefore a ballistic rocket is not a precision munition but a GPS or laser guided missile, bomb, shell or whatever is.
Your reply is valid in a narrow sense but invalid in a wider sense.
In particular: where is the accountability and/or skepticism that theoretically should arise once "senior officials" have proven to be wrong not just once, but multiple times? This is why I showed 4 links ranging over literally 8 months.
Nor is this area the only example. There are many others including the Russiagate narrative then vs. now, the Biden-kid laptop narrative then vs. now, etc etc.
Any one example can be said to be a perfectly legitimate case; taken as a whole, it looks far more like a media which is either consciously lying or at a minimum, failing the most basic of journalistic integrity and/or professionalism.
But those articles may have been written by different reporters and even if by the same reporter is it really that crazy to judge the reliability of a source by their reliability in general rather than on that one issue. Seems quite likely that over the same time period there have been hundreds of articles where that source or those like them panned out.
Are you really asserting that so long as every wrong article is published by a different reporter - there is no need for skepticism that a consistent meme is wrong?
No, my point was that if officials are right in 99/100 cases it makes sense to view them as reliable. The point about different reporters was to explain why, even if one issue seems like officials are particularly unreliable on, that pattern might not get noticed. It would obviously be better if it did but it's not a wholesale indictment of the system.
Actually, your point is nothing more than trying to justify the unjustifiable.
I don't care if officials are right in 99/100 cases - which is false, BTW - especially if that 1 case is a falsified case for war (Iraq) in which literally thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. That's the thing about integrity and professionalism: it doesn't matter if you act with integrity 99/100 times or are professional 99/100 times - it only takes one time to destroy it.
But fortunately, there are numerous examples of NYT nonsense.
In any case, it is clear that you don't pay close attention to what such "august" institutions emit. As such, your credibility in defending them is quite low.
I agree with your point that journalists make choices about who to trust and how to contextualize their comments. However, I feel your piece is ambiguous between two claims:
1) Places like Infowars are different from the NYT but the difference is one of degree and/or intent and not one that allows for any bright line rules. We should expect any attempt to apply a censorship regime to be quite arbitrary and highly influenced by affiliation of whoever is doing the deciding.
2) In fact there isn't much difference between Infowars and the NYT in terms of reporting. The difference is really just all about their priors.
1) is frankly irrelevant under the context of free speech. Ideas should be allowed to compete regardless of intent.
2) is exactly my point. The pretense of "journalistic integrity and/or professionalism" is absent in the vast majority of the mainstream media such that there is no difference between the NYT and Infowars except the following:
many journalists who have exhibited journalistic integrity and professionalism have openly proclaimed that most of the mainstream media is now reliable only for speaking "the truth" from the powers that be as opposed to speaking truth to power.
1 isn't irrelevant. It speaks to the costs vs benefits. I personally prefer a us style system but the experience in western Europe suggests that narrow, relatively bright line rules against things that are socially agreed on to be unacceptable (holocaust denial etc) aren't that damaging. Now I still think the us system is better but the argument against fuzzy rules is stronger than the one against clear lines.
And here we are talking about private platforms like Twitter or Facebook and the truth is that people are going to go elsewhere if you don't either algorithmically hide or moderate certain kinds of content (explicit porn, goatse, really extreme violence, holocaust denial etc etc). Honestly, I'd prefer this wasn't true but at least you can pick clear cut bright line rules that don't track partisan disagreement. (Eventually ppl will hopefully be able to choose for themselves what to see in settings but the default still does tons of work here).
2). Except the NYT doesn't consent to default judgements against it in defamation cases because it knows discovery will show it knew the claims to be false.
I mean c'mon, Jones knew damn well the Sandy Hook shit was just literal obvious BS and broadcast it anyway. If they thought it was true they would have investigated and called up old friends etc to blow it open.
The NYT may be biased sometimes but the ppl there are true believers in what they write. I'd say the same about fox news. Infowars is in a different category.
The beauty of my view is that I have no problem with you expressing a view which I personally find odious, but believe that you have the right to have and express that belief.
The ugliness of your view is that the negative of the above is true.
Re: private platforms
Your argument might have played better before the exposure of massive FBI and other government direct manipulation of Twitter actions to suit said government/agency agenda. Quite frankly, it is utterly ludicrous that censorship was being requested (and enacted) for literally double digit follower twitter accounts. Talk about mountains over molehills and/or egregious abuse of power.
And finally, consent to default judgements. I have actually followed the case. There was no consent of anything; the legal process in that case was egregiously bad including, but not limited to:
a) Jurors being asked if they believed in $100M+ judgements - as part of the screening process.
b) Alex Jones being literally prohibited from testifying in his own defense.
c) Arbitrary and nonsensical decisions made concerning things like the valuation of Infowars without Alex Jones. The former is worth pretty much nothing without the latter but somehow this isn't true in that legal proceeding.
Alex Jones says crazy shit, absolutely true. But he also says a lot of true things. And I see nothing he spouts as any more or less crazy than the nonsense emitted from mainstream outlets.
As for people being true believers at the NYT: yeah ok buddy. I might have agreed with you before the Iraq WMD nonsense - which the NYT has STILL not admitted error - I don't now.
What I believe now is that mainstream journalists at the NYT and other outlets believe in their fat paychecks and class identity. They don't believe in journalistic integrity or professionalism. You believe different, that's on you.
I've also followed the TX and CT Jones lawsuits & I'm leaving the following comments on a) & b).
(Disclaimer: I am saying this because I think it is true & important. I am constructing it to convincingly convey the true and important things. I am not leaving out any important context or inconvenient facts I am aware of.)
a) I'm not a legal expert, but if the plaintiff attorneys asked the jury pool egregiously impermissible questions, they'd be taking a huge risk the appellate court would call it a mistrial- essentially giving their opponents the option to reroll the dice for a lower judgement. I doubt experienced lawyers would make such an obvious mistake, so I'm inclined to think it's permissible.
Additionally in the TX jury selection Reynal (Jones' lawyer) asked potential jurors how they felt about a request for a $1 judgement. I doubt we'd see 1 plaintiff team + 1 defendant team make the same type of egregious error.
b) Jones was of course permitted to testify. He was not permitted to dispute the determinations of default judgements during the damages trial. Courts do things like this frequently. States have strict laws about what can be stated or considered during a trial. Eg in criminal cases, if it's considered irrelevant or prejudicial you can't bring up the defendant's criminal history.
In these trials the jury questions boiled down to "take as fact that he's liable, how much is he liable for?" The court considered it effectively proven that he was liable, and regarded a dispute during damages to be irrelevant or prejudicial.
This default was avoidable if he and his company had not carried out extreme abuses during discovery. For example, he had to send a corporate representative to answer every question about the videos that were the basis for one lawsuit; the representative had not even bothered to view the videos in preparation. In civil trials the court essentially plays referee between parties, and it doesn't seize evidence by force. In extreme cases they can eventually say "this party repeatedly flouts the rules and as a result we can't do a fair trial; as a result we have to go with common sense and declare them guilty".
I think the fact that this happened with 2 judges in 2 states is good evidence that it was justified.
The claim that something is "running out" is so vague as to basically be empty. Its factual meaning is simply that the amount of something today is less than it was at some previous point, which is plausibly true for each four of those dates. Presenting that fact as "running out" is basic editorializing/cheerleeading, which is something that the West (and Russia) do plenty of, whenever they can.
Ooh, I'll give you a subject where the media lies explicitly and consistently without censure; guns and gun laws. I can't think of another subject where they feel they can just make things up and not get called out by anyone who matters, even other clout chasing journalists, it's kinda weird even if you believe they're all just being partisan hacks on the topic.
I'm interested in seeing examples of this; most of the time I see people saying they're "lying" it's either minor mistakes or failures to provide context. I've objected to media treatments of gun laws before (see eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/ ) but as far as I can tell it was misdirection and not outright lies.
The exaggerations of the terminal effects of the 5.56mm round are almost laughable, to say nothing of the ignorance displayed towards how weapons and cartridges are designed and developed. I could go into mind numbing detail about the various iterations of both the AR15 design and the 5.56mm cartridge it fires (I'm a gunsmith and I've built thousands of them), but I'll keep it simple by pointing out that changing over to it in the Vietnam era was controversial because it was significantly *less* powerful than contemporary battle rifles, and to this day the round is considered too light to hunt deer with in many states, in comparison to the 7.62mm weapons it replaced.
This one from the same outlet and around the same time manages to completely mangle how ammunition works:
Hollow points aren't typically necessary in rifle calibers as the terminal effects are caused by hydrostatic shock from the supersonic projectile and not blunt trauma from the bullet itself, they're much more commonly used in pistols to both increase the energy transferred to the target by increasing the surface area of the bullet, and to be safer to bystanders by reducing the chances of overpenetration. Again, very basic fact checking would have caught this, but journalists never seem to fact check each other when it comes to gun stuff, even when doing so would increase their own overall credibility.
I know what you're talking about, Scott, most of the time it's more "not quite a lie" types of stuff, the one I come back to again and again because I remember it personally was this move where a journalist would talk about an "assault weapon" ban targeting semi automatic weapons with modern features while a cop fired a full auto duty weapon in the background, creating a misleading conflation without technically lying. That, or getting basic stuff about how guns work wrong (you see this with gun laws as well, it's obvious that the people who wrote them have never handled firearms), it's just gotten to a point where it feels willful, like these people think the knowledge will somehow taint them.
I'll give you a good example of an incoherent gun law, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Originally, FDR wanted to ban handguns completely, and so the bill included language targeting potential work-arounds of said ban by regulating the barrel lengths of rifles and shotguns, but then the handgun ban was scrapped but the anti work-around language remained, and so we're (IIRC) the only country in the world that regulates barrel lengths on long guns (with very draconian federal penalties for even accidental violation), making life complicated for gun builders for no real reason. Even the ATF concedes that these regulations make no sense and they actually floated deregulating silencers a few years ago as well, as they're almost never used in crime and are simple to manufacture (it's just a tube with some cones in it, essentially), but political inertia keeps the laws intact. I could go on.
My synthesis of the Andrew Sullivan-Jonathan Last dispute is that while the press only occasionally prints outright factual falsehoods, the bigger problem is that it still manages to inculcate fallacious worldviews in millions by what it treats as news and how it spins it.
For example, the fact that blacks do worse than whites on test scores in a particular school district is often spun as a shocking exposé about which Something Must Be Done, usually involving spending even more money on Diversity-Inclusion-Equity consultants.
On the other hand, the fact that blacks do worse than whites in every single school district in America, which might suggest that the particular school district being blamed for its race gap is not necessarily all that guilty of discrimination, is decidedly Not News.
And when the media do print details that subvert the Narrative, they tend to shove them down into the latter reaches of the article, long after most have stopped reading. For instance, The Washington Post just ran an article about how Facebook’s formerly color-blind policies about banning hate speech were racist because they treated hate speech against whites the same as hate speech against blacks. Finally, the 22nd paragraph gets around to the most interesting fact the reporters uncovered:
"One April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of “hate speech” subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men…"
But The Washington Post doesn’t see that as big news because, of course, unlike “the vulnerable,” white people and men deserve hate.
> I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here.
Do you see a difference in the *frequency* of deceptiveness?
It seems self evident to me, though not to Scott apparently, that while it's easy to find anecdotes of similar levels of deception from both the NYT and Infowars it is significantly less common in the former than the latter.
I would put forth that the NYT will explicitly attempt to put forth a neutral approach to the three types (misinterpretation, selection bias, ignoring context) of bias that Scott identifies. You can argue they aren't always successful, Scott points out some examples, but that's their goal and most of their articles are slim on bias. Whereas Infowars will predominantly choose to use some combination of these three types of bias in the majority of their articles
"This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars ; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits."
I'm pretty sure he looked and Infowars and NYT because he was trying to demonstrate that even a media outlet that everyone knows is extremely biased and low quality (Infowars) very rarely actually lies, and that a media outlet that is just about the most establishment outlet there is (NYT) also very rarely lies, though it does a similar thing to what Infowars does (in kind, not degree) in terms of not putting in context.
A large fraction of New York Times reporters are admirably even-handed about insisting on including facts in their stories that may well upset the world views of NYT subscribers. The compromise the NYT marketing department has worked out with its more honest reporters is that if there are facts that will upset subscribers' worldviews about who are the the good guys and who are the bad guys, those facts awkward to the Narrative subscribed to by most subscribers should most of the time be buried toward the end of the article after some boring stuff that will cause most readers to move on before they get to the shocking bits.
In contrast, the Daily Mail puts the entertaining politically incorrect facts right up front. For example, both newspapers ran articles about the California cult that infiltrated one division of Google. The NYT's article was quite boring, and tended to give the impression to anti-Christian readers that the infiltrators were some kind of Christian cult and saved for the end the facts that the DM put in the headlines: that this is a New Age cult of art-worshippers run by a gay man to get his hands on young male flesh.
I am going to have to call shenanigans on this one. The NY Times piece says right up front that it is a New Age cult of art worshippers; the second sentence of their article is: "More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship’s base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google."
As for the leader, the NYT says: "The Fellowship came under fire in 1984 when a former member filed a $2.75 million lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization “had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton.” In 1996, another former member filed a suit that accused Mr. Burton of sexual misconduct with him while he was minor. Both suits were settled out of court."
The Daily Mail says the same thing: "But critics claimed that he had sexually abused new members of his group - in particular young boys.
In 1984 a former member filed a $2.75 million lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization 'had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton,' according to documents obtained by The New York Times. In 1996, another former member accused Burton in a law suit of sexual misconduct with him while he was minor. Both suits were settled out of court."
Neither paper claims that the founder founded the cult for the purpose " to get his hands on young male flesh" as you (dare I say baselessly?) infer. Your complaint seems to be that the NYT did not think that the sexual abuse was the most important part of the story, which seems perfectly reasonable, especially, but not exclusively, because of the age of the complaints.
The word "art" or "arts" does not appear in the second sentence, as it apparently does to you, but instead it doesn't show up until the 9th paragraph. Here's what I see:
Ex-Google Contractor Settles Lawsuit Over Religious Sect
The suit claimed that the Fellowship of Friends, an obscure group based in the Sierra Nevada foothills, gained influence inside Google.
A green lawn with trees and two American flags on poles.
The entrance to the Fellowship of Friends in Oregon House, Calif.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times
By Cade Metz
Cade Metz, based in San Francisco, has followed developments on this story since early this year.
Dec. 19, 2022
A former video producer for Google has settled a lawsuit that claimed he was fired after he complained that a religious sect had gained a foothold inside a business unit of the company.
Kevin Lloyd, 34, said in the suit that he had been fired after complaining that the Fellowship of Friends, a religious organization based in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, dominated a business unit called Google Developer Studios, which makes videos showcasing the company’s technologies.
The suit claimed that the leader of the business unit — Peter Lubbers, a longtime member of the Fellowship of Friends — hired many of the religious group’s members onto the team as contractors, helped some advance to full-time positions and gave work to many others when staffing company conferences and parties.
Google confirmed on Monday that the suit had been resolved. It also confirmed that Mr. Lubbers was no longer employed by Google, though it declined to explain his departure. Mr. Lubbers could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Lloyd last year brought the suit against both Google and Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, a staffing company that brought him into Google as a contractor. It accused both companies of violating a California employment law that protects workers from discrimination.
The suit raised questions about Google’s dependence on contract employees, who now outnumber full-time workers inside the company. Most of Mr. Lloyd’s team joined the company through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship.
Mr. Lloyd agreed to settle the suit last week. Terms of the settlement — which was between Mr. Lloyd and ASG — were not disclosed.
Founded by a former schoolteacher named Robert Earl Burton in 1970, the Fellowship of Friends describes itself as “available to anyone interested in pursuing the spiritual work of awakening.” It claims about 1,500 members around the world, including roughly 500 in and around Oregon House, Calif., a tiny town about 180 miles north of Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Mr. Burton believed people could achieve a higher consciousness by embracing the fine arts. Over the decades, he cultivated an extravagant lifestyle with help from his followers, who often donated 10 percent of their monthly earnings to the organization.
In 1984, a former member filed a lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization “had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton.” In 1996, another former member accused Mr. Burton of sexual misconduct with him when he was a minor.
With months to think it over, the NYT has made their coverage of the scandal much less interesting by putting scandalous details well down into what starts out as tedious reportage.
It's a general pattern in recent years for New York Times news articles to bury scandalous facts that don't affirm the Narrative deep into the later paragraphs. Presumably, it assuages the consciences of reporters while the marketing department understands that people don't typically pay $17 per month to the NYT to find out the facts, they pay $17 per month to be reassured that their worldview is correct. So, placing the facts in this story so that casual readers will assume it's some Christian foothill cult infiltrating Google before they get bored and stop reading, while those actually interested in the story can read deep enough into the article to find out its a gay art cult is a win-win for the NYT's bottom line.
So, your complaint it that the newspaper failed to lead with "scandalous details" which are essentially irrelevant to the lawsuit that is the subject of the suit -- the legal claim would be identical if the employee had alleged that he was fired for complaining about any religion, so irrelevant, in fact, that the specific views of the religion would almost certainly have been inadmissible had the case gone to trial?
And, your evidence that it is a gay cult is, what, exactly? The fact that the leader has been accused of sexually harassing young men, as have leaders in many other religious organizations, including, obviously, the Catholic Church?
And, it is tedious reportage because it is a tedious story: "Lawsuit settles at very early stage; parties disclose nothing."
Also, where was the NYT marketing department in June, when the New Age nature of the organization was clearly stated in the second sentence of the article?
Moreover, in your original post, you purported to unfavorable contrast the NYT story with the Daily Mail story, yet the Daily Mail hasn't reported on the settlement, and, as I noted, the Daily Mail story in June was essentially the same as the NYT story in June; in fact, the Daily Mail story seems to be based on the NYT story, as it cites the NYT and even includes a link to the NYT story. Yet, you claim ignorance of the original NYT story.
Brazil's Electoral Court created an interesting concept: "informational disorder", as in, saying true things that imply a lie (according to whoever asked for the injunction, of course).
“Lying” headlines are also a huge issue. an example “4 Million Expected to Die From Covid” in the article below they quote the source, “in the very unlikely event no changes in behavior occur.” But tons of people apparently only read the headlines.
That’s an issue between editors and reporters - reporters don’t want to lie and don’t. Editors want clicks so they push it to the limit and cleanse their conscience with, “it’s all the article.”
That said the number of people who make statements revealing they hardly ever read the article is shocking.
I've been intentionally trying to cultivate an allergy to weasel language like that. You could drive an Iowa-class battleship through the words "Expected to".
"Factual and truthful are not synonyms". Something I've been noticing more and more lately is that journalists and the pundits they mine for quotes are big fans of statements which are clearly intended to be interpreted in a way not supported by the literal definition of the words. Classic example being stating that a scandal affecting ones home team "has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", or similar. That on its face is a meaningless phrase; presumably a scandal cooked up by Russian intelligence would look pretty similar to a real scandal. But the intention is to create the impression in the minds of the audience that "Experts say these are Russkie lies" and the people saying it are fully aware that's how it will be taken, without having to stake their reputations on actually making that claim.
So there is obviously some (ethical, legal?) reason why they don't lie directly. This is good. But could it be expanded to some of these cases too?
Some of those cases are surely hard, but especially the example of "x% economists say so" while omitting the amount of the other options seemed obviously deliberate. So the only difference between that and a blatant lie must be that this omission is categorized to the (ethically/legally) acceptable category, while lying is not. Can this category boundary be moved?
Easy case: if you report the number in a survey that chose one option you should report the number that chose other relevant options to provide appropriate context. It deals with this case.
Slightly less easy case: if you report something that involves big numbers like 100,000 or a billion or a trillion, you should also report the corresponding number for other familiar examples so that people can understand what this means. (Eg when reporting on a government mistake that cost a million dollars, also mention other recent mistakes that cost millions or billions so that we can know whether or not this is big.)
I didn't say my point clearly enough; I meant of finding a way we can make it part of the norm not to mislead in this way, similarly as not-lying is now a norm. Because indeed the practical solution of how reporting should go in those cases is easy. So more like, what are the reasons why direct lying in media is now unacceptable, and when understanding those reasons, try to expand them to these cases.
I think one difference between conspiracy theorists and the media is that a lot of the time conspiracy theorists are just actually dumb, while the media is very calculated about how to phrase things so as to be technically correct but very misleading.
That's why I kinda get more annoyed at a super misleading CNN headline than at a vaccine-Satanism conspiracy theory some boomer is posting on facebook. One is just extremely dumb, and the other is very smart and competent at misleading me.
Often it’s the opposite - flat earthers are far more sophisticated in their knowledge of the evidence for and agains there roundness of the earth than the media is about almost anything it reports on.
No, reporters are dumb, too. Certainly legal reporters are incapable of understanding very simple court decisions. Do you remember when at least one media outlet reported that the Supreme Court had overturned Obama care, because it was NG under the Commerce Clause, even though it was well known that the there were two alternative ways the government could win? Then there was the NPR (or maybe local public radio guy) who nodded along when his guest said the Iran nuclear deal must really be about oil, because "why else would the US send the Secretary of Energy to the negotiations" when the Secretary at the time was a Nobel Prize winner in physics.
One thing I've noted while dabbling in politics is that people often are unable to read political statements exactly as they are written, even though often many aides pore over those statements in great detail to deliver exactly a certain message down to very forms of words.
To give some simple examples,
A politician says "At this point I don't see myself doing X..." and, a few months later, does X. They have not lied at any point; they indeed didn't do it at that point, but at a whole another point, after considering that the situation has changed enough.
A politician says "It is my belief that in a few months we'll be in a situation where it's safe enough to do Y...", but in a few months time, Y is not done. They have not lied at any point; they described a belief they had. A belief does not have to realize itself.
These are probably not particularly good examples of what I'm thinking about, but then again it's late here.
Why not censor stuff if a prediction market classifies it as misleading? I.e. if they read a randomly selected other article on this topic, theres an x% chance theyd change their minds. I could imagine that giving a high number in cases where theres a single fairly important piece of missing context like your vaccine example.
Because you're motivating manipulation of the market? If something has real outcomes, there is incentive to manipulate it. And if there is manipulation you've lost the point of a prediction market (and in this case I can't see how you'd short the manipulation to make a profit, since the result is being manipulated not just a prediction).
I'm trying to model your intended audience (my outgroup) and I don't think this fully addresses their concerns. I "think" they would view it as...prioritizing an abstract process of arriving at the truth at the expense of real life consequences
Using your example of the NYT/Infowars discussion on racial disparities in policing, while an abstract debate to arrive at the proper context for these facts might be ideal, in the reality they live in, racial disparities in policing result in many dead African Americans every year. As such, any discussion of abstract truth values must be weighed against the loss of life of African Americans and the reporting of any responsible journalist must weigh these tradeoffs.
Your article feels like it takes as an assumption that seeking the truth is the highest value, which I'm not sure your intended audience/my outgroup would agree to. I model them as responding that they like truth but not at the cost of real human lives. Besides, I think they're confident they have the truth, they cannot imagine any circumstances under which anything from Infowars would ever convince them, and so they're not even trading off discovering the truth vs real human lives but trading off the approved process of discovering the truth vs real human lives.
And, while I don't agree with them because I obviously think my outgroup are deluded fools, I'm not sure this logic is wrong. There are certainly theoretical circumstances in which we would absolutely worry more about the practical consequences of doing something vs discovering the truth at any cost. And I can certainly model a NYT editor, within his own deluded mental model, legitimately struggling with this tradeoffs.
You have a great point. I think the disagreement comes down to different priors on the fundamental value of truth. Not the value of knowing truth, but of the truth itself.
If you think the truth is fundamentally good, then knowing more of it is better.
But if you think that some aspects of the truth really are fundamentally awful and bad, it is then only reasonable to want to keep some aspects of the truth covered up or just not talked about.
Looks like Maxwell here has the right of it in responding to Wooly's original comment. There is absolutely nothing even remotely similar to a conflict between valuing life and valuing Truth going on in this discussion, it is all a question of where people are choosing to focus their attention. For instance, the greatest loss of African American life from violence involves same race perpetrators, not police. A polemicist might assume for the sake of argument that anyone distracting from this by discussing police violence is doing so out of a callous disregard for the lives of Black Folk in order to score points in a political debate, perhaps because of personal bias against police after getting too many speeding tickets. Would that be true? No of course not. It has nothing to do with disregard for life it has to do with the fact that people don't choose their field of vision, it is assigned to them by the media they are exposed to over the previous course of life.
This feels, perhaps not unfair, but certainly not how my outgroup models it. It's less about absolute, binary truth than weighing probabilities and tradeoffs.
For example, we're never 100% sure of the safety of any new medical drug. How could we be? Clinical testing of humans is inherently limited, as is our ability to judge long-term impacts. Where we draw the line on when we're appropriately certain of a new medical drug's safety for general distribution is a matter of intense debate with massive real world consequences, see the FDA.
Once debate of that topic loops back into real impacts, it's much harder to weigh those consequences. Take the Covid vaccine. Would it have been worth delaying it another three months for more testing and more certainty? Would it have been better to release it six months earlier with more limited testing? Public debate and perception certainly had massive consequences for people's usage, with measurable consequences in terms of deaths and suffering.
If my outgroup is 99% confident in something that involves real people dying, I understand why they wouldn't want to undercut current solutions just to get 99.9% confident.
it's unfair in the sense you're presenting a dilemma between 0% knowledge vs 100% knowledge. but in the minds of wooly's outgroup, the dilemma is between 99% knowlege vs 100% knowledge. there's a tradeoffs to investing in knowledge-utilization vs knowledge-acquisition.
before the outgroup could be convinced that the pursuit of truth might be worthwhile, their trust in infowars would need to be undermined. He mentioned infowars, so i assume the outgroup is republicans.
EDIT: but he also mentions NYT, so i have no idea tbh.
Yeah I had trouble with his wording. I didn't present any dilemma about knowledge, and rather was saying his setting up an antagonism between knowledge and life was nonsense.
> The problem of racial disparities in policing is too urgent for us to figure out whether there are racial disparities in policing.
this was the comment being called unfair. it's weighing knowledge vs action, not allocation of knowledge. i suspect you think his complaint of unfairness was in reply to you, rather than in reply to Maxwell E.
You may consider my outgroup to be the "woke" writ large. I assume Scott's writing is to convince liberals and the left to push back against growing online censorship. To convince people, you need to understand their internal thought process and feelings. And I'm concerned because I don't think Scott's article here fully address their internal thought process.
I've deviated off the racial violence example because, well, it's very CW and that tends to make discussion difficult. Instead, I'm trying to find examples where Maxwell or you could feel something similar to what liberals and leftists feel. So, for example, when Maxwell responds that they're "assuming the question", imagine we're working in a factory where one person dies every day from a mechanical failure. We're confident that we've found the problem but when we take it to upper management to get approval to fix it, there's some guy who keeps saying that the evidence isn't conclusive enough, we need to gather more data. That's defensible for awhile but at some point the additional data isn't really telling us anything and we just need to implement the fix.
I think this is how the "woke" would view this. The advantage of open debate is it's ability to determine the truth but at some point all "reasonable" people know what needs to be done and further debate is detrimental to the actual task of solving the problem.
Which, to be clear, I sympathize with. The goal of public policy isn't to have interesting debates, it's to improve society. An 80% solution implemented today is better than a 90% solution a year from now. I get this vibe and I think anyone who has done practical work gets it as well.
So, generally, I think the "woke" view racial policing this way. All "reasonable" people know what the problem is, "racism", and know the solution, "awareness and broad cultural anti-racism", backed up by legal and administrative penalties as necessary. Every day this is delayed equals dead black people.
And I think Maxwell and/or you and/or others could get this. I'm not saying it's correct, I'm extremely confident the "woke" are wrong, but I do think this is how the woke internally perceive it. If you want to persuade people, as I "think" Scott was trying, you need to correctly model their internal mind. I don't think Scott did, I think he's making an appeal to truth discovery which the "woke" will perceive as nitpicking while real people are dying.
Is the premise even true? Scott doesn't actually quote anyone who says that police shootings "must be racially motivated" on the basis of a raw disparity in police shooting deaths. Here are two NYT articles I found on a quick search that make basically the same point Scott made about black people encountering police more often:
I'm in your outgroup and think your model is wrong. I don't think it's a common view that we should try to suppress the fact that police encounter black people more often. There are disagreements about interpretation and significance.
These represent a minority view, especially McWhorter who is essentially a conservative by 2022 liberal standards.
At the very least, "more encounters with police" is an absolute minority view amongst BLM supporters and one which will almost certainly get you you called "racist"
Yes, McWhorter is a conservative by 2022 liberal standards, who often says stuff that provokes left-liberals. And the NYT hired him. Which seems pretty good evidence NYT editors do not believe that free discussion of racial disparities in police shootings must be suppressed for fear of discovering some harmful truth. .
Is this missing the entire point of the article ? the NYT never (or rarely) actually says "Police *Must* be racially motivated to kill blacks", it just heavily implies it. You, me, or Scott will never catch the NYT saying it outloud, they are very careful not to, perhaps even throwing the occasional "Maaaaaaaaaaybe the data is against us" from time to time by the occasional heretic.
It's a motte-and-bailey where the bailey is never explicitly articulated.
So when Scott says "NYT claims police shootings must be racially motivated" he doesn't actually mean that literally?
Yeah I do find Scott's post unclear so maybe I am missing the point. As I said in another comment, the infowars claim that covid vaccines cause miscarriages seems just straightforwardly wrong and not merely an example of missing context. So when an article says there's a racial disparity in police shooting victims, and this is both true and relevant to the article, but it doesn't get into the debate over cause, that doesn't seem very similar. Especially when the paper also publishes articles that do go into that debate.
This may be correct, but if it is, why is it so important for the writers of these pieces to try to use the language of science? Why do they seek out scientific papers to support their truth? Why, to take an extreme example, are there people trying to equate the status of critical race theory with the theory of evolution? These aren't people setting aside the ideal of truth as the highest authority, but rather they are seeking to use that truth to support their preferred narrative, which is essentially emotional (as is that of their outgroup most likely). For all this is a huge bias, they are still attached to the idea of science as a determinator of truth, even if their actual behaviours may fail to meet the scientific ideal (and in that respect, I'd ask whose behaviours do?).
The media's promotion of Black Lives Matter in 2015-2016 and then again in 2020-2022 helped get thousands of incremental blacks murdered by other blacks and thousands of incremental blacks killed in car crashes.
This is one of the more important findings in the social sciences in recents years, but in the 18 months since this pattern was discovered, the New York Times has not seen fit to print it.
Sure, and that's a fair way to judge relative harmfulness but I think Scott isn't targeting the person who is willing to admit there are significant costs but it's still worth it. Rather, the person who insists that of course we respect free speech but we are just cutting out a small obviously valueless piece.
I mean, I think your response also demonstrates that any attempt to limit the harmful speech:
1) Has a massive chance of getting it wrong. In practical terms what matters is how this affects actual actions and votes and it's super easy for the effect of limiting harmful speech to be worse than the speech.
2) Is going to limit the ability to make valid points on some issues. For instance, that line won't distinguish between the research findings showing that the racial disparity in police stops tends to disappear when one moves to actual shootings (agree or not it's reputable research from major universities...I haven't read it carefully to know) and other kinds of speech with harmful effect.
You could still say it's worth it but that's a different argument.
“What is contextually relevant” is a value judgement. Absent shared values, we can’t agree on what reality looks like even if we both claim to value seeing reality accurately, since we will disagree on which parts of reality are worth taking a closer look at.
I’m not sure that’s all. If you consistently make an honest attempt at presenting a broad enough and balanced context you could theoretically gain a good reputation. Maybe that could be called a hack to create a shared value „honest attempt at truth“ that has the potential to draw in lots of people.
From my German perspective it seems that this was the case for roughly all major „respectable“ newspapers roughly 10-15 years ago (I cannot seriously report on earlier times due to being too young then).
But it has completely disintegrated on all sides since then and we are back to your post.
"This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars ; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
No. It's worse. Infowars is known as a right-biased, partisan publication, and proud of it. Anyone who is not a magatard would be skeptical from the get go, if they ever went to the site. These people are convenient hobgoblin to the easily frightened -- but they have no levers of power. But the NYT and Scientific American still, (still!), insist on their objectivity and reasoned analysis, and their narratives drive debate among our oh-so-educated "elite". I find that much more a mortal, than venial, sin, when the implications of that are considered.
To be more specific, the EEG study is intended to lead to throwing even more money we don't have
into the bottomless maw of the "War on Poverty". And the disparity of women in STEM (or any other real or imagined disparity) can only lead to a lowering of standards or "talent", to use their quaint term. The people reading those publications can actually make that happen.
What's really scary is that both of those are ferociously scrubbing off any patina of respectability and objectivity they have left. Who are we supposed to be believe?
I'm not sure I agree. I guess it partly depends on your definition of lying or your definition of "very rarely". Even if you don't consider lying by omission to be a form of lying, it seems to be that the media lies (as in intentionally says something they know to be false) pretty often. It's not something I have quantified, so I couldn't give you a figure such as "average number of false claims stated on the top 100 most read newspapers in the world per day". Anecdotally, I can say that I read/watch a decent amount of content related to media criticism and my recollection is that at least once a week I learn about a case of a major media outlet lying about something that I consider to be significant.
People have touched on it elsewhere but one way in which flagrant lies end up in the media all the time is the practice of uncritically repeating obvious lies from "official" sources. "White house spokesmen said earlier this week that..." Or my favorite "Anonymous officials within the intelligence community have reported..." Sure the journalist themselves didn't technically lie, they just repeated a lie verbatim that they could have debunked in 5 minutes if they wanted, or which came from a source with a poor track record.
They still didn’t technically lie - which is precisely Scott’s point, isn’t it?
What you and Scott are describing is nonetheless the major reason behind distrust in media. The bigger problem seems to be that many(?) choose to only distrust one part of the media, while at the same time there is no good „fallback media“ that are making an honest attempt most of the time. At least that’s my impression.
You're absolutely right, but I wrote my comment because I do believe that there are many cases where the journalists themselves lie without outsourcing it to someone else. I would say it's more common than what Scott thinks.
Applies more widely than the media. Those with power have things they don't like to say, and forms of words that are acceptable or unacceptable for reasons that are only tenuously connected to any form of morality. Magic spells are real - if you know the right incantations, you can access hidden knowledge, and gain power over others
Magic spells are also useless unless they are precisely correct, and they are gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) changing the whole time.
Some of the most profound and complex insights into modern society can be summarised as "the thing is, we're ruled by powerful wizards".
I worked on misinformation at Facebook and I can confirm that we pretty much never saw outright "unquestionably false" content, but instead just a huge ton of "deliberately misrepresenting things to push an agenda" content. Indeed pretty much all "politics" or "social issues" content that goes viral on social media is misleading in some way.
Ironically misinformation is itself something the media misrepresents.
Yes. The Dispatch and CheckYourFact are right-leaning fact checkers that are part of the Facebook fact checking program and they will flag pro-liberal misinfo. However there probably is a left-bias in fact checking. This is partly driven by the difficulty in finding right leaning fact checkers that don't provoke media outrage (there was outrage about CheckYourFact). The team does try hard to be politically neutral, but of course the employee base is left-leaning and so that can distort one's view of what it means to be neutral.
That said, as Scott points out, fact checking isn't actually that effective because the vast majority of misleading content isn't sufficiently "lying" to get labelled and taken down.
Can we take this a step further and simply say that the data is meaningless without knowing *in detail* what it represents? The vast majority of stats in news reads like "Look at how big this number is! We won't bore you with what it actually means, but it's surprising and scary, so why don't you be a good little consumer and post about it to everyone you know?"
On a more constructive note, with how complex the world is, and how most people have lives to lead outside of sleuthing through the news, how would you signal boost sources which try to take a more neutral, informative view? Whatever people have been doing the last few decades doesn't seem to have produced very useful news sources.
i don't think the problem is ultimately tractable. but i wouldn't mind if a catchy platitude like "data only disproves" were popularized to the same extent as "correlation is not causation".
Why doesn't the first example count as a completely false claim? If you say "vaccines cause miscarriages" and this is not correct, that seems like a "completely false thing" and not just lacking context. The NYT EEG article for example does not seem similar in this regard--it makes clear it's a finding from one study and not established fact.
Fever, especially during the first trimester of pregnancy, might cause miscarriages and/or birth defects. There doesn't seem to be universal agreement one way or another, but it's a possibility.
I’d be willing to bet that on a wide variety of facts I care about and think should be widely known, NYT readers will know these facts in far greater proportion than infowars readers, and that this is because NYT is more capable of providing relevant context and information to its readers, so I’d also be willing to bet on causal interventions in this space showing NYT is better.
I’d be willing to bet that on a wide variety of facts I care about and think should be widely known, NYT readers will know these facts in far greater proportion than infowars readers, and that this is because NYT is more capable of providing relevant context and information to its readers, so I’d also be willing to bet on causal interventions in this space showing NYT is better.
A much more blatant example of the media maligning is the repeated hypothesis that "immunity debt" is causing an upsurge in RSV, Influenza, Strep A and scarlet fever (in UK).
Immunity Debt was never a thing before COVID. They just latched onto this "idea" since it was a lot easier to continue the messaging that COVID is no longer worth worrying about.
What the science does seem to show is COVID causing immune system dysfunction (T cell dysfunction) for a significant percentage of people. If true, I suppose that's not very convenient.
I'm the opposite of a Covid minimizer (fully vaxxed, mask everywhere and continue to substantially curtail activities to try to put it off as long as possible, and very concerned about long Covid). But FWIW, the recent discussions I've been following seem to mostly run against T-cell problems from Covid as being well established or a likely primary cause for long Covid.
To be honest, I'd be happy to know that there was some good news, but the possibility of things getting worse given how many mutating copies are out there is huge. Vaccines are pretty much worthless against preventing infection with XBB1.5 and once it's in you're playing Russian Roulette with your DNA. Maybe you'll be one of those that isn't affected much. And, then there's the long list of hazard ratios showing infection is just not good, in general.
Thanks for pushing back on the T-cell stuff with Ben's tweet. I read the entire thing and think the studies he was referencing were not quite as interesting as the studies in Jeff Gilchrist's thread, but it's obvious I have no idea which study to believe here.
I would argue that it is a lie when you are presenting yourself as a Real Media Source, and therefore as a source of Real Information, when you repeat something without fact-checking it, or when you say something and fail to consider any sort of alternative hypothesis or contradictory hypothesis.
This is, in fact, taught to journalists - you need to look for alternative narratives/all sides to a story - but they fail to apply it in practice, and oftentimes, when they DO apply it, they do a horrible job and just present it as a he said/she said without any additional or useful context.
So yeah, I'd say this actually does qualify as "lying", or at the very least as spreading misinformation, which I think most people would say constitutes "lying".
Sadly, I think the biggest problem with journalism is that journalism is a profession that people are trained in specifically. The problem is that journalism doesn't give you subject expertise, and as we know from the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who lack subject matter expertise cannot actually distinguish it in others.
I'd be careful saying "rarely lies". There is pressure to be minimally blatant while still conveying one's preferred narrative, and that means that "distortions" and "omissions of context" are more common, yes.
But that does not mean that people will not outright lie if they have to and if they feel like they can get away with it. The moment you think it's safe to rule out "outright lies" is the moment outright lying becomes a viable option.
Something can be factually and demonstrably untrue, and the moment enough people will allow the required amount of willful blindness to be seen as "normal", you will (and do) get outright lies.
I don't think I agree with the conclusion of this article.
If the outcome of posting an article is a more misinformed populace, I don't really care that there are technical semi-truths buried in the article. The headline and the narrative that emerges forth from that headline is **significantly** more relevant than the actual text of the article itself.
When thinking about why misinformation is so bad, I think about people I have met that tell me that 5G is killing birds, or think that microchips are in vaccines and Bill Gates is out to do nefarious things.
I think an honest accounting of the last decade should yield a more bearish view on the efficacy of the marketplace of ideas.
We can and should have an interesting debate about whether misinformation should be censored. But it is mere pretending to act like our world is not steeped deep in a stew of outright lies and nonsense.
What we think of as positive journalistic ethics only existed for a brief period in the 20th century when the local monopoly on advertising revenues made newsrooms completely insulated from economic pressure.
I don't know if that can be brought back, but if it can, removing the media from profit incentive is probably part of it.
Were they good at getting the facts right then, or was it just harder for people who noticed the facts being wrong to point it out in public? 40+ years ago, my dad described that he'd been involved in a couple events that were reported in newspapers, and that the papers had gotten basically everything important about the event wrong.
I really like the point you are making. However, you are giving too much credit to the media. For example, either Infowars is stupid (they don't understand what they did, in good but stupid faith), or they are lying, because they know that their headline states an untruth: all that the "factual" -and context free- data shows is that "... alarming number of stillbirths... " preceded by "COVID shot". You could not nit-pick that as mis-contextualized spread of incorrect and dangerous misinformation, but neither could they have written their designed to be alarmist article.
There is an important distinction between lying and deceptive/misleading statements. Lying occurs when someone says or writes something that they believe is not true. And indeed, I think I agree with Scott's claim that the media very rarely explicitly lies.
However, I think the media is often intentionally deceptive - i.e., presenting information in ways that they know will lead to misunderstandings of reality. When Colgate ran an add saying that 80% of dentists recommend their product, they knew that the average consumer would imagine that dentists PREFER Colgate over other brands... whereas, in reality, dentists were asked to name ALL toothpastes they recommend (https://bit.ly/3BS7zBt). So, while Colgate didn't lie, they were being deceptive. Similarly, when mainstream media present statistics or quote 'experts' that lead to wrongheaded conclusions (as in the examples that Scott presents), I think many of them know they are spreading biased information and misleading their readers. Or, at the least, it is 'bullshit' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit), where the journalist doesn't care about whether what they're saying is correct... as long as it gets the intended reaction. Journalists (these days?) seem closer to lawyers than to scientists. Like lawyers, they use the facts at hand to make a very partial case for their side. Unlike the ideal scientists, they are not even-handed in presenting the evidence. When people claim that "the media lies", I think it is only because the average person isn't pedantic enough to distinguish between lying and deception.
However, if we’re nitpicking anyway: I don’t think that’s what most people think of when they think of lying. As you said, lying requires a different dimension – not only factual incorrectness, but also an intent to deceive. If it turns out that police do *not* shoot more white people than black people after all, for example, this doesn’t necessarily mean Scott was lying; I’d assume he was just wrong.
And I think the difference is very important. There’s a reason for the distinction between *misinformation* and *disinformation*, with the latter intending to deceive and thus being a lie in the strict sense. If we want to promote truth, we need to know why people don’t tell it; and I think brandishing all false statements “lies” is unnecessary and even incendiary.
There’s a comment further up by a former mainstream reporter who says journalists almost never lie but outsource there lies to others like experts (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11341076). I’m not sure whether he means intentional deception, but my theory is that both journalists and experts hardly ever lie in the stricter sense. Even if they have preconceived notions which lead to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning etc., they almost always write what they believe to be true, and believe what they write. I know of a handful of cases of conscious lies, but they were either a journalist misleading the publication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_of_stories) or Russian state TV paying people to say things on camera. But these are really few and far between. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to prove intent; but perhaps it’s just because most people aren’t diehard liars.
Great points! Very insightful, and thanks for clarifying that MISinformation and DISinformation are different.
But I've become too cynical to agree with the hypothesis that: "[journalist] almost always write what they believe to be true, and believe what they write." I think that, even in the MSM, truth is often subordinated to publishing a good story that will attract readership. When the truth and a good story conflict, I think the good story wins out more than not. Thus, I think that a lot of MSM stories are 'bullshit', in the philosophical sense of the word of someone making a claim without caring about the truth of the claim. The media is a business, and it will only publish the truth to the extent that "truth sells" - i.e., to the extent that it is demanded by readers. Given that the epistemological standards of the average media consumer is low, so are the standards of the average journalist. There are some journalists whose brand is trustworthy/unbiased (e.g., Fareed Zakaria (https://adfontesmedia.com/fareed-zakaria-gps-bias-and-reliability/)... and some outlets (e.g., PBS, The Economist, Reuters, ABC News). But most people don't get their information from these sources... because their stories aren't that interesting. As my mom used to say, nothing ruins a good story like the truth.
I think we largely agree about the situation, but might or might not agree on the reasons.
Sometimes, the a good story being more important that the truth is trivial and non-controversial; "The sky is blue" is true, but not newsworthy. The more interesting cases, the ones you talk about, are if there's actually a conflict between reader demand and some kind objective importance - if, say, there was uncontroversial proof that the elections were rigged, would the NYT publish it, and why/why not?
My take is that this is purely hypothetical, since there is hardly ever uncontroversial proof. You can always find reasons to doubt the arguments, you can always seek out other experts. My personal opinion is that journalists are no more likely to do that than anyone else, including scientists who have come under attack for p-hacking and similar behavior over the past years. More to the point of our argument, I think that most of the time, *this isn't conscious behavior*. I don't think journalists think: "Oh, this expert statement means I was wrong. I'll just ask around until I can find another expert who helps me hide that". I think that, like most of us, they think: "Oh, this expert statement contradicts what I think it's true. I wonder whether the expert might be wrong after all, let me double-check with some others". The same can happen if a promising story turns out to be unremarkable - a journalist might snoop around some more to find a juicy angle.
I think no-one doubts that these things happen, and they happen all the time (and sometimes, the behavior might well be justified). The point I want to make is just that journalists rarely intentionally deceive there readers. Bias, per definition, is having skewed thought processes or beliefs, which means you are erring, not lying.
I get what you’re doing but you need to be very clear about whether the following category of story is a “lie” or not:
“Anonymous source says X” where X is false and the reporter is perfectly aware that their source is using them to plant a lie that both the source and the media organization would like people to believe is true.
Technically, “a person familiar with the matter” or “an official in the agency Y” can be true characterizations of the source even when they expect that their source is planting misinformation with them.
In such a situation, what is the subjective probability with which the reporter believes the statement X is false that you would require to classify the story as “media lying”?
Of course it is totally different when the source is named. “Named person says X” where the reporter believes X is false is still a perfectly valid story to write, where the reporter is not lying. I am talking about the use of anonymous sources and the implicit duty a reporter has to vouch for the reliability of his anonymous sources.
Do you agree that reporters are less willing to report a story that is evidence against their beliefs than one that is evidence for, and that most reporters have liberal beliefs? Consider the same question for professors. If you agree, it follows that your sources of information have a liberal bias, inasmuch as they funnel through reporters and professors. How then do you tell whether reality has a liberal bias or only your biased picture of reality?
Just because there's no obvious bright-line division doesn't mean you can't draw any lines for the purposes of law or categorization.
Going 5 mph over the speed limit is the same sort of sin as going 50 mph over the speed limit, but beyond a certain point we call it "reckless driving" rather than "the thing every driver does when traffic is flowing smoothly." There's no obvious discontinuity - driving 19 mph over is only slightly less bad than 20 mph over - but the law has to draw a line *somewhere* to distinguish reckless driving from speeding, even if the exact border is somewhat arbitrary.
Similarly, there is a level of deceptiveness at which we can recognize a news source as "a tabloid rag" rather than "a respectable newspaper," and it seems useful for Twitter or other news-amplifying websites to draw a line *somewhere* when deciding what to amplify, even if the exact details of that line are somewhat arbitrary.
IMO the problem alluded to is, unlike car speeds, we can't put an objective metric on how misleading an article is, and so we can't ensure or trust that the censors aren't more lenient with the side they support.
And suppressing misleading claims (or even outright lies) in one direction but not the other can even make the average public's views *less* accurate than if we don't suppress either, as in the latter case the lies or exaggerations in each direction might cancel out each other.
A lot of things in law are subjective. Did the killer intend to kill with malice aforethought, or was it something that they did in the heat of the moment? Was the officer fearing for his life when he shot and killed the suspect, or was he just looking for an excuse to kill someone? Would a hypothetical reasonable person in the same situation have made the same decision? This is definitely vulnerable to bias - police officers can get away with a lot of crimes - but a lot of times people do come to a consensus and a jury says "Yes, that was very definitely murder and not manslaughter."
"It's subjective" doesn't mean that you should always refrain from making a judgement. Sometimes you still need to make a decision, and all you can do is pick your judges and your laws as carefully as you can and accept that sometimes they'll still get it wrong. (Twitter does sometimes get things wrong, and sometimes when they do there's a big outcry and people move to Mastodon or wherever. It's always important to remember that Twitter is not the sole judge of discourse, merely one large platform that we can choose to trust or distrust.)
I disagree that the lies will probably cancel out - there's no law that says that liars have to be equally distributed among all political stances or that all lies will be equally popular to share. Refusing to filter or fact-check anything doesn't mean that you'll end up closer to the truth than those who do, it simply means that you're adding zero information - everything you repeat is as untrustworthy as it was when you first heard it.
In some cases we need to make a decision, and have no choice but make subjective decisions. But in the case of censorship, we do have the choice of not censoring anything.
Also, some kinds of subjective decisions, such as censorship, are particularly tempting to abuse; and, in practice, as far as I can tell, policies of suppressing misinformation are abused approximately two moments after they are introduced.
(Out of your examples of subjective decisions, deciding between manslaughter and murder isn't really necessary, but I don't find it particularly problematic either, because it only affects the degree of the sentence, not that it's a crime either way.)
But of course I say that since it agrees with my suspicions that media like to simplify stories to the point their editors think is important. And how reliably objective can that be?
One power of the institutional press is that it has a huge amount of leeway in determining what is considered News. For example, the name "Emmett Till" appeared fairly frequently in the New York Times in the years immediately following the black youth's murder at the hands of whites in 1955. But by 1980, "Emmett Till" was only appearing about twice per year in the NYT. In this century, however, Emmett Till news has become omnipresent, with Emmett Till's name appearing in the NYT about once per week in recent years (e.g., 50 times so far this year).
A few people get the joke: that the there's so much demand and so little supply of news of whites violently oppressing blacks that the NYT can sell more subscriptions by finding absurd excuses to constantly obsess over a murder that happened 67 years ago. But a huge number of people take it instead at at face value: that America in 2022 is plagued by whites hunting down and murdering blacks as proved by how often you read about Emmett Till in the New York Times.
> But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other.
This is itself an instance of ignoring context. I don’t think Scott really thinks InfoWars and the NYT are equally non-credible, but by referencing two single instances out of many thousands from both sources one could certainly be lead to draw that inference.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the general point about censorship, but the argument just seems like a contrived Loki’s wager vis-a-vis misinformation and deceptive reporting.
One major form of lying by omission is simply deciding what stories to cover or not cover. I think most people believe that blacks are more often shot by the police than whites, because it is *way* more common for a questionable police shooting of a black guy to make the news than an equally questionable shooting of a white guy. And this isn't exactly unreasonable, since the white guy's shooting will almost never trigger a riot or weeks of protests, but the black guy's shooting sometimes will.
When there is a widespread ideological or financial or social incentive not to report certain kinds of story, you get a file-drawer-like effect, where media all over the country independently decide not to report this kind of story, and so the public perception is that this kind of story basically never happens.
> But I would argue this is honest disagreement - exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas
I get the point that all censorship is an assertion of values, but does "marketplace of ideas" necessarily follow? Like, how do you reconcile that with the Toxoplasma of Rage post? It seems fairly clear that the marketplace is selecting for inflammatory bits of information missing context. Inflammatory headlines are easy to retweet. Context is not.
The premise of this post is that there is some group of censors who seek to ban, in some general way, "misinformation", which they believe that can objectively distinguish from fact. But who is this?
InfoWars was banned from most social media in 2018--but the reason given was hate speech, not "lies" or "deceptiveness."
If I go to e.g. YouTube community guidelines, they prohibit hate speech and misinformation about COVID, elections or the census. But they do not have any general policy against lying. The goal is to police a few specific areas of false claims that are seen as particularly harmful, not to provide a general solution to deceptiveness. Everyone more or less accepts that most false or misleading claims will have to be dealt with through normal discourse. Vaccine misinformation is restricted because it is seen as especially dangerous, not especially wrong. So I'm not sure what it adds to point out that there's a lot of bad information out there, in general, and censorship cannot be the solution--the censors themselves already agree.
Well...the platforms make the decision? At least in the US with relatively strong speech protections. And I didn't say (and don't believe) they always make the right choice. I'm not sure what you're looking for here.
Except hate speech is implicitly a concept defined in terms of falsity. Saying that the Chinese slaughtered millions of Europeans in secret camps is likely to be deemed hate speech. In contrast, it would be denying the Germans did so that would be deemed hate speech.
In general, we regard things that seemingly *baselessly* slander a group as hate speech. When the claims are true we draw the line quite differently. It's not an identical determination but the notion of substantial truthfulness plays a huge role.
I'm not saying truth is irrelevant. I'm saying only a narrow set of untruths are targeted, and this is by design. Alex Jones was banned for his lies, but not for being a liar as such. He was banned because the specific lies he told were seen as egregious. It would be missing the point to argue for his reinstatement by saying, well, lots of other people lie too and are tolerated.
I agree that's true but I don't think it undermines the attack on this particular defense of moderatio.n
I agree that you could formulate a different, and probably better, defense that focused on the fact that the lies were seen to be of a certain egregious kind.
However, the person Scott takes himself to be replying to feels that all the hard questions about who gets to decide what is egregious etc aren't going to be a problem because there is this easy category of misinformation we can ban where there is no danger of banning true or valuable claims.
> Except hate speech is implicitly a concept defined in terms of falsity.
How did you reach that conclusion? My impression is not that truth is considered a valid defence. E.g. politician Bertil Malmgren was sentenced for hate speech for saying that people from South Sudan have a lower IQ.
Good essay, making a powerful and important point. Well done!
Strangely, though, it doesn't feel as polished as some of your other work. It almost feels like your heart isn't *entirely* in it. That would not be surprising: I think very few of us are 100% free speech absolutists, in the sense that there can never be *any* social constraint on *any* speech at all. Most of us can think of at least a few situations where we would want social forces to suppress certain extremely malignant or dangerous speech -- whether by ostracism or even government power.
So probably the really interesting and difficult part of this, indeed the debate that has probably been going on for 40,000 years and will continue forever, is figuring out how we can determine where to draw that final bright line. You can say all kinds of weird and strange and hurtful and dangerous shit, up to this line, and no further. It would not be surprising if uncertainty over that difficult process seeped into the essay.
But if the point to be made here is that people are today flirting foolishly and dangerously with moving that line much further from really outrageous things -- "foolishly" in no small part because they are idiotically assuming the demons summned thereby will never come for *them* -- then I would entirely agree, and it's valuable to point it out in the way you have.
I think the interesting question here is why do even sources like Infowars rarely outright lie?
You might think it is because of the risk of lawsuit - and maybe that plays some role. However, defamation law is broad enough to capture comments that would reasonably lead someone to believe a defamatory claim. I mean consider the litigation against fox et al by the voting machine company.
So is the answer that it's because very few people are willing to actually lie for a non-astronomical salary? If they report true things and then twist them a bit in response to editor feedback maybe that feels ok?
Or is it because it makes it harder to convince readers they are lying? I dunno but it's an interesting question.
Because even the InfoWars people don't see themselves as evil liars I'd imagine, they think that they're on the right side and that they're playing by the same rules as everybody else.
Except we have pretty good circumstancial evidence that Jones knew full well his claims about Sandy Hook were BS or he'd not have accepted a directed verdict rather than discovery.
And it's just not plausible that quite a few people in the organization aren't aware that some things they write are just false. Indeed, if they really believed many of the things they said they'd be putting more effort into digging deeper to expose the truth.
But yes, I suspect it's still true that most people there see themselves as fighting the good fight. Maybe it's like religious belief where ppl really do believe but somehow know not to press on the hard questions. Maybe they all only write the things they do believe in, maybe they see it as a cost of doing buisnesses but I feel like it's a bit more complicated than that.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I think there is more to be explained.
Well, I can't answer for Jones, but I can think of a plausible scenario even there. Maybe at first he'd really thought that it was a hoax, then eventually the evidence mounted so high that even he was privately forced to reconsider. But he considered that a public apology on a hot topic would harm his brand/cause more than a lost lawsuit.
But he could have just shut up about it. However, in the court case they introduced traffic analysis showing that it drove a ton of traffic to his material whenever he talked about it.
I personally detest Tucker Carlson (I just disliked him until his agenda against Zelensky) but I think he ultimately believes (modulo some hyperbole etc) what he says. Maybe Jones started out that way but somewhere down the line he decided to keep saying things even he must have admitted to himself were probably wrong.
TBF I suspect he justifies this to himself by saying he's just asking questions. But that's Jones himself it doesn't necessarily tell me what's going on with his employees.
Lots of ppl would say what Jones says to be as rich as he is. The same can't be said for those who just collect a salary and it may be that they believe the material they write or maybe not...that's the question I found interesting...Jones himself gets the kind of money that I'd consider doing it.
Sure at some level of description he didn't shut up therefore he couldn't (eg given all facts about everything that will happen). However, what is meant by a claim like that is really: the choice to not shut up was within the realm of choices we traditionally regard as voluntary (roughly tracking the things that we can punish or reward to change outcomes).
>However, defamation law is broad enough to capture comments that would reasonably lead someone to believe a defamatory claim. I mean consider the litigation against fox et al by the voting machine company.
No, the Dominion vs Fox lawsuit is over factually false statements - stuff like "Dominion voting machines had a secret algorithm that flipped votes to Biden to steal the election."
I expect there's going to be some debate over *who* did the defaming - Sidney Powell said a lot of nonsense, and Fox knew it was bullshit but still gave her a platform to repeat that nonsense unchallenged, but does that mean Fox *endorsed* what she said? - but whoever it was is in trouble for actual lies rather than implications.
If Powell had limited herself to things like "a lot of votes suddenly showed up for Biden overnight, and I think that's suspicious" they probably wouldn't be in this situation.
Why isn't there a website that basically aggregates context checking for all these newspapers so it's possible to at least get a sense of the big things left out?
The claim that Infowars isn't really different than the NYT is undermined by the fact that Jones choose to accept a directed verdict rather than allow discovery. Almost certainly that's because there were a bunch of emay showing he and his staff knew claims were substantially false (eg they knew the person quotes was lying even if they did say it) but published anyway.
I think the stronger point to make here is that there isn't any easy rule which let's you distinguish misinformation from generic failure to provide context and that any attempt to apply such a rule would be intensely marred by partisan bias.
Indeed, this argument is so strong exactly because even with Infowars it's hard to point to what exactly they do that's different. However, I don't think that means we should believe that they aren't really any different than the NYT.
Yes, they both have stories to tell and views they want you to reach but my sense is that (and it's a difference in degree) the NYT for the most part doesn't try to decieve you but is simply often lazy or lets the reporters bias seep through while Infowars is pushing things it knows to be false.
>Yes, they both have stories to tell and views they want you to reach but my sense is that (and it's a difference in degree) the NYT for the most part doesn't try to decieve you but is simply often lazy or lets the reporters bias seep through while Infowars is pushing things it knows to be false.
And the NYT is incomparably powerful compared to infowars and is used as a "reputable" source of information and truth by almost everyone with power in American society. "Better than infowars" isn't fucking good enough.
Sure, I wish it was better too. But until the news industry cuts the excess papers made irrelevant by the internet there is huge pressure on profits. If you want it to get better sooner you really need a website that can provide relevant context in a reasonably nuetral way in real time (so it could easily be checked when you read the news). Absent that the incentives just don't favor taking more time.
Great post! I remember a while ago when your survey came out and one of the results were that many readers agreed your posts' quality had recently decreased.
In my opinion, these last few months have had multiple great posts, the kind of insight porn I keep coming back to ACX for. So I just wanted to mention it.
The NYT is the harvard of newspapers. It is the absolute authority in US media. It has more power than almost any institution in the US, and a *majority* of people on the left believe that is a reputable source that prints not only things that are true, but accurately captures all true, relevant things that happen. If some unimportant college in rural west virginia has a racially discriminatory admissions policiy, it shouldn't be talked about next to Columbia explicitly stating that they discriminate against asian applicants due to them having privilege. If you're a tagged authority in American society, then you should be held to an incomparably higher standard.
Am I missing something? That very first infographics _is_ an outright lie - the deaths are _not _ "attributed to" vaccines, that a blatant falsehood and a misrepresentation of the facts. They _could_ have decided to be merely weasely and say "associated with", but they didn't.
So it's a really weird illustration about "not lying"?
It isn't just about misrepresenting facts of a story in itself. A media outlet, or anyone for that matter, can also mislead by deliberate omission, simply not reporting a story that doesn't fit their agenda.
An outlet can also attempt to downplay the prominence of a story, by tucking it away unobtrusively in some subsection instead of on the main or front page. For web sites, an outlet can also vary the time, if at all, that the story is prominent.
In the UK, for example, the BBC are often blatantly guilty of all these tricks, especially in their reporting or non-reporting of crimes committed by minorities, and I'm sure it works the same in other countries.
Regarding Covid specifically, I can never understand all the hoo-hah over jabs. If someone (over 60 say) has a one in 3000 chance of dying if they catch Covid and one in 3000000 of dying from adverse effects of a vaccine, then it seems a no-brainer on the balance of probabilities to chance having the vaccine, especially as Covid can have long-term effects in someone even if it does not kill them, whereas I'm not aware that is so with vaccines.
That said, I would agree the probabilities shift in opposite directions the younger someone is, perhaps to the extent that a 20 year old would be better advised to skip the vaccine and take their chances with Covid instead!
The 'half-truth' - understood through means of the kinds of examples this article cites, where omission (strategic or incidental) is far more widespread than outright mendacity - is a much better heuristic for the average newsreader trying to remain informed while retaining a healthy epistemological scepticism, than are canards, old or new, about 'fake news' or the supposed tendency of one side of the political aisle to lie or dissemble more than the other.
That's because those canards make a lot of points of contention in news discourse seem like differences of interpretation, where they can often be traced to basic technical errors/defects in the reporting itself.
This is not a "nitpicky technical point", in my opinion. 15 years ago, your conclusion was the point that should have ended further discussion. And I would still have agreed strongly as recently as just two or three years ago. Today, however, this is exactly where the line gets blurry, and we need to put in some extra effort to draw new lines and solve difficult problems.
There has always been a legitimate discussion to be had on where the limits of free press / free speech should be drawn. We already agree that defamation and outright fraud are out of bounds. Importantly, however, the government wasn't supposed to censor anything prior to publication. They typically just trust publications to use their best judgment, and expect them to face the consequences if they cross the line.
In other areas, no one would bat an eye at prior constraint (whether it was strictly constitutional or not). Promoting child abuse or disseminating highly sensitive information about nuclear installations are pretty clear-cut cases where everyone would be upset if there were *not* some kind of prior constraint. Not to say that people agree on what that means in the real world (as illustrated by discussions about "groomers" and Snowden), but there are cases where the damage done by producing or publishing the information is irreversible and so significant as to justify prior constraint on publishing.
Today we're in an era of instant worldwide reach, deep fakes, smart bots, algorithmic manipulation, etc. … These are all force multipliers that may put a lot of information into the category of "significant and irreversible damage". At the very least, it makes misinformation a much bigger deal than it used to be. And so, more of it should be part of a discussion of whether censorship is called for, and if so, when and which kind.
Add to that, enforcement is increasingly privatized and democratized. Decisions are no longer taken by a few powerful editors and judges and top-level government bureaucrats with some idealistic telos, but are outsourced to mid-level managers with blunt tools and tech executives who are mostly in it for the money, not the principles. The new gatekeepers aren't bound by constitutional rules about what the state can do, or by the rules of editorial conduct that newspapers and network TV had to abide by, but are making up their own rules as they go.
So, I no longer think we can just point to our old rule of thumb, that all censorship is necessarily arbitrary and subjective, and therefore undemocratic and ominous. We need new rules, and we probably need to do a lot of talking and changing of minds to come up with good ones.
Personally, I think and hope much of the answer lies in better technology and better regulation of it, and as little as possible lies in censoring outlets, stories or individuals. But reasonable people will disagree. And that, of course, is the most important thing, that we need to preserve.
Is it possible that nobody answers because you seem to be asking in bad faith and with a closed mind? Otherwise, you might find much of the answer if you re-read my comment.
Most importantly: My main point is that I don’t claim to have the answer, but think we need to be open to changing our minds and coming up with new rules. So asking a question I can’t answer isn’t really a strong counterargument.
Police shootings/killings have been politicized and practically nothing can be trusted. Roland Fryer has debunked some, but your statistic keeps popping up - there are 5 times as many whites!! Where do most shootings happen? Urban areas. Are urban area demographics fairly represented by the US average? No. That is important context.
In the machine learning and AI era, when the public is starting to understand the power of data, it is frustrating to see the increasing number of (deliberate) misinterpretations of statistics. As it becomes mainstream, something should be done about the general public understanding of statistics and how surveys/studies are done.
Here's a wonderful example. New Yorker music critic completely misleads about a cancel culture case -- a professor's tenure is threatened, there's a petition to discipline him and to shut down the magazine he edits. And the New Yorker is like "wow, why do people think this is *cancel culture* -- it's just Outgroup hysteria." But in a crucial sentence, they insert a semi-colon so that they technically avoid a lie! It's an amazing performance... (and one thinks, if people will lie about something so small...)
I feel like the issue we're skirting round is something like "How can we the the epistemically-virtuous-elites-who-are-correct-about-everything transmit our correct views to the epistemically-un-virtuous-masses, when Joe Rogan and Fox News are filling their heads with nonsense and ruining democracy?"
And, even assuming we really are the epistemically-virtuous-elites-who-are-correct-about-everything and not the NYT or the anarcho-primitivist or whoever, I don't see how that's ever going to be possible given that being epistemically un-virtuous means you can't distinguish correct things from incorrect ones, so they won't be able to tell a reliable source of information from an unreliable one.
Maybe you can tinker around the edges, but fundamentally the only way to help people believe more correct things and fewer incorrect one is to improve them epistmeically, or have someone who is more epistemically virtuous dictate what they should think.
I mean that's just not a very good point, in a form of a gotcha, and it's a real chore to explain why this isn't relevant. Not surprising why people tend not to engage with it.
No I would not want to have this power in the hands of my enemies. But if we assume that this is enough to declare that such power shouldn't exist than we have successfully disproved police, army, government and all kind of other moder day institutions.
Yes, of course, there is a cost of having any kind of power. There are always risks that this power would be used for evil means. Sometimes these risks are acceptable and sometimes they are not. This requires a cost-benefit analysis, a single gotcha question doesn't help to distinguis between the two cases.
On another hand, I've been banned on a Russian discord server for being pro-lgbt. And this sucks, but it's a fare game. Some power will inevitably be in the hands of the people who are wrong and bad. Thankfully, there seems to be some kind of progress in this regard. A thousand years ago this power as well as all other kind of powers was in the hands of the followers of the non-existing Gods. Nowdays it's somewhat in the hands of people who want the society to be nicer to minorities. We seem to be on the right track.
Sigh. As expected, you just tried to reaffirm the already established conclusion without any attempt to understand what exactly I had meant. This is another reason people may prefere not to answer your questions, seeing how much good faith engagement you show.
Anyway, for the sake of better faith readers, I'll try to explain once more. I didn't pick a side by random and then started endorsing it no matter what. I tried to figure out the merits of all sides and in the process have slowly arrived to the beliefs and alignments that I have now. And, coincidentally, the majority of intelligent and well meaning people also arrived somewhat here as well as most advanced and successful societies enlarge.
Now, I do not think that marketplace of ideas is omnipotent, otherwise, I wouldn't be arguing in favour of regulating it. But I still believe that it somewhat works. And thus, the fact that society arrived to this point means something. The side that is winning after thousands of years of memetic selection has to be onto something, regardless of whether it's mine or not. And the fact that I also had the possibility to validate its reasoning with my own intelligence is just a cherry on top.
"I didn't pick a side by random and then started endorsing it no matter what. I tried to figure out the merits of all sides and in the process have slowly arrived to the beliefs and alignments that I have now."
The problem with this optimistic view of the situation is that all of us are heavily dependent on second hand information. I doubt there is anyone who actually knows whether climate change exists, is anthropogenic, and has serious bad effects, even a professional in the field, entirely on the basis of his own first hand observations.
So your "tried to figure out the merits of all sides," although the best one can do, risks resulting in your being persuaded of false beliefs that are widely held in the circles you mostly move in. Dan Kahan has some interesting results which seem to show that someone is more likely to agree with his side's view of an issue the more intellectually sophisticated he is, whether that means believing in evolution/global warming/... or not believing in it.
"The side that is winning after thousands of years of memetic selection has to be onto something"
Does that only count the last few decades in western countries? If not, it is evidence that the suppression of homosexuality, traditional views of sex and marriage and gender roles, hostility to the children of unmarried mothers, are all good ideas that we should emulate, or at least was until very recently. They, after all, were winning after thousands of years of memetic selection.
This is much less of a problem than people tend to think. It reminds me of the old philosophical confusion about our inability to be truly confident in our knowledge. No we can't be fully confident, but neither we actually need to for practical reasons. As long as we can expect that our perception is more than less correlated with the reality it's fine.
Same here. As long as majority of evidence isn't counterfeited and majority of experts are not part of the conspiracy we can do pretty well by just accepting current scientific consensus as our best guess. This is tremendous amount of trust. Much more than I actually do, as I have curriousity and ability to verify some things. But even this lazy epistemological strategy is solid.
But wouldn't this strategy lead us to believe in all kind of wrong things if we applied it 1000 years ago? Yep. Because it was a 1000 years ago. This is exactly the point that I'm making. Progress is going on. That's why we can be somewhat optimistic about our knowledge. And if literal burning people alive for saying things not endoursed by the church didn't prevent our progress back then, than having some kind of policies against misinformation now, won't as well.
The point is precisely to get people to get people to think about it!
Most just poke along “anything I dislike is obviously bad and should be stopped” without thinking further about “by whom?” or “how do we make sure this doesn’t turn into a monster that eats me too - is that even possible?”
Maybe the thing should be a thing but only with good guardrails (like the police). Maybe the thing can’t be expected to be tame / even handed enough to be trusted to exist. But “people being wrong on the internet must be stopped” (or whatever) doesn’t comprise a well-thought-through policy
> The point is precisely to get people to get people to think about it!
I think the more straightforward question akin to: "Okay I see your point, what's your actual plan of implementation that would allow this kind of free speech restriction to get most of the gains and evade all the disadvantages?" - would be much more successful in this regard.
> Most just poke along “anything I dislike is obviously bad and should be stopped”
Not sure whether it's a fair characterisation. And people are allowed to have preferences without a ready policy proposal that would allow to satisfy them. But in general, I agree that public discourse around the topic can only benefit from actually trying to explore possible strategies and doing cost-benefit analysis.
Not often enough. Sometimes I get people to engage and then I can draw them into conversation about how, if they want (eg) internet censorship, it might be done more “safely”.
But sometimes you just have enemies, you know.
Also, see my comment beneath the other one beneath yours
"It said that only 36% of economists on a survey supported school vouchers - and if even economists don’t support a free market policy, surely that policy must be very stupid indeed. Not mentioned in the article: only 19% of economists in the same survey opposed school vouchers. The majority described themselves as uncertain"
Do the pro and con groups include some uncertains? Otherwise seems like only 45% were uncertain—a plurality, but not a majority.
Pregnant women regularly get both the flu shot and TDaP, one can only hope in greater numbers than those for new vaccines that still haven't reported any data from their own pregnancy exposure databases, despite many claims of safety from governmental agencies. TDaP is given relatively late in pregnancy and would probably only be associated with stillbirths, but the flu shot is given when it comes out, so that could be at any point in pregnancy and could be associated with either miscarriages or stillbirths.
Your analysis of InfoWars is itself lacking a key piece of context: you are reading its web site after it has declared bankruptcy following a $965 million verdict for defamation for claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and the bereaved parents were all professional actors. (Alex Jones, who runs InfoWars, also recently declared bankruptcy after a separate $473M verdict against himself personally.)
It's entirely reasonable that InfoWars completely revamped its approach to lying after those chickens came home to roost. I suspect that repeating the experiment with archived versions of the InfoWars front page on randomly selected dates in 2016-2021 would yield more examples of outright lies (not just about Sandy Hook), from before the site was deterred by defamation law.
I haven't verified this part myself, but it's been alleged that most of their print articles are mostly plagiarized from other websites, with more misleading headlines added. In Jones' video/radio show, these headlines are then used as props for him to lie about.
In general Jones seems focused on having a loyal audience. It isn't in his interest to make lies that can be falsified at a glance by them. Instead he will have an article or an "expert" to point to as the source of his spoken claims. If someone points out a discrepancy between the source and his statements, he can claim that it's being taken out of context. (Here "context" refers to multi-hour rambling shows, which are hard to fact check.)
I never got the impression that the argument 'at least we can all agree that we don't want people to spread blatant misinformation, right? so can we at least censor THAT?' was good-faith - it's just a rhetorical move to sell the idea that 'there are instances where it's socially beneficial to censor 'bad information'', as a way of getting the inquisitor's boot in the door.
The difference in VAERS reports is due to a much broader reporting regime. Most vaccines have a set of well-known complications and specific reporting requirements based on those events and their known time frames. For covid, any severe event after vaccination is reportable, even if there’s no reason to believe the vaccine was the cause.
This is good policy and moves towards more robust medical data practice, but it means VAERS statistics for covid vaccines are not comparable with those of other vaccines.
Thank you for saying this. I thought I remembered this being explained somewhere on the VAERS site, how you cannot compare data across vaccines, and especially not with Covid data, but I may be wrong.
I don't know if anyone has spoken to this elsewhere, but I also wondered if it's possible that Covid itself produced more miscarriages. Covid was moving through the population as it was being vaccinated, so it seems hard to disentangle those two in some cases.
On the topic of lying, I'll just add here, I consider a media outlet inaccurately reporting statistics to be lying when statistics are a key part of the article. That includes only reporting on one part of a study to the point that it is misleading. They have enough tools at their disposal to do this right such that doing it egregiously wrong pretty clearly comes across as intentional -- whether for economic or political aims. Likewise, if headlines are misleading relative to what the article says, that's an instance of the outlet lying. As well if an article presents information buried in the sixteenth paragraph that substantially shifts what a person would take away after reading the first paragraph, that's also lying. There's no value in "censoring" information presented this way, but I think it's important to keep calling it out as unethical, and a form of journalistic lying and malpractice.
Data Scientist here. This happens also happens all the time within tech organizations. People see data and make false conclusions. Even with a decent stats understanding, the logic supporting a certain dataset could obtuse / could include important assumptions that meaningful shift the take away.
The system is complex and requires expertise to unravel! This is where data scientists provide huge value in a company. In a company these Data Scientists have been and are scrutinized by other Data Scientist. This helps keep rigor high.
Given the world / system will always grows in complexity, how can we provide better understanding for a lay person? The answer should be good journalism / data science! Ideally journalists should be working hand in hand with data scientists. Obviously data science can also be subverted :/
This is true, but out of context and not actually informative: I am constantly surprised that "Alex Jones" of Infowars looks like a Russian/Ukranian Propaganda Minister reporting on ethnic cleansing. Because for years I assumed he actually looked like Alexi Lalas, who was the visibile face of US Men's Soccer for a decade or more. And who, in turn, looked like a guy at my first job, a great coder who loved weed and hackey-sack and vegan co-ops in the East Bay.
I feel the problem with this premise is it is using the narrowest possible definition of lie. One that means you can intentionally publish lies that you know are lies with the intention of deceiving without "lying." So if I track down a janitor at the FBI who says Jews eat babies and I write a story headlined "Sources at FBI warn Jews are Baby Eaters," then I haven't technically lied. Even if I know it's untrue, and that the janitor is insane, and I'm writing the article because I believe it will be popular. Even though I don't even believe Jews eat babies, I still haven't actually lied.
There are a lot of ways to lie without lying. Tucker Carlson has made a career out of lying by making wild accusations in the form of a question. "Are Jews eating babies? And if they are, why aren't Democrats trying to stop it? Is it because Democrats have made a deal so Jews only eat Republican babies? And isn't it suspicious how many people don't want me to ask these questions?"
So if you work on a binary "lie/not lie," then neither the Times or Alex Jones lies. But what happens if we define lie as "intentionally promoting falsehoods"?
I also feel when talking about the reliability of sources, picking out one piece of misinformation by the Times and one piece of misinformation by Jones and saying, "look, they did the same thing" is problematic. Does the Times slant stories in a misleading way? Absolutely. Do they do it to the same degree with the frequency and cynicism of Alex Jones? Well, I don't have any stats on that, nor do I actually know how much of Jones' actions are fueled by greed and cynicism and how much is he is genuinely insane, but it would certainly be helpful to know.
This binary approach to lies simply ignores the way humans find non-binary ways to do things like lie without lying. In the end, "The Media Rarely Lies" is a statement that is both technically true and completely useless.
If both sides don't lie, then you must be in the possession of some heretofore unseen proof that Trayvon Martin was shot in cold blood by George Zimmerman, Mike Brown had his hands up when he was shot, the Christian bakers refused to serve customers because of their homosexuality per se, and that James Damore said that women are less intelligent than men. Otherwise, it's not up for debate that both sides lie.
Scott recently made a post "If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism". Doesn't this post contradict that post, since it establishes that the media *does* report on other things like it reports on effective altruism?
I have to wonder if there's a temporal selection bias in the Infowars articles. They did just get sued into oblivion for defamation, so they might be a bit hesitant currently to publish as usual.
The difference between those who follow the news media and those who do not, is not a difference between the informed and the uninformed. It is a difference between the disinformed and the uninformed. (Old social science saying)
Every experienced liar agrees with Flashman that 'suppressio veri is a useful servant but suggestio falsi is a perilous master'. Doesn't mean the media rarely lies. Lies of omission and lies of commission are both lies. That's why courts tell witnesses to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
When I was a kid in the 1970's the media was biased but gave facts. Now it's mostly gibberish whipping up moral panics. Why the collapse? Well, the old Venona transcript lefties had already done the whole 'gibberish whipping up moral panics for the Party' thing for the Soviets and developed a useful cynicism about the D party line. They aged and died, and their successors are dumb and inexperienced. And there's still no real right-wing media beyond 'look how bad the D party line is'.
> Censorship - even the “safe” kind of censorship that just blocks “fake news” - will always involve a judgment call by a person in power enforcing their values.
In an ideal world where the censorship is actually executed by saints that have absolutely no other interests than to ensure every information packet passing through them is providing proper context. In the real world, in the meantime, anything that the censor deems serving their goals (which, as always, is the greater good of humanity itself) for be declared "good information", and anything that opposes them would be declared "misinformation", and the squabbling over context will be left to bloggers - at least those who aren't deplatformed yet.
There are two different ways of undercutting MLMs and some other scams, one requiring mathematical intuition and the other not.
The mathematical way is to realize that you're going to run out of people to recruit.
The non-mathematical way is to realize that if this is actually a way to get rich, why is the person trying to sell it to you working so hard at selling it when there are more pleasant things to do if you're rich.
Your first example (i.e. Infowars and their use of VAERS reports) lets them off the hook much too easily. A better inference is their article's willful naivete or ignorance of how VAERS works and is meant to be used is incredibly sloppy. If you go to VAERS site (https://vaers.hhs.gov/index.html) and check the links to "About" and "Guide to Interpreting Data" sections you will see that these reports can be made by anyone and are unfiltered, raw, and unverified. Some relevant parts: "Anyone can report an adverse event to VAERS.," "VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, . . . VAERS can provide CDC and FDA with valuable information that additional work and evaluation is necessary to further assess a possible safety concern." , "VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning that reports about adverse events are not automatically collected, but require a report to be filed to VAERS. "VAERS reports can be submitted voluntarily by anyone, including healthcare providers, patients, or family members. Reports vary in quality and completeness. They often lack details and sometimes can have information that contains errors." Better, more curated systems are the Vaccine Safety Datalink and Clinical Immunization Safety Assesment Project, both on the CDC site.
One thing I wonder is what’s the way around this issue? If we put together a newspaper we thought was really awesome about being honest and being contextually fair and accurate, couldn’t critics still find things to make us look bad? A creative person can always find fair-sounding criticism of something
I had hoped that OpenAI Chat would be a good tool for examining public data and policy, but the developers have crippled it by forcing it to murmur cant responses if you ask any question about population groups.
Of all the national-level mainstream news organizations I've ever read regularly (which is a lot of them, because I grew up with that as a daily practice and am old enough to remember when "60 Minutes" was a new TV show), the best by far on the dimensions discussed in this post is the Economist. Since someone gifted me a subscription 18 years ago all others have steadily fallen away from my personal habits.
I'm an American who thinks they cover my own country better -- smarter, frankly -- than any American national news outfit. And I've come to enjoy being better informed about news and events around the world too. Also they do some of the best generalist coverage of science and tech that you can find these days. I've even become a fan of that painfully-dry English wit that pops through here and there.
Of course they aren't perfect, nothing written and edited by human beings ever will be. But sooo many times over the years I have wished that the United States had its own national news publication even half as good.
Can you clarify for me where your figure of 0.01% testing positive came from? Reading the articles I see 0.2% quotes, not 0.01%. I thought perhaps you made a typo but I see you repeating the number. Or are you making a subtle point about bad journalism?
I wonder if our discussions could be made more useful by adding some categories and probabilities. My personal estimates (which I'm not confident in) would be as follows:
TOTAL UNTRUTHFUL PIECES (50%): In the average piece of consumed news media (among a global population), ~50% have something 'deeply untruthful' with the reporting, such that fully believing the media would lead to misguided feelings/actions.
PREVENTABLE UNTRUTHS (25%): When reporting a 'deeply untruthful' piece, the journalist(s) creating the news could have prevented the flaw if they were incentivised to ~50% of the time - i.e., the relevant knowledge exists and they have the epistemological skills to figure out the truth. These preventable truths are attributable to either self-deception, other-deception, or bullshitting ( with BS defined as making a claim without caring whether or not it is true).
DECEPTIVE PREVENTABLE UNTRUTHS (5%): When reporting preventable untruths, ~20% are the result of intentional deception - i.e., the journalist(s) involved know that what they are reporting is deeply untruthful. The rest of the time, the journalists are either self-deceptive or bullshitting.
LIES (1%): When reporting deceptive preventable untruths, ~20% involve explicit lies (of commission). The other ~80% result from intentionally omitting critical context or posting lies by 'experts'.
Thus, I basically agree with Scott's claim that the media very rarely lies, but also think it is important to consider all the ways that the media is misleading and deceptive.
Moreover, fundamentally, the audience bears most of the proximal blame. Truthful media cannot survive unless is pays economically. If most audience members were willing and able to pay for truthful media, then the vast majority of media would be truthful. But a lack of epistemological education and widespread cognitive biases (e.g. confirmation bias) mean that truthful media does not dominate.
I like your analysis, but would add important context that might alter the conclusion that the NYT and infowars are equally lacking context in their reporting.
Your piece omits any mention of the fact that Infowars is run by Alex Jones, a malicious liar and conspiracy theorist. It’s likely that their editorial decision-making reflects the deliberate lies that he advances. I can’t think of an equivalent on the Sulzberger or NYT Editorial board side of things.
When nearly all the providers have converging interests the message is massaged and not even an eye wink is needed, just a subtle head nod. Its easy to move a mountain when everyone is pushing at the same time even if they dont know why.
In order to claim "rarely lies," you have to exclude two things:
1. Connotation and
2. English uses structure to convey information.
The latter is NPRs favorite (ok, maybe second or third) way to lie. They'll say "Senator X claims A, however Organization Y has determined B,"
In this case, "claimed" and "determined" both have connotative truth value which should NOT be overlooked, and the "however" indicates that B refutes A. If you construct a statemen in which B has nothing whatsoever to do with A, you have in fact lied, even if there are no lies in either A or B. This almost always happens when the reporter shifts from absolute to relative measurements in the middle of a statement.
I remember the whole thing about Trump and the bleach comment so specifically because when it was reported seriously, I just thought, Am I the only person in the world that could tell he was being facetious? Not that I'm defending him as a person, just that I've watched as other politicians say some things that are also facetious or sarcastic and are defended in that way. Another thing my son taught me is to learn how to read research conclusions, but that takes practice and patience, and is super boring. The people reporting know the majority of the populace will not do this. It's why you really can't trust any of them. They all have an agenda.
Studies to this effect were covered in my journalism classes. Perceptions of inaccuracy in the media are almost always based in a belief that different context or facts should have been given equal presentation, not that the facts presented are themselves inaccurate.
This matches my experience of the media reporting on my company (so I have inside knowledge of what’s being reported on). If they lie, it’s only by omission.
I am in full agreement with the conclusion, censorship requires that someone be trusted with the value judgement and there is no certainty that the "someone" will yield results that don't look like tyranny to a substantial portion of the population. But the set up uses a Clintonesque definition of "lie" - defining lies for this purpose as fabricating facts. But the textbook definition of "lie" includes the intent to deceive - particularly for personal gain or loss avoidance. I would suggest that the modern day media outlets (of all flavors) slant their stories for gain - i.e. advertising revenue and are therefore lying.
> But that means there isn’t a bright-line distinction between “misinformation” (stories that don’t include enough context) and “good information” (stories that do include enough context).
...duh? Aren't you the guy who put 'motte and bailey' into wide circulation to describe this phenomenon? The vague term 'misinformation' is politically useful precisely because it is vague. I don't claim it is kept vague through sinister intention, but rather that it is an evolutionary process. I don't know what it would take to stop the political-evolutionary pressures which drive this phenomenon. The extinction of humanity _might_ do the trick. Even mitigating it somewhat would take a lot of work.
Incidentally, it is also possible to mislead by adding too much context to facts, making them appear unique rather than typical and thus preventing readers from forming undesirable generalizations. It is not limited to media either. People are prone to doing it to themselves, through the fundamental attribution error with regards to their and others' actions, and through overcontextualizing their own problems in order to be able to perceive them as pleasingly unique rather than boringly and degradingly typical. Again I do not claim that this is done with open, conscious intent - in fact usually the reverse seems to be the case - but then I think that "open, conscious intent" has been very overrated lately as a criterion for judgment of actions. Notably, the traditional legal concept of mens rea does not require it. I do not know the reasoning which led to the formation of this concept, but I suspect that people used to be more aware of how prone we are to self-delusion, compartmentalization and other behaviors of this kind.
You're right. I don't think the media lies as much as people think.
But one of their very common practices is even worse than lying - in my opinion. And that is suppressing actual news. They simply don't report something unless it supports their narrative.
This gives them a perceived moral high ground because they can say "we didn't lie." Maybe so, but you deceived your readers.
Suppressing evidence like this is typically illegal in courts of law. But like many things in modern society, the court of public opinion trumps everything. Today, the credibility and trust in the media are at all time lows - and getter lower each day. Journalists and media employees are getting laid off in droves because they provide little to no value to the public.
Personally, I can't even remember when I watched media or even read a newspaper. I personally don't trust them - both sides of the aisles are unreliable.
Late to the party here, but the Fox News Dominion Lawsuit seems to show that Fox News specifically does lie to its viewers and its presenters do this intentionally. How does that change how you feel?
This all reminds me of this book I read years ago called How To Lie With Statistics. It was originally published in the 1950s and still holds up very well. And it really showed that the average American has no idea how to read and interpret data, especially with how percentages work. I believe that you can make the average American believe anything with mathematical sleights of hand, as long as it view their pre-existing worldview. That's why I now roll my eyes when I see "studies show" or "data says" because data doesn't mean anything in a vacuum.
Edit: Also, I got a notification saying that someone "liked" this comment. How is that possible?
This is why I (a mathematician teaching at universities) would like to strongly advocate for some sort of "interpreting data and numerical results" type course to be taught at whatever school I end up getting a permanent job at. Honestly, it would be a much more important part of those students' mathematical educations on the whole than most of the content in course topics I'm passionate about like multivariable calculus and linear and abstract algebra.
I agree. I was assigned the How To Lie With Statistics book by a very logical thinking teacher in high school. In senior year, we could choose to take Human Reasoning (his class) or take Calculus. I chose Human Reasoning because it sounded a lot more interesting and less work. We learned so many interesting things: the prisoner's dilemma and iterations, logical paradoxes, social engineering techniques, Milgram/Zimbardo conformity experiments, the ethics of eugenics, etc. One of my favorite classes ever and shaped how I think now.
If anyone else here happened to have Mr. Brooks at Stuyvesant HS in NYC, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Those experiments perhaps should not be relied on.
Some of those experiments may have been unreliable, but it seems to me that Human Reasoning should be a required part of everyone's education.
'Humans are bad at reasoning on their own, but your average high school teacher will be expected to be so good at teaching human reasoning that they will be able to overcome this shortfall and dramatically improve the reasoning of their average students.' Well at least this position is consistent with the first half of the proposition.
That's too high of a bar. It's enough if the teachers are able to slightly improve reasoning in student sometimes, in areas where people generally think badly.
In particular, that seems more useful than other subjects that are taught today.
Ha, I'm a high-school logic teacher (both formal and informal reasoning), and I'd aspire to be the sort of teacher Sheluyang describes!
However, I'm quite skeptical about the value of logic / human reasoning on its own for helping people identify misinformation. My favorite way of teaching logic is to pack it with Harry Potter references, the Lord of the Rings, and the Lewis Carroll Wonderland books. Students learn amazingly quickly how to reason, despite their examples all being about jabberwocks and hippogriffs and moons made of cheese. They can spot valid arguments and fallacies and cognitive biases almost anywhere, based on their exercises with vorpal swords and bandersnatches. And it all works because validity and unbiased reasoning, themselves, are not guides to soundness or truth.
Our reasoning processes are truth-independent. Logic teaches us how to reason consistently GIVEN our prior starting points. If our priors are false, our rigorous use of logic will only make our conclusions false, or else accidentally true for the wrong reasons.
One of the few ways to break free of priors is by looking at opposing arguments backed up by good evidence. But logic doesn't teach what counts as "good evidence." Evidence is discipline-specific. We have to take physics classes to figure out what counts as good evidence in physics. We take history classes to figure out what counts as good evidence for historiographic theories. We take law classes (by which I mean "the rich kids who can afford them take law classes") to figure out what counts as good evidence in a court of law. Ditto for the med students figuring out what counts as good evidence for vaccine efficacy. By the nature of the case, no general class on reasoning or data interpretation fits the bill. To identify misinformation in our priors, we'd have to become specialists in a hundred different areas.
I'm not sure what lesson to draw from this exactly. As a logic teacher, I think it's dreadfully important to know how to reason validly. But it's also important to know that reasoning is not a silver bullet.
A very interesting comment, but let me disagree a bit with the paragraph on what constitutes good evidence: we don't need to take physics classes to know what counts as good evidence, we need to do physics *experiments*. And that doesn't take pre-requisite education in algebra and a skilled instructor with a PhD -- kids do experiments in physics all the time, by running and falling and throwing and catching things. They learn an enormous amount of basic mechanics by the time they hit double digits -- no formal classes or study required.
This is one reason all of us actually do have a somewhat reasonable instinctual feel for what constitutes good evidence in at least some physics problems, e.g. if I proposed that I could build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean for some modest sum, or that a certain very strong man could throw an apple across the Mississippi RIver, few would be sufficiently credulous to buy that, no matter how many charts 'n' figures accompanied my claim.
With history it's definitely more difficult, because there's no such thing as experimental history. But a lot of history has to do with what people do and choose, and I would say just living among people for a few decades gives you a reasonable starting point for critically evaluating historical claims. (It can of course be taken too far, and often is, when we judge the past by the shibboleths of the present, but this is sort of a mistake of overshooting rather than complete ignorance.)
In medical education it's definitely the case that clinical experience trumps most every form of hyphothesizing, however well informed. This is why clinical experience is so heavily emphasized in medical education, and why medicine is one of the few broad social activities in which we strongly emphasize evidence and measurement.
And arguably mastering even one of these fields gives one at least a starting point for evaluating evidence in general: you insist on duplicated measurement, you prefer "blinded" studies, you insist on perusing as close to original sources as possible, you are highly aware of the possibility of alternate explanations, you look for unexamined assumptions and uncontrolled variables -- all the paraphernalia of any experimental empirical discipline. So I don't think the problem is insoluble at all, although without doubt there are difficulties, and the associated problem of when and how to trust expertise is not removed.
So are the countless physics *experiments* finding evidence of ESP "good evidence"?
I really enjoyed this comment and agree. I do think however, that while it is very difficult to teach people how to find truth, you might be able to teach them defenses against some common tricks. It's worthwhile to avoid being misled, even if that doesn't directly help you find the right path.
Critical thinking is not a skill valued by politicians or employers.
I think most employers value critical thinking,bat least if they want valuable employees. I'm sorry if your experiences have led you to believe differently though.
Only for a tiny minority of supervisory employees, and usually only at the very top. Much of the premium for college education is because it is a signal for conscientiousness and conformism.
Have you got concrete examples of this, as it reads like a media narrative rather than a real-world likelihood. The question I ask is simly why would you pay good money for an employee who doesn't add value?
Depends on your definition of value. As Gloria Steinem showed way back in the 1970s, car companies preferred to remain sexist (refusing to advertise in magazines read by women, though more than 50% of spending on automobiles was controlled by women) to making more money.
Regarding the signaling model of education, read Bryan Caplan on Econlib.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed.html
Most jobs do not require serious critical thinking, even white-collar ones (like the tax preparers at H&R Block, America’s largest if seasonal white-collar employer). Conscientiousness on the other hand is very valuable. I’d argue critical thinking may even be seen as a negative if it’s associated with challenging authority.
Agreed. Can't give examples because NDA, of course. Critical thinking is "valued" as long as it is within the orthodoxy, but if someone above you feels threatened you are out. Okay, I'll give the example. The workplace I was at stated their mission that year was "Equity" in the DEI sense (in student outcomes in US public education). And, there was a lot of talk about "moving the needle". As a Data Scientist, I refined their very aspirational definition of Equity, sticking to its spirit, and constructed a metric to measure, not Equity, which is a state, but rather Inequity, which is distance from that ideal state. Similar analyses challenged their claim that their system had not done harm to students of color. Management, all Authentic and Vulnerable and all that, did not like any of this, and made my worklife impossible until I left.
My reading of this was heavily biases by the NDA being mentioned. If your employer is so bad that an NDA is required to cover the reason for you leaving, I'd regard them as dysfunctional; obviously an NDA regarding your output for them may be reasonable, but if it covers why you left as well then that speaks volumes about your management. So yes, you clearly had management whose tolerance for critical thinking was limited.
And I'm now hoping that no-one is going to tell me that such NDAs are normal practice in the US, as it won't alter my prior on bad management but might alter my priors on the future of the global economy...
It's weird you imagine yourself a "critical thinker" while unironically using terms like "students of color".
Depends on what is meant by "critical thinking skills." If one means "ability to rapidly comprehend one's social surrounding, so you can get along well with co-workers, work cooperatively, get shit done with a team with a minimum of fuss and drama" -- then you bet, this is valued in every worker, from the bottom to the top. If one means means "ability to critically evaluate one's own job, and figure out how to get it done faster and better without requiring some giant revamp of protocols or eight other people to revise how *they* get their jobs done" -- then again, certainly, valued from top to bottom.
But if one means "evaluate from some elegant theoretical perspective how an entire division could (theoretically) be more efficient, and propose expensive and complex reorganization to achieve it" -- yeah, this would not be super valuable in a line worker. It's the kind of thing that a consultant might be hired to address, if there was some clear problem and the old hands had already been asked what might be done.
And if one means "critique the overall purpose of the firm, measure it against social goals one was taught in a freshman seminar to cherish, and propose vast sweeping re-organizations of the firm in order to accomplish these" -- then....mmm...yeah, that wouldn't be very valuable in a line worker, or even a middle manager. Arguably it might be interesting in a CEO, if the firm is otherwise floundering and the board thinks drastic measures are appropriate.
Every employer I've worked for highly valued critical thinking.
And I think most politicians do as well, they're just mostly bad at it outside of their particular subject matter expertise.
How do you propose it be measured/quantified in any way
You’d need to come up with some way to score critical thinking (it doesn’t fit within the Big 5 model, and while correlated with analytical skills is not the same thing), then perform a regression to assess the impact on earnings or likelihood to get a job offer.
I'm dubious about critical thinking being unitary. It's my strong suspicion that an "all topics" appropriate measure of "critical thinking" not only does not exist, but cannot exist for humans. (There might well be possible designs of AIs that could have such a measure.) I feel that thinking is so biased not only by priors, but also be desired conclusions that critical thinking can only be done in domains where the effect of the desired conclusions are weak...and that this varies a lot from person to person.
Unfortunately, I can't come up with any SMALL example of why I believe this. The examples all have a huge context.
I think that you could get most of the way there by splitting it into two distinct skills:
1) ability to think critically about blergs (i.e. abstract toy models with no emotional valence) - I expect this to correlate strongly with fluid intelligence - and
2) ability to think in an unbiased way about something which one has strong feelings about - this one I don't expect to correlate particularly with intelligence, though personality traits might show interesting correlations as to whether the 'too emotional to think' topics are the common CW ones or some niche personal bugbear.
I teach a class on critical thinking. I have units. Clear writing, use of logic, use of stats, use of science, recognizing cognitive traps, paradox... there are recurrent themes, but I also think critical thinking is a toolbox, not one skill.
Fazal Majid wrote:
>
> Critical thinking is not a skill valued by politicians or employers
So true. Many politicians think it a dangerous fault in voters, and a critical thinking employee is often considered a liability by their boss! Loose cannons and all that. :-)
There is no skill of critical thinking. There's critical attitude towards specific ideas. A person who blindly buys into one idea is critical towards other, and vice versa.
It is valued as long as the conclusions are aligned with current corporate policy.
High school math tracks for most kids should cap off with statistics, not calculus.
Even getting an understanding of Bayes’ theorem, which doesn’t require anything but grade-school arithmetic, would do wonders. Our brains are the product of evolution and terrible at estimating probabilities.
Do they not do a certain amount of that stuff in science lessons when teaching about the scientific method?
I've never seen a curriculum or textbook at the K-12 level that teaches the scientific method in anything that even approaches accuracy, let alone usefulness.
The best I've seen are the few off the beaten path curricula that encourage kids to play outside and build stuff, without any particular accomplishment required by any particular date. This actually encourages children to experiment, hypothesize, test their hypotheses, and gain respect for the daunting gap between theory and reality.
But even when kids do experience that curriculum, it rarely lasts past 3rd or 4th grade, before the inevitable round of standardized testing and teaching to standards takes over, and there's no more time for play.
Mind you, I'm not saying a certain amount of standardized testing and teaching to a standard is bad. We do need educated citizens who have commited a certain big chunk of what is known to memory, so they can work efficiently and cooperatively, and there just isn't time in the standard 12 year education period to have each individual rediscover in his own way any substantial chunk of knowledge about the real world humanity has wrung out over the past 4000 years.
But it's a shame we *entirely* abandon the natural and valuable instinct of children to explore, play, and discover on their own how stuff works. It probably makes for more frustrated and narcissistic rising generations, who are more detached from reality and therefore a bit more fragile.
Agreed!
Do you have favorite books, lectures, yt vids, etc., in the vein of that class?
I don't know who that was asked of, but I'll volunteer as if it were me. :) Yes! How to Lie with Statistics; Science: a Candle in the Dark; Lewis Carroll's logic puzzles; The Righteous Mind; Orwell's "On Politics and the English Language."
Are you sure you're not seeing the problem as a nail because you have a particular hammer (mathematics education) at hand? I'm myself kind of doubty that the main problem with people credulously accepting "studies" or pigheadedly rejecting them is....a lack of the requisite math skills. If they were truly *interested* in determining truth by objective mathy approaches, I daresay they'd figure out how to do it reasonably efficiently.
I taught research paper writing for many years and invited students with knowledge of statistics to comment on the statistical methods and conclusions in the papers they read. They did no better, and often worse, than students with no such knowledge. Probably an issue of being less interested in the context.
Over time and in discussion with math and logic professors I’ve come to the conclusion that students who are overly focused on math or absolutely uninterested in math are unlikely to develop critical thinking skills useful for assessing the veracity of what they read. There has to be interplay between formal logic and their own observations of their world.
Having tried to teach college stats I'm not convinced this would help and very likely could hurt. The more rules you stuff into people's heads without understanding the more chance for manipulation.
Look, the problem with most required math courses is a huge part of the class doesn't want to be there and doesn't like doing the work and no one can think creatively in those conditions. This leaves instructors two options: give students rote techniques they can memorize or deal with a bunch of upset students who put in tons of time and did badly who then complain to admin and parents.
The more ppl remember testing for p< .05 or whatever the more that seems like a trustworthy statistic. Better if they've never taken a stat class and just have a generalized distrust than to have taken one but not understood the material.
It's a nice idea for an optional class but that won't reach those who need it most.
Don't get me wrong. I could imagine a different system where this worked but you can't just erase 8 years of being taught math is that awful memorizing rote rules thing.
Personally, I'd rather see us totally eliminate the whole memorized routine stuff. We have CASs now so if you don't understand what you are doing it's better to trust the computer.
Require math only to the point where you can make change and calculate percents then make it conceptual and optional (so you don't have to keep giving studious students who hate it too much to think creatively good grades) and make CS courses required. All the students who stick in math do psuedo-proofs from that point on (don't have to be real proofs but point is they face problems designed to require creative solutions not selections from a list of 20 standard problems).
If you don't understand the algorithm, doing on a computer does not change that.
I agree that guessing (for badly designed multiple choice tests) doesn't show that you understand it either.
No it doesn't. But if you aren't going to understand it anyway why waste your time learning to do a bad imitation of a computer?
Understanding is worth something. Mere rote application of an algorithm is something that it's no longer worthwhile to train humans to do.
I mean have you ever asked adults in non-STEM careers how much math they retain? For most of them (even in high powered careers like lawyer) the answer is nothing after percentages and reading a graph except a deep-seated fear.
We made them miserable for years of their lives and at the other end they have pretty much nothing to show for it. Indeed, they may be worse off than someone who at least didn't learn to hate the subject.
I think we need to be honest about our success rate and admit that the goals of making people understand mathematics and making it required are incompatible. We aren't succeeding at making everyone understand so lets try and not make the people who won't miserable and help those who want to be there actually understand.
(to be clear the barrier isn't intelligence or mathematical ability...it's simply dislike of the class and the feeling that they are bad at it. A good teacher can help with that on the margin but you fundamentally can't overcome the fact that to convey understanding you need students to want to figure it out -- and after our HS system many of them not only don't but feel it's unacceptable not to be taught a rote algorithm.
Sadly, alot more of these students would understand the material if that was the only way to do well. But as long as you have to give good grades for rote work they'll take that option. Thst leaves making the math truly optional or failing a bunch of ppl out of college who would make good lawyers and writers etc...)
I think you're not understanding the point you're making.
E.g., I taught myself tensor calculus because I was trying to follow Einsteins' construction of Relativity. I did it because I wanted to. But I had no use for it afterwards, and these days I don't remember any of it. I think I could still reconstruct the theory of limits, but I'd need to work at it.
I had no use for the stuff after I graduated, so over the years it slipped away. I also can't remember the proofs from symbolic logic...and I use that stuff all the time as a programmer. But I don't use the proofs. I work with integers, if tests, hash tables, files, that kind of thing. And what I remember is how those interact. I'd even have to look up how to properly invert a matrix.
So whether you want to learn something of not *is* important, but it doesn't determine whether you retain it. You retain it if you KEEP wanting to retain it, e.g., if you use it. If you stop thinking about it, it slips away.
Your argument is a special case of this more general argument. (Paragraph of context and exceptions deleted.)
We generally don't teach math to everybody in the hopes that a middle manager at Chrysler is going to factor quadratic equations every day on the job. We teach it so that (1) people know math exists, and what can and can't be done by it -- that it's neither mappable onto common sense nor some kind of black magic that can do anything -- so they have a basis for evaluation when technical experts, hucksters and politicians say "This was done by math! Believe!" -- and (2) so that people practice a certain kind of rigorous and empirical thinking, e.g. "I got a root of negative a billiion, maybe I'll just pop that back into the original equation to see if it works," since we have found that rigorous and empirical thinking is valuable, but doesn't come naturally to human beings.
That's why it doesn't actually matter that much what *kind* of math we teach, only that it require clear and logical thinking and mental self-discipline, and that it relate at least somewhat to the kind of math that *is* used in technology and science today.
I think the primary reason so many people fail miserably at math is the same as the reason why they fail miserably at learning a foreign language, or learning to play an instrument: It's one of those things that you just have to commit yourself to doing every day if you want to become proficient at it, and most people--even as kids-- just won't commit to that.
As an example, both of my kids have (or will, my daughter's only in 10th grade) 'taken Spanish' every year since kindergarten, and I wouldn't trust either of them to order off a menu in Guatemala. And I don't think it's because the teachers sucked, or the curriculum sucked, or anything like that-- I just think it's down to only doing it 2-3 times a week, which is simply inadequate.
Tying this in with math education, most people realize by the time they're 12 that they can slither through by only engaging with the course material 2-3 times a week, because most math classes are moving so slowly by then that daily study isn't required. Which is great as a kid, but it does lead us to the point where your average 18 year old is going to stare at you like a dachshund who just shit on the rug if you ask them to divide two fractions.
I've seen this argument all my professional life, and in my experience of people, it's deeply flawed. Those who memorize nothing and look up everything are very rarely creative or show genuine understanding, they are completely at the mercy of their sources. It's like Internet commenters who know zilch about a subject except what they can glean from rapid googling and reading through a Wikipedia article. They have a surface familiarity -- can use the jargon, and repeat the conventional wisdom, maybe even paraphrase it creatively -- but they lack any deeper understanding.
Conversely, people who *do* exhibit a deep understanding not only very often have vast amounts of the useful data memorized, at their mental fingertips, they often have emphasized memorizing key points and data all through their learning[1], because it allows them to reason about problems in the field for quite a long way before they need to look anything up. That allows them to fully develop their own reasoning structure, better integrate it with their instincts and typical reasoning paths.
I wouldn't know what aspect of the human brain is responsible for this, but it's what I see. Maybe the problem is that when you have memorized almost nothing, what you have in your head is essentially a bunch of verbal/social scripts, since you lack the "data" anchor points to which you might otherwise have attached chains of intuitive (and nonverbal) understanding.
Another way to look at it: we all know experience teaches better than any amount of lecture. If you want to know how to rip a 8 foot 2x4 on a table saw without taking your fingers off, actually doing it once is worth about infinity hours of lectures, or even watching videos, on it. You just take in far more from your senses when you *do* it then when you watch it. Similarly, when you actually do math problems you learn way more than when you watch a teacher demonstrate them on the whiteboard. But this all suggests there is some necessity in human thinking to have some kind of experential anchor points for solid learning to take place. And that points to memorization, to the incorporation of factual data as the anchor points.
Of course, one can go to far, and require memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up and probably should be. In college I once took a chemistry class that required me to memorize the *entire* Periodic Table (as it was then), and this was clearly too far. What value can be found in knowing without looking that tellurium is next to antimony?
But I don't get the feeling that this is what is most usually meant (although cases like that are often served up as justification). Unfortunately, what I think is too often meant is that people are complaining that learning is itself hard, requires a lot of practice and memorization, and shouldn't there be some kind of nice shortcut? Can't you just learn to wave your hands and parrot the established conventional wisdom and that be sufficient? Increasingly, the social answer has become "sure!" and the consequences in terms of declining productivity and invention, not to mention adult credulity and innumeracy, are already manifest.
----------------
[1] I'm reminded of Feynman's recounting of how he memorized all the common square roots, because he found it useful to do little calculations mentally to quickly check his reasoning as he was noodling along working out some theoretical new path. Having to stop and get out a calculator would've derailed the train of thought, or more likely he would've just skipped the quick check, with an impact on the eventual rightness of the new path.
I think maybe the rote learning helps with "chunking" concepts or otherwise frees up working memory? A thing you looked up has to be mentally stored and transferred to where you need it, something you 'just know' doesn't take the same resources.
On the other hand, rote learning like this tends to be very topic specific and will happen for whatever a person actually specialises in, and probably doesn't need to happen for the sort of broad learning one does in school
Or it helps you to build an initial mental framework for a problem quickly, because it’s easier to see how a new data point might fit into the larger structure. (Carl’s note about Feynman is relevant.) Then, once you have your framework, you can rapidly develop hypotheses to test and make sure you’ve understood the problem correctly.
If you’re building the framework from scratch each time, you’ll be slower and you’ll miss important components. So, your hypotheses will be weaker.
Why doesn't it need to happen in school? Heavens, the whole reason we sacrifice the valuable labor of young, strong, healthy people aged 12-22, and instead let them loll about all day studying books -- at a staggering cost to the rest of us, who have to work harder to make up for letting the kids be grasshoppers instead of ants -- is because we think they'll come out the other end way more qualified to do sophisticated work, and the quality of the work they do in their late 20s and early 30s will more than make up for their missing decade of contribution.
I mean, if school is only meant as some kind of aristocratic finishing school, where people learn good manners, how to elucidate the social shibboleths eloquently, and the modern equivalent of being able to produce an apt quote of Cicero in a genteel argument -- we can't afford that for everyone. If everyone is going to spend his late adolescence and early adulthood being idle, he damn well be getting some very valuable practical skills out of it. If he ends up needing *more* training, on the job, to actually know how to do something useful, then school is a gigantic waste of public resources and should be reserved for the aristocracy, who can pay for it themselves.
Lots of good (bad) examples here:
https://viz.wtf/
I often tell people that I've taken two really important classes in my literally long life - typing in high school (to have a class with my girlfriend) and entry level statistics in college (to satisfy my math requirement).
there is a similar on-line course from University of Washington: https://www.callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html
Subhead to WaPo article from this morning seems pertinent to lack of statistical knowledge and media misrepresentation: "An American child born in 2021 could expect to live to 76.4 years, according to the latest government data" (from https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/22/us-life-expectancy-decline-2021-covid-fentanyl/ ).
It equates the average life expectancy today with how a child born will do in old age, which are two very different concepts. Covid and fentanyl effects on life expectancy are horrible, but are also unlikely to be the cause of death for babies born in 2021.
Journalist seem as helpless as the average Joe to interpret numbers. My local newspaper rarely manages. (And as a language-teacher without massive dyscalculia I noticed: many a colleague and textbook-authors share this.) - The average journalist (without a strong background in STEM or economics) is unable to lie with statistics. Cause they are unable to understand them in the first place.
True. The "journalists" today have never had a job until they signed on with some publication somewhere out of college. They have no math or science, and what little history they might have studied has been so corrupted they might as well not even bothered.
That as may be, but they're doing great at their actual jobs - nothing described above is a failure of journalism, it's a failure to understand what journalism is and is meant to do. Ladeling out this slop without even understanding it well enough to signal dishonesty is the point, as is the point of the 'press secretary' we all have in our own minds. Journalism is one of those irregular verbs: I'm a fearless truth seeker, you are honest but misled, he is both a liar and an ignoramus.
Thomas Sowell has a good angle on this, saying that the intellectual class have a greater ability to believe what they would like to believe by having the facility to invent complicated theories and choosing not to test them. "A little learning is a dangerous thing" as the saying goes
True, they are not lying per se, but they are lying about their ability to provide useful information to their readers. And are so insufferable about it at the same time.
Although I am very confident that journalists are insufferable I don't think they know enough about statistics and advanced logic to assess their own ability in those areas. This is the key problem that we need to get out there to accelerate the end of the Late Pre-Truth Era (hat tip to Scott's tweet)
Actually, "life expectancy" data are very difficult for anyone not specifically educated in demography to interpret, because the life expectancy of someone born today is not an expected value in the statistical sense. It is basically the average age at death of people today, which may have little or nothing to do with deaths in 2100 (which is roughly when a child born today is likely to die).
Dyscalculia is an interesting idea. What percentage of the population is so helplessly challenged by math and formal explicit reasoning that they will never be able to grok stats at a sufficient level to not be easily duped? An experiment on replacing calc with intro stats sounds good but I could easily imagine it'd backfire by giving people overconfidence.
I assumed, by analogy, that dyscalculia was a visual processing issue with *reading* maths, rather than an inability to do it (much like how dyslexics are fine with spoken words)? One can develop tools to work around visual processing issues if it is that, though I can trivially see how they'd make a conventional school curriculum near impossible to follow
Maybe that was what was meant, but I meant a strong inability to process formal mathematical computations rather than anything sensorily driven. I believe this affects the majority of the population, although it's unclear how much of it is due to a lack of effort and poor training and how much is truly due to innate cognitive faculties. How much of an issue would this be for the rationalist movement if a substantial portion of people couldn't calculate stuff? I guess not too much for things like "donate to these orgs and not to these ones" and "recognize qualitative cognitive biases in yourself" but for things like "forecast events in your personal life via Bayes law and probability theory [i.e., recognize quantitative cognitive biases]," I'm not hopeful.
More generally, the entire field of behavioral economics is built around detecting these biases with questions like "which sequence of coin flips is more probable: HHHHH or HTTHT?" Each sequence has equal probability of occurring, but only people who think in highly technical terms even approach the problem in this way. The 95th percentile of adult (even college educated ones) does not think this way and instead is answering a different question than the mathematically formal one that was intended: "which sequence is qualitatively more similar to a typical sequence in the information theoretic sense?" which is totally valid for everyday reasoning and so they answer the second sequence. But behavioral economists interpret this as evidence of "bias" rather than the correct interpretation, which is that adults simply don't think I'm this way. I'd guess 98%+ of adults do not think either formally or quantitatively. One interesting question is how to characterize non-formal thought patterns. We frequently think about this in terms of biases, i.e., how far from "rational" is a person but less commonly in terms of "anti-biases": what is a person trying to positively capture or represent in their thought processes. This is inherently hard and psychology has a wildly hard time addressing this because it's hard to effectively control cognitive strategies as well as observe them directly.
The point of a journalist is to probe - that's why the cliche is wearing out shoe leather. Just sitting there retyping the press release does not add value. If you can't understand it, you ask questions of people until you do.
Of course, not many news organizations will pay for this - most of the stories in newspapers don't require it (must fill those column inches). So when there's a story that requires this, there's no one left to do it.
"Journalist seem as helpless as the average Joe ..." -- I swear, journalists are worse. I've seen front-page articles in the Boston Globe get numbers off by a factor of 1,000, numbers about things that the typical Boston Globe reader would notice are far away from plausible. But neither the reporter nor the editor caught it.
"Subhead to WaPo article from this morning seems pertinent to lack of statistical knowledge and media misrepresentation: 'An American child born in 2021 could expect to live to 76.4 years, according to the latest government data'"
"Life expectancy" reporting is one of my hobby horses!
Most of the time I don't think the problem is either:
a) A lack of statistical knowledge, or
b) Media misrepresentation
I think the problem is that people *think* they know what 'life expectancy' means and the way the government data works does not line up with their definition.
I only sorted this out for myself when I saw some claims like this, knew (roughly) what the extra covid deaths looked like and then thought to myself, "This can't be right...."
But it *was* right ... given the calculation they were applying and the data they were using. Unfortunately, this isn't what 99%+ of the population thinks is being reported.
Corporate "earnings" are another one of these ... AOL Time Warner reported an annual loss of almost $100 billion in 2002. It didn't mean that AOL's treasury was short $100 billion ...
Ah interesting, so I guess I am in the cohort of people confused by the statistic.
The header from the data ( https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/65 ) matches the subheading I was complaining about. I guess I can't fault WaPo as much as WHO. The definition seems misleading? I don't understand why that is called "Life expectancy at birth (years)" and not something like "Average age of death" for a given year.
Idk how WHO defines it so maybe I'm off on the wrong track here.
But... life expectancy (per the CDC) isn't "average age of people who died this year". It's "for each age cohort in year X, calculate the fraction of the population who died that year. Then if a person lived their whole life under those age specific mortality rates, what would their expected age at death be". For example, if a plague killed 10% of people in each age category in year 2030, but 2031 returns to normal, then life expectancy would dip to 10 in 2030 before bouncing straight back to normal in 2031. Aka the "lived their whole life at these age specific mortality rates" doesn't apply very well to pandemics etc that cause a one off shock to all age groups - someone 30 today won't have the COVID death risk of 2020's 70 yr olds in 40 years time.
Yea that's a good explanation, my attempt at renaming it "Average age of death" would be misleading too because it's missing the condition on age-specific death rates. As you point out, the part that is misleading (per my original comment) is the notion that it can predict the future.
Agreed
What you said is exactly right, but "average age of people who died this year" comes closer to a plain English interpretation of "life expectancy" than "number of years a child born today can expect to live."
"I don't understand why that is called 'Life expectancy at birth (years)' and not something like 'Average age of death' for a given year."
What Aristophanes said about the definition.
Another example of this definitional weirdness is "mean time between (or before) failure" for electronics. You can find examples of mechanical hard drives with MTBFs of 2.5 million hours. This works out to around 285 years. But no one expects a given mechanical hard drive to have any chance of still being operational in 285 years.
The way to interpret the statistic is that for the near future (a few years? 10 years?) the chances of the thing failing during any given hour are 1 in 2,500,000.
But that isn't what the phrase "mean time between failures" implies ...
Great example of the error in extrapolating measured and estimable short term failure rates to orders of magnitude beyond. No measurement in the short term (unless they conduct artificial aging or usage experiments) can possibly tell you anything about when the other end of the bathtub curve is going to hit.
Yet another example is the misleading media use of “record profits”. If inflation is some positive number then even a stagnant business with no real growth will report “record” profits/earnings every year.
That is really annoying with films cause it would be really easy to count ticket sales instead of $$$$ but they don't cause they want the bigger number every year.
Here I think a significant part of the problem is the fact that non-technical writing tries to avoid repeating the same word or phrase, and thus substitutes things that *sound* like paraphrases, but actually mean quite different things!
It's a flaw in humanities education that we try to teach people to express themselves both accurately and stylishly, and perhaps don't stress the importance of using the first objective rather than the second when they come into conflict. Although Law has gone that way and routinely produces work that no-one who is not a lawyer can really grasp due to an insistence on a hyper-accurate but often obscure grammar and vocabulary as a result. So there's a danger that the targeting of the humanities student mind on accuracy would just produce unreadable prose (cynically, this actually happened with a lot of modernist writers in the mid-twentieth century), which isn't really what humanities are about. Recognising you are using a technical term is however important and is perhaps not generally taught enough, other than perhaps in archaeology and linguistics (and if we could employ only archaeologists and linguists as journalists, the world would be a better place?).
I don’t think this is true of humanities education generally. I think any specialized academic humanities education gets to the same sort of insistence on proper use of technical terms (or jargon, if you want to put it negatively) - this is where we get many of the worst excesses like “Latinx” and “phallogocentrism”.
But writing for a general audience aims for style, and intro composition classes try to teach that, which advanced humanities education needs to teach out of you.
I disagree (as a humanities PhD and sometimes lecturer). The terms you describe are derived from the social sciences, which generally do in my experience seek to maintain terminological accuracy over style (one reason their proponents are so insistent on having the right to define their terms in public debate). The humanities, whilst being capable of producing really bad and jargon-laden writing, especially under the influence of social or hard scientific theories, actually aim to have a default readership style that the interested intelligent layman could follow the argument (if pressed, I'd say a holder of an undergraduate degree, subject unimportant). Whilst the actual content is often idiosyncratic, it's legitimate to criticise a humanities paper in review for the style being difficult to read (l have done this) and even in reviews to complain that an author has made the subject boring (not actually done enough in my opinion).
There are of course exceptions to this. But get to the root of this outside and you'll generally find an academic or department subscribing to a social-scientific school of thought and seeking to apply this in a fairly doctrinal way. The classic example would be the mostly unreadable dross about modes of production that many Marxist academics produced in the early 1980s, in a technical conversation amongst themselves based on accepting as given a model that was in reality starting to collapse in reality and in the social sciences where Weber, Foucault and their ilk were becoming the terms of reference.
On writing styles, you may be interested in this:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing-styles.html
Thanks. I'd argue that the classical style is the intent in humanities education with the exception that you show your workings, generally through foot/endnotes (the latter being an abomination unto the gods of good writing in my view...). The ideal work, if read aloud, is a persuasive polemic but one that can on review be checked.
Why would fentanyl be an unlikely cause of death later in their lives?
It's a reflection on the uncertainty of the future. It's unlikely for opioid deaths and the primary opioid being consumed to remain static for the next 70 years. Fentanyl's devastating effect has been within the last ~10 years as an example.
I think people actually have developed a healthy intellectual immune response to this. It looks a lot like saying, "I don't care about your studies, I know what I know!"
Now, this has the downside that it works against both good and bad evidence. But the prevalence of charlatans makes it important that most people have a heavy status quo bias against changing their minds.
You aren't going to convince the average American about something truly absurd. You might get them to smile and nod after being badgered for long enough (so you go away), but they won't flip their positions after a few math tricks. They also won't flip their positions after lengthy correct analysis. People don't change their positions, generally speaking.
Scott wrote something related to this idea a few years back: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
This. I think people who think critically dismiss news that disagrees with their common sense (per Einstein, the set of beliefs acquired by age 18). But those who do NOT think critically fall into one of two camps: they agree with the news story if it fits with their beliefs (and dismiss it if it doesn't) or they conclude, "Huh, I guess it must be true, since they can't lie".
There's a lot of people who believe obviously absurd things because they've been told them, actually.
See also: People who think that race is just a social construct, people who think gender is non-biologically determined, people who think that the 2020 election was stolen, people who think that vaccines are killing vast numbers of people, people who think that everyone who isn't a member of the 1% is poor, etc.
I think it is more likely that people will believe absurd things simply because:
1) Don't care about them much.
2) Their "tribe" tells them it is true.
3) They want it to be true.
Sorry, I was unclear. People absolutely believe absurd things.
What I meant is that 'you' (literally the person reading this) are not going to convince many folks something that those people would find absurd before you started talking to them.
I think your points on when folks believe absurd things largely checks out, even if I might quibble that in many cases that fall into (2) the people involved don't actually believe the absurd thing, but they know what they're supposed to say to make their tribe happy.
I think the idea that race is a social construct is actually pretty defensible. The notion of different identifiable populations with different frequencies of various genes is very real and our popular notions of race do bear a relation to that, but very badly and not close to anything yo'd come up with looking at actual population structures.
Like, we consider native Irish people to be "white" but native Gujaratis and Japanese to be part of the same "asian" race which is obviously crazy. As is considering an Ibgo, a Masai, a Khoisan, and a San all the same "black" race despite the differences there being generally larger than between "white" and "asian". We say that the descendant of a "white" and a "black" person is "black" but we say that the descendant of a "white" and an "asian" person is "mixed." Also we've taken to saying that an Argentinian of pure European ancestry, a Mexican of mixed European and native ancestry, and a Dominican of mixed European and African ancestry are all of the "hispanic" race and not actually "white" for explicable but also absurd reasons. And this is even before getting into how racial categories change between time and place, like the first Portuguese explorers categorizing Indians as "black" and the Japanese as "white."
So the racial categories we popularly use are indeed absurd social constructs that bears about as much relation to actual population genetic structures as Aristotelian physics does to real physics.
Yes, this looks like people using the same word: race, in two quite different ways. That is always a recipe for perpetual conflict.
Similar: rightist criticisms of Black culture get called racist by leftists, though these are (at least nominally) about culture not ancestry. "Black" refers to both an ancestry and a culture, which don't always align (recent immigrants from Africa having the former but not the latter, and Macklemore and Iggy Azalea having the latter but not the former).
> Edit: Also, I got a notification saying that someone "liked" this comment. How is that possible?
The "like" button is hidden on the website here via special-case code, but is still present on the Substack mobile apps.
I’m on the Substack iOS app and I can’t like any comments.
Ah, then I stand partially corrected. I'm on the Substack Android app and I absolutely _can_ like any comments.
I have heard that there's a browser addon that enables liking comments here.
It also shows up in the email notifications about comments.
I'm curious about your name. I know one Chinese girl with the unusual official name of "Langyingzi Lu", 吕郎英子, whose name is that way because (a) her father's surname is 吕, (b) her mother's surname is 郎, (c) her parents wanted to give her a hyphenated surname, (d) the Chinese government refused to recognize a new double-character surname [I asked her once "what if your name were 司马?", and the response was "that's different"], and (e) some problem specific to America must have arisen that stopped her official surname of Lü from being represented either that way or in the common Chinese vernacular of "Lv". (Chinese people call her Yingzi, which is what her name is supposed to be. Prefixing the Lang is purely an artifact of official forms.)
Is something similar going on with you?
I basically have a hyphenated surname. My last name is my father’s, the first syllable of my first name is my mother’s.
You’re the first person since I started writing on Substack to notice that my name has 4 syllables instead of the standard 2 or 3. Kudos.
Do people call you Sheluyang? Substack will let you have any name you want; why put it that way?
Because it’s my legal name. When my parents brought me to America, they wrote it that way. It’s on all my identity documents. This is who I am.
Thanks for explaining. I had a student whose name was four syllables but I couldn't ask why so I always wondered what I was missing.
I would remove the word “American” in all these contexts. It’s unclear that there is any national population that is substantially better at interpreting any of these claims than Americans. (It’s quite possible that there just haven’t been relevant tests done to identify whether Finns or Koreans or San Marinoans do better, but my expectation is that even if they do, it’s not by a lot.)
Presumably the author is familiar with the situation in America and less so with other countries. I read it as a clarification to where the statements are known to mean to apply.
If someone tried to carry these claims over to very non-western parts of the world, the surrounding social structure very likely is different in important ways. As the author has specified they mean an American context, the reader can now make their own judgement call how similar/dissimilar that is to other locales.
Data says people liked your comment. /ducks
You mention Americans a lot. Is there some other nationality which has a significantly better grasp of statistics?
I think that the OP was being careful not to extrapolate without justification. An important consideration when working with data.
See also _How to Lie with Maps-.
Is there an article on that?
Not that I know of. It's a book.
There's more to that story than meets the eye. The author's name was Darrell Huff, and he did a very good job convincing people to be more skeptical of statistical claims. Ten years later, he testified before Congress on that very matter, brought the story about storks and birth rates and many others, and concluded that it was precisely the reason why there was no real link between smoking and cancer. Apparently, he was paid by the tobacco industry, and was also working on a follow-up called "How to Lie with Smoking Statistics".
I like Tim Harford's "How to Make the World Add Up", where he tells this story in the introduction and warns that, like there is a continuum between providing no context and providing all context, there is also a continuum between believing everything you read and believing nothing. It's not clear to me we, as a society, are closer to the first one than to the second.
Well then, it sounded like he managed to lie about statistics, and in front of the whole Congress. Brilliant meta-example of his own knowledge.
People are generally not good with relative proportions. The (non paradoxical but unintuitive) "Potato paradox" demonstrates this: A cucumber made up of 99% water is twice as large as the same cucumber with 98% water. Very useful when trying to misrepresent how many X..
> I got a notification saying that someone "liked" this comment. How is that possible?
I've seen that once or twice, and wondered the same, as no thumbs up or down icons or like counts appear against any comments (mine or others'). I assume these are available and visible only to paid subscribers.
You can like comments in the substack app.
Tim Harford wrote a whole book because of he loved How To Lie With Statistics so much as a kid. Darrell Huff does not come of well, but Harford's book is highly recommended.
https://timharford.com/2022/01/how-to-truth-with-statistics/
When our kids were about ten and seven we had them read that book. There was a presidential election after which someone on the losing side claimed that there were nine states where the election results were worse for his candidate than the exit polls, clear evidence of cheating. We told our daughter about it and her immediate response was "how did they choose those nine states?"
The book Factfulness gives a nice and very short, catchy and accessible shot at fighting this:
‘never trust a number on its own’
Pravda rarely lied. It just didn’t tell the whole truth. Factory production was up in Minsk when the Ukraine starved but only one of those truths was written.
A simple web search reveals that in 2011 about 40% of pregnant women received the flu shot...
Exactly
did more stillbirths happen in 2021 than previous years?
Yeah, at this point any claim about widespread vaccine side effects or long COVID survives or falters on this point. If it's frequently caused by <vaccine or COVID> it just has to be more common now.
Thanks for this context.
It looks like total number of US miscarriages didn't increase much in 2021, which means COVID vaccines can't cause much of an increase since so many people got the vaccine. I think this means the most likely story is that people reported their post-COVID-vaccine miscarriages to VAERS in a way that they didn't report their post-flu-vaccine miscarriages because side effects from the COVID vaccine seemed more report-worthy since it was new. I've edited this into the post. Interested in hearing from anyone else who knows more about this.
Yup, although "new" is perhaps less relevant than "COVID vaccine side effects were a big part of cultural discussion" (arguably because everything about Covid was polarised and a big part of the cultural discussion).
Pregnant people are also advised to get TDAP during pregnancy, because it passes antibodies to the baby. Don't know what % of bad things that happen after that get reported, either.
Can confirm. I've been pregnant a lot, and they always want the Tdap and flu shot. I don't keep an immune response to pertussis or something, so they always want me to revaccinate. I've miscarried three times, always had some vax or another during pregnancy, never reported or even vaguely considered reporting it to anyone.
I wrote one blog post with some fertility data. I couldn't find a signal that the covid vaccines caused any decline in birth rates:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/are-covid-vaccines-causing-declining-birth-rates-f9a60c7c3f5a
Viki Male has a good FAQ with lots of studies showing that the vaccines are safe for women and don't effect fertility:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_wHIYX-tGkGBPwuax7N8BxZPR4PTTCDm/view
That said, I'm not sure either of those sources can rule out that the VAERS data here is a signal of real harm. That's because the signal here is very small. There are about 4 million births in the US, per year. The graph you posted said that 3,500 miscarriages were reported in VAERS in 2021. Only about half of VAERS reports are actually US data, the rest are foreign. So, maybe that's less than 2,000 miscarriages in the US.
Even if all those miscarriages were really caused by the vaccine, the rate would still be very low -- on the order of 1 in 2,000. Or likely a bit higher since not all pregnant women got vaccinated, or did so during the first trimester.
The natural rate of miscarriage is about 15%. So we're talking something like 700,000 miscarriages in a normal year. Adding 2,000 more is just going to look like noise in any population level data.
None of the vaccine trials had enough pregnant women to detect a 1 in 1,000 risk, or even a 1 in 100 risk.
And follow-up studies probably weren't large enough either (I think the largest one I've read followed 2,000 women).
We've only recently seen studies confirming that there's an elevated risk of developing dysautonomia (POTS) after a covid vaccine. The odds for that appear to be about 1 in 1,000. Patients have been complaining about that for 2 years now -- some develop symptoms resembling long covid after getting vaccinated.
There could be multiple reasons why VAERS reports surged in 2021. Heightened concern about the vaccines and heightened awareness of the reporting systems is definitely a big part of it. But it's also possible that the covid vaccines do cause more problems than other vaccines.
Yes, it's annoying when people dismiss crackpot theories of what VAERS shows by saying "there's 100% nothing there! guaranteed! we did Phase III trials and all..." This just helps feed the paranoid because it's far too dismissive in the other direction.
The right response would be: "The VAERS data definitely do NOT show a giant effect -- and we already pretty much knew it wouldn't from the Phase III trials and the early deployment -- so if you're arguing it's some kind of Death Jab you're entirely full of shit. However, it's *also* undeniably true that this vaccine was approved quickly, and it was simply not possible to assess risk factors down in the 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100,000 probability range (depending on how rare the demographic slice is), and so it *may be* that the vaccine does have some unfortunate, even deadly, effects on a very rare basis. We'll find out, by and by. Indeed, this is *why* we collect the VAERS data -- to eventually discover even these tiny risks.
"But do bear in mind that new medicine is *always* a trade-off between demonstrated benefit and risk, both known and unknown. There is no such thing as a medicine which is both (1) effective and (2) risk-free. So we have to balance these things: the vaccine will save X lives, but maybe cost Y. What is the relationship between X and Y, and what relationship should we insist hold? These are worthwhile and sensible questions to debate."
Sometimes it's worth nothing that when the polio vaccines where approved they *knew* the vaccine would cause a certain amount of polio, because the manufacturing just wasn't good enough to 100% disable every single viral particle. But the judgment was made: this amount of iatrogenic polio is worth saving this other number of lives from wild polio. And the public knew this, and accepted it. It's unfortunate how much more hysterical we are than our grandparents.
Well said.
There may even be evidence that the vaccine trials didn't monitor side effects thoroughly enough. If there's a 1 in 1,000 risk of POTS, there should have been 20 extra cases diagnosed in the vaccinated group. I'm not sure if Pfizer noticed or reported that.
There's also some indication that severe reactions went unreported. Brianne Dressen claims that her reaction was unreported and she was excluded from the AstraZeneca trial, perhaps because she was sick enough that she couldn't get a second shot.
There's also no indication that any of these reactions are common, or worse than what would have happened had any of these people gotten infected with covid without the vaccine.
As the pandemic continues, it's worth having an on-going, rational conversation about the risk/reward profile, evaluated by age, by booster number, by virus strain. Instead, we've mostly been left with another culture war debate, with polarized camps thinking that vaccines are either incredibly safe or incredibly dangerous.
Our grandparents, or at least contemporary judges, were hysterical enough to hold the manufacturer of the vaccine liable for damages due to someone getting polio from the vaccine on the grounds that it did not itself make sure that everyone who got the vaccine knew the risk — they told the medical people giving the vaccine, left it to them to inform the people they were vaccinating. Also innumerate enough to compare the chance of getting polio from the vaccination to the annual chance of getting polio if not vaccinated instead of the lifetime chance in order to conclude that someone informed of the risk might plausibly have declined vaccination as a result.
I think that's a valuable nuance, so thanks for that. I agree our grandparents weren't all levelheaded cool cucumbers -- people are still people. But I don't think it vitiates the main point. If you are referring to things like the Cutter lawsuites, let us bear in mind there were genuine significant mistakes made, and genuine significant harmful outcomes. That's not in the same category as people suing -- and winning $billions -- because they think baby powder caused their ovarian cancer, or the autism-MMR hysteria.
When people were seriously freaked about polio, they generally accepted the risk of vaccines. These days, serious infectious disease among the young to middle-age is so rare there is no general appreciation for its innate threat, and therefore we lack competence to measure the tradeoff between the consequences of disease and the costs of its treatment (either personally or socially).
This was borne to me forcefully by the amazing levels of hysteria and flailing about -- in both directions -- during COVID. We acted like a species that had never experienced infectious disease before, and had no general principles on which to tackle it, so we were just ad-hocking it all the time, lurching from one idea to another. God knows what would've happened to us had some well-timed new biotechnology not come along.
Do you know how VAERS works, Scott?
Yeah I was going to add that a large fraction would get the TDAP shot as well, and often reasonably late in pregnancy. The issue with VAERS is far more likely to do with the very incomplete and opt-in reporting rather than just the denominator.
TDAP is administered in the third trimester, usually after 27 weeks, when a baby could plausibly survive outside the womb, when miscarriages are in general uncommon. I got TDAP and the flu vaccine and a COVID shot during my pregnancy.
Outcomes for my baby and myself if I got any of the TDAP diseases, flu, COVID in 2021 seemed far worse than any vaccine risk.
Scan the mommy-webs for a while and you’ll find women who believe all sorts of things caused their miscarriage. Lemongrass. Cold medicine. A bumpy ride on a bus. Given that my *pharmacist* admitted she suspects the COVID vaccine caused her breast cancer, I assume there is no shortage of women attributing miscarriages that typically would have gone unreported as caused by the vaccine.
Miscarriages are very hard cases, because (I'm assuming) the majority of pregnancies nowadays are planned, so the baby is wanted and expected, and when a miscarriage happens it's very painful for the mother. If there isn't a clear reason as to what happened or why, then it's natural to look around for "I did this and then it happened". 'I'm healthy, the pregnancy was progressing fine, my doctor never said anything about any problems, then I took lemongrass/cold medicine/a bumpy ride on a bus and had a miscarriage' at least gives *some* explanation, rather than "it was random chance and we don't really know what happened, try again!"
Re: the bumpy bus ride, old wives' tales about inducing labour included things like taking a lot of exercise - or that miscarriages were caused by things like eating certain foods or having a fall. See this site:
https://www.todaysparent.com/pregnancy/giving-birth/old-wives-tales-for-inducing-labour/
"A bumpy car ride
A bouncing motion is believed to break your water, push the baby farther into the birth canal or into the correct birthing position."
> Miscarriages are very hard cases, because (I'm assuming) the majority of pregnancies nowadays are planned, so the baby is wanted and expected, and when a miscarriage happens it's very painful for the mother.
I'm not wholly convinced planning the pregnancy out of overt desire for a baby makes the miscarriage any more painful for the mother.
I watched the following sequence of attitudes in a friend:
1. I don't want children. Why would I?
2. I didn't plan the pregnancy, but I feel that it is a gift from god.
3. (enthusiasm)
4. (miscarriage)
5. I need to find a job that will allow for another pregnancy.
6. I don't want children.
7. No, I never wanted children. Why would I?
The lesson I tend to draw from this is "a lot of people have no idea what they want".
I agree with your point re timing of TDAP... except if one is being technical the graph in the OP says stillbirths (which are definitionally late pregnancy) and miscarriages. (I looked it up, ~20k stillbirths in the US per year, presumably only a fraction are reported to VAERS).
I was a reporter for the WSJ & Bloomberg News for almost two decades. Here's the dirty little secret: you, as a reporter, hate to lie, and almost never (almost never: I've seen, rarely, reporters lie in print) do it. But you outsource lies to experts. Big time media has a massive cottage industry built around itself, made up of think tank hustlers and various analysts that will take your calls and give you comment for free, on anything you want, in whichever direction you want, just in exchange for the exposure and publicity they get from being published in your media. Those guys ("instaquotes" or "instapundits") are sometimes on call, waiting for you to call them at, say, 2200 on a Sunday to give you comment on a regional election in Germany. And they know very well what they have to say, the line they must take, and in fact are very careful to never stray from what you expect from them. So, if you're the Times guy writing about the school vouchers, you KNOW which instaquote to call so you get exactly the lines you are dying for, be they gross lies or just mere obfuscations. These dudes are not real sources, but if you want your bosses happy and your readers content within their thought-bubble, they are almost as important for you as a reporter.
I cannot recall the name of the course that taught me to recognize certain aspects in news stories, but I can never forget the techniques. Phrases like:
"Experts agree that...." (what experts???)
"Critics claim...." (who are these critics??)
Once you learn to recognize the Sophist rhetoric employed in news and opinion pieces, it sticks with you.
That's the kind of thing Sagan warned about. I wonder what he'd think of things today if he was still alive?
You know, I've had exactly that thought. Would he have remained consistent with his vision of a purer rationality, or ended up down the path of Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, where the political and scientific had no separation between them.
That was a trap that Sagan himself fell into with regards to the whole "nuclear winter" debacle, which he at least expressed some regret over in later years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Social_concerns
It wasn't just nuclear winter.
Everybody gets stumped by the new biological realities that we are finding out more about every day, I suspect being old school Sagan would unfortunately come down on the wrong side of the cishet patriarchy.
Yes, I'd expect that's how they'd attack him if he held firm to more scientific explanations.
New biological realities are confusing indeed, like which half of a mammalian species can get pregnant, that stuff is devilishly hard.
Probably not, Sagan has the same no-nonsense vibe like Richard Dawkins, and we know for a fact that one isn't afraid of calling out the fashionable bullshit. Sagan is perhaps less confrontational and more spiritual, but don't for one second mistake that for willingness to let bullshit and bullies win.
>Sagan is one of my heroes
This jewel in particular is the one I remember him by :
>>>If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
I don't know what happens after death, but I hope it's something better than nothingness solely so that Sagan and a few others like him can enjoy what they deserve.
There is a Great Courses Philosophy class on logic where the professor points out that if someone is going to claim that "experts say" they should be able to name at least one of these experts.
So maybe a Philosophy logic class?
Mark Roulo,
Yes, it was a Philosophy class. Thanks for the memory reminder. 👍
On the one hand, it's good to make people as specific and as concrete as possible in their arguments. It's a sort of "double think" of the human mind to talk about generalities while meaning only specifics, for example I maybe talking about birds while imagining only cute blue animals in my brain, and not hawks or penguins or chicken. I remember this had a name in AI or cognitive science, but I can't nail it down. It's good to challenge and point out this.
On the other hand, abstraction and lossy compression is how the brain works. Close your eyes and try to navigate your own house by memory alone, or even remember the face of people you see every single day. You will be surprised how often you fail, that doesn't mean you're lying when you say you know these things.
"On the other hand, abstraction and lossy compression is how the brain works."
I think there are a few things in play here and I'm not quite sure where you are trying to go (maybe because of lossy compression :-)), so:
*) There isn't (usually) a problem with "birds" because people do agree about what birds are. One *CAN* make a mistake by using a general term when your argument only applies to a specific case. Ooops.
But in the example of "life expectancy" we aren't getting generalized birds mixed up with specific hawks, we are conflating two different things because the NAMES are the same (or close enough...) but the concepts are different.
*) The philosophy class prof. pointing out that "experts say" requires that you know a specific expert was not claiming that you need to present that expert as part of your argument (though it certainly isn't a bad thing to do). His point was that if you make the claim and you don't know any actual experts who "say" then your argument is logically flawed because you can't know that "experts say" if you don't know any experts that "say."
*) Lossy compression is how the brain works, but if getting the correct answer is important then it does become important to define terms. Failing to do so can (easily!) result in circular arguments that never reach a conclusion because the folks involved haven't decided what they are talking about.
A current example from an other site I frequent is a "discussion" about whether strategic bombing has ever worked. The two sides haven't agreed on what constitutes "strategic" vs "tactical" bombing nor agreed on what working would look like. So we get Hiroshima and Nagasaki proposed as examples that worked and these are rejected because they (a) weren't strategic, or (b) didn't work. This isn't going to close because the sides don't agree on what the terms mean so each can be correct using whatever definition they have in mind (but are unwilling to share).
The compression here is lossy, but the lossyness (and/or unwillingness to be precise) means that the discussion can't achieve anything.
X says Y.
X claims Y.
X admits Y.
X denies not-Y.
X angrily denies not-Y.
And the new one, X asserts Y without evidence.
Newspapers should use the phrase "some experts say" rather than "experts say."
Or "an expert told me"
My son was drilled on the logical difference between "for all" and "there exists." I'm amazingly happy that it actually took!
Plus the classic principle of correct headline interpretation: If the headline asks a question, then the answer is NO!
That is similar to the technique often used in junk science programs about UFOs or Big Foot and suchlike. They pose a series of questions, as if being oh so open minded. For example, "Could there be alien civilizations living at the bottom of the ocean?", "Could the Loch Ness monster be real?", etc, etc, the answers to which are all again NO!
I found _Bias_ by a former CBS(?) reporter to be very interesting in this.
So, I've learned to pay attention to adjectives, especially in headlines.
"According to anonymous sources within the intelligence community..."
Of course, that poisons the well regarding expertise itself.
Regarding go-to experts for the media, I don't want to blacken the man's name by imputing any bias to him, though he's reliably liberal (then again, he is a Jesuit) but for a good while there it seemed like the only Catholic clergyman any reporter had a contact number for was this guy: Fr. Thomas Reese. Any story about the Church in American media, and up he'd pop being quoted for his opinion on it.
https://www.americamagazine.org/voices/thomas-j-reese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Reese
"Over a period of five years beginning at the turn of the millennium, Reese adopted various stances at odds with official Catholic teaching on matters such as homosexuality, priestly celibacy, birth control, and the abortion debate.
He resigned from America in 2005. The National Catholic Reporter claimed that Reese's resignation was forced by the Vatican, although America and the Society of Jesus in Rome denied this."
I have so many questions about this. In your experience, what's really going on in the minds of reporters/editors? Are they aware that they're providing biased analyses? If so, how do they justify it? Is everyone in the newsroom a political ideologue who views themselves as fighting for their side, or are they just trying to maximize their readership by cynically appealing to a particular mindset? What happens when dissenting voices within the newsroom pipe up with "hey, that's totally intellectually dishonest"?
My personal theory is that basically all newsrooms have been captured by one party or the other and are essentially ideological echo-chambers and that all intellectually honest "hey that doesn't sound right" dissenters are shouted down faster than a conservative on reddit. How accurate is that?
Every news room has a slant of some kind. It could be right or left, or it could be fiscal conservatism or fiscal progressivism. And then the culture stuff could be untethered from that. "The News" and "The Facts" are entirely socially constructed.
This postmodern take is trivially true and easy to justify, as relativism usually is. But is that really sufficient reason to adopt it, and thus never evaluate one news room as better than another at reporting the news?
Consider the prairie dog. If a prairie dog on sentry duty spots a hawk and doesn't bark, do we say the prairie dog is defective? Or do we say the prairie dog is, according to one particular established opinion, defective? I think we just say the prairie dog is defective.
Now compare the defective prairie dog sentry with a radio station that neglects to report an approaching tsunami. Why should we now say it's just an opinion that this radio station is bad at reporting the news?
Is the difference because humans are metaphysically different from prairie dogs? Is it because of something about the human use of language, i.e. that language only ever refers to itself? Is it because the complexity of civilization makes it impossible to figure out all the ways that events can effect humans? I am not a philosopher, so I would be grateful to see the full rationale spelled out.
The standard for the prairie dog is uncontroversially universal, so there's no question about it not fulfilling its role. But there's no universal standard for what the media should be. Or rather, there is, to be on the same side as you politically (the obviously correct one), but few people are honest and self-aware enough to admit this. Tellingly, they tend to be outraged only by misinformation favoring the other side.
Right? I mean it isn't that complicated.
This answer broadened my question from whether one particular thing (the tsunami in the area) is or isn't a certain sort of news, to whether there is a universal standard for what the [news] media should be, which would imply that all information can be classified into one of two categories (and excludes e.g. a spectrum model).
Let's get specific with your controversy/consensus distinction. Is there actually more controversy around a radio station not mentioning an incoming tsunami than there is about a prairie dog not barking at a hawk? They sound uncontroversially universal in equal measure to me.
So what is the actual source of the categorical difference? (And when, in the tens of millions of years separating us from our distant cousins the prairie dogs, did it emerge?)
Or else, why aren't we postmodern about prairie dogs' roles as sentries too?
Sure, I'll grant that the failure to mention an incoming tsunami by the local radio station is an uncontroversial error. However, this sort of thing doesn't really happen in practice, and it's not the kind of problem that people are bemoaning when they talk about the crisis of trust etc. They are generally upset about the postmodern stuff, or tribalistic in other words. See the reply by Carl Pham below for elaboration of the role that the media plays, especially on the national level: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11349942
This comment wasn't helpful in the least. Every halfway intelligent adult is already aware of these vague truisms. I wanted specific insights from someone on the inside.
Good thing you wasted even more time replying to it then, big brain stuff. Your theory of course is on the same level or even lower in effort/quality, perhaps why OP didn't respond.
Let's be charitable. People are only in a few rather narrow cases willing to fork out good money for genuine unbiased information. If you want to know whether to buy this house or that, say, or if you want to know the best restaurants in Paris for a trip. And in any such case, there is a profit-making industry that specialized in providing accurate information for a fee.
But general news is in a different category. It's mostly not actionable, at the personal level. It doesn't really change what we *do*, for the most part, only what we yammer about on social media or on blog comment sections. It bears more than a slight resemblance to scholastics and bishops fiercely debating theological arcana circa AD 1600.
What general news really is, is a certain form of entertainment. It tickles our prurience or cupidity, it gives us gossip to repeat, with glee or rage, it gives us tear-jerker or heartwarming or outrageous stories so we can have a nice cathartic cry, smile, or yell at the clouds.
Since the "news" is really a branch of entertainment, it's not the least bit surprising that it caters to the tastes of its subscribers, and that varying news sources fight over certain demographics. There's a typical New York Times subscriber for whom the Times editors and reporters write, and they know pretty well what he wants to read. There's a typical New York Post subscriber who wants to read different stuff, and the editors and reporters of the Post provide it. There's what the Economists subscribers want to read, and the subscribers to Scientific American, and to Nature, too.
That doesn't mean any of them can't write the truth. It just means that expecting that to be their #1 goal is naive with respect to human nature. They will print gospel truth when it's either sufficiently entertaining or there's no more lucrative option.
At some point Scientific American shifted from being "science for the intelligent layman" to "purportedly scientific articles that support left of center views." Do you interpret that as due to a change in who read it or what readers wanted, a recognition that its readers didn't actually want what it had been providing, or a rare exception to your description, an ideological takeover.
That's a very good question. I subscribed as a young adult and loved it, and its demise (in the way you describe) was shocking to me. My hypothesis at the time was twofold: first, that the rise and rapid growth of other pop sciencey magazines in the 70s and 80s persuaded the owners that a great deal more money could be made by broadening the appeal by making the rigor more shallow and the tone less cool and detached, and second, that the available demographics changed, that amateur science and engineering just became less interesting to a mostly male mostly 19-45 readership.
That demographic stopped tinkering with their cars, building model rockets, taking apart or building radios, grinding telescope lenses, buying home chemistry sets and making invisible ink, et cetera, so a lot of the nuts 'n' bolts "Here's how shit works" material just became less interesting. Fewer readers were interested in being amateur scientists or engineers. Give us big bold mind-blowing ideas instead, sort of "Cosmos" in print, which we can just admire and discuss, without actually *doing* anything. (Climate change is a big bold idea. It may be completely wrong, or greatly exaggerated, but the *idea* that burning oil and coal can totally rework the climate of the Earth is a great big and bold idea for sure.)
I don't know why that happened. I might've said computers, given that today's young men pretty much spend all their spare time and mental energy screwing around with computers, building and operating fantasy worlds. But the change seemed to happen well before that, already in the late 80s and 90s. So I don't know. But...some kind of broad slow sociological change, which I'm tempted to say mostly altered the ambitions and focus of young men.
Having the electronic equivalent of a rolodex full of think tank phone numbers enables reporters to get a lot of decent work done fast, with a couple of "experts" offering the article's thesis and one "expert" offering the antithesis. Reporters seldom (but occasionally) come up with a synthesis creating an overarching explanation of how both warring sets of experts' views can be true at the same time.
Which point of view gets to be the thesis tends to be fairly arbitrary, with political bias or a new study or favor bank logrolling all perhaps playing a role in determining which set of experts gets to be the protagonist in the article.
also, it's in bad taste to quote the same instapundit every time (you look lazy) so you must shuffle the cards, so to speak, and keep all of them engaged and ready to take your call
During the few years I worked as as a reporter a couple of decades ago, I found that academic geniuses Noam Chomsky and David Hackett Fischer ("Albion's Seed") would graciously answer my not particularly highbrow questions. E.g., for my utterly disposable article on the general topic of "What to Look for on Election Night 2000," I recall Fischer pointing out for me that Delaware had an impressive record in the 20th Century as a swing state that went with winners for reasons, according to Fischer, with deep roots going back to the 17th Century.
If I'd stuck with reporting, I likely could have recruited a wide roster of brilliant professors to provide me with quotes about current events. Fischer, for example, was pleased that I'd carefully read his magnum opus "Albion's Seed" and that I asked him intelligent questions about the latest news relevant to his life's work.
My view was: Why doesn't every politics reporter ask the great David Hackett Fischer for his view on the upcoming election?
Similarly, Tom Edsall's columns in the New York Times in the 2020s largely consist of him emailing contemporary questions to highbrow academics and posting their answers.
Yup, same thing happened to me while covering Iberian political infighting. I used to call the very famous and gracious historian Stanley Payne, who was always kind and informative. Other reporters thought that Payne, who wasn't always highly critical of Generalissimo Franco, was a Fascist who shouldn't be entertained. In the end, I found that such important people are often smart and complicated and they often don't give you the exact quote that you need, or take ages to do so. Instaquotes, being faster and nimbler, work much better for the Internet age, and they always have the perfect pithy quote ready for you.
Why wouldn't you (or another reporter) cut corners and lie outright that a source told them something? Does someone fact-check with the instapundit?
It sometimes happens. Stephen Glass is an oft-cited example, but there are many others. But you have to make up the source completely. In big time publications, editors will check with the original source of the quote when there are doubts or questions, if they can find it. The instapundit may also complain, of course, they have a business & reputation to protect, they're players, not dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
Matt Taibbi's recent book Hate, Inc. is revelatory and how the media has changed in recent years.
What about lying by omission? For example, don't report something even though it is clearly newsworthy, because it makes you or your news business or the politician / party you like, look bad?
That's sort of the trivial case of misinforming via lack of context. Or perhaps misinforming via lack of context is a particular case of lying by omission.
Lying by omission is still possible. I think the argument here is more Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice [in this case 'lying', whether by omission or no] that which is adequately explained by stupidity [in this case '*misinterpreting context'].
It's not very amenable to censorship, at least until things get really bad.
All true. It's very, very difficult to report honestly on something you have strong partisan feelings about. Even if you try.
I'll add what anyone who's ever been quoted by a newspaper, or who has had the experience of reading a newspaper story about an event one witnessed firsthand knows - reporters just get things wrong. A lot. They misquote, paraphrase in a misleading or plain incorrect way. They report some facts, and omit other equally important facts. And omit critical context. They fall for plausible narratives from biased parties. All this, just via incompetence and ignorance, with absolutely no intent to deceive.
This happens all the time, to a far greater extent than those who haven't witnessed it imagine, even without any intent to report anything but the purest truth. This is just human fallibility.
When there are strong partisan feelings or moral outrage, so much the worse. Even when the reporter is genuinely trying to be fair (which I suspect isn't as often today as it used to be - journalists once felt a professional obligation to at least try to tell the truth; that has recently broken down).
There is no fix other than multiple voices with multiple viewpoints, and critical crosschecking of facts.
I was in a meeting detailed in the NYTimes. It was sort of a radicalizing moment for me. They quoted exactly what an executive said accurately, in a meeting that actually took place and they managed to get the entire context exactly backwards.
It's hard to be an instant expert. It's not surprising that reporters get context of a topic they never heard of before today wrong sometimes.
On the other hand, it's a bit too convenient if every time a wider context made you look bad or reflect critically on a cherished belief, you just - wonder of wonders - get it wrong.
If someone has absolutely 0 problem with arithmetic, but every time you lend them money they suddenly struggle with fractions and mistake 1/4 for a quantity greater than 1/3 ("coincidentally" in their favor), you would be understandably skeptical.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
'Sufficiently...' neat phrase I will remember.
The Houston Chronicle ran a front page story about my Rice U. college bowl team in 1979 with a lot of quotes from me as the team captain. The reporter didn't take a shine to me so he made me look bad, but in an utterly fair way: by not cleaning up the quotes I gave him over the phone but instead by quoting me absolutely verbatim, including a grammatical mistake I made talking to him, leaving in all my "you knows" and "uhs," and letting me ramble on like an idiot.
I was initially peeved, but my ultimate opinion quickly became, "Well played, sir, well played."
So when I read people complaining about how reporters quote them, I recall how often reporters pass up the chance to make them look bad by quoting them precisely, and instead the reporters polish up what they were told into respectable written prose.
I love everything about this post except for the conclusion, because it's not at all clear to me that an unmoderated free-for-all would produce better results than what we're getting right now, and on priors I would expect it to perform worse. Just because there's no biased central authority in your system doesn't mean you don't end up with bias - but it does increase uncertainty about the direction and magnitude of that bias considerably.
"Different biases will cancel each other out and truth will prevail!" Not impossible, but again no reason to expect that on priors. The socially dominant strategies will generally win and have no binding commitment to the truth.
Again, the problem you're describing is real, but there's no argument for why the proposed solution would work. It's like when people say we just need to abolish capitalism. Yes, it would be great if we could solve all of our coordination problems and optimally harness all available resources for the betterment of everyone, but getting rid of the thing you're pointing at does nothing to further that goal, and in fact throws away a lot of very useful social infrastructure that could otherwise be used for exactly the goals you're aiming at.
The problems are real and complicated and will not be at all helped by getting rid of the giant central thing that makes any of it work at all.
I find the concept that the "truth will out" or the "truth will set us free" to be very unconvincing.
The real argument for free speech, perhaps the only meaningful one, it that censorship by its nature requires an act of force against another, and there are very few circumstances where an matter of speech should justify such an action.
Speech most certainly isn't violence, but censoring it certainly can end up requiring violence to implement it, whether under force or arms or color of law.
The truth will out if there's some way for untrue statements to be shown to be untrue, and if that process is visible and people care about it.
True (LOL), but in the meantime, there may be suffering caused by the suppression. I'd always rather avoid the suppression to begin with. Not always possible, of course.
I love everything about this comment except for the...
Wait, I just love everything about the comment!
I will also add that I tend to actually think that free-for-all *would* produce better results, just that the I don't think it follows from the arguments made in Scott's post.
In the absence of a Press Accountability Office like the GAO to fact-check articles, the solution is to read foreign news sources that are not as conflicted, although the culture wars have gone global. Nikkei News from Japan is a very useful corrective, for instance.
I don’t think there is any source that is “not as conflicted”. The best you can get is “differently conflicted, and perhaps in a way you more clearly recognize as conflicted”.
Read Nikkei’s coverage on China, for instance. As for US politics, most foreigners see little daylight between the two parties (apart from historical anomalies like Trump) and are far less likely to be sucked in by US tribal affiliation. The one exception is English ones, who usually transpose US battles on British soil, and many of them are owned by Murdoch anyway.
Foreign news is rarely well studied and even more rarely "neutral". They are often focused on aspects Americans don't care about, sure, but neutral? Nah.
Reading about the US in British newspapers, or the UK in American newspapers, is a really good way to grasp another common journalism problem of drastic oversimplification, to the point where it becomes factually wrong. Sometimes this will be biased, sometimes not in any obvious way.
Everywhere else in the world, the story will sometimes be biased to use as a casus belli/shoehorned parable; more often, it's just so wildly, absurdly wrong that it's not worth reading.
I think you need to separate British (English is not really accurate for most of our major media, for all Scotland has it's own media ecosystem) media which aspires to be global, notably the Guardian and the Mail, and that which is still essentially focused on the British isles. The former is likely to adopt culture war issues in part because they are competing for US voters, whilst the latter tend to not fight the culture war so much, unless one of the issues becomes relevant to it's readers. So you'll find very little discussion about abortion (and a lot of horror at how backwards the US is on this...) in British-focused publications, because the target markets for the internationally-focused publications are not supportive of a ban and there's no real religious constituency pushing a ban in the UK. You will find a lot about transgender issues because that's an actual issue in the UK, with the Scottish government passing fairly radical laws to allow self-ID, whilst the service to support young people with gender issues in the NHS was found to be ideologically-driven and ignoring safeguarding. We're not just echoing the US discussion, but having our own about issues relevant to us, or seeking to contribute to the US one in some cases.
I used “English” rather than “British” purposefully. Some of the pathologies of the UK media like their largely rabid anti-EU stance are a specifically *English* pathology.
Abortion is a special case. It’s only been legalized in Northern Ireland three years ago, and that was against the wishes of the devolved local assembly.
And yes, self-ID is one of those culture-war issues you will hear of in anglophone media but not in French or German language ones.
What rabid anti-EU stance? If you mean my decision to vote to leave due to the democratic deficit and the fact that I saw more future in a world where we could partner with the energy of India and Indonesia (I made my mind up how to vote during a visit to the former) than in the current moribund state of Europe, I suppose I'm guilty, but I guess you're not referring to considered viewpoints here. The rabid anti-EU thing is a media talking point. As for the English thing, are you aware the majority of Welsh voters also voted to leave? The nations were evenly split (as you'd probably expect in a vote with such a small margin of victory), not aligned England versus the rest.
It's interesting in relation to the Northern Irish abortion issue quite how small an issue this was in the British press (sidenote here for US readers: British/Britain should not be used to refer to Northern Ireland, the most distinctively disparate part if the UK, because it is not on the island of Britain). I didn't see a single piece supporting the ban though; admittedly devolution supporters in the UK tend to be left-wing and generally liberal outside of Northern Ireland itself.
As for the transgender issue, I'd expect that to appear in continental discourse over the next few years as people either seek to make transitioning easier or start to identify 'men' in women's spaces (going on the two main drivers for debate in the UK). I'm not sure how to explain the fact that these tensions haven't appeared sooner on the continent?
Edit: corrected my description if Northern Ireland from "desperate" to "disparate", with apologies to any very quick Northern Irish readers.
Yeh the guardian has totally become a US offshoot. A seachange for a newspaper that used to be hostile to US foreign policy, to the extent of slightly defending 9/11
They've become a Leftist offshoot. Their anti-war faction seems to have vanished, now that the Democrats have been poking the bear in Ukraine.
+1
Isn't what we have right now an unmoderated free-for-all? And isn't the argument instead that a moderated free-for-some would be worse because it is impossible to censor for truth because (generally) nobody is lying so you would by necessity be censoring for something other than truth?
What we have right now is absolutely NOT an unmoderated free-for-all. I'm focusing on Covid specifically, about which there has been coordinated global censorship and suppression backed by lots of money. Like TNI.
Your second sentence, which I'm trying to disentangle, is what we do have, and it is worse.
When faced with the choice of censoring anything* versus censoring nothing*, I feel like I have to come down on the side of censoring nothing. Because otherwise somebody is going to put their finger on the scale. Of course with the free-for-all there's a whole lot more noise to wade through. I don't think there's any easy answer.
* with the pre-existing exceptions to the First Amendment regarding things like child pornography.
I would argue that using censorship to fact check will tend to increase the magnitude of the underlying bias. For example in the 1970's there are at least some well known headlines projecting catastrophic global cooling from sulphur particulates. Possibly it was typical for climate change headlines in that decade. And in the 1970's I have heard that 90% of published climate papers predicted future warming from CO2
Consider how strong the social and journalistic narrative bias towards a coming catastrophe must be if both of those things are directionally true. Now we have that underlying catastrophe narrative running in the same direction as the 90%+ of published papers predicting warming. So can we expect mainstream fact checking to moderate this bias?
In the case I know of Facebook censored posts that were factually true regarding how many heat and cold deaths occur each year, and the reason was that the posts went against the grain of the catastrophe narrative. They did not succeed in showing factual inaccuracy in their fact check, they generally just stated "this is opposed to the important dominant narrative"
Interestingly it was not an internal Facebook group doing this moderating but an activist climate concerned group which Facebook had outsourced to. Why would they do that? Because the underlying dominant narrative can, often, include the belief that the underlying dominant narrative should be reinforced. It's obvious that in a climate emergency it is reasonable to outsource your climate censorship to a group who is interested in the issue and believes there is a climate emergency. Regulatory capture, meet narrative capture
Agreed that censorship will only increase bias, in addition to innumerable other damages. It changes the incentives of the politically motivated from misleading by leaving out key facts or statistics to seizing control of the levers of censorship and wielding the institution against their opponents. It makes an suboptimal situation terrible. Censorship is never the answer.
Coincidentally, I just started my own blog and my first post, Epistemic Arrogance, touches on this topic a little bit. Especially the bit about facebook censoring because it goes against their preferred narrative, rather than out of any sort of respect for truth.
https://modernheresy.substack.com/p/epistemic-arrogance
Were the posts actually "censored", or did they just add a disclaimer?
My understanding is that disclaimered posts are also throttled, this was a common feature in the twitter file reports and is functionally the same as censorship in most cases. The disclaimer blocks your view of the Lancet graph about temperature mortality with an overlayed link to the fact check unless you unblock it
The fact check has a decent element of reasonableness and impressive thoroughness which ultimately serves to disguise the basic flaw in the counterclaim and that no attempt was made to find a quote that makes a case for the original post's argument
"The issue with Lomborg’s argument is that he is using cherry-picked data that may be compelling in isolation, but belies a firm grasp of the science, which makes clear that unmitigated climate change is a disaster for human health and welfare, even if we may, in the near term, see reductions in cold deaths." https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/posts/375952123889797/
IE: maybe the post was basically accurate but fails to uphold the important dominant narrative. The fact check makes a reasonable point that the Lancet temperature death trend study did not identify whether man-made climate change was the actual driver, merely that cold deaths have reduced far more than heat deaths have increased
However they go on to cite studies which make the specific claim that climate change has in isolation increased heat deaths while playing a bit of a magic trick on the reader and themselves that in their other hand there is no attempt to identify whether any study has looked at whether increased temperature has reduced cold mortality. In this way they basically engage in the same argument they say is invalid. It wouldn't surprise me if there is no peer-reviewed article asking the question of whether increased temperatures have reduced cold mortality - I think this in itself is good evidence that there is an underlying dominant narrative driving the public discourse as well as affecting the literature and they succeed in reinforcing that narrative moreso than making an honest fact check
I'm not sure - what do you mean by Scott's "proposed solution"? As far as I see, he doesn't really *propose* anything, he just says that there's no obvious way to censor falsehoods since, generally, there aren't any. My guess is he plays the ball back to the "pro-fake-news-blocking" camp, saying it's on them to explain how exactly they would define "fake news".
“Fake news” had a clear definition: pieces that appear to be news stories but which are in fact fictional.
What made fake news profitable was the ability to monetize it on Facebook, where readers would get a mixture of real and fake news. As a result, once Facebook and other social media sites cracked down on fake news, it essentially disappeared. This does not mean that social media should no longer ban fake news, any more than the fact that almost nobody gets measles today means that we shouldn't vaccinate children for measles. But it does mean that if you look at the material currently being removed by social media platforms under their disinformation policies, essentially none of it is fake news.
“Fake news” no longer has a clear meaning for much the same reason that the word “literally” is often used to mean “figuratively.” Fake news stories were mostly targeted at people on the right because attempts to write fake news that would appeal to people on the left didn't attract enough readers. Probably because of concerns that this made the right look bad, people started accusing left of center news organizations of producing “fake news.” When the New York Times, with its legions of reporters, is accused of producing fake news, the term “fake news” loses its meaning.
I think that, when Trump accused the media of producing "fake news", he meant it in the original sense - that they deliberately made up things they new to be false. I agree that it evolved to often mean anything wrong now, though.
Which giant central thing? The one that claims to enshrine "free speech" in its founding document? I haven't noticed Scott proposing to get rid of that just yet.
This is great. I agree that the media rarely lies. I've been studying this space for the past year, and there are multiple levels to the way media influences their readers:
1. By and large, the topics that an outlet chooses to report on is the most important factor. (10 facts on the border vs 10 facts on climate change)
2. The next biggest is slant, focusing on a specific set of facts for a story, they will make the reader feel a certain way
3. The final is misinterpretation of the data, which you've expertly documented. Most stories don't have such quantitative data around it, but when it does come up, it can have drastic consequences, since the reader can point to the data as an established trust indicator.
I've been documenting this for the past year and publish a weekly newsletter on 1 & 2: https://topdown.substack.com/
It provides a map for seeing what the topical focal points are for each side (left, right, international, etc.) as well as detailing some of the slant for each topic
I can boil it down further. Selection and emphasis. Every writer alive does it. Every single person has a point of view. Every employee of a news org knows their particular Overton window.
Brilliant compilation! Your substack really needs more exposure.
Scott's article focuses on #2 and #3, while the true elephant in the room is the #1.
For what it's worth, I think you''re showcasing some pretty impressive paintings of elephants in there. Thanks!
My line on this is "Very few people lie, most repeat the lies they tell themselves". It's extremely uncomfortable to encounter reality without a pre-existing internal model of how things work and why. And so it is very easy to report that things are occurring according to how your world model predicts without a lot of motivation, effort and understanding of how to read and overcome your own bias
The current media financial landscape is the cherry on top where your organization will tend to have a very strong need to affirm the world model of their most motivated readers who are the most likely to pay for a source of news that regularly fits their expectations
Looking forward to checking out your newsletter!
Following up here, we just released a website https://useclarity.com that automates the analysis of distilling multiple views into one place, and highlights when one side over-indexes on or minimizes a certain topic.
This is great, I'm not into US politics that much now but I would absolutely send this back in time to myself in my political exploration phase
Many times, things are reported incorrectly because the reporters make a mistake, or because they don't really understand what they are reporting on. This is especially prevalent in issues where statistics are involved; since COVID started, the general public's misunderstanding of how to interpret raw data has become quite apparent.
In cases of genuine mistakes, honest disagreement can usually be sorted out if free debate is allowed. What angers me is not writers making mistakes--it is the ongoing attempt to intentionally mislead.
I think this is the key point - general shoddiness is a much bigger problem with the press than intentional partisan deception. The two sometimes combine, but it makes newspapers close to worthless as a source of information for anything other than the vaguest outline of current affairs, and slightly more detail (although I wouldn't oversell this) for politics.
Did you miss out on the past couple years, when there was a ton of straight up lying? Lying about fraudulent votes? Straight up lies about the vaccine killing people? Straight up lies about covid being less dangerous than the flu?
Sure there are examples of misinformation lacking context. But there are also examples of straight up lies. And way too many examples of them over the past few years.
Edit: on reflection as to why I am so adamant about this, I remember all of the straight up lies that have been shared with me by friends over the past several years. They didn't get them from nowhere. They got them from right wing media. Sure, they also shared half truths with me, as have left wing friends of mine based on mainstream media. But there were a large number of straight up lies that have been shared with me over the past couple of years. Maybe you are lucky enough not to have friends who have been sucked in to that nonsense.
in particular, you use infowars as an example of only lying by missing context, when they just lost a major court case for making up *blatant lies* and sharing them.
Sure the NYTimes rarely lies other than by being misleading, but Infowars in particular lies all the time! Sometimes by being misleading, as you found, but sometimes by making lies up from whole cloth!
I'm having trouble telling whether you're taking the side that the media was lying because vaccine deaths and voting fraud did exist vs. didn't. Based on you being against Infowars I'm assuming you're on the side that they didn't. If I'm wrong about that, ignore the rest of this post since I'm misunderstanding your concern.
I looked through Infowars for a while and couldn't find great examples of this. I'm interested if you can - go to infowars.com and tell me which of their articles seem like straight-up lies and not the kind of stuff I included in II.
My impression is that the "vaccine killing people" stuff was overwhelmingly along the lines of my first example of vaccines causing stillbirths, and the "fraudulent votes" was overwhelmingly along the lines of my second example with Kari Lake (which I edited in later, it might not have been in the version you read).
Something like this was the first thing that came to mind:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140925233727mp_/http://www.infowars.com/fbi-says-no-one-killed-at-sandy-hook/
If you look on the infowars website now (site:https://www.infowars.com/ "sandy hook"), they don't have this story any more. Probably cuz of the giant lawsuit and all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories#Alex_Jones_claims
The story you link is cleverly written to not include any lies. If you read the headline and skim the text you might think it says that the Sandy Hook shooting didn't happen. But its actual claims are:
-Recently-released FBI crime statistics list zero homicides in the town of the shooting in 2012 (true)
-"Internet sleuths immediately took to the web to stitch together clues indicating the shooting could be a carefully-scripted false flag event" (trivially true with an expansive definition of "clue" and "could")
-"national school safety consultant Wolfgang Halbig was visited and threatened at his home by homicide detectives" (true as far as I can tell)
-etc.
This is how it all works! You read a news story and come away thinking that the story claimed X. But instead it claimed that some expert claimed X, or claimed that people are worried about X, or that there's a lawsuit about X, or that someone's investigating X.
In the comment above, Tony Saunders wrote "Did you miss out on the past couple years, when there was a ton of straight up lying? Lying about fraudulent votes? Straight up lies about the vaccine killing people? Straight up lies about covid being less dangerous than the flu?"
Saunders didn't link to the news articles he's concerned about. I bet that if he did, they'd mostly be carefully crafted to not outright lie.
Yes, I agree that print media is less likely to have outright lies in it. But Alex Jones on Infowars specifically lied about Newtown shooting not happening. I'm not going to subject myself to listening through all of it, but here is a NYTimes article that reports quotes. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/politics/heres-what-jones-has-said-about-sandy-hook.html. Some of those are weasel-word half truths, but some are just false. Indeed, a jury found him guilty of defamation, which means intentional lying.
The election fraud lies in 2020 were just lies. Not half-truths. Lies. Here is a rundown of lies in a single press conference in 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/politics/giuliani-trump-legal-team-press-briefing-fact-check/index.html
ETA: Or how could I forget about Pizzagate??? https://thehill.com/homenews/325761-infowars-alex-jones-apologizes-for-pushing-pizzagate-conspiracy-theory/
ETA: As vermillion mentions, Infowars is on high alert since they just lost a huge lawsuit for lying, so it'll be harder to find right now. But even so, this was on their front page and it's just lies. https://www.infowars.com/posts/watch-pathologist-proves-covid-shot-causes-blood-clots-in-groundbreaking-microscope-video/
Are you suggesting that there is no blood clot side effect of the vaccines? Based on your definition of an intentional lie, that would be an intentional lie as far as I can tell
I am well aware that you probably forgot about blood clots in the moment as you were motivated to find a particular example, or you didn't forget about blood clots but are aware that they are generally much less of a concern than for instance blood clots caused by getting a severe case of covid and so in your mind if someone were to write a headline about vaccines causing blood clots that would be misleading in terms of the overall picture and therefore intentionally untrue because that overall picture is well established. It's also possible you don't know about the side effect at all because your news sources wisely don't report heavily on it as they know that it would be misleading as to the overall pros and cons of the vaccines
There is one way to lie, nine ways to not tell the truth, 12 steps to not being aware of the difference and one answer (42) to it all
Are you serious right now? You are strawmanning the hell out of me.
That article doesn't say "vaccines can cause clotting in some rare cases" it says thing like "vaccines cause clotting on contact" and "all the rats in the studies were killed by the vaccine"
You made all sorts of assertions about what I was saying to paint me in the worst possible light while bending over backwards to read Infowars in the best possible light. Give me a break.
I made numerous assertions about how you were probably being entirely honest but interpreted a report that given context is certainly wrong as an intentional lie because your standard for saying someone is lying is broad enough to include your own example
Now if your claim is specifically that Infowars carefully vetted their source of information and are aware that all the rats did not die and are intentionally stating otherwise then you do not meet your own standard of saying something knowingly untrue, I will agree. I should add, not knowing, it's quite possible that the study used a massive dose that would have killed all the rats with a large number of otherwise benign substances
I stand by my assertion that you are being entirely honest in either case and I have virtually no doubt that Infowars actually believes that vaccines are bad and that they were reporting a true example of that
I think you could consider the pathologist story to be an instance of this:
> Or articles about “EXPERT SAYS X!”, where someone who could be charitably described as an expert (an MD or PhD) really did say X, even though X is insane and all other experts disagree.
Jones is summarizing what the pathologist said, and appears to summarize him accurately. Dr. Cole does appear to be a real, licensed doctor. The problem is Dr. Cole's views are crazy.
To be picky, no jury has found that Alex Jones committed defamation re Sandy Hook. Both the TX and CT cases were default judgment, entered after Jones failed to comply with discovery, etc. The juries only decided damages, not liability. Also, liability for defamation does not require intentional lying. Even under the higher standard for public figures, reckless disregard for the truth of the statement is enough.
It seems like your examples focus on things that liars have said in other formats, rather than lies printed as news stories. That all of your links are to news stories about the lies rather than news stories packaging the lies as truth makes your complaint seem off-topic to this article.
Now it may be reasonable to complain that Scott's focus was too narrow, and that lies are spread so effectively outside of written news that his defense of news here is irrelevant to the larger issue.
This is a very fair point.
Sure maybe I would like to say that his focus is too narrow. And maybe I'd like to say that when the news stories repeat lies that others have told that that is more problematic than Scott is admitting. That is very close to lying even though Scott categorizes it as technically true.
Scott, it would be clearly useful to calculate the percentage of dubious articles using the criteria you have described for each of these sources.
For many of us a subliminal comparison over an extended interval of this percentage for Infowars with respect to NYT and WaPo is the Bayesian prior that is used to assess the relative plausibility of a particular article. You may miss the rare occasion when Infowars is not misleading, but this heuristic saves the time and effort required to read an awful lot of bullshit. The converse is true and you will, of course with some effort as you have shown, find egregious examples where NYT and WaPo generate nonsense.
Isn't false equivalence a wondrous thing?
You need to go to archives.infowars.com.
Here's an example: https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
or here:
https://archives.infowars.com/clinton-body-count-murders-suicides-mysterious-deaths-surround-bill-hillary-clinton/
Here's another: https://archives.infowars.com/the-clinton-body-count/
Here's another: https://archives.infowars.com/chemtrails-what-in-the-world-are-they-spraying/
Here's some more: https://archives.infowars.com/scalias-death-linked-to-bohemian-grove-illuminati/
No expert hedging here. Just straight up conspiracist bullshit.
Compare to this Washington Post article on the same topic: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-scalia-spent-his-last-hours-with-members-of-this-secretive-society-of-elite-hunters/2016/02/24/1d77af38-db20-11e5-891a-4ed04f4213e8_story.html
Scalia did spend his last hours in the lodge of a creepy secret society whose members wear green robes and are currently led by Grand Master Imperial Highness Archduke Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen.
The society really was founded in Bohemian Grove, home to an even weirder secret society where elites including past presidents meet in secret and do weird rituals (I've been to the site, though not during the weird rituals - I recommend it if you're visiting the Bay!) See https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/bohemian-grove-where-the-rich-and-powerful-go-to-misbehave/2011/06/15/AGPV1sVH_blog.html for more details.
People really have been linking the real Bohemian Grove secret society to the Illuminati (another real secret society from 18th century German people have been misinterpreting and taking out of context for centuries) for decades, long before Infowars entered the picture. For example, here's a 2011 movie about the connection ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2004180/ ). It seems like whoever wrote this article is just quoting Alex Jones talking about it, and Alex Jones probably saw a lot of documentaries like this one and is just repeating what's "common knowledge" in the conspiracy sphere.
So I repeat, basically none of this is made up. They're combining true facts (taken out of context) with credulously believing fake experts (the people who talk about the links between Bohemian Grove and Illuminati). I don't want to watch whatever original Alex Jones piece they're quoting but it wouldn't surprise me if he cited his sources in it. Those fake experts, in turn, are making incorrect inferences out of weird facts and past generations of fake experts, all the way back to the people who first worried about the Illuminati (though some of them were pretty crazy and probably did make a lot of it up, especially the 1800s people).
This is the first of your links I looked at but I'm betting the others have similar stories.
I'd take that bet. I find it convenient you respond to my weakest example. Have you looked at the article on the birth certificate? I guess outsourcing to "Infowars computer experts", if they exist, may count as quoting an expert, but I would consider that an outright lie. The Clinton Kill list may technical be a true list of people who are dead, but associating their deaths with Bill Clinton is an outright lie.
Or check out the magazine link I posted, where they claim "The NDAA gutted the Bill of Rights and turned America into a bonafide police state, with no due
process, no Fifth Amendment, and no Bill of Rights. It authorized secret arrests, secret kill lists of American citizens, and endless secret prison detainment without ever being charged with a crime, among other things. It signified the complete
destruction of the Bill of Rights, and Obama signed it in secret." This too is much more outright lying than lack of context.
https://static.infowars.com/magazine/iv/infowars%20mag%20_DEC12_Issuu.pdf
Still not convinced that there's a magnitude of difference between Infowars and NYT?
I looked at this one because my Notifications list put it first because it was the last one you posted. In the spirit of the exercise, I will interpret your conspiracy theory about this point as a misinterpretation rather than a lie.
The Clinton Kill List is a true list of people who are dead and tangentially connected to Bill Clinton, with their deadness and degree of connection generally described accurately. It then makes the argument that this is too many suspicious deaths to be coincidence, and the best explanation is that the Clintons are killing people connected to them. You may agree or disagree with this argument (I disagree), but it is no more a lie than "look at all these diplomats getting Havana Syndrome, surely that many illnesses in the same embassy can't be a coincidence" or any other "it seems unlikely that all these correlated events are a coincidence" argument.
"Still not convinced that there's a magnitude of difference between Infowars and NYT?"
I specifically said I wasn't trying to equate Infowars with NYT in the article. My exact words were "This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits." Please stop lying about - sorry, incorrectly interpreting - my post.
Nitpick: Jones did an "investigation" of Bohemian Grove in 2001 in which he went there and secretly filmed. I expect he did explicitly lie about what he saw and would be happy to bet on it if we had some way to verify.
We do! Jon Ronson went with him and describes it in one of with books, though I don't remember offhand which. He describes Alex as lying about the sacrifices.
> in particular, you use infowars as an example of only lying by missing context, when they just lost a major court case for making up *blatant lies* and sharing them.
As far as I heard, they lost the court case *by default*, which means there was no judgment on the merits of the case.
Yes, but that's because the case was indefensible. He had knowingly and repeatedly lied about it.
IANAL: I'm pretty sure that a default judgement is considered an assertion of truth. "We don't have the power to make you comply to give a fair trial, but your behavior is more or less incompatible with innocence, so you are legally presumed to be liable."
Also pretty sure punitive damages indicate the jury finds the defendant extra-liable.
The NYT's lies led to a war that killed 650,000 people:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/world/nation-challenged-secret-sites-iraqi-tells-renovations-sites-for-chemical.html
I can't see a defence of them (in particular, "we genuinely believed it was true") that doesn't apply to Alex Jones. Jones is an odd, paranoid guy, but an honest mistake isn't a lie.
No. Alex Jones knew he was lying and didn't care.
This is clear from documentation about the case.
Moreover, convincing yourself that a lie is true does not make something not a lie.
The NYT repeated something that was not true.
But the idea that that is what caused the war is a lie. Indeed, the idea that the Iraq War was even over WMDs is a lie. It was not. While WMDs were part of the justification, there were a large number of justifications for the war, as Iraq was in violation of a number of UN resolutions.
And the macrostrategic reason for getting rid of Saddam Hussein was that he was a genocidal dictator who could be gotten rid of and replaced with a democratic regime in the Middle East to show that a majority Islamic Middle Eastern democracy was workable, thereby setting up a domino effect of people overthrowing their authoritarian dictators.
Additionally, the claim that the war killed 650k people is extremely suspect; body counts indicate a number close to 500k less than that.
No, as nasty a character as Saddam Hussein was, the main reason for getting rid of him was that Cheney and his fellow neocons had been choking on a sort of perverted coitus interruptus ever since G.H.W. Bush made the decision not to go all the way to Baghdad and remove Saddam in 1991. As for replacing his regime with a "democratic" one... that hasn't worked out all that well, has it? And oddly enough, it didn't work in Afghanistan either!
Yeah no. I was there, and Hussein was seen as a serious potential regional, if not greater, threat. *Everybody* agreed on that, that's why the original Iraq War was wildly popular, and even Round 2 started out popular enough that almost all major politicians from both parties supported it (necessitating some artful backpedaling among Democrats later). The whole "this was a scam pulled on the American people (or certain politicians who came later to regret their participation) by that dastardly Bush 1/Bush 2/Dick Cheny combo for squalid private reasons" is just so much convenient retconning that could only work on someone too young to remember it for themselves.
You can certainly argue that the threat of Hussein was hugely overestimated, but that is nothing new in assessing foreign threats. Right up until the moment it collapsed, the general assessment of the establishment was that the USSR was a powerful and stable empire that could go on for generations. For a while Iran was the Big Threat. ISIS kind of took a turn, too. Russia comes and goes. China's been fairly steadily growing.
That Saddam was a threat to regional interests and allies of the US is compatible with tons of Americans being intentionally mislead and lied to.
Most normal people don't care about what happens in the middle east.
Perhaps this wasn't true but I remember that at one point it was doing the rounds that Iraqi mortality rates were lower on average under the occupation including the war than during Hussein's reign. ISIS screwed that up I believe
Part of the reason for the high mortality under Hussein's rule was that he used up all his weapons of mass destruction on the Kurds, which is why we know he didn't have any
The key problem with the occupation was bright eyed belief, which I shared, that Iraq just needed a democracy vaccine and they would get the kind of civil society that in many cases evolved over centuries. WMD never existing is a just so story in my opinion
Without taking a position on the underlying facts, please note that you are conflating "what caused the second Iraq War" with "what justifications were proffered for the war at the time", as well as with "what justifications would I make today". People who really want to go to war can find justifications, and people who don't want to can ignore very similar would-be justifications.
That NYT article is carefully crafted to report on what the Iraqi defector claims, rather than to report on the content of the claims.
"An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells" is true.
("Iraq has secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells" would be false, but the article is careful not to make that claim.)
The article makes claims about the defector's claims:
-He "gave details of the projects he said he worked on"
-"The experts said his information seemed reliable and significant."
-"Separately, Mr. Saeed had told representatives"
-"To support his account, Mr. Saeed provided copies of contracts"
"Mr. Saeed said" occurs 7 times in the article, and "he said" occurs 33 times.
I wish people understood that this is how such things work. Sometimes the journalists are cackling gleefully, knowing they're creating a misleading impression (like Alex Jones, who then got sloppy and told actual lies), but I don't even blame the NYT in this case. They repeatedly allude to the fact that these are claims: "American intelligence officials...were trying to verify his claims", "If verified, Mr. Saeed's allegations", etc.
When "expert says" claims are disprovable with a phone call or a Google search, I blame journalists more for reporting on them as possibly true, but these claims seem hard to check. Ideally the NYT would provide a quick media literacy primer at the start of such articles, warning that readers should pay attention to whether the article says "X is true" or "John says X is true".
Losing a libel case can motivate a stricter approach to the facts.
It was precisely because the National Enquirer gossip sheet got sued so much that it soon had better fact checking systems than, say, The New Yorker, if "Bright Lights, Big City" is reliable.
In an absolute sense there’s a lot of that, but it still likely only makes up about 1% of publications on Infowars! (I’m just making up numbers here and this definitely bears more detailed study. But my main point is that something like 1% can both be a lot in some important senses and very little in other senses, including our ability to objectively detect. Like a 1% fatality rate.)
Agreed 100%, but none of this implies that censorship is net bad. You talk about the the negative side, but not the positive side :)
The question is how much damage is actually prevented or caused by real-life censors, say on twitter or Facebook. You can go "marketplace of ideas" all you want, but it won't be very convincing if people were routinely dying from preventable diseases due to "misleading" information about vaccines.
How many dead children are worth the free speech principles? I don't mean this as a gotcha, I mean this as an honest question. Suppose the (admittedly biased) censors ended up saving net 1000 children a year -- are they still net negative due to the value of free speech? And if it were 1 child a year, or a million? Is the answer to the question independent of the number of dead children, or is there a threshold?
Well how many died because of a lack of free speech? Such as the belated recognition that the risk of injury from a mandated product that you’re not allowed to criticize is worse than the risk from the disease it was said to prevent? The argument here stands. You don’t have perfect information. More speech is better. Then the errors have a chance of correction.
I think you’re missing a step in the jump to “More speech is better”. Errors have a chance of correction with more speech, but they also have a chance of amplification. You have to actually know something about the dynamics of the system to know which way things will flow when you reduce the friction.
I think there are some general principles at work that result in the usual direction being toward "correction"; without putting in too much effort, I'll gesture vaguely at it and hope someone links Scott's post about this from way back.
--------------------------
The idea, in this case, being that censorship is symmetrical in effect, equally potent for both true and false ideas: you get the power, you get the... uh... censorship... pen.
(There's a term I'm not remembering, here, I feel like.)
A censored true idea will never win out by merit; and even if *your* guys are in charge now and censoring the *right* stuff which no sane individual could ever disagree about, there's no reason that those with the power to do so will always agree with you; and, hence, the balance between true and false is set not by merit of claim, but by whim of fate.
But if ideas can be debated and discussed, there is reason to suppose that correction occurs more than amplification.
I mean, I'd say it just *does*, before any justification on reason — our history since 1500 seems to attest to this, in the main. It isn't always quick, it isn't monotonically increasing, but the process has clearly operated more in one direction than the other.
You say: "But *why* should that be? Also, I'm a hardcore reactionary and I think we're going backwards if anything, so there!"
Because true vs. false, in an open forum, is maybe an *asymmetrical* conflict: where enough relevant data is available and censorship doesn't prevent its airing, the argument for a true claim must be the stronger. We can demonstrate this with a toy example; consider a claim about a set of marbles, Z, such that–...
...well, scratch that, actually; I'm lazy, and surely this is self-evident.
(...*is* this self-evident? I'd hope so, but the Internet has made me cynical. Still, "evidence" and "reason" require this, in order to be coherent concepts at all: if no amount of evidence can differentiate between two hypotheses, either "evidence" isn't a meaningful concept, or the hypotheses aren't meaningfully different. Or! –they might need a shave from Himaldr's Razor! Which is what I call this neat idea I had, about needlessly multiplying entities. I'll explain it sometime.)
Of course, there are many instances where data isn't available, or it's misleading — but as another consequence of free inquiry, this can be remedied; again, more and freer research tends to strengthen true claims but weaken false ones.
The only issue is, of course, that people are dumb, and a bad argument can be *more persuasive*, even if technically weaker to anyone with eyes to see.
But a), this applies also to the beliefs the censors hold, in a censorious society, so we're not clearly any better-off delegating here; however, if we assume that those in power are super smart and accurate, and won't lose their grip on that power to stupider people ever...
...well, then, why not assume that the public will always see reason, *since we're apparently living in fantasy-land anyway?!*
But also, b): from the arguments above — from history and from the principle that *in general* true claims will have the weight of evidence behind them — we ought assume that "terribly persuasive and horribly wrong" will occur less than "terribly persuasive and horribly right".
(That is, first: it doesn't seem like we've fallen into barbarism from the masses of impossibly seductive lies all around; it seems like in general, we do get a clearer picture of reality. And, second, the false-but-seductive idea is at disadvantage from the start: it is strongest when evidence is weakest, which — again, not monotonically, but in general — can only go one way from there, as more data is gathered... and, more importantly, if humans have any truth-finding ability, a true-and-persuasive formulation has a potential audience of everyone, but a false-and-persuasive version will be understood as such by *some* fraction of the population. These won't always be of relevant magnitudes, perhaps, but again — there would be a trend expected.)
-------------------------
Well, so much for that part. Behold now the other argument I see for my vague sense of why it's generally better to err on the side of "let's not prevent people from spreading heresy, because oh boy are we monstrous heretics by the standards of so many, now and past, and they just as sure of rightness":
It also seems to me that plausible worst-case scenarios favor more free over less.
E.g., I can't think of many cases where people being allowed to say what they wanted resulted in an outcome as bad and "sticky" as Best Korea, churchified states as in Europe previously or some of the Middle East now, the excesses of the USSR, etc.
How *much* of their bad outcome(s) can be laid at the feet (lower lip?) of censored speech alone, or how much the freedom to say "hey what if this isn't true / hey this seems to be a lie" would have mitigated said outcomes, can, of course, be debated; but again, looking at it on the level of general principle, the links between "we'll kill/arrest/silence/fire you if you speak out" <---> a population captive to delusion <---> "let's..."—
— "...burn the heretic / execute the counter-revolutionary / support the Great Leader / report suspicious interest in learning / melt our farming implements to smelt steel in the back yard / keep silent about possible improvements as we do about clear injustice..." —
— ...seems clear enough.
"What if some people are fooled by some claims and don't get vaccinated?" is, comparatively, easy to address, and not so bad. So far, anyway.
And even so, here we might turn again to the first argument, perhaps: if you are able to say *also* "vaccines are good actually", then — great, this will *have* to win out! Unless your society has pro-censorship norms which are instituted or co-opted by the "Vaccines = Autism" folks, who will use the same reasoning you initially pondered:
"Well, *we're* right, so this is justified because *prevents* harm. It's those horrible stupid pro-vaccine heretics that we must prevent from trying to 'make an honest case' —as they maliciously whine."
I definitely agree with a lot of what you said here - but I hope you now agree with my earlier claim that your move in the previous post was too fast! And I think there are points in here where we might be more precise and resist the full generality of the argument against any form of “censorship” and suspect there might be occasional uses where it can help symmetrically clear the ground for asymmetric strategies to do their work.
I suspect this is the Scott article you're thinking of: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
I'm sorry I'm not willing to read your entire long comment, but from a skim, the following point seems relevant and important:
I think a randomly-selected true idea has a sizable natural advantage over a randomly-selected false idea in persuasiveness. Unfortunately, this does NOT imply that persuasive false ideas will be less common than persuasive true ideas, because false ideas massively MASSIVELY outnumber true ones. A tiny percentage of false ideas can still outnumber a large percentage of true ones.
It could be the case that the average true idea is vastly more persuasive than the average false idea, and yet simultaneously also be the case that the MOST persuasive idea is usually false, because you're pitting the best of a hundred true ideas against the best of a trillion false ones.
I think your main argument (in my eyes at least) that "true vs. false, in an open forum, is maybe an *asymmetrical* conflict" can be supported by a simple observation: Given a question, there is only one (or very few, reasonably) true answer, while there is a practically infinite number of possible lies. Therefore free speech is *biased* towards truth, because it's the only signal that gets reliably boosted and all the bullshit is spread across a large spectrum of lies.
This assumes, of course, a free society where there is not enough coordination to boost a lie to the same level as the truth.
I don't follow your chain of reasoning. In order to get from "there are many possible lies but few possible truths" to "therefore the truth will be reliably boosted in a way that lies aren't" it seems like you'd need a premise along the lines of "and the total boosting power is divided between truth and lies in a way that doesn't depend on how many truths or lies are available", which seems like a surprising premise in need of explanation.
(Usually people argue something along the lines of "there's some evidence somewhere, and evidence is more likely to convert people towards truth than away from it, which creates an asymmetrical pressure towards truth", but that argument doesn't depend on how many possible lies there are, so I presume you're trying to make a different argument than that.)
I was indeed trying to make the point that you mention at the end.
If "evidence is more likely to convert people towards truth", isn't this the same argument? I can create an infinite number of lies but no evidence for them. Only another lie that looks more or less convincing like evidence, thereby maybe delaying the finding of truth a little more.
How is the premise that you are missing from my formulation of the argument any different than that?
I think that maybe the premise for both of the arguments is that people are actually looking for truth and have some capability to discriminate evidence from further lies (and this obviously depends very much on what is discussed with whom).
I agree that this doesn't prove it's net bad - I'm slowly trying to write articles to argue against some common points in favor of censorship, with the end goal of making people actually make real arguments for censorship instead of using easy outs like "We're not censoring, we're just banning misinformation" or "We're not censoring, we're just improving customer experience".
Would it even be bad for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies to penalize major "news sources" for printing misinformation, though?
The main problem with dealing with misinformation is curation and determination of what is and is not misinformation.
The main problem is an enormous, fatal problem. It's not some little wrinkle that needs to be ironed out. It's the very heart of the matter.
How do you decide who gets to censor? Whoever you choose gains a kind of power, which like all power, corrupts unless there is some strong counterforce to prevent it.
And if you allow censorship, how will you know if the censors are lying to you? Who will be allowed to say so?
As with so many things, more important than WHAT will be done is WHO will decide?
The same ways we give every other kind of power to some people. Elections and downstream party appointments for censorship from institutions, free market capitalism for censorship on twitter and facebook, and maybe enacting laws by referendum where you're lucky enough to have them. I don't see the particular mystery. The problem with censorship is that it's a very useful tool to slippery slope into removing other freedoms, not that it's uniquely hard to choose who does it.
In fact, that's also true of the police / monopoly of violence, and also makes it a complicated problem. Depending on your favourite brand of autocracy, maybe even more useful! Yet there's only a handful of people that react to the problem with "eliminate the police". (Funnily enough, a lot of them sitting opposite on the political spectrum to the center of mass of absolute free speech defenders.)
You mean the same absolute free speech defenders who get apoplectic when footballers take the knee?
Someone once said there was never a consensus on free speech in America, just the absence of a consensus as to which speech to ban. That said, institutions like the ACLU that used to be absolutist to the point of defending actual Nazis, have turned away from free speech, in what appears to be a deeply concerning generational shift.
Haha yeah, exactly. But not seeing the mote in one's eye happens everywhere - I can imagine in the States the dissonance is a bit stronger because "absolute free speech(*)" as a political desire is more into the Overton window than I feel it is in e.g. Europe. Where it is mostly acknowledged that limits are part of the picture. ("One right ends where another begins" etc etc.) TBH I think it can actually help in moderation, in the sense that, as Scott says, at the end of the day you have to admit that there's no "evil censorship vs. normal misinformation protection" binary. When I see debates from the States there's very little acknowledgement that what "my side" asks for may be problematic - it's just common sense, I'd never ask for censorship! While the debate in Europe (well, or the places I know) usually starts from a point of "ok, listen, I know this is censorship and it sounds bad, but hear me out because the consequences of not doing it are...". Which I feel is the kind of consequentialist difficult conversation the post is asking to have?
I get apoplectic at a lot of things I hear people say. I will call them all kinds of names, I will point out to my friends the unforgivable thing they said, I might change what products or services I purchase so that my dollars will not redound to their benefit, I would shun them or spit at them if we met on the street. Footballers who take the knee in protest to the national anthem are among them.
But I still believe in free speech. Do you acknowledge the difference?
Sure, the difference is evident, and that's very commendable of you. The problem is that e.g. the NFL initially banned it. The NFL is not a State, but nonetheless holds quite a lot of power over the careers of players. The fact of the matter is that some people had to consider not sending a powerful political message due to a threat to their livelihood. The point we're making above is not that there aren't people like you, is that there are a lot that go apoplectic and in their absolute indignation have to use all power in their hands, no matter how disproportionate, to keep others from talking.
Edit: I'm -> in, I don't know how to type
I’m of mixed feelings about the NFL ban. Such an organization has the same desire as, say, the New York Times to decide what image it wants to present to the paying public. I’d have respected them if they had said that they detest and deplore Kaepernick’s action but respect his freedom of “speech”. But not everybody is as nuanced as I. And if he were doing something out on the field that, say, 90% of viewers found disgusting, like, I don’t know, dropping trou and mooning the cameras, or waggling his penis around, would we consider it unfair if they made him stop? Even if he held a press conference to say he had a serious political point he was making by these actions? Would the danger of losing 90% of their revenue be enough justification for a ban?
I don’t know how much of the audience found him objectionable, but I notice you say the NFL “initially” banned it, which suggests that there was enough free speech in support of him that they later found it prudent to unban him.
How do you feel about boycotts, as a general rule? Is it a violation of free speech to participate in one? Is it a violation of free speech for the target to change what it does or says, in response to the boycott? Is it a violation if they are proactive in that change, hoping to nip the boycott in the bud before too many of their customers find alternatives?
You understand that these are employees making their employer look bad rather than people being censored because some authority unilaterally decided that what they were saying is "misinformation" right?
And if we're going to be playing the hypocrisy game, how many people defending social media censorship on the basis of "it's a private company they can do what they want" absolutely, explicitly do not believe in this type of private property rights?
I never understand the violent reaction people show to footballers taking the knee. I'm generally right-wing, albeit not necessarily conservative, and I just can't see why it's worth making a fuss about. When it first started (I'm English but follow 'football' as a somehow fan of the Dolphins...)I thought it was just the typical rich-people-pick-up-university-dogma thing and that it wasn't relevant. It didn't seem to threaten anything, since the US is a country with free speech. Yet it seems to elicit a literal hatred from some people, and I'd like to ask why. Note the only narratives explaining this are (on topic) media ones which place this in a context of white racists feeling threatened. Since these come from writers who are either motivated (they are employed by organisations dependent on funding for anti-racism, or they themselves earn a living as anti-racism commentators) or who I don't trust from experience of reading them and disliking their presentation of facts, I'm not inclined to accept their narrative, but it would be interesting to see the other side of the story.
Neither watch football (either kind) nor care about this, but this is easy to explain. `Taking the knee' is very clearly and publicly taking a (particular) side in the American culture war, and if you see that side as your enemy then you are going to be pissed. All the more so if you see (American) football as belonging to `your' tribe - then the person taking the knee is not only an enemy, but a renegade.
For me some of it is the punching up vs down. I know Kaepernick is black-ish, but he is in a position to broadcast his opinion much more widely than I am. Another is that he is in that exalted position precisely because he lives in a polity that he claims to abhor; the hypocrisy of it fills me with contempt.
He should be able to express this abhorrence. I will defend to the death his right to do so. But I have the right to feel contempt for it and I do not apologize.
That an American football team is a multiracial coalition that works together really well for its common good reassures a lot of Americans that diversity can work. When American football because racialized in a tendentious manner by BLM, it worries a lot of Americans that their optimistic assessment of diversity might be in the process of being undermined by self-interested activists.
Speaking only for myself as a more or less right-wing American and serious "football" fan.
The playing of the anthem before a game is a little formalistic ritual that for many people has associations with the nation's war dead, with the memory of family members' military service, or with -- who knows, really? It's a brief moment of observance that has different meanings for different people, but is emphatically about directing attention away from the here and now toward lives lost, sacrifices made, debts to be paid.
Appropriating such a moment, exploiting its ritual character to draw attention to oneself by a gratuitous display of noncompliance with the expected decorum, is obnoxious, arrogant, infuriating. No matter the urgency of your message, no matter the righteousness of your cause, it doesn't justify opportunistically talking over other people's moment of silence.
There was no "violent" reaction, and if you're saying that words are "violence" then you're not right-wing, you're woke.
I suspect part of the reason is that star athletes are thought of as heroes, people you are supposed to look up to and emulate. That makes it upsetting when they turn out to be supporting the forces of evil.
>You mean the same absolute free speech defenders who get apoplectic when footballers take the knee?
You mean the people who do not say that the government should force them not to kneel?
How do you make an informed decisions in the elections if the information allowed to reach you is censored? How do you decide if the censors made the right decisions if arguments that they decided to censor something truthful is suppressed?
Censorship is unique among policies in that it prevents people from arguing for its own lifting (at least on a case-specific basis). If claiming X is censored, then to argue that it shouldn't be censored because it's plausibly true, you have to make arguments for X, but that's banned. So if we make a mistake and censor a truth, we can't correct it as long as we accept the premise that falsehoods should be censored.
The only way we can argue against the censorship of X without arguing for X and thus running afoul of the censorship is to argue that nothing should be censored, not even falsehoods (as I'm doing here). And then hope that arguing against censorship in general doesn't get added to the list of censored ideas.
Slippery slopes are real. Nobody is EVER going to stop at something as cut and dry as the well studied impacts of a medical intervention. Misinformation is by now a propaganda term, used by the left against potentially anything they disagree with, meaning they cannot be trusted to unilaterally decide what is "true" or not.
Think about how many lives, livelihoods and billions of dollars of wealth would have been saved if all of the BLM propaganda promoted by the media in its three main instances has been censored.
Perhaps so.
If only there were an infallible, incorruptible source of truth your hypothetical censors could refer to. Because knowing what is true is difficult.
Even with such an impossible oracle, censors would still need to decide how much inaccuracy justifies censorship. Is omission of critical context in an otherwise truthful statement permissible? How much? How can they make such decisions in an evenhanded way, even if they wanted to? (Real humans are unlikely to want to.)
Yes, lives and treasure would likely be saved if everyone knew all the facts and all the context. Unfortunately, that is not one of the options.
Ok, I've thought about it. Now do you care to offer evidence of the magnitude, or even the sign? I don't think counterfactuals like this can ever be estimated with much certainty, but you could at least try instead of just snidely hinting to the choir.
There is no positive side to censorship.
"The question is how much damage is actually prevented or caused by real-life censors". Censorship is itself a harm to the entire population, and if people are routinely dying from preventable diseases, that is both simultaneously tragic and on them for not preventing the disease. Having the government step in and enforce a narrative on an entire population is tyranny.
"How many dead children are worth the free speech principles? I don't mean this as a gotcha, I mean this as an honest question. Suppose the (admittedly biased) censors ended up saving net 1000 children a year -- are they still net negative due to the value of free speech?" This is an absurd appeal to emotion. Speech does not kill children, speech communicates ideas through sound waves and electrical signals. Censors do not save children, they violate fundamental human rights.
> This is an absurd appeal to emotion.
There are appeals to emotions and appeals to emotions. This one is the good kind. It technically appeals to emotion, but only to highlight the actual point without substituting it. As a test, we can remove all the emotionality from the phrase, getting something like "How much utility is reasonable to sacrifice in order to preserve a specific deontological principle?" and it's still be meaningfull and relevant to the discussion.
On the other hand, compare it with you answer. Phrases like
> Having the government step in and enforce a narrative on an entire population is tyranny.
> Censors do not save children, they violate fundamental human rights.
fail to engage with the point of having to perform a cost benefit analysis to solve a complex real life issue. You just restate "Breaking deontological rules is bad" in an emotional manner. Yes, we already no that it's bad. That's why all the argument is happening in the first place. We want to find out how bad exactly it is in case of this specific rule. You do not bring anything new to the table - just emotional proclamations. Now, this is the bad kind of appealling to emotions. I would be grateful if you stopped doing it.
> Speech does not kill children, speech communicates ideas through sound waves and electrical signals.
I hope I do not need to explain you the idea of causality. If some kind of speech leads to more dead children, this is a problem which could be improved by forbidding this kind of speech. Yes, this will cost us some value due to breaking the deontological rule. It may be worth it, it may be not. If you think that this rule is more important than any amount of children lives than just state it. Do not pretend that your prefered policy has no drawbacks - this is just dishonest.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided
Typos and other nitpicking:
1. "Before 2021, there were very few reasons for pregnant women to get vaccines, and maybe only a few thousand did each year." -- um, Tdap booster in the third trimester? To me it seems more plausible that many fewer people were aware of the existence of VAERS before it got heavily advertised with the Covid vaccines.
EDIT: this point has also already been raised with flu vaccines.
2. "A few of the articles mentioned a different attempt at urine drug tests, which only a few recipients failed - but didn’t mention that they had the option of not taking the drug tests and that many people (probably including all the drug users) chose to take it." -- chose *not* to take it, I presume?
<snark>
...imagine still believing in a marketplace of ideas, in CURRENT_YEAR
</snark>
No but seriously, it seems very obvious to me (given the last 10 years or so) that true and/or good ideas don't have more memetic power than false and/or bad ones, and in fact often have less. I don't understand how anyone expects a "marketplace of ideas" to result in anything good.
Well, the question is, can you do better?
Can you think of a true idea which has less than 50% penetration right now? (I can, but I'm interested in what examples you give)
What? Yes? That is a space that's so large I'm not even sure where to start.
Trying to limit myself to not just "true things" but "true things I wish were more popularly known":
- 90% of [the upper N% of] academic papers published in the last 5 years
- The relevant details of the laws we live under, and of the bills currently being debated
- What kinds of online behavior are prosocial
- Most of the stuff in the CFAR Handbook and The Sequences
I guess the question is more "an empirical(*) fact for which a competing false idea has more than 50% penetration", than ideas that are just absent?
Yeah, I tried to gesture at that with some of my examples, but to be more concrete:
Most of the time, when some bill or proposition is being debated by the general public, opinions that result from actually reading the bill and understanding what impact it will have, in context, get utterly drowned out by people who are rounding the whole bill off to some very tribalistic notion.
That's not truth or falsehood though, just simplification. Arguably that's the fault of people who create bills that cannot be easily and succinctly summarised and therefore require a level of explanation that is much more open to inserting partisan bias.
This is zero examples. It’s easy to give a description that picks out a true fact that not many people know (the mass of Jupiter to the nearest kilogram; next week’s winning lottery number; etc). The interesting thing is giving the actual fact itself in a way that you are reasonably confident is true.
(But also, Scott presumably meant to include an implicit restriction to the class of widely interesting facts.)
Yeah, I gave categories of ideas rather than individual ideas, because I was concerned that if I gave individual ideas the conversation would become too focused on the merits of those specific ideas and not whether the "marketplace of ideas" phenomenon is real and reliable
Until fairly recently, a majority of Americans rejected the Theory of Evolution.
Right, and Darwnian evolution came to be as an accepted theory not because a central authority declared it correct, but because a herterodox thinker was able to promote his theories. If someone disagrees with the institutional religion of today in a way analogous to what Darwin did, they tend to lose their livelihood.
Meh. An even greater fraction of Americans are wrong about relativity, too. And for very similar reasons: because it has essentially zero impact on their lives. It's a theory about the far away and long ago that doesn't mean squat for everyday life[1]. Now, the fact that Americans might *reject* evolution where they merely don't know about relativity is interesting -- but probably more the result of a weird choice by the anti-Christian crowd to jam it down every schoolchild's throat in public school as a way to stick it to their religious parents, even though most adults need to know about evolution about as much as they need to know about relativity, which is not much and hardly ever.
--------------------
[1] The interesting exception is with respect to microbial evolution, e.g. antibiotic resistance, which indeed you *do* need to understand as an adult to take competent part in everyday life. And mirabile dictu it turns out quite a lot of people who are passionately "anti-evolution" will carve out a specific exception for what they call "micro-evolution," meaning the evolution of new bacterial species or new viruses in response to natural (or artificial) selection. It's quite likely you could compel every schoolchild to learn about the response of bacteria to evolutionary pressure (e.g. from antibiotics) and leave out men and apes having a common ancestor, or even the much trickier issue of abiogenesis, and get hardly a squawk from even the fundies.
That's far too easy a question. The real test is whether there are any false ideas with >50% penetration (or possibly penetration exceeding their true antithesis; basically no ideas have >50% penetration).
If there are, then the marketplace of ideas has some sort of problem (even if that problem is a thumb on the scales). If not, then that's a pretty robust defence of it (or of the thumb).
Christianity has 63% penetration in the US and is false. 57% of Americans believe in ghosts. Two-thirds of British surveyed don't believe dinosaurs existed. Half think the moon landings were faked.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/moon-landing-celebrates-47th-anniversary-8446862
I think there's little chance that respondents with skin in the game would disbelieve at such a high rate (if only we could figure out what skin in the game might mean here). But setting that aside, the mention of moon-landing disbelief made me think.
With recent technological advances, such as SpaceX's rockets, is the moon-landing-hoax community now split into 'there can never be a moon landing' versus 'the 20th-century landings were fake, but a real one is becoming plausible'?
A majority of Americans believe that intelligence differences between races either do not exist, or if they exist they have nothing to do with genetic differences.
Has anyone ever polled that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it may be one of those things where if you do a survey, the median opinion is miles away from orthodoxy.
<Parenting doesn’t matter> Childhood development appears to be purely a function of genetics and non-shared environmental factors, but I would wager that most people believe that parenting has important influence on outcomes (and not just in extremis, such as abuse etc)
It seems much more likely to me that something like "no parenting intervention leads to significantly better outcomes across the board, because there is a lot of variance in people, but if you understand your situation and your child well you can often pick out strategies that will work for you" is the case than that parenting actually doesn't matter.
I don't care if it seems likely to you. There's either support for it in the literature or there's not.
The `literature' could easily be wrong though. Especially in the social sciences which seem heavily captured by Lysenko-type social dynamics.
There's also fun cases like minimum wage -> unemployment where there is considerable literature supporting *both* sides.
I've heard of this research but I don't believe it, because I think this `fact' is actually false, whatever the parenting `research' says. I may not know *what* is wrong with the research (after all, I'm not an expert in the field), but I am confident that something must be very wrong with it. I would feel similarly about research that showed that actually water is not wet, or that the moon is actually made of cheese. I think this is what Scott meant by `epistemic learned helplessness.'
There are also other areas of `research' where I know that a `consensus' exists, and also believe it is pants on fire wrong.
Thankfully, the world does not operate on the basis of your hunches.
Nor does it operate on the basis of garbage social science research.
But Humphrey does operate on the basis of his "hunches" and so, mutatis mutandis, do the rest of us. The existence of an apparent consensus on an issue lots of people care about is at most weak evidence that the consensus position is true.
better - school quality in the US isn't a thing and any supposed measures of it do not explain any meaningful proportion of the variance after controlling for student quality
Parenting obviously matters, if parents don't feed their children they die. It doesn't matter past a certain level of competence, but I'm pretty sure that a substantial fraction of parents doesn't meet it.
Yes, that’s why I specified “not just in extremis” ;)
That the IPCC projection for sea level rise by 2100 is about one meter, which shifts coastlines in by only about a hundred meters — more some places, less other.
That according to the latest IPCC report, some projections of climate change show it leading to the greening of the Sahara and Sahel.
That according to the latest IPCC report the earth is on net greening, total leaf coverage increasing, probably due to increased CO2 concentration.
That increased CO2 concentration by itself leads to increases in crop yields.
That's just from one politically loaded area I happen to be interested in.
Your ideas also come from the marketplace of ideas, so any skepticism of this marketplace should make you more skeptical of the ideas you hold, and more reluctant to censor other ideas.
(1) I am indeed pretty skeptical of the ideas I hold, because I recognize how much my evolutionary and cultural environment have caused me to be the sort of person who would hold them
(2) But also I get to apply epistemics beyond just whatever has the most memetic power
(3) None of this amounts to an argument that I should be more reluctant to censor other ideas
You get to apply epistemics beyond whatever has the most memetic power, but censorship is necessary for other people, without censorship, other people will just believe whatever has the most memetic power? And your skepticism of the ideas you hold does not make you more reluctant to censor opposing ideas?
Memetics is about how ideas spread among the population.
Epistemics is something I get to apply as an individual.
Yes, the population is made up of individuals, but sometimes there is good reason to believe that you as an individual really do differ from the average or typical person. (But yes there is also good reason to be cautious and skeptical of that.)
I certainly don't claim not to be vulnerable to powerful-but-false memes. But I do claim to not be *totally* at the mercy of them.
---
As for the other piece - yes, my skepticism of the ideas I hold makes me more reluctant to censor opposing ideas, in that I acknowledge that some of the opposing ideas may be correct. It's in fact highly likely that at least one idea that I strongly oppose is more correct than my own position.
However, my skepticism of the "marketplace of ideas" phenomenon (that there is some sort of emergent property of the way people share ideas that results in the best ideas rising to the top/"winning" over time, analogous to how market efficiency results in things being priced according to their value) does *not* make me more reluctant to censor opposing ideas. If anything it makes me want to censor opposing ideas more.
" the best ideas rising to the top/"winning" over time" is a straw man of the position. All the argument requires is that it works better than the alternatives.
To quote Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
"Your doubt in yourself comes from your ability to reason, so any doubt about your ability to reason should make you doubt your doubts in yourself, and actually be more confident." Yeah sure.
Meta-reasoning is a nice exercise and all for, say, examining your biases, but when there's a concrete topic , much better to discuss the actual fine print of those ideas. Cf Bulverism.
The concrete topic here is censorship. Censorship presupposes some idea of what to censor. Where this idea comes from is not secondary to this discussion.
If your justification for censorship is that the marketplace of ideas doesn't work, you really have to explain where your ideas of what to censor come from.
If your justification is that your better at reasoning then other people, you really have to engage in some meta-reasoning about this claim.
And if your justification is that other people are biased, you really have to examine your own biases.
I’m not sure why “more skeptical” should lead to “more reluctant to censor”. Presumably reluctance to censor should come from a belief that censoring leads to bad effects, not from low confidence in one’s own beliefs.
So you believe in something like this?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
True ideas do have more memetic power than false ones, all other things being equal. The problem is all other things are very rarely equal and there are a lot of other factors except being true or false witch correspond to the power of the meme. False memes are optimised to spread, despite being false, after all.
So the "marketplace of ideas" kind of works. Just... not as well as we might have hoped.
I vote for aggressively adversarial anti-reporting. You can get a lot of mileage out of "left-wing mainstream media does <what you describe>!!" on right wing sites, but they then do the same thing themselves -but the skepticism of "mainstream media" wasn't always there, it was built. The goal is (similarly) to create a constituency of "unpartisan context skeptics" that have a social norm of not accepting "context-scarce" reporting that has obvious propaganda goals. Preferably with some way to actual prevent the click-traffic to the "bad" source.
The problem is that such a community will just have its own biases and false memes.
So many things that are not true here for example, and WP is considered a very respectable source of information. https://twitter.com/evkontorovich/status/1605796225780879360?s=46&t=O0tVBH_8j0jctWkAEK1BXA
" many people (probably including all the drug users) chose to take it" Scott, I think you mean " many people (probably including all the drug users) chose NOT to take it"
You're right, thank you.
What about the Russians running out of missiles and/or ammo - 4 different times now by my count?
Clearly at least 3 of these following links are lies... or are they out of context?
March 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/
May 2022: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-706826
September 2022: https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/09/01/russia-missiles-running-out/
December 2022: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-15/russia-is-running-out-of-missiles-ukraine-security-chief-says
Looking at the first one, its actual claim is "Senior Pentagon official says Russia is running out of precision munitions". I have no doubt a senior Pentagon official said this, so it sounds like it's not a lie.
This may sound nitpicky, but it's my ENTIRE POINT. Journalists often make bad decisions about who to trust and how much to fact-check them, but this is different from clear bright-line misinformation. You can't run a censorship regime that censors journalists who accurately report the words of government spokespeople!
"Senior Pentagon official says Russia is running out of precision munitions". I have no doubt a senior Pentagon official said this, so it sounds like it's not a lie."
Hmmm - as regards religion news, quite often stories appear with "Senior Vatican official says..." and then it turns out to be "random monsignor in the general area of St Peter's Square with whom I had a very nice chat over coffee" and not somebody associated with the Curia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Curia
Like this story:
https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/senior-vatican-official-says-church-must-welcome-all-families/16168
All due respect to the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life but it's not one of the Top Top branches. Though Francis has done a lot of re-organising, so dicasteries may indeed be higher up the totem pole than previously:
"In the Roman Curia, a congregation is a type of department of the Curia. They are second-highest-ranking departments, ranking below the two Secretariats, and above the pontifical councils, pontifical commissions, tribunals and offices."
The gold standard for "senior Vatican official" would be if you could get someone from one of the Secretariats to whisper sweet nothings into your ear. Or the likes of this guy, who blotted his copybook:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/vatican-judge-indicts-10-including-cardinal-alleged-financial-crimes-2021-07-03/
"Giovanni Angelo Becciu (born 2 June 1948) is an Italian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis made him a cardinal on 28 June 2018. On 24 September 2020, he resigned the rights associated with the cardinalate.
An archbishop since 2001, he held several appointments in the diplomatic service of the Holy See between 1984 and 2011, including those of Apostolic Nuncio to Angola and to Cuba. From 2011 to 2018 he was Substitute for General Affairs in the Secretariat of State, a key position in the Roman Curia. He was head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints from 2018 to 2020, when he resigned from that office and from the rights and privileges of a cardinal, including the right to participate in a papal conclave, after being implicated in a financial corruption scandal; he retains the title of cardinal."
So that makes me wonder who exactly this "senior Pentagon official" was - a high ranking guy, or "Major Major who works in the under over upper assistant office of the deputy to the secretary"?
So that colours my interpretation of "unnamed guy who we swear, cross our hearts, is a senior official in the ministry of paperclips" quotes in the newspapers. Headlines work better when they splash "Senior Pentagon/Vatican official" around rather than "guy who works there, sure, but he's about three levels above the janitor".
I agree that this is the point. I think the root cause is that the news stories are told to sway the audience to a particular viewpoint, rather than to present facts. Communication is not the goal, but persuasion instead.
That is one thing I like about this particular blog. You present statements, such as "The media very rarely lies" and then present things both for and against it, searching for an actual truth. The Infowars article started with a premise, something like, "COVID vaccines are bad?" and found a way to demonstrate their conclusion. Or "welfare users aren't more likely to use drugs". Or "Russia must be losing the war".
So I, like probably many others, now distrust the news I receive, even what sounds initially like facts. I no longer consider it news, but more of an entertainment source.
Figures don't lie, but liars figure.
Your leadership seems unusually bright, scott, but often as I move from the body of your text into the comment section I fervently wish that there were some mandatory multiple choice questions at the bottom of each one so that people could prove they understood your point before commenting or even before just moving on with the rest of their day.
I've been enjoying your series on this collection of topics so far, but suspect you'll stop short of the final piece entitled "everyone is wrong and only consuming misinformation, loosely defined".
Also, Russia did start to run out of precision ammunitions pretty quickly in its invasion of Ukraine. Whilst it retained (and still retains to an extent) the ability to launch cruise missiles, it basically stopped using guided artillery, which is the vast majority of precision ammunition usage. This was one of the first indicators that the Russian military was not the fearsome force sometimes portrayed. So I don't think that fact is untrue.
Even setting aside your assertion of fact - perhaps you can provide some evidence - the reality is that any guided missile, cruise missile, etc is a precision munition. They can be artillery, they can be air dropped, they can be missiles, they can be cruise missiles, they can be drones.
The difference between a precision munition and a non-precision munition is precisely the guidance to a specific target. Therefore a ballistic rocket is not a precision munition but a GPS or laser guided missile, bomb, shell or whatever is.
Scott,
Your reply is valid in a narrow sense but invalid in a wider sense.
In particular: where is the accountability and/or skepticism that theoretically should arise once "senior officials" have proven to be wrong not just once, but multiple times? This is why I showed 4 links ranging over literally 8 months.
Nor is this area the only example. There are many others including the Russiagate narrative then vs. now, the Biden-kid laptop narrative then vs. now, etc etc.
Any one example can be said to be a perfectly legitimate case; taken as a whole, it looks far more like a media which is either consciously lying or at a minimum, failing the most basic of journalistic integrity and/or professionalism.
But those articles may have been written by different reporters and even if by the same reporter is it really that crazy to judge the reliability of a source by their reliability in general rather than on that one issue. Seems quite likely that over the same time period there have been hundreds of articles where that source or those like them panned out.
Are you really asserting that so long as every wrong article is published by a different reporter - there is no need for skepticism that a consistent meme is wrong?
Okey dokey then.
No, my point was that if officials are right in 99/100 cases it makes sense to view them as reliable. The point about different reporters was to explain why, even if one issue seems like officials are particularly unreliable on, that pattern might not get noticed. It would obviously be better if it did but it's not a wholesale indictment of the system.
Actually, your point is nothing more than trying to justify the unjustifiable.
I don't care if officials are right in 99/100 cases - which is false, BTW - especially if that 1 case is a falsified case for war (Iraq) in which literally thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. That's the thing about integrity and professionalism: it doesn't matter if you act with integrity 99/100 times or are professional 99/100 times - it only takes one time to destroy it.
But fortunately, there are numerous examples of NYT nonsense.
In any case, it is clear that you don't pay close attention to what such "august" institutions emit. As such, your credibility in defending them is quite low.
I agree with your point that journalists make choices about who to trust and how to contextualize their comments. However, I feel your piece is ambiguous between two claims:
1) Places like Infowars are different from the NYT but the difference is one of degree and/or intent and not one that allows for any bright line rules. We should expect any attempt to apply a censorship regime to be quite arbitrary and highly influenced by affiliation of whoever is doing the deciding.
2) In fact there isn't much difference between Infowars and the NYT in terms of reporting. The difference is really just all about their priors.
1) is frankly irrelevant under the context of free speech. Ideas should be allowed to compete regardless of intent.
2) is exactly my point. The pretense of "journalistic integrity and/or professionalism" is absent in the vast majority of the mainstream media such that there is no difference between the NYT and Infowars except the following:
many journalists who have exhibited journalistic integrity and professionalism have openly proclaimed that most of the mainstream media is now reliable only for speaking "the truth" from the powers that be as opposed to speaking truth to power.
1 isn't irrelevant. It speaks to the costs vs benefits. I personally prefer a us style system but the experience in western Europe suggests that narrow, relatively bright line rules against things that are socially agreed on to be unacceptable (holocaust denial etc) aren't that damaging. Now I still think the us system is better but the argument against fuzzy rules is stronger than the one against clear lines.
And here we are talking about private platforms like Twitter or Facebook and the truth is that people are going to go elsewhere if you don't either algorithmically hide or moderate certain kinds of content (explicit porn, goatse, really extreme violence, holocaust denial etc etc). Honestly, I'd prefer this wasn't true but at least you can pick clear cut bright line rules that don't track partisan disagreement. (Eventually ppl will hopefully be able to choose for themselves what to see in settings but the default still does tons of work here).
2). Except the NYT doesn't consent to default judgements against it in defamation cases because it knows discovery will show it knew the claims to be false.
I mean c'mon, Jones knew damn well the Sandy Hook shit was just literal obvious BS and broadcast it anyway. If they thought it was true they would have investigated and called up old friends etc to blow it open.
The NYT may be biased sometimes but the ppl there are true believers in what they write. I'd say the same about fox news. Infowars is in a different category.
Re: 1) and "cost vs. benefits"
The beauty of my view is that I have no problem with you expressing a view which I personally find odious, but believe that you have the right to have and express that belief.
The ugliness of your view is that the negative of the above is true.
Re: private platforms
Your argument might have played better before the exposure of massive FBI and other government direct manipulation of Twitter actions to suit said government/agency agenda. Quite frankly, it is utterly ludicrous that censorship was being requested (and enacted) for literally double digit follower twitter accounts. Talk about mountains over molehills and/or egregious abuse of power.
And finally, consent to default judgements. I have actually followed the case. There was no consent of anything; the legal process in that case was egregiously bad including, but not limited to:
a) Jurors being asked if they believed in $100M+ judgements - as part of the screening process.
b) Alex Jones being literally prohibited from testifying in his own defense.
c) Arbitrary and nonsensical decisions made concerning things like the valuation of Infowars without Alex Jones. The former is worth pretty much nothing without the latter but somehow this isn't true in that legal proceeding.
Alex Jones says crazy shit, absolutely true. But he also says a lot of true things. And I see nothing he spouts as any more or less crazy than the nonsense emitted from mainstream outlets.
As for people being true believers at the NYT: yeah ok buddy. I might have agreed with you before the Iraq WMD nonsense - which the NYT has STILL not admitted error - I don't now.
What I believe now is that mainstream journalists at the NYT and other outlets believe in their fat paychecks and class identity. They don't believe in journalistic integrity or professionalism. You believe different, that's on you.
I've also followed the TX and CT Jones lawsuits & I'm leaving the following comments on a) & b).
(Disclaimer: I am saying this because I think it is true & important. I am constructing it to convincingly convey the true and important things. I am not leaving out any important context or inconvenient facts I am aware of.)
a) I'm not a legal expert, but if the plaintiff attorneys asked the jury pool egregiously impermissible questions, they'd be taking a huge risk the appellate court would call it a mistrial- essentially giving their opponents the option to reroll the dice for a lower judgement. I doubt experienced lawyers would make such an obvious mistake, so I'm inclined to think it's permissible.
Additionally in the TX jury selection Reynal (Jones' lawyer) asked potential jurors how they felt about a request for a $1 judgement. I doubt we'd see 1 plaintiff team + 1 defendant team make the same type of egregious error.
b) Jones was of course permitted to testify. He was not permitted to dispute the determinations of default judgements during the damages trial. Courts do things like this frequently. States have strict laws about what can be stated or considered during a trial. Eg in criminal cases, if it's considered irrelevant or prejudicial you can't bring up the defendant's criminal history.
In these trials the jury questions boiled down to "take as fact that he's liable, how much is he liable for?" The court considered it effectively proven that he was liable, and regarded a dispute during damages to be irrelevant or prejudicial.
This default was avoidable if he and his company had not carried out extreme abuses during discovery. For example, he had to send a corporate representative to answer every question about the videos that were the basis for one lawsuit; the representative had not even bothered to view the videos in preparation. In civil trials the court essentially plays referee between parties, and it doesn't seize evidence by force. In extreme cases they can eventually say "this party repeatedly flouts the rules and as a result we can't do a fair trial; as a result we have to go with common sense and declare them guilty".
I think the fact that this happened with 2 judges in 2 states is good evidence that it was justified.
I assume you’re a headline reader? They state clearly in the article who said what.
The claim that something is "running out" is so vague as to basically be empty. Its factual meaning is simply that the amount of something today is less than it was at some previous point, which is plausibly true for each four of those dates. Presenting that fact as "running out" is basic editorializing/cheerleeading, which is something that the West (and Russia) do plenty of, whenever they can.
Ooh, I'll give you a subject where the media lies explicitly and consistently without censure; guns and gun laws. I can't think of another subject where they feel they can just make things up and not get called out by anyone who matters, even other clout chasing journalists, it's kinda weird even if you believe they're all just being partisan hacks on the topic.
I'm interested in seeing examples of this; most of the time I see people saying they're "lying" it's either minor mistakes or failures to provide context. I've objected to media treatments of gun laws before (see eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/ ) but as far as I can tell it was misdirection and not outright lies.
Here's a famous detailed examination of the guns as vectors public health arguments against gun possession. Some authors are JDs with 2nd amendment expertise. Others are MDs (including a psychiatrist if I recall.): https://drgo.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Kates-et-al-Tennessee-Law-Review-vol.-62-no.-3-Spring-1995.pdf
This is one of the more over the top ones that jumped out at me recently:
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/26/ar-15-uvalde-school-shooting-vietnam-war/
The exaggerations of the terminal effects of the 5.56mm round are almost laughable, to say nothing of the ignorance displayed towards how weapons and cartridges are designed and developed. I could go into mind numbing detail about the various iterations of both the AR15 design and the 5.56mm cartridge it fires (I'm a gunsmith and I've built thousands of them), but I'll keep it simple by pointing out that changing over to it in the Vietnam era was controversial because it was significantly *less* powerful than contemporary battle rifles, and to this day the round is considered too light to hunt deer with in many states, in comparison to the 7.62mm weapons it replaced.
This one from the same outlet and around the same time manages to completely mangle how ammunition works:
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/28/uvalde-gun-control-bullets-ammunition/
Hollow points aren't typically necessary in rifle calibers as the terminal effects are caused by hydrostatic shock from the supersonic projectile and not blunt trauma from the bullet itself, they're much more commonly used in pistols to both increase the energy transferred to the target by increasing the surface area of the bullet, and to be safer to bystanders by reducing the chances of overpenetration. Again, very basic fact checking would have caught this, but journalists never seem to fact check each other when it comes to gun stuff, even when doing so would increase their own overall credibility.
I know what you're talking about, Scott, most of the time it's more "not quite a lie" types of stuff, the one I come back to again and again because I remember it personally was this move where a journalist would talk about an "assault weapon" ban targeting semi automatic weapons with modern features while a cop fired a full auto duty weapon in the background, creating a misleading conflation without technically lying. That, or getting basic stuff about how guns work wrong (you see this with gun laws as well, it's obvious that the people who wrote them have never handled firearms), it's just gotten to a point where it feels willful, like these people think the knowledge will somehow taint them.
I'll give you a good example of an incoherent gun law, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Originally, FDR wanted to ban handguns completely, and so the bill included language targeting potential work-arounds of said ban by regulating the barrel lengths of rifles and shotguns, but then the handgun ban was scrapped but the anti work-around language remained, and so we're (IIRC) the only country in the world that regulates barrel lengths on long guns (with very draconian federal penalties for even accidental violation), making life complicated for gun builders for no real reason. Even the ATF concedes that these regulations make no sense and they actually floated deregulating silencers a few years ago as well, as they're almost never used in crime and are simple to manufacture (it's just a tube with some cones in it, essentially), but political inertia keeps the laws intact. I could go on.
I have no idea which side you think the lies are coming from. Maybe both.
Steve Sailer agrees: https://www.takimag.com/article/print-the-legend/
From my 2021 article:
My synthesis of the Andrew Sullivan-Jonathan Last dispute is that while the press only occasionally prints outright factual falsehoods, the bigger problem is that it still manages to inculcate fallacious worldviews in millions by what it treats as news and how it spins it.
For example, the fact that blacks do worse than whites on test scores in a particular school district is often spun as a shocking exposé about which Something Must Be Done, usually involving spending even more money on Diversity-Inclusion-Equity consultants.
On the other hand, the fact that blacks do worse than whites in every single school district in America, which might suggest that the particular school district being blamed for its race gap is not necessarily all that guilty of discrimination, is decidedly Not News.
And when the media do print details that subvert the Narrative, they tend to shove them down into the latter reaches of the article, long after most have stopped reading. For instance, The Washington Post just ran an article about how Facebook’s formerly color-blind policies about banning hate speech were racist because they treated hate speech against whites the same as hate speech against blacks. Finally, the 22nd paragraph gets around to the most interesting fact the reporters uncovered:
"One April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of “hate speech” subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men…"
But The Washington Post doesn’t see that as big news because, of course, unlike “the vulnerable,” white people and men deserve hate.
> I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here.
Do you see a difference in the *frequency* of deceptiveness?
It seems self evident to me, though not to Scott apparently, that while it's easy to find anecdotes of similar levels of deception from both the NYT and Infowars it is significantly less common in the former than the latter.
I would put forth that the NYT will explicitly attempt to put forth a neutral approach to the three types (misinterpretation, selection bias, ignoring context) of bias that Scott identifies. You can argue they aren't always successful, Scott points out some examples, but that's their goal and most of their articles are slim on bias. Whereas Infowars will predominantly choose to use some combination of these three types of bias in the majority of their articles
"This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars ; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits."
I'm pretty sure he looked and Infowars and NYT because he was trying to demonstrate that even a media outlet that everyone knows is extremely biased and low quality (Infowars) very rarely actually lies, and that a media outlet that is just about the most establishment outlet there is (NYT) also very rarely lies, though it does a similar thing to what Infowars does (in kind, not degree) in terms of not putting in context.
In kind and in degree and in frequency, but in the opposite direction.
I think it's a pretty slippery slope if you start censoring articles because you don't like what you assume to be their goal.
A large fraction of New York Times reporters are admirably even-handed about insisting on including facts in their stories that may well upset the world views of NYT subscribers. The compromise the NYT marketing department has worked out with its more honest reporters is that if there are facts that will upset subscribers' worldviews about who are the the good guys and who are the bad guys, those facts awkward to the Narrative subscribed to by most subscribers should most of the time be buried toward the end of the article after some boring stuff that will cause most readers to move on before they get to the shocking bits.
In contrast, the Daily Mail puts the entertaining politically incorrect facts right up front. For example, both newspapers ran articles about the California cult that infiltrated one division of Google. The NYT's article was quite boring, and tended to give the impression to anti-Christian readers that the infiltrators were some kind of Christian cult and saved for the end the facts that the DM put in the headlines: that this is a New Age cult of art-worshippers run by a gay man to get his hands on young male flesh.
I am going to have to call shenanigans on this one. The NY Times piece says right up front that it is a New Age cult of art worshippers; the second sentence of their article is: "More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship’s base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google."
As for the leader, the NYT says: "The Fellowship came under fire in 1984 when a former member filed a $2.75 million lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization “had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton.” In 1996, another former member filed a suit that accused Mr. Burton of sexual misconduct with him while he was minor. Both suits were settled out of court."
The Daily Mail says the same thing: "But critics claimed that he had sexually abused new members of his group - in particular young boys.
In 1984 a former member filed a $2.75 million lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization 'had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton,' according to documents obtained by The New York Times. In 1996, another former member accused Burton in a law suit of sexual misconduct with him while he was minor. Both suits were settled out of court."
Neither paper claims that the founder founded the cult for the purpose " to get his hands on young male flesh" as you (dare I say baselessly?) infer. Your complaint seems to be that the NYT did not think that the sexual abuse was the most important part of the story, which seems perfectly reasonable, especially, but not exclusively, because of the age of the complaints.
Sorry, but you must be looking at a different version of the New York Times article than the one I see as a subscriber. When I look at
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/technology/google-contractor-lawsuit-fellowship-of-friends.html
The word "art" or "arts" does not appear in the second sentence, as it apparently does to you, but instead it doesn't show up until the 9th paragraph. Here's what I see:
Ex-Google Contractor Settles Lawsuit Over Religious Sect
The suit claimed that the Fellowship of Friends, an obscure group based in the Sierra Nevada foothills, gained influence inside Google.
A green lawn with trees and two American flags on poles.
The entrance to the Fellowship of Friends in Oregon House, Calif.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times
By Cade Metz
Cade Metz, based in San Francisco, has followed developments on this story since early this year.
Dec. 19, 2022
A former video producer for Google has settled a lawsuit that claimed he was fired after he complained that a religious sect had gained a foothold inside a business unit of the company.
Kevin Lloyd, 34, said in the suit that he had been fired after complaining that the Fellowship of Friends, a religious organization based in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, dominated a business unit called Google Developer Studios, which makes videos showcasing the company’s technologies.
The suit claimed that the leader of the business unit — Peter Lubbers, a longtime member of the Fellowship of Friends — hired many of the religious group’s members onto the team as contractors, helped some advance to full-time positions and gave work to many others when staffing company conferences and parties.
Google confirmed on Monday that the suit had been resolved. It also confirmed that Mr. Lubbers was no longer employed by Google, though it declined to explain his departure. Mr. Lubbers could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Lloyd last year brought the suit against both Google and Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, a staffing company that brought him into Google as a contractor. It accused both companies of violating a California employment law that protects workers from discrimination.
The suit raised questions about Google’s dependence on contract employees, who now outnumber full-time workers inside the company. Most of Mr. Lloyd’s team joined the company through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship.
Mr. Lloyd agreed to settle the suit last week. Terms of the settlement — which was between Mr. Lloyd and ASG — were not disclosed.
Founded by a former schoolteacher named Robert Earl Burton in 1970, the Fellowship of Friends describes itself as “available to anyone interested in pursuing the spiritual work of awakening.” It claims about 1,500 members around the world, including roughly 500 in and around Oregon House, Calif., a tiny town about 180 miles north of Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Mr. Burton believed people could achieve a higher consciousness by embracing the fine arts. Over the decades, he cultivated an extravagant lifestyle with help from his followers, who often donated 10 percent of their monthly earnings to the organization.
In 1984, a former member filed a lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization “had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton.” In 1996, another former member accused Mr. Burton of sexual misconduct with him when he was a minor.
I am looking at the original article from June, not the one from last week. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html and comparing it to the Daily Mail article from June. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10947885/Google-whistleblower-claims-Developer-Studio-infiltrated-pedophilic-doomsday-cult.html
I don't see a more recent article in the Daily Mail. Which one were you referring to.
Sorry, I'm looking at the New York Times' most recent article about the gay art cult from a few days ago, December 19, 2022:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/technology/google-contractor-lawsuit-fellowship-of-friends.html
With months to think it over, the NYT has made their coverage of the scandal much less interesting by putting scandalous details well down into what starts out as tedious reportage.
It's a general pattern in recent years for New York Times news articles to bury scandalous facts that don't affirm the Narrative deep into the later paragraphs. Presumably, it assuages the consciences of reporters while the marketing department understands that people don't typically pay $17 per month to the NYT to find out the facts, they pay $17 per month to be reassured that their worldview is correct. So, placing the facts in this story so that casual readers will assume it's some Christian foothill cult infiltrating Google before they get bored and stop reading, while those actually interested in the story can read deep enough into the article to find out its a gay art cult is a win-win for the NYT's bottom line.
So, your complaint it that the newspaper failed to lead with "scandalous details" which are essentially irrelevant to the lawsuit that is the subject of the suit -- the legal claim would be identical if the employee had alleged that he was fired for complaining about any religion, so irrelevant, in fact, that the specific views of the religion would almost certainly have been inadmissible had the case gone to trial?
And, your evidence that it is a gay cult is, what, exactly? The fact that the leader has been accused of sexually harassing young men, as have leaders in many other religious organizations, including, obviously, the Catholic Church?
And, it is tedious reportage because it is a tedious story: "Lawsuit settles at very early stage; parties disclose nothing."
Also, where was the NYT marketing department in June, when the New Age nature of the organization was clearly stated in the second sentence of the article?
Moreover, in your original post, you purported to unfavorable contrast the NYT story with the Daily Mail story, yet the Daily Mail hasn't reported on the settlement, and, as I noted, the Daily Mail story in June was essentially the same as the NYT story in June; in fact, the Daily Mail story seems to be based on the NYT story, as it cites the NYT and even includes a link to the NYT story. Yet, you claim ignorance of the original NYT story.
The whole endeavor sounds pretty dubious.
Brazil's Electoral Court created an interesting concept: "informational disorder", as in, saying true things that imply a lie (according to whoever asked for the injunction, of course).
Caveating that this links to the equivalent to Brazil's NYT, google translate does a good enough job, I think https://www1-folha-uol-com-br.translate.goog/poder/2022/10/tse-foca-combate-a-desordem-informacional-e-amplia-acao-contra-fake-news.shtml?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
“Lying” headlines are also a huge issue. an example “4 Million Expected to Die From Covid” in the article below they quote the source, “in the very unlikely event no changes in behavior occur.” But tons of people apparently only read the headlines.
That’s an issue between editors and reporters - reporters don’t want to lie and don’t. Editors want clicks so they push it to the limit and cleanse their conscience with, “it’s all the article.”
That said the number of people who make statements revealing they hardly ever read the article is shocking.
I've been intentionally trying to cultivate an allergy to weasel language like that. You could drive an Iowa-class battleship through the words "Expected to".
"Factual and truthful are not synonyms". Something I've been noticing more and more lately is that journalists and the pundits they mine for quotes are big fans of statements which are clearly intended to be interpreted in a way not supported by the literal definition of the words. Classic example being stating that a scandal affecting ones home team "has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", or similar. That on its face is a meaningless phrase; presumably a scandal cooked up by Russian intelligence would look pretty similar to a real scandal. But the intention is to create the impression in the minds of the audience that "Experts say these are Russkie lies" and the people saying it are fully aware that's how it will be taken, without having to stake their reputations on actually making that claim.
This book is outdated (it is much worse now) but funny. Get the audiobook if you can>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_and_the_Lying_Liars_Who_Tell_Them
A relative bought me that when I was young. It was before Franken became a politician himself, as I recall.
So there is obviously some (ethical, legal?) reason why they don't lie directly. This is good. But could it be expanded to some of these cases too?
Some of those cases are surely hard, but especially the example of "x% economists say so" while omitting the amount of the other options seemed obviously deliberate. So the only difference between that and a blatant lie must be that this omission is categorized to the (ethically/legally) acceptable category, while lying is not. Can this category boundary be moved?
Easy case: if you report the number in a survey that chose one option you should report the number that chose other relevant options to provide appropriate context. It deals with this case.
Slightly less easy case: if you report something that involves big numbers like 100,000 or a billion or a trillion, you should also report the corresponding number for other familiar examples so that people can understand what this means. (Eg when reporting on a government mistake that cost a million dollars, also mention other recent mistakes that cost millions or billions so that we can know whether or not this is big.)
I didn't say my point clearly enough; I meant of finding a way we can make it part of the norm not to mislead in this way, similarly as not-lying is now a norm. Because indeed the practical solution of how reporting should go in those cases is easy. So more like, what are the reasons why direct lying in media is now unacceptable, and when understanding those reasons, try to expand them to these cases.
I think one difference between conspiracy theorists and the media is that a lot of the time conspiracy theorists are just actually dumb, while the media is very calculated about how to phrase things so as to be technically correct but very misleading.
That's why I kinda get more annoyed at a super misleading CNN headline than at a vaccine-Satanism conspiracy theory some boomer is posting on facebook. One is just extremely dumb, and the other is very smart and competent at misleading me.
Often it’s the opposite - flat earthers are far more sophisticated in their knowledge of the evidence for and agains there roundness of the earth than the media is about almost anything it reports on.
No, reporters are dumb, too. Certainly legal reporters are incapable of understanding very simple court decisions. Do you remember when at least one media outlet reported that the Supreme Court had overturned Obama care, because it was NG under the Commerce Clause, even though it was well known that the there were two alternative ways the government could win? Then there was the NPR (or maybe local public radio guy) who nodded along when his guest said the Iran nuclear deal must really be about oil, because "why else would the US send the Secretary of Energy to the negotiations" when the Secretary at the time was a Nobel Prize winner in physics.
One thing I've noted while dabbling in politics is that people often are unable to read political statements exactly as they are written, even though often many aides pore over those statements in great detail to deliver exactly a certain message down to very forms of words.
To give some simple examples,
A politician says "At this point I don't see myself doing X..." and, a few months later, does X. They have not lied at any point; they indeed didn't do it at that point, but at a whole another point, after considering that the situation has changed enough.
A politician says "It is my belief that in a few months we'll be in a situation where it's safe enough to do Y...", but in a few months time, Y is not done. They have not lied at any point; they described a belief they had. A belief does not have to realize itself.
These are probably not particularly good examples of what I'm thinking about, but then again it's late here.
Why not censor stuff if a prediction market classifies it as misleading? I.e. if they read a randomly selected other article on this topic, theres an x% chance theyd change their minds. I could imagine that giving a high number in cases where theres a single fairly important piece of missing context like your vaccine example.
Because you're motivating manipulation of the market? If something has real outcomes, there is incentive to manipulate it. And if there is manipulation you've lost the point of a prediction market (and in this case I can't see how you'd short the manipulation to make a profit, since the result is being manipulated not just a prediction).
I'm trying to model your intended audience (my outgroup) and I don't think this fully addresses their concerns. I "think" they would view it as...prioritizing an abstract process of arriving at the truth at the expense of real life consequences
Using your example of the NYT/Infowars discussion on racial disparities in policing, while an abstract debate to arrive at the proper context for these facts might be ideal, in the reality they live in, racial disparities in policing result in many dead African Americans every year. As such, any discussion of abstract truth values must be weighed against the loss of life of African Americans and the reporting of any responsible journalist must weigh these tradeoffs.
Your article feels like it takes as an assumption that seeking the truth is the highest value, which I'm not sure your intended audience/my outgroup would agree to. I model them as responding that they like truth but not at the cost of real human lives. Besides, I think they're confident they have the truth, they cannot imagine any circumstances under which anything from Infowars would ever convince them, and so they're not even trading off discovering the truth vs real human lives but trading off the approved process of discovering the truth vs real human lives.
And, while I don't agree with them because I obviously think my outgroup are deluded fools, I'm not sure this logic is wrong. There are certainly theoretical circumstances in which we would absolutely worry more about the practical consequences of doing something vs discovering the truth at any cost. And I can certainly model a NYT editor, within his own deluded mental model, legitimately struggling with this tradeoffs.
You have a great point. I think the disagreement comes down to different priors on the fundamental value of truth. Not the value of knowing truth, but of the truth itself.
If you think the truth is fundamentally good, then knowing more of it is better.
But if you think that some aspects of the truth really are fundamentally awful and bad, it is then only reasonable to want to keep some aspects of the truth covered up or just not talked about.
“The problem of racial disparities in policing is too urgent for us to figure out whether there are racial disparities in policing.”
Seems like a textbook example of assuming the question.
Looks like Maxwell here has the right of it in responding to Wooly's original comment. There is absolutely nothing even remotely similar to a conflict between valuing life and valuing Truth going on in this discussion, it is all a question of where people are choosing to focus their attention. For instance, the greatest loss of African American life from violence involves same race perpetrators, not police. A polemicist might assume for the sake of argument that anyone distracting from this by discussing police violence is doing so out of a callous disregard for the lives of Black Folk in order to score points in a political debate, perhaps because of personal bias against police after getting too many speeding tickets. Would that be true? No of course not. It has nothing to do with disregard for life it has to do with the fact that people don't choose their field of vision, it is assigned to them by the media they are exposed to over the previous course of life.
This feels, perhaps not unfair, but certainly not how my outgroup models it. It's less about absolute, binary truth than weighing probabilities and tradeoffs.
For example, we're never 100% sure of the safety of any new medical drug. How could we be? Clinical testing of humans is inherently limited, as is our ability to judge long-term impacts. Where we draw the line on when we're appropriately certain of a new medical drug's safety for general distribution is a matter of intense debate with massive real world consequences, see the FDA.
Once debate of that topic loops back into real impacts, it's much harder to weigh those consequences. Take the Covid vaccine. Would it have been worth delaying it another three months for more testing and more certainty? Would it have been better to release it six months earlier with more limited testing? Public debate and perception certainly had massive consequences for people's usage, with measurable consequences in terms of deaths and suffering.
If my outgroup is 99% confident in something that involves real people dying, I understand why they wouldn't want to undercut current solutions just to get 99.9% confident.
Can you elaborate on which part feels unfair and can you be more specific about who this out-group is? Some antecedents are missing.
Also is there a reason you are no longer using the racial violence example?
it's unfair in the sense you're presenting a dilemma between 0% knowledge vs 100% knowledge. but in the minds of wooly's outgroup, the dilemma is between 99% knowlege vs 100% knowledge. there's a tradeoffs to investing in knowledge-utilization vs knowledge-acquisition.
before the outgroup could be convinced that the pursuit of truth might be worthwhile, their trust in infowars would need to be undermined. He mentioned infowars, so i assume the outgroup is republicans.
EDIT: but he also mentions NYT, so i have no idea tbh.
Yeah I had trouble with his wording. I didn't present any dilemma about knowledge, and rather was saying his setting up an antagonism between knowledge and life was nonsense.
> The problem of racial disparities in policing is too urgent for us to figure out whether there are racial disparities in policing.
this was the comment being called unfair. it's weighing knowledge vs action, not allocation of knowledge. i suspect you think his complaint of unfairness was in reply to you, rather than in reply to Maxwell E.
Sorry for the delay.
You may consider my outgroup to be the "woke" writ large. I assume Scott's writing is to convince liberals and the left to push back against growing online censorship. To convince people, you need to understand their internal thought process and feelings. And I'm concerned because I don't think Scott's article here fully address their internal thought process.
I've deviated off the racial violence example because, well, it's very CW and that tends to make discussion difficult. Instead, I'm trying to find examples where Maxwell or you could feel something similar to what liberals and leftists feel. So, for example, when Maxwell responds that they're "assuming the question", imagine we're working in a factory where one person dies every day from a mechanical failure. We're confident that we've found the problem but when we take it to upper management to get approval to fix it, there's some guy who keeps saying that the evidence isn't conclusive enough, we need to gather more data. That's defensible for awhile but at some point the additional data isn't really telling us anything and we just need to implement the fix.
I think this is how the "woke" would view this. The advantage of open debate is it's ability to determine the truth but at some point all "reasonable" people know what needs to be done and further debate is detrimental to the actual task of solving the problem.
Which, to be clear, I sympathize with. The goal of public policy isn't to have interesting debates, it's to improve society. An 80% solution implemented today is better than a 90% solution a year from now. I get this vibe and I think anyone who has done practical work gets it as well.
So, generally, I think the "woke" view racial policing this way. All "reasonable" people know what the problem is, "racism", and know the solution, "awareness and broad cultural anti-racism", backed up by legal and administrative penalties as necessary. Every day this is delayed equals dead black people.
And I think Maxwell and/or you and/or others could get this. I'm not saying it's correct, I'm extremely confident the "woke" are wrong, but I do think this is how the woke internally perceive it. If you want to persuade people, as I "think" Scott was trying, you need to correctly model their internal mind. I don't think Scott did, I think he's making an appeal to truth discovery which the "woke" will perceive as nitpicking while real people are dying.
Is the premise even true? Scott doesn't actually quote anyone who says that police shootings "must be racially motivated" on the basis of a raw disparity in police shooting deaths. Here are two NYT articles I found on a quick search that make basically the same point Scott made about black people encountering police more often:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/opinion/redlining-systemic-racism.html
I'm in your outgroup and think your model is wrong. I don't think it's a common view that we should try to suppress the fact that police encounter black people more often. There are disagreements about interpretation and significance.
These represent a minority view, especially McWhorter who is essentially a conservative by 2022 liberal standards.
At the very least, "more encounters with police" is an absolute minority view amongst BLM supporters and one which will almost certainly get you you called "racist"
Yes, McWhorter is a conservative by 2022 liberal standards, who often says stuff that provokes left-liberals. And the NYT hired him. Which seems pretty good evidence NYT editors do not believe that free discussion of racial disparities in police shootings must be suppressed for fear of discovering some harmful truth. .
Is this missing the entire point of the article ? the NYT never (or rarely) actually says "Police *Must* be racially motivated to kill blacks", it just heavily implies it. You, me, or Scott will never catch the NYT saying it outloud, they are very careful not to, perhaps even throwing the occasional "Maaaaaaaaaaybe the data is against us" from time to time by the occasional heretic.
It's a motte-and-bailey where the bailey is never explicitly articulated.
So when Scott says "NYT claims police shootings must be racially motivated" he doesn't actually mean that literally?
Yeah I do find Scott's post unclear so maybe I am missing the point. As I said in another comment, the infowars claim that covid vaccines cause miscarriages seems just straightforwardly wrong and not merely an example of missing context. So when an article says there's a racial disparity in police shooting victims, and this is both true and relevant to the article, but it doesn't get into the debate over cause, that doesn't seem very similar. Especially when the paper also publishes articles that do go into that debate.
This may be correct, but if it is, why is it so important for the writers of these pieces to try to use the language of science? Why do they seek out scientific papers to support their truth? Why, to take an extreme example, are there people trying to equate the status of critical race theory with the theory of evolution? These aren't people setting aside the ideal of truth as the highest authority, but rather they are seeking to use that truth to support their preferred narrative, which is essentially emotional (as is that of their outgroup most likely). For all this is a huge bias, they are still attached to the idea of science as a determinator of truth, even if their actual behaviours may fail to meet the scientific ideal (and in that respect, I'd ask whose behaviours do?).
If you sacrifice the truth, how reliably do you think you can save lies? Your beliefs about how many lives are saved vs lost could be false.
Truth matters.
The media's promotion of Black Lives Matter in 2015-2016 and then again in 2020-2022 helped get thousands of incremental blacks murdered by other blacks and thousands of incremental blacks killed in car crashes.
This is one of the more important findings in the social sciences in recents years, but in the 18 months since this pattern was discovered, the New York Times has not seen fit to print it.
Sure, and that's a fair way to judge relative harmfulness but I think Scott isn't targeting the person who is willing to admit there are significant costs but it's still worth it. Rather, the person who insists that of course we respect free speech but we are just cutting out a small obviously valueless piece.
I mean, I think your response also demonstrates that any attempt to limit the harmful speech:
1) Has a massive chance of getting it wrong. In practical terms what matters is how this affects actual actions and votes and it's super easy for the effect of limiting harmful speech to be worse than the speech.
2) Is going to limit the ability to make valid points on some issues. For instance, that line won't distinguish between the research findings showing that the racial disparity in police stops tends to disappear when one moves to actual shootings (agree or not it's reputable research from major universities...I haven't read it carefully to know) and other kinds of speech with harmful effect.
You could still say it's worth it but that's a different argument.
“What is contextually relevant” is a value judgement. Absent shared values, we can’t agree on what reality looks like even if we both claim to value seeing reality accurately, since we will disagree on which parts of reality are worth taking a closer look at.
I’m not sure that’s all. If you consistently make an honest attempt at presenting a broad enough and balanced context you could theoretically gain a good reputation. Maybe that could be called a hack to create a shared value „honest attempt at truth“ that has the potential to draw in lots of people.
From my German perspective it seems that this was the case for roughly all major „respectable“ newspapers roughly 10-15 years ago (I cannot seriously report on earlier times due to being too young then).
But it has completely disintegrated on all sides since then and we are back to your post.
"This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars ; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
No. It's worse. Infowars is known as a right-biased, partisan publication, and proud of it. Anyone who is not a magatard would be skeptical from the get go, if they ever went to the site. These people are convenient hobgoblin to the easily frightened -- but they have no levers of power. But the NYT and Scientific American still, (still!), insist on their objectivity and reasoned analysis, and their narratives drive debate among our oh-so-educated "elite". I find that much more a mortal, than venial, sin, when the implications of that are considered.
To be more specific, the EEG study is intended to lead to throwing even more money we don't have
into the bottomless maw of the "War on Poverty". And the disparity of women in STEM (or any other real or imagined disparity) can only lead to a lowering of standards or "talent", to use their quaint term. The people reading those publications can actually make that happen.
What's really scary is that both of those are ferociously scrubbing off any patina of respectability and objectivity they have left. Who are we supposed to be believe?
Besides you, of course.
Wow! It’s so refreshing to read a thoughtful, balanced commentary. Thank you.
I'm not sure I agree. I guess it partly depends on your definition of lying or your definition of "very rarely". Even if you don't consider lying by omission to be a form of lying, it seems to be that the media lies (as in intentionally says something they know to be false) pretty often. It's not something I have quantified, so I couldn't give you a figure such as "average number of false claims stated on the top 100 most read newspapers in the world per day". Anecdotally, I can say that I read/watch a decent amount of content related to media criticism and my recollection is that at least once a week I learn about a case of a major media outlet lying about something that I consider to be significant.
People have touched on it elsewhere but one way in which flagrant lies end up in the media all the time is the practice of uncritically repeating obvious lies from "official" sources. "White house spokesmen said earlier this week that..." Or my favorite "Anonymous officials within the intelligence community have reported..." Sure the journalist themselves didn't technically lie, they just repeated a lie verbatim that they could have debunked in 5 minutes if they wanted, or which came from a source with a poor track record.
They still didn’t technically lie - which is precisely Scott’s point, isn’t it?
What you and Scott are describing is nonetheless the major reason behind distrust in media. The bigger problem seems to be that many(?) choose to only distrust one part of the media, while at the same time there is no good „fallback media“ that are making an honest attempt most of the time. At least that’s my impression.
You're absolutely right, but I wrote my comment because I do believe that there are many cases where the journalists themselves lie without outsourcing it to someone else. I would say it's more common than what Scott thinks.
Examples?
Applies more widely than the media. Those with power have things they don't like to say, and forms of words that are acceptable or unacceptable for reasons that are only tenuously connected to any form of morality. Magic spells are real - if you know the right incantations, you can access hidden knowledge, and gain power over others
Magic spells are also useless unless they are precisely correct, and they are gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) changing the whole time.
Some of the most profound and complex insights into modern society can be summarised as "the thing is, we're ruled by powerful wizards".
I worked on misinformation at Facebook and I can confirm that we pretty much never saw outright "unquestionably false" content, but instead just a huge ton of "deliberately misrepresenting things to push an agenda" content. Indeed pretty much all "politics" or "social issues" content that goes viral on social media is misleading in some way.
Ironically misinformation is itself something the media misrepresents.
Has your team ever labeled any misleading pro-liberal orthodoxy content as misinformation?
Yes. The Dispatch and CheckYourFact are right-leaning fact checkers that are part of the Facebook fact checking program and they will flag pro-liberal misinfo. However there probably is a left-bias in fact checking. This is partly driven by the difficulty in finding right leaning fact checkers that don't provoke media outrage (there was outrage about CheckYourFact). The team does try hard to be politically neutral, but of course the employee base is left-leaning and so that can distort one's view of what it means to be neutral.
That said, as Scott points out, fact checking isn't actually that effective because the vast majority of misleading content isn't sufficiently "lying" to get labelled and taken down.
Can we take this a step further and simply say that the data is meaningless without knowing *in detail* what it represents? The vast majority of stats in news reads like "Look at how big this number is! We won't bore you with what it actually means, but it's surprising and scary, so why don't you be a good little consumer and post about it to everyone you know?"
On a more constructive note, with how complex the world is, and how most people have lives to lead outside of sleuthing through the news, how would you signal boost sources which try to take a more neutral, informative view? Whatever people have been doing the last few decades doesn't seem to have produced very useful news sources.
i don't think the problem is ultimately tractable. but i wouldn't mind if a catchy platitude like "data only disproves" were popularized to the same extent as "correlation is not causation".
Why doesn't the first example count as a completely false claim? If you say "vaccines cause miscarriages" and this is not correct, that seems like a "completely false thing" and not just lacking context. The NYT EEG article for example does not seem similar in this regard--it makes clear it's a finding from one study and not established fact.
Well, actually...
Fever, especially during the first trimester of pregnancy, might cause miscarriages and/or birth defects. There doesn't seem to be universal agreement one way or another, but it's a possibility.
Some vaccines cause fever.
“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
William Blake
I’d be willing to bet that on a wide variety of facts I care about and think should be widely known, NYT readers will know these facts in far greater proportion than infowars readers, and that this is because NYT is more capable of providing relevant context and information to its readers, so I’d also be willing to bet on causal interventions in this space showing NYT is better.
I’d be willing to bet that on a wide variety of facts I care about and think should be widely known, NYT readers will know these facts in far greater proportion than infowars readers, and that this is because NYT is more capable of providing relevant context and information to its readers, so I’d also be willing to bet on causal interventions in this space showing NYT is better.
You posted this comment twice.
oops!
A much more blatant example of the media maligning is the repeated hypothesis that "immunity debt" is causing an upsurge in RSV, Influenza, Strep A and scarlet fever (in UK).
Immunity Debt was never a thing before COVID. They just latched onto this "idea" since it was a lot easier to continue the messaging that COVID is no longer worth worrying about.
What the science does seem to show is COVID causing immune system dysfunction (T cell dysfunction) for a significant percentage of people. If true, I suppose that's not very convenient.
I'm the opposite of a Covid minimizer (fully vaxxed, mask everywhere and continue to substantially curtail activities to try to put it off as long as possible, and very concerned about long Covid). But FWIW, the recent discussions I've been following seem to mostly run against T-cell problems from Covid as being well established or a likely primary cause for long Covid.
E.g., this thread and linked article: https://twitter.com/benmazer/status/1605789758591889408?s=46&t=mHtEKRKRAEBB_nsBbb26fA
Thanks for the link to Ben Mazer's thread. I had not seen it. There seems to be a war going on regarding the effects to T-cells. Here's another competing twitter thread regarding COVID vs immune system: https://twitter.com/jeffgilchrist/status/1605958004163084292?s=20&t=QptwXLOsFzttWQ4jWcLndw
To be honest, I'd be happy to know that there was some good news, but the possibility of things getting worse given how many mutating copies are out there is huge. Vaccines are pretty much worthless against preventing infection with XBB1.5 and once it's in you're playing Russian Roulette with your DNA. Maybe you'll be one of those that isn't affected much. And, then there's the long list of hazard ratios showing infection is just not good, in general.
Thanks for pushing back on the T-cell stuff with Ben's tweet. I read the entire thing and think the studies he was referencing were not quite as interesting as the studies in Jeff Gilchrist's thread, but it's obvious I have no idea which study to believe here.
> Immunity Debt was never a thing before COVID.
Or maybe it just wasn't discussed in the media because there was no reason to.
I would argue that it is a lie when you are presenting yourself as a Real Media Source, and therefore as a source of Real Information, when you repeat something without fact-checking it, or when you say something and fail to consider any sort of alternative hypothesis or contradictory hypothesis.
This is, in fact, taught to journalists - you need to look for alternative narratives/all sides to a story - but they fail to apply it in practice, and oftentimes, when they DO apply it, they do a horrible job and just present it as a he said/she said without any additional or useful context.
So yeah, I'd say this actually does qualify as "lying", or at the very least as spreading misinformation, which I think most people would say constitutes "lying".
Sadly, I think the biggest problem with journalism is that journalism is a profession that people are trained in specifically. The problem is that journalism doesn't give you subject expertise, and as we know from the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who lack subject matter expertise cannot actually distinguish it in others.
I'd be careful saying "rarely lies". There is pressure to be minimally blatant while still conveying one's preferred narrative, and that means that "distortions" and "omissions of context" are more common, yes.
But that does not mean that people will not outright lie if they have to and if they feel like they can get away with it. The moment you think it's safe to rule out "outright lies" is the moment outright lying becomes a viable option.
Something can be factually and demonstrably untrue, and the moment enough people will allow the required amount of willful blindness to be seen as "normal", you will (and do) get outright lies.
I don't think I agree with the conclusion of this article.
If the outcome of posting an article is a more misinformed populace, I don't really care that there are technical semi-truths buried in the article. The headline and the narrative that emerges forth from that headline is **significantly** more relevant than the actual text of the article itself.
When thinking about why misinformation is so bad, I think about people I have met that tell me that 5G is killing birds, or think that microchips are in vaccines and Bill Gates is out to do nefarious things.
I think an honest accounting of the last decade should yield a more bearish view on the efficacy of the marketplace of ideas.
We can and should have an interesting debate about whether misinformation should be censored. But it is mere pretending to act like our world is not steeped deep in a stew of outright lies and nonsense.
The press is broken. Is there anyway to fix it?
Find a way for the press to be incentivized to get the facts right and state them clearly.
So, no then.
4th estate : partisanism :: prediction-markets : match-fixing
I'd love to see a media outlet that made public bets and paid off on them.
Those are called hedge funds.
What we think of as positive journalistic ethics only existed for a brief period in the 20th century when the local monopoly on advertising revenues made newsrooms completely insulated from economic pressure.
I don't know if that can be brought back, but if it can, removing the media from profit incentive is probably part of it.
Were they good at getting the facts right then, or was it just harder for people who noticed the facts being wrong to point it out in public? 40+ years ago, my dad described that he'd been involved in a couple events that were reported in newspapers, and that the papers had gotten basically everything important about the event wrong.
I really like the point you are making. However, you are giving too much credit to the media. For example, either Infowars is stupid (they don't understand what they did, in good but stupid faith), or they are lying, because they know that their headline states an untruth: all that the "factual" -and context free- data shows is that "... alarming number of stillbirths... " preceded by "COVID shot". You could not nit-pick that as mis-contextualized spread of incorrect and dangerous misinformation, but neither could they have written their designed to be alarmist article.
Same goes for NYT.
There is an important distinction between lying and deceptive/misleading statements. Lying occurs when someone says or writes something that they believe is not true. And indeed, I think I agree with Scott's claim that the media very rarely explicitly lies.
However, I think the media is often intentionally deceptive - i.e., presenting information in ways that they know will lead to misunderstandings of reality. When Colgate ran an add saying that 80% of dentists recommend their product, they knew that the average consumer would imagine that dentists PREFER Colgate over other brands... whereas, in reality, dentists were asked to name ALL toothpastes they recommend (https://bit.ly/3BS7zBt). So, while Colgate didn't lie, they were being deceptive. Similarly, when mainstream media present statistics or quote 'experts' that lead to wrongheaded conclusions (as in the examples that Scott presents), I think many of them know they are spreading biased information and misleading their readers. Or, at the least, it is 'bullshit' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit), where the journalist doesn't care about whether what they're saying is correct... as long as it gets the intended reaction. Journalists (these days?) seem closer to lawyers than to scientists. Like lawyers, they use the facts at hand to make a very partial case for their side. Unlike the ideal scientists, they are not even-handed in presenting the evidence. When people claim that "the media lies", I think it is only because the average person isn't pedantic enough to distinguish between lying and deception.
That’s an important point. I think the distinction Scott makes is like a two-dimensional matrix:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------- contains factual errors -- doesn’t contains factual errors -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
implies true conclusion ----------- ??? ----------------------------- truth -----------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
implies false conclusion --- lie/misinformation -------------- too little context -----------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
However, if we’re nitpicking anyway: I don’t think that’s what most people think of when they think of lying. As you said, lying requires a different dimension – not only factual incorrectness, but also an intent to deceive. If it turns out that police do *not* shoot more white people than black people after all, for example, this doesn’t necessarily mean Scott was lying; I’d assume he was just wrong.
And I think the difference is very important. There’s a reason for the distinction between *misinformation* and *disinformation*, with the latter intending to deceive and thus being a lie in the strict sense. If we want to promote truth, we need to know why people don’t tell it; and I think brandishing all false statements “lies” is unnecessary and even incendiary.
There’s a comment further up by a former mainstream reporter who says journalists almost never lie but outsource there lies to others like experts (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11341076). I’m not sure whether he means intentional deception, but my theory is that both journalists and experts hardly ever lie in the stricter sense. Even if they have preconceived notions which lead to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning etc., they almost always write what they believe to be true, and believe what they write. I know of a handful of cases of conscious lies, but they were either a journalist misleading the publication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_of_stories) or Russian state TV paying people to say things on camera. But these are really few and far between. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to prove intent; but perhaps it’s just because most people aren’t diehard liars.
Great points! Very insightful, and thanks for clarifying that MISinformation and DISinformation are different.
But I've become too cynical to agree with the hypothesis that: "[journalist] almost always write what they believe to be true, and believe what they write." I think that, even in the MSM, truth is often subordinated to publishing a good story that will attract readership. When the truth and a good story conflict, I think the good story wins out more than not. Thus, I think that a lot of MSM stories are 'bullshit', in the philosophical sense of the word of someone making a claim without caring about the truth of the claim. The media is a business, and it will only publish the truth to the extent that "truth sells" - i.e., to the extent that it is demanded by readers. Given that the epistemological standards of the average media consumer is low, so are the standards of the average journalist. There are some journalists whose brand is trustworthy/unbiased (e.g., Fareed Zakaria (https://adfontesmedia.com/fareed-zakaria-gps-bias-and-reliability/)... and some outlets (e.g., PBS, The Economist, Reuters, ABC News). But most people don't get their information from these sources... because their stories aren't that interesting. As my mom used to say, nothing ruins a good story like the truth.
I think we largely agree about the situation, but might or might not agree on the reasons.
Sometimes, the a good story being more important that the truth is trivial and non-controversial; "The sky is blue" is true, but not newsworthy. The more interesting cases, the ones you talk about, are if there's actually a conflict between reader demand and some kind objective importance - if, say, there was uncontroversial proof that the elections were rigged, would the NYT publish it, and why/why not?
My take is that this is purely hypothetical, since there is hardly ever uncontroversial proof. You can always find reasons to doubt the arguments, you can always seek out other experts. My personal opinion is that journalists are no more likely to do that than anyone else, including scientists who have come under attack for p-hacking and similar behavior over the past years. More to the point of our argument, I think that most of the time, *this isn't conscious behavior*. I don't think journalists think: "Oh, this expert statement means I was wrong. I'll just ask around until I can find another expert who helps me hide that". I think that, like most of us, they think: "Oh, this expert statement contradicts what I think it's true. I wonder whether the expert might be wrong after all, let me double-check with some others". The same can happen if a promising story turns out to be unremarkable - a journalist might snoop around some more to find a juicy angle.
I think no-one doubts that these things happen, and they happen all the time (and sometimes, the behavior might well be justified). The point I want to make is just that journalists rarely intentionally deceive there readers. Bias, per definition, is having skewed thought processes or beliefs, which means you are erring, not lying.
“The facts are true, the news is false.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=kbEyEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=%22the+facts+are+true+the+news+is+false%22&source=bl&ots=g1WmIZpu4O&sig=ACfU3U0taMcCLMN9DS8mc0PPzSFJFHnWHg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid0pOh0Y78AhXtpnIEHWprCVIQ6AF6BAgIEAI
I get what you’re doing but you need to be very clear about whether the following category of story is a “lie” or not:
“Anonymous source says X” where X is false and the reporter is perfectly aware that their source is using them to plant a lie that both the source and the media organization would like people to believe is true.
Technically, “a person familiar with the matter” or “an official in the agency Y” can be true characterizations of the source even when they expect that their source is planting misinformation with them.
In such a situation, what is the subjective probability with which the reporter believes the statement X is false that you would require to classify the story as “media lying”?
100%?
>=99%?
>=80%?
>=51%?
Of course it is totally different when the source is named. “Named person says X” where the reporter believes X is false is still a perfectly valid story to write, where the reporter is not lying. I am talking about the use of anonymous sources and the implicit duty a reporter has to vouch for the reliability of his anonymous sources.
And we can easily figure out which direction the spin of the context goes by looking at the voting patterns of journalists. We did this across 17 Western countries. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/new-paper-out-the-left-liberal-skew-of-western-media
No its because reality has a liberal bias
Do you agree that reporters are less willing to report a story that is evidence against their beliefs than one that is evidence for, and that most reporters have liberal beliefs? Consider the same question for professors. If you agree, it follows that your sources of information have a liberal bias, inasmuch as they funnel through reporters and professors. How then do you tell whether reality has a liberal bias or only your biased picture of reality?
Compare that to the voting patterns of their employers.
Just because there's no obvious bright-line division doesn't mean you can't draw any lines for the purposes of law or categorization.
Going 5 mph over the speed limit is the same sort of sin as going 50 mph over the speed limit, but beyond a certain point we call it "reckless driving" rather than "the thing every driver does when traffic is flowing smoothly." There's no obvious discontinuity - driving 19 mph over is only slightly less bad than 20 mph over - but the law has to draw a line *somewhere* to distinguish reckless driving from speeding, even if the exact border is somewhat arbitrary.
Similarly, there is a level of deceptiveness at which we can recognize a news source as "a tabloid rag" rather than "a respectable newspaper," and it seems useful for Twitter or other news-amplifying websites to draw a line *somewhere* when deciding what to amplify, even if the exact details of that line are somewhat arbitrary.
IMO the problem alluded to is, unlike car speeds, we can't put an objective metric on how misleading an article is, and so we can't ensure or trust that the censors aren't more lenient with the side they support.
And suppressing misleading claims (or even outright lies) in one direction but not the other can even make the average public's views *less* accurate than if we don't suppress either, as in the latter case the lies or exaggerations in each direction might cancel out each other.
A lot of things in law are subjective. Did the killer intend to kill with malice aforethought, or was it something that they did in the heat of the moment? Was the officer fearing for his life when he shot and killed the suspect, or was he just looking for an excuse to kill someone? Would a hypothetical reasonable person in the same situation have made the same decision? This is definitely vulnerable to bias - police officers can get away with a lot of crimes - but a lot of times people do come to a consensus and a jury says "Yes, that was very definitely murder and not manslaughter."
"It's subjective" doesn't mean that you should always refrain from making a judgement. Sometimes you still need to make a decision, and all you can do is pick your judges and your laws as carefully as you can and accept that sometimes they'll still get it wrong. (Twitter does sometimes get things wrong, and sometimes when they do there's a big outcry and people move to Mastodon or wherever. It's always important to remember that Twitter is not the sole judge of discourse, merely one large platform that we can choose to trust or distrust.)
I disagree that the lies will probably cancel out - there's no law that says that liars have to be equally distributed among all political stances or that all lies will be equally popular to share. Refusing to filter or fact-check anything doesn't mean that you'll end up closer to the truth than those who do, it simply means that you're adding zero information - everything you repeat is as untrustworthy as it was when you first heard it.
In some cases we need to make a decision, and have no choice but make subjective decisions. But in the case of censorship, we do have the choice of not censoring anything.
Also, some kinds of subjective decisions, such as censorship, are particularly tempting to abuse; and, in practice, as far as I can tell, policies of suppressing misinformation are abused approximately two moments after they are introduced.
(Out of your examples of subjective decisions, deciding between manslaughter and murder isn't really necessary, but I don't find it particularly problematic either, because it only affects the degree of the sentence, not that it's a crime either way.)
Excellent column!
But of course I say that since it agrees with my suspicions that media like to simplify stories to the point their editors think is important. And how reliably objective can that be?
One power of the institutional press is that it has a huge amount of leeway in determining what is considered News. For example, the name "Emmett Till" appeared fairly frequently in the New York Times in the years immediately following the black youth's murder at the hands of whites in 1955. But by 1980, "Emmett Till" was only appearing about twice per year in the NYT. In this century, however, Emmett Till news has become omnipresent, with Emmett Till's name appearing in the NYT about once per week in recent years (e.g., 50 times so far this year).
A few people get the joke: that the there's so much demand and so little supply of news of whites violently oppressing blacks that the NYT can sell more subscriptions by finding absurd excuses to constantly obsess over a murder that happened 67 years ago. But a huge number of people take it instead at at face value: that America in 2022 is plagued by whites hunting down and murdering blacks as proved by how often you read about Emmett Till in the New York Times.
> But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other.
This is itself an instance of ignoring context. I don’t think Scott really thinks InfoWars and the NYT are equally non-credible, but by referencing two single instances out of many thousands from both sources one could certainly be lead to draw that inference.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the general point about censorship, but the argument just seems like a contrived Loki’s wager vis-a-vis misinformation and deceptive reporting.
One major form of lying by omission is simply deciding what stories to cover or not cover. I think most people believe that blacks are more often shot by the police than whites, because it is *way* more common for a questionable police shooting of a black guy to make the news than an equally questionable shooting of a white guy. And this isn't exactly unreasonable, since the white guy's shooting will almost never trigger a riot or weeks of protests, but the black guy's shooting sometimes will.
When there is a widespread ideological or financial or social incentive not to report certain kinds of story, you get a file-drawer-like effect, where media all over the country independently decide not to report this kind of story, and so the public perception is that this kind of story basically never happens.
Fallacy of gray
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/fallacy-of-gray
Wronger than wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong
> But I would argue this is honest disagreement - exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas
I get the point that all censorship is an assertion of values, but does "marketplace of ideas" necessarily follow? Like, how do you reconcile that with the Toxoplasma of Rage post? It seems fairly clear that the marketplace is selecting for inflammatory bits of information missing context. Inflammatory headlines are easy to retweet. Context is not.
The premise of this post is that there is some group of censors who seek to ban, in some general way, "misinformation", which they believe that can objectively distinguish from fact. But who is this?
InfoWars was banned from most social media in 2018--but the reason given was hate speech, not "lies" or "deceptiveness."
If I go to e.g. YouTube community guidelines, they prohibit hate speech and misinformation about COVID, elections or the census. But they do not have any general policy against lying. The goal is to police a few specific areas of false claims that are seen as particularly harmful, not to provide a general solution to deceptiveness. Everyone more or less accepts that most false or misleading claims will have to be dealt with through normal discourse. Vaccine misinformation is restricted because it is seen as especially dangerous, not especially wrong. So I'm not sure what it adds to point out that there's a lot of bad information out there, in general, and censorship cannot be the solution--the censors themselves already agree.
Well...the platforms make the decision? At least in the US with relatively strong speech protections. And I didn't say (and don't believe) they always make the right choice. I'm not sure what you're looking for here.
Except hate speech is implicitly a concept defined in terms of falsity. Saying that the Chinese slaughtered millions of Europeans in secret camps is likely to be deemed hate speech. In contrast, it would be denying the Germans did so that would be deemed hate speech.
In general, we regard things that seemingly *baselessly* slander a group as hate speech. When the claims are true we draw the line quite differently. It's not an identical determination but the notion of substantial truthfulness plays a huge role.
I'm not saying truth is irrelevant. I'm saying only a narrow set of untruths are targeted, and this is by design. Alex Jones was banned for his lies, but not for being a liar as such. He was banned because the specific lies he told were seen as egregious. It would be missing the point to argue for his reinstatement by saying, well, lots of other people lie too and are tolerated.
I agree that's true but I don't think it undermines the attack on this particular defense of moderatio.n
I agree that you could formulate a different, and probably better, defense that focused on the fact that the lies were seen to be of a certain egregious kind.
However, the person Scott takes himself to be replying to feels that all the hard questions about who gets to decide what is egregious etc aren't going to be a problem because there is this easy category of misinformation we can ban where there is no danger of banning true or valuable claims.
> Except hate speech is implicitly a concept defined in terms of falsity.
How did you reach that conclusion? My impression is not that truth is considered a valid defence. E.g. politician Bertil Malmgren was sentenced for hate speech for saying that people from South Sudan have a lower IQ.
Good essay, making a powerful and important point. Well done!
Strangely, though, it doesn't feel as polished as some of your other work. It almost feels like your heart isn't *entirely* in it. That would not be surprising: I think very few of us are 100% free speech absolutists, in the sense that there can never be *any* social constraint on *any* speech at all. Most of us can think of at least a few situations where we would want social forces to suppress certain extremely malignant or dangerous speech -- whether by ostracism or even government power.
So probably the really interesting and difficult part of this, indeed the debate that has probably been going on for 40,000 years and will continue forever, is figuring out how we can determine where to draw that final bright line. You can say all kinds of weird and strange and hurtful and dangerous shit, up to this line, and no further. It would not be surprising if uncertainty over that difficult process seeped into the essay.
But if the point to be made here is that people are today flirting foolishly and dangerously with moving that line much further from really outrageous things -- "foolishly" in no small part because they are idiotically assuming the demons summned thereby will never come for *them* -- then I would entirely agree, and it's valuable to point it out in the way you have.
I think the interesting question here is why do even sources like Infowars rarely outright lie?
You might think it is because of the risk of lawsuit - and maybe that plays some role. However, defamation law is broad enough to capture comments that would reasonably lead someone to believe a defamatory claim. I mean consider the litigation against fox et al by the voting machine company.
So is the answer that it's because very few people are willing to actually lie for a non-astronomical salary? If they report true things and then twist them a bit in response to editor feedback maybe that feels ok?
Or is it because it makes it harder to convince readers they are lying? I dunno but it's an interesting question.
Because even the InfoWars people don't see themselves as evil liars I'd imagine, they think that they're on the right side and that they're playing by the same rules as everybody else.
Except we have pretty good circumstancial evidence that Jones knew full well his claims about Sandy Hook were BS or he'd not have accepted a directed verdict rather than discovery.
And it's just not plausible that quite a few people in the organization aren't aware that some things they write are just false. Indeed, if they really believed many of the things they said they'd be putting more effort into digging deeper to expose the truth.
But yes, I suspect it's still true that most people there see themselves as fighting the good fight. Maybe it's like religious belief where ppl really do believe but somehow know not to press on the hard questions. Maybe they all only write the things they do believe in, maybe they see it as a cost of doing buisnesses but I feel like it's a bit more complicated than that.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I think there is more to be explained.
Well, I can't answer for Jones, but I can think of a plausible scenario even there. Maybe at first he'd really thought that it was a hoax, then eventually the evidence mounted so high that even he was privately forced to reconsider. But he considered that a public apology on a hot topic would harm his brand/cause more than a lost lawsuit.
But he could have just shut up about it. However, in the court case they introduced traffic analysis showing that it drove a ton of traffic to his material whenever he talked about it.
I personally detest Tucker Carlson (I just disliked him until his agenda against Zelensky) but I think he ultimately believes (modulo some hyperbole etc) what he says. Maybe Jones started out that way but somewhere down the line he decided to keep saying things even he must have admitted to himself were probably wrong.
TBF I suspect he justifies this to himself by saying he's just asking questions. But that's Jones himself it doesn't necessarily tell me what's going on with his employees.
Lots of ppl would say what Jones says to be as rich as he is. The same can't be said for those who just collect a salary and it may be that they believe the material they write or maybe not...that's the question I found interesting...Jones himself gets the kind of money that I'd consider doing it.
"He could have just shut up" maybe, maybe not. https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
Sure at some level of description he didn't shut up therefore he couldn't (eg given all facts about everything that will happen). However, what is meant by a claim like that is really: the choice to not shut up was within the realm of choices we traditionally regard as voluntary (roughly tracking the things that we can punish or reward to change outcomes).
>However, defamation law is broad enough to capture comments that would reasonably lead someone to believe a defamatory claim. I mean consider the litigation against fox et al by the voting machine company.
No, the Dominion vs Fox lawsuit is over factually false statements - stuff like "Dominion voting machines had a secret algorithm that flipped votes to Biden to steal the election."
I expect there's going to be some debate over *who* did the defaming - Sidney Powell said a lot of nonsense, and Fox knew it was bullshit but still gave her a platform to repeat that nonsense unchallenged, but does that mean Fox *endorsed* what she said? - but whoever it was is in trouble for actual lies rather than implications.
If Powell had limited herself to things like "a lot of votes suddenly showed up for Biden overnight, and I think that's suspicious" they probably wouldn't be in this situation.
"Hands up don't shoot" is an obvious lie repeated by every "reputable" news org in the country and , and it wasn't some minor unimportant detail.
It was a true fact that a witness reported that. The witness turned out to be lying.
Why isn't there a website that basically aggregates context checking for all these newspapers so it's possible to at least get a sense of the big things left out?
The claim that Infowars isn't really different than the NYT is undermined by the fact that Jones choose to accept a directed verdict rather than allow discovery. Almost certainly that's because there were a bunch of emay showing he and his staff knew claims were substantially false (eg they knew the person quotes was lying even if they did say it) but published anyway.
I think the stronger point to make here is that there isn't any easy rule which let's you distinguish misinformation from generic failure to provide context and that any attempt to apply such a rule would be intensely marred by partisan bias.
Indeed, this argument is so strong exactly because even with Infowars it's hard to point to what exactly they do that's different. However, I don't think that means we should believe that they aren't really any different than the NYT.
Yes, they both have stories to tell and views they want you to reach but my sense is that (and it's a difference in degree) the NYT for the most part doesn't try to decieve you but is simply often lazy or lets the reporters bias seep through while Infowars is pushing things it knows to be false.
>Yes, they both have stories to tell and views they want you to reach but my sense is that (and it's a difference in degree) the NYT for the most part doesn't try to decieve you but is simply often lazy or lets the reporters bias seep through while Infowars is pushing things it knows to be false.
And the NYT is incomparably powerful compared to infowars and is used as a "reputable" source of information and truth by almost everyone with power in American society. "Better than infowars" isn't fucking good enough.
Sure, I wish it was better too. But until the news industry cuts the excess papers made irrelevant by the internet there is huge pressure on profits. If you want it to get better sooner you really need a website that can provide relevant context in a reasonably nuetral way in real time (so it could easily be checked when you read the news). Absent that the incentives just don't favor taking more time.
Great post! I remember a while ago when your survey came out and one of the results were that many readers agreed your posts' quality had recently decreased.
In my opinion, these last few months have had multiple great posts, the kind of insight porn I keep coming back to ACX for. So I just wanted to mention it.
I really don't care if infowars lies or not.
The NYT is the harvard of newspapers. It is the absolute authority in US media. It has more power than almost any institution in the US, and a *majority* of people on the left believe that is a reputable source that prints not only things that are true, but accurately captures all true, relevant things that happen. If some unimportant college in rural west virginia has a racially discriminatory admissions policiy, it shouldn't be talked about next to Columbia explicitly stating that they discriminate against asian applicants due to them having privilege. If you're a tagged authority in American society, then you should be held to an incomparably higher standard.
So... to put it in abstract terms, in the presence of enough noise, a filter becomes a signal generator?
Am I missing something? That very first infographics _is_ an outright lie - the deaths are _not _ "attributed to" vaccines, that a blatant falsehood and a misrepresentation of the facts. They _could_ have decided to be merely weasely and say "associated with", but they didn't.
So it's a really weird illustration about "not lying"?
I don’t think you’ve missed anything.
It isn't just about misrepresenting facts of a story in itself. A media outlet, or anyone for that matter, can also mislead by deliberate omission, simply not reporting a story that doesn't fit their agenda.
An outlet can also attempt to downplay the prominence of a story, by tucking it away unobtrusively in some subsection instead of on the main or front page. For web sites, an outlet can also vary the time, if at all, that the story is prominent.
In the UK, for example, the BBC are often blatantly guilty of all these tricks, especially in their reporting or non-reporting of crimes committed by minorities, and I'm sure it works the same in other countries.
Regarding Covid specifically, I can never understand all the hoo-hah over jabs. If someone (over 60 say) has a one in 3000 chance of dying if they catch Covid and one in 3000000 of dying from adverse effects of a vaccine, then it seems a no-brainer on the balance of probabilities to chance having the vaccine, especially as Covid can have long-term effects in someone even if it does not kill them, whereas I'm not aware that is so with vaccines.
That said, I would agree the probabilities shift in opposite directions the younger someone is, perhaps to the extent that a 20 year old would be better advised to skip the vaccine and take their chances with Covid instead!
The 'half-truth' - understood through means of the kinds of examples this article cites, where omission (strategic or incidental) is far more widespread than outright mendacity - is a much better heuristic for the average newsreader trying to remain informed while retaining a healthy epistemological scepticism, than are canards, old or new, about 'fake news' or the supposed tendency of one side of the political aisle to lie or dissemble more than the other.
That's because those canards make a lot of points of contention in news discourse seem like differences of interpretation, where they can often be traced to basic technical errors/defects in the reporting itself.
This is not a "nitpicky technical point", in my opinion. 15 years ago, your conclusion was the point that should have ended further discussion. And I would still have agreed strongly as recently as just two or three years ago. Today, however, this is exactly where the line gets blurry, and we need to put in some extra effort to draw new lines and solve difficult problems.
There has always been a legitimate discussion to be had on where the limits of free press / free speech should be drawn. We already agree that defamation and outright fraud are out of bounds. Importantly, however, the government wasn't supposed to censor anything prior to publication. They typically just trust publications to use their best judgment, and expect them to face the consequences if they cross the line.
In other areas, no one would bat an eye at prior constraint (whether it was strictly constitutional or not). Promoting child abuse or disseminating highly sensitive information about nuclear installations are pretty clear-cut cases where everyone would be upset if there were *not* some kind of prior constraint. Not to say that people agree on what that means in the real world (as illustrated by discussions about "groomers" and Snowden), but there are cases where the damage done by producing or publishing the information is irreversible and so significant as to justify prior constraint on publishing.
Today we're in an era of instant worldwide reach, deep fakes, smart bots, algorithmic manipulation, etc. … These are all force multipliers that may put a lot of information into the category of "significant and irreversible damage". At the very least, it makes misinformation a much bigger deal than it used to be. And so, more of it should be part of a discussion of whether censorship is called for, and if so, when and which kind.
Add to that, enforcement is increasingly privatized and democratized. Decisions are no longer taken by a few powerful editors and judges and top-level government bureaucrats with some idealistic telos, but are outsourced to mid-level managers with blunt tools and tech executives who are mostly in it for the money, not the principles. The new gatekeepers aren't bound by constitutional rules about what the state can do, or by the rules of editorial conduct that newspapers and network TV had to abide by, but are making up their own rules as they go.
So, I no longer think we can just point to our old rule of thumb, that all censorship is necessarily arbitrary and subjective, and therefore undemocratic and ominous. We need new rules, and we probably need to do a lot of talking and changing of minds to come up with good ones.
Personally, I think and hope much of the answer lies in better technology and better regulation of it, and as little as possible lies in censoring outlets, stories or individuals. But reasonable people will disagree. And that, of course, is the most important thing, that we need to preserve.
Is it possible that nobody answers because you seem to be asking in bad faith and with a closed mind? Otherwise, you might find much of the answer if you re-read my comment.
Most importantly: My main point is that I don’t claim to have the answer, but think we need to be open to changing our minds and coming up with new rules. So asking a question I can’t answer isn’t really a strong counterargument.
Police shootings/killings have been politicized and practically nothing can be trusted. Roland Fryer has debunked some, but your statistic keeps popping up - there are 5 times as many whites!! Where do most shootings happen? Urban areas. Are urban area demographics fairly represented by the US average? No. That is important context.
In the machine learning and AI era, when the public is starting to understand the power of data, it is frustrating to see the increasing number of (deliberate) misinterpretations of statistics. As it becomes mainstream, something should be done about the general public understanding of statistics and how surveys/studies are done.
Here's a wonderful example. New Yorker music critic completely misleads about a cancel culture case -- a professor's tenure is threatened, there's a petition to discipline him and to shut down the magazine he edits. And the New Yorker is like "wow, why do people think this is *cancel culture* -- it's just Outgroup hysteria." But in a crucial sentence, they insert a semi-colon so that they technically avoid a lie! It's an amazing performance... (and one thinks, if people will lie about something so small...)
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/music-theory-narrative-constriction-and-the-fix-were-in
I feel like the issue we're skirting round is something like "How can we the the epistemically-virtuous-elites-who-are-correct-about-everything transmit our correct views to the epistemically-un-virtuous-masses, when Joe Rogan and Fox News are filling their heads with nonsense and ruining democracy?"
And, even assuming we really are the epistemically-virtuous-elites-who-are-correct-about-everything and not the NYT or the anarcho-primitivist or whoever, I don't see how that's ever going to be possible given that being epistemically un-virtuous means you can't distinguish correct things from incorrect ones, so they won't be able to tell a reliable source of information from an unreliable one.
Maybe you can tinker around the edges, but fundamentally the only way to help people believe more correct things and fewer incorrect one is to improve them epistmeically, or have someone who is more epistemically virtuous dictate what they should think.
And as I always (and repeatedly say) ask when topics like censorship come up: “would you want this power in the hands of your enemies?”
I mean that's just not a very good point, in a form of a gotcha, and it's a real chore to explain why this isn't relevant. Not surprising why people tend not to engage with it.
No I would not want to have this power in the hands of my enemies. But if we assume that this is enough to declare that such power shouldn't exist than we have successfully disproved police, army, government and all kind of other moder day institutions.
Yes, of course, there is a cost of having any kind of power. There are always risks that this power would be used for evil means. Sometimes these risks are acceptable and sometimes they are not. This requires a cost-benefit analysis, a single gotcha question doesn't help to distinguis between the two cases.
On another hand, I've been banned on a Russian discord server for being pro-lgbt. And this sucks, but it's a fare game. Some power will inevitably be in the hands of the people who are wrong and bad. Thankfully, there seems to be some kind of progress in this regard. A thousand years ago this power as well as all other kind of powers was in the hands of the followers of the non-existing Gods. Nowdays it's somewhat in the hands of people who want the society to be nicer to minorities. We seem to be on the right track.
Sigh. As expected, you just tried to reaffirm the already established conclusion without any attempt to understand what exactly I had meant. This is another reason people may prefere not to answer your questions, seeing how much good faith engagement you show.
Anyway, for the sake of better faith readers, I'll try to explain once more. I didn't pick a side by random and then started endorsing it no matter what. I tried to figure out the merits of all sides and in the process have slowly arrived to the beliefs and alignments that I have now. And, coincidentally, the majority of intelligent and well meaning people also arrived somewhat here as well as most advanced and successful societies enlarge.
Now, I do not think that marketplace of ideas is omnipotent, otherwise, I wouldn't be arguing in favour of regulating it. But I still believe that it somewhat works. And thus, the fact that society arrived to this point means something. The side that is winning after thousands of years of memetic selection has to be onto something, regardless of whether it's mine or not. And the fact that I also had the possibility to validate its reasoning with my own intelligence is just a cherry on top.
"I didn't pick a side by random and then started endorsing it no matter what. I tried to figure out the merits of all sides and in the process have slowly arrived to the beliefs and alignments that I have now."
The problem with this optimistic view of the situation is that all of us are heavily dependent on second hand information. I doubt there is anyone who actually knows whether climate change exists, is anthropogenic, and has serious bad effects, even a professional in the field, entirely on the basis of his own first hand observations.
So your "tried to figure out the merits of all sides," although the best one can do, risks resulting in your being persuaded of false beliefs that are widely held in the circles you mostly move in. Dan Kahan has some interesting results which seem to show that someone is more likely to agree with his side's view of an issue the more intellectually sophisticated he is, whether that means believing in evolution/global warming/... or not believing in it.
"The side that is winning after thousands of years of memetic selection has to be onto something"
Does that only count the last few decades in western countries? If not, it is evidence that the suppression of homosexuality, traditional views of sex and marriage and gender roles, hostility to the children of unmarried mothers, are all good ideas that we should emulate, or at least was until very recently. They, after all, were winning after thousands of years of memetic selection.
Religion too.
This is much less of a problem than people tend to think. It reminds me of the old philosophical confusion about our inability to be truly confident in our knowledge. No we can't be fully confident, but neither we actually need to for practical reasons. As long as we can expect that our perception is more than less correlated with the reality it's fine.
Same here. As long as majority of evidence isn't counterfeited and majority of experts are not part of the conspiracy we can do pretty well by just accepting current scientific consensus as our best guess. This is tremendous amount of trust. Much more than I actually do, as I have curriousity and ability to verify some things. But even this lazy epistemological strategy is solid.
But wouldn't this strategy lead us to believe in all kind of wrong things if we applied it 1000 years ago? Yep. Because it was a 1000 years ago. This is exactly the point that I'm making. Progress is going on. That's why we can be somewhat optimistic about our knowledge. And if literal burning people alive for saying things not endoursed by the church didn't prevent our progress back then, than having some kind of policies against misinformation now, won't as well.
The point is precisely to get people to get people to think about it!
Most just poke along “anything I dislike is obviously bad and should be stopped” without thinking further about “by whom?” or “how do we make sure this doesn’t turn into a monster that eats me too - is that even possible?”
Maybe the thing should be a thing but only with good guardrails (like the police). Maybe the thing can’t be expected to be tame / even handed enough to be trusted to exist. But “people being wrong on the internet must be stopped” (or whatever) doesn’t comprise a well-thought-through policy
> The point is precisely to get people to get people to think about it!
I think the more straightforward question akin to: "Okay I see your point, what's your actual plan of implementation that would allow this kind of free speech restriction to get most of the gains and evade all the disadvantages?" - would be much more successful in this regard.
> Most just poke along “anything I dislike is obviously bad and should be stopped”
Not sure whether it's a fair characterisation. And people are allowed to have preferences without a ready policy proposal that would allow to satisfy them. But in general, I agree that public discourse around the topic can only benefit from actually trying to explore possible strategies and doing cost-benefit analysis.
Not often enough. Sometimes I get people to engage and then I can draw them into conversation about how, if they want (eg) internet censorship, it might be done more “safely”.
But sometimes you just have enemies, you know.
Also, see my comment beneath the other one beneath yours
Does me declining this power have meaningful impact over the probability of my enemies getting this power?
Nitpick incoming:
"It said that only 36% of economists on a survey supported school vouchers - and if even economists don’t support a free market policy, surely that policy must be very stupid indeed. Not mentioned in the article: only 19% of economists in the same survey opposed school vouchers. The majority described themselves as uncertain"
Do the pro and con groups include some uncertains? Otherwise seems like only 45% were uncertain—a plurality, but not a majority.
Pregnant women regularly get both the flu shot and TDaP, one can only hope in greater numbers than those for new vaccines that still haven't reported any data from their own pregnancy exposure databases, despite many claims of safety from governmental agencies. TDaP is given relatively late in pregnancy and would probably only be associated with stillbirths, but the flu shot is given when it comes out, so that could be at any point in pregnancy and could be associated with either miscarriages or stillbirths.
Your analysis of InfoWars is itself lacking a key piece of context: you are reading its web site after it has declared bankruptcy following a $965 million verdict for defamation for claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and the bereaved parents were all professional actors. (Alex Jones, who runs InfoWars, also recently declared bankruptcy after a separate $473M verdict against himself personally.)
It's entirely reasonable that InfoWars completely revamped its approach to lying after those chickens came home to roost. I suspect that repeating the experiment with archived versions of the InfoWars front page on randomly selected dates in 2016-2021 would yield more examples of outright lies (not just about Sandy Hook), from before the site was deterred by defamation law.
I haven't verified this part myself, but it's been alleged that most of their print articles are mostly plagiarized from other websites, with more misleading headlines added. In Jones' video/radio show, these headlines are then used as props for him to lie about.
In general Jones seems focused on having a loyal audience. It isn't in his interest to make lies that can be falsified at a glance by them. Instead he will have an article or an "expert" to point to as the source of his spoken claims. If someone points out a discrepancy between the source and his statements, he can claim that it's being taken out of context. (Here "context" refers to multi-hour rambling shows, which are hard to fact check.)
Hey.
I've written the complete explanation of the Sadly Porn book. I've got a letter, but I don't know how to send it to Scott. Can you help me ?
He has listed his email (here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-winners) as: scott@slatestarcodex.com.
very cool
This was a great article. Very well-written.
I never got the impression that the argument 'at least we can all agree that we don't want people to spread blatant misinformation, right? so can we at least censor THAT?' was good-faith - it's just a rhetorical move to sell the idea that 'there are instances where it's socially beneficial to censor 'bad information'', as a way of getting the inquisitor's boot in the door.
The difference in VAERS reports is due to a much broader reporting regime. Most vaccines have a set of well-known complications and specific reporting requirements based on those events and their known time frames. For covid, any severe event after vaccination is reportable, even if there’s no reason to believe the vaccine was the cause.
This is good policy and moves towards more robust medical data practice, but it means VAERS statistics for covid vaccines are not comparable with those of other vaccines.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html
https://vaers.hhs.gov/docs/VAERS_Table_of_Reportable_Events_Following_Vaccination.pdf
Thank you for saying this. I thought I remembered this being explained somewhere on the VAERS site, how you cannot compare data across vaccines, and especially not with Covid data, but I may be wrong.
I don't know if anyone has spoken to this elsewhere, but I also wondered if it's possible that Covid itself produced more miscarriages. Covid was moving through the population as it was being vaccinated, so it seems hard to disentangle those two in some cases.
On the topic of lying, I'll just add here, I consider a media outlet inaccurately reporting statistics to be lying when statistics are a key part of the article. That includes only reporting on one part of a study to the point that it is misleading. They have enough tools at their disposal to do this right such that doing it egregiously wrong pretty clearly comes across as intentional -- whether for economic or political aims. Likewise, if headlines are misleading relative to what the article says, that's an instance of the outlet lying. As well if an article presents information buried in the sixteenth paragraph that substantially shifts what a person would take away after reading the first paragraph, that's also lying. There's no value in "censoring" information presented this way, but I think it's important to keep calling it out as unethical, and a form of journalistic lying and malpractice.
Data Scientist here. This happens also happens all the time within tech organizations. People see data and make false conclusions. Even with a decent stats understanding, the logic supporting a certain dataset could obtuse / could include important assumptions that meaningful shift the take away.
The system is complex and requires expertise to unravel! This is where data scientists provide huge value in a company. In a company these Data Scientists have been and are scrutinized by other Data Scientist. This helps keep rigor high.
Given the world / system will always grows in complexity, how can we provide better understanding for a lay person? The answer should be good journalism / data science! Ideally journalists should be working hand in hand with data scientists. Obviously data science can also be subverted :/
This is true, but out of context and not actually informative: I am constantly surprised that "Alex Jones" of Infowars looks like a Russian/Ukranian Propaganda Minister reporting on ethnic cleansing. Because for years I assumed he actually looked like Alexi Lalas, who was the visibile face of US Men's Soccer for a decade or more. And who, in turn, looked like a guy at my first job, a great coder who loved weed and hackey-sack and vegan co-ops in the East Bay.
So yes, the media lies.
I wrote this a few years ago ... related, and perhaps a little more trusting in the media than I would be now.
http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/09/acknowledging-incorrect-facts-but-not.html
I feel the problem with this premise is it is using the narrowest possible definition of lie. One that means you can intentionally publish lies that you know are lies with the intention of deceiving without "lying." So if I track down a janitor at the FBI who says Jews eat babies and I write a story headlined "Sources at FBI warn Jews are Baby Eaters," then I haven't technically lied. Even if I know it's untrue, and that the janitor is insane, and I'm writing the article because I believe it will be popular. Even though I don't even believe Jews eat babies, I still haven't actually lied.
There are a lot of ways to lie without lying. Tucker Carlson has made a career out of lying by making wild accusations in the form of a question. "Are Jews eating babies? And if they are, why aren't Democrats trying to stop it? Is it because Democrats have made a deal so Jews only eat Republican babies? And isn't it suspicious how many people don't want me to ask these questions?"
So if you work on a binary "lie/not lie," then neither the Times or Alex Jones lies. But what happens if we define lie as "intentionally promoting falsehoods"?
I also feel when talking about the reliability of sources, picking out one piece of misinformation by the Times and one piece of misinformation by Jones and saying, "look, they did the same thing" is problematic. Does the Times slant stories in a misleading way? Absolutely. Do they do it to the same degree with the frequency and cynicism of Alex Jones? Well, I don't have any stats on that, nor do I actually know how much of Jones' actions are fueled by greed and cynicism and how much is he is genuinely insane, but it would certainly be helpful to know.
This binary approach to lies simply ignores the way humans find non-binary ways to do things like lie without lying. In the end, "The Media Rarely Lies" is a statement that is both technically true and completely useless.
If both sides don't lie, then you must be in the possession of some heretofore unseen proof that Trayvon Martin was shot in cold blood by George Zimmerman, Mike Brown had his hands up when he was shot, the Christian bakers refused to serve customers because of their homosexuality per se, and that James Damore said that women are less intelligent than men. Otherwise, it's not up for debate that both sides lie.
Scott recently made a post "If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism". Doesn't this post contradict that post, since it establishes that the media *does* report on other things like it reports on effective altruism?
I have to wonder if there's a temporal selection bias in the Infowars articles. They did just get sued into oblivion for defamation, so they might be a bit hesitant currently to publish as usual.
The difference between those who follow the news media and those who do not, is not a difference between the informed and the uninformed. It is a difference between the disinformed and the uninformed. (Old social science saying)
It seems similar to asking why do dictatorships like Syria, USSR and North Korea hold elections.
If you are going to be totally dishonest why bother having some kind of process and principals.
I have no idea what the answer is.
Every experienced liar agrees with Flashman that 'suppressio veri is a useful servant but suggestio falsi is a perilous master'. Doesn't mean the media rarely lies. Lies of omission and lies of commission are both lies. That's why courts tell witnesses to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
When I was a kid in the 1970's the media was biased but gave facts. Now it's mostly gibberish whipping up moral panics. Why the collapse? Well, the old Venona transcript lefties had already done the whole 'gibberish whipping up moral panics for the Party' thing for the Soviets and developed a useful cynicism about the D party line. They aged and died, and their successors are dumb and inexperienced. And there's still no real right-wing media beyond 'look how bad the D party line is'.
> Censorship - even the “safe” kind of censorship that just blocks “fake news” - will always involve a judgment call by a person in power enforcing their values.
In an ideal world where the censorship is actually executed by saints that have absolutely no other interests than to ensure every information packet passing through them is providing proper context. In the real world, in the meantime, anything that the censor deems serving their goals (which, as always, is the greater good of humanity itself) for be declared "good information", and anything that opposes them would be declared "misinformation", and the squabbling over context will be left to bloggers - at least those who aren't deplatformed yet.
There are two different ways of undercutting MLMs and some other scams, one requiring mathematical intuition and the other not.
The mathematical way is to realize that you're going to run out of people to recruit.
The non-mathematical way is to realize that if this is actually a way to get rich, why is the person trying to sell it to you working so hard at selling it when there are more pleasant things to do if you're rich.
The latter is probably easier to teach than math.
Your first example (i.e. Infowars and their use of VAERS reports) lets them off the hook much too easily. A better inference is their article's willful naivete or ignorance of how VAERS works and is meant to be used is incredibly sloppy. If you go to VAERS site (https://vaers.hhs.gov/index.html) and check the links to "About" and "Guide to Interpreting Data" sections you will see that these reports can be made by anyone and are unfiltered, raw, and unverified. Some relevant parts: "Anyone can report an adverse event to VAERS.," "VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, . . . VAERS can provide CDC and FDA with valuable information that additional work and evaluation is necessary to further assess a possible safety concern." , "VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning that reports about adverse events are not automatically collected, but require a report to be filed to VAERS. "VAERS reports can be submitted voluntarily by anyone, including healthcare providers, patients, or family members. Reports vary in quality and completeness. They often lack details and sometimes can have information that contains errors." Better, more curated systems are the Vaccine Safety Datalink and Clinical Immunization Safety Assesment Project, both on the CDC site.
One thing I wonder is what’s the way around this issue? If we put together a newspaper we thought was really awesome about being honest and being contextually fair and accurate, couldn’t critics still find things to make us look bad? A creative person can always find fair-sounding criticism of something
I had hoped that OpenAI Chat would be a good tool for examining public data and policy, but the developers have crippled it by forcing it to murmur cant responses if you ask any question about population groups.
Of all the national-level mainstream news organizations I've ever read regularly (which is a lot of them, because I grew up with that as a daily practice and am old enough to remember when "60 Minutes" was a new TV show), the best by far on the dimensions discussed in this post is the Economist. Since someone gifted me a subscription 18 years ago all others have steadily fallen away from my personal habits.
I'm an American who thinks they cover my own country better -- smarter, frankly -- than any American national news outfit. And I've come to enjoy being better informed about news and events around the world too. Also they do some of the best generalist coverage of science and tech that you can find these days. I've even become a fan of that painfully-dry English wit that pops through here and there.
Of course they aren't perfect, nothing written and edited by human beings ever will be. But sooo many times over the years I have wished that the United States had its own national news publication even half as good.
Can you clarify for me where your figure of 0.01% testing positive came from? Reading the articles I see 0.2% quotes, not 0.01%. I thought perhaps you made a typo but I see you repeating the number. Or are you making a subtle point about bad journalism?
You made a very good and important point.
I wonder if our discussions could be made more useful by adding some categories and probabilities. My personal estimates (which I'm not confident in) would be as follows:
TOTAL UNTRUTHFUL PIECES (50%): In the average piece of consumed news media (among a global population), ~50% have something 'deeply untruthful' with the reporting, such that fully believing the media would lead to misguided feelings/actions.
PREVENTABLE UNTRUTHS (25%): When reporting a 'deeply untruthful' piece, the journalist(s) creating the news could have prevented the flaw if they were incentivised to ~50% of the time - i.e., the relevant knowledge exists and they have the epistemological skills to figure out the truth. These preventable truths are attributable to either self-deception, other-deception, or bullshitting ( with BS defined as making a claim without caring whether or not it is true).
DECEPTIVE PREVENTABLE UNTRUTHS (5%): When reporting preventable untruths, ~20% are the result of intentional deception - i.e., the journalist(s) involved know that what they are reporting is deeply untruthful. The rest of the time, the journalists are either self-deceptive or bullshitting.
LIES (1%): When reporting deceptive preventable untruths, ~20% involve explicit lies (of commission). The other ~80% result from intentionally omitting critical context or posting lies by 'experts'.
Thus, I basically agree with Scott's claim that the media very rarely lies, but also think it is important to consider all the ways that the media is misleading and deceptive.
Moreover, fundamentally, the audience bears most of the proximal blame. Truthful media cannot survive unless is pays economically. If most audience members were willing and able to pay for truthful media, then the vast majority of media would be truthful. But a lack of epistemological education and widespread cognitive biases (e.g. confirmation bias) mean that truthful media does not dominate.
I like your analysis, but would add important context that might alter the conclusion that the NYT and infowars are equally lacking context in their reporting.
Your piece omits any mention of the fact that Infowars is run by Alex Jones, a malicious liar and conspiracy theorist. It’s likely that their editorial decision-making reflects the deliberate lies that he advances. I can’t think of an equivalent on the Sulzberger or NYT Editorial board side of things.
I cannot imagine the NYT ever publishing a magazine like this:
https://static.infowars.com/magazine/iv/infowars%20mag%20_DEC12_Issuu.pdf
Here is an example of Infowars outright lying: https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
The reason for stillborn deaths and covid was really a reach. Needs to do better in future explanations.
When nearly all the providers have converging interests the message is massaged and not even an eye wink is needed, just a subtle head nod. Its easy to move a mountain when everyone is pushing at the same time even if they dont know why.
I wish they did lie, it would be less insidious than the shit they do and more easily remedied.
In order to claim "rarely lies," you have to exclude two things:
1. Connotation and
2. English uses structure to convey information.
The latter is NPRs favorite (ok, maybe second or third) way to lie. They'll say "Senator X claims A, however Organization Y has determined B,"
In this case, "claimed" and "determined" both have connotative truth value which should NOT be overlooked, and the "however" indicates that B refutes A. If you construct a statemen in which B has nothing whatsoever to do with A, you have in fact lied, even if there are no lies in either A or B. This almost always happens when the reporter shifts from absolute to relative measurements in the middle of a statement.
A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation
https://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/a-comparison-of-prebunking-and-debunking-interventions-for-implied-versus-explicit-misinformation(321fe65b-02a4-4d85-bc4b-e29c493eac84).html
This is one of the most reasonable, measured takes on censorship that I have found. Thank you.
I remember the whole thing about Trump and the bleach comment so specifically because when it was reported seriously, I just thought, Am I the only person in the world that could tell he was being facetious? Not that I'm defending him as a person, just that I've watched as other politicians say some things that are also facetious or sarcastic and are defended in that way. Another thing my son taught me is to learn how to read research conclusions, but that takes practice and patience, and is super boring. The people reporting know the majority of the populace will not do this. It's why you really can't trust any of them. They all have an agenda.
Do people read alternative news these days? Cant believe how far right messed up with millions of brains. We r quite fallible creatures
Studies to this effect were covered in my journalism classes. Perceptions of inaccuracy in the media are almost always based in a belief that different context or facts should have been given equal presentation, not that the facts presented are themselves inaccurate.
This matches my experience of the media reporting on my company (so I have inside knowledge of what’s being reported on). If they lie, it’s only by omission.
I am in full agreement with the conclusion, censorship requires that someone be trusted with the value judgement and there is no certainty that the "someone" will yield results that don't look like tyranny to a substantial portion of the population. But the set up uses a Clintonesque definition of "lie" - defining lies for this purpose as fabricating facts. But the textbook definition of "lie" includes the intent to deceive - particularly for personal gain or loss avoidance. I would suggest that the modern day media outlets (of all flavors) slant their stories for gain - i.e. advertising revenue and are therefore lying.
> But that means there isn’t a bright-line distinction between “misinformation” (stories that don’t include enough context) and “good information” (stories that do include enough context).
...duh? Aren't you the guy who put 'motte and bailey' into wide circulation to describe this phenomenon? The vague term 'misinformation' is politically useful precisely because it is vague. I don't claim it is kept vague through sinister intention, but rather that it is an evolutionary process. I don't know what it would take to stop the political-evolutionary pressures which drive this phenomenon. The extinction of humanity _might_ do the trick. Even mitigating it somewhat would take a lot of work.
Incidentally, it is also possible to mislead by adding too much context to facts, making them appear unique rather than typical and thus preventing readers from forming undesirable generalizations. It is not limited to media either. People are prone to doing it to themselves, through the fundamental attribution error with regards to their and others' actions, and through overcontextualizing their own problems in order to be able to perceive them as pleasingly unique rather than boringly and degradingly typical. Again I do not claim that this is done with open, conscious intent - in fact usually the reverse seems to be the case - but then I think that "open, conscious intent" has been very overrated lately as a criterion for judgment of actions. Notably, the traditional legal concept of mens rea does not require it. I do not know the reasoning which led to the formation of this concept, but I suspect that people used to be more aware of how prone we are to self-delusion, compartmentalization and other behaviors of this kind.
You're right. I don't think the media lies as much as people think.
But one of their very common practices is even worse than lying - in my opinion. And that is suppressing actual news. They simply don't report something unless it supports their narrative.
This gives them a perceived moral high ground because they can say "we didn't lie." Maybe so, but you deceived your readers.
Suppressing evidence like this is typically illegal in courts of law. But like many things in modern society, the court of public opinion trumps everything. Today, the credibility and trust in the media are at all time lows - and getter lower each day. Journalists and media employees are getting laid off in droves because they provide little to no value to the public.
Personally, I can't even remember when I watched media or even read a newspaper. I personally don't trust them - both sides of the aisles are unreliable.
“Safe and effective”
Topical discussion of fake news https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/The-San-Francisco-Inquirer-looks-like-local-news-17732331.php
Late to the party here, but the Fox News Dominion Lawsuit seems to show that Fox News specifically does lie to its viewers and its presenters do this intentionally. How does that change how you feel?
Interestingly, pregnant women who were unvaccinated and caught Covid had an anomalous number of stillbirths.
Infowars publishes a blatantly made-up report: https://www.infowars.com/posts/exclusive-biden-admin-preparing-to-bring-back-full-covid-restrictions-rollout-to-begin-mid-september/