"I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past"
I agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither?
What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue.
On the other side, you have governance structures that require the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the populace.
Both work hand in hand - one provides the message the other the megaphone. In the past 2 years, the government has bankrolled the largest campaign in history, and the media have been willing recipients.
Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions.
Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.
To be honest, in Italy this issue was solved during ww-2 time, a bunch of commercial newspapers from far-left to right (we couldn't have far-right back then, of course :D, we still can't but people has forgot and so we have now, but they can't really read and write), created a cooperative called ANSA (https://www.ansa.it), that is no opionion, no controlling point of view, just facts as they happen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Assoc...)
If you force Fox, CNBC, CNN to create an agency of news reporting where each one oversee the content created, in order to be as objective as possible, then I think the society in US would benefit
In Italy those newspapers do money by selling copies containing the premium content, which is like reports, opinion articles, more in depth opinion articles etc, which people is still interested in, but for news and facts then ANSA is the source of truth
But Berlusconi's (finivest/mediaset) ownership of Il Giornale and 3 of 7 TV channels makes that all a little less relevant due to political manipulation, doesn't it?
Yes and no, I would divide the news consumer between TV and written/paper/internet, Berlusconi is an issue because he controls a big chunk of TV easily accessible news content, but I am not sure how would you solve that, if a person wants to go to see news that match its point of view, then you can't force him not to, and if a TV has a lot of reality shows and entertainment and it mixes all of that with "news" program, then yeah he can kind of decide the weather, but yeah if you want un-opinionated news source you can at least have that, for what it's worth
But the scope of my reply was about "who owns the truth?" and yeah you need a place where people can go and check facts that are checked by peers of other point of view
I would tell you about my literature professor, he would walk around with multiple newspapers under his armpit and suggest that "If you want to try to get the truth you need to get the same fact from multiple point of view and try to get it in the middle"
We do have the Associated Press (AP), which seems similar to what you describe. That said, even such sources can be guilty of ideological bias if they choose to report certain facts and not others. In practice, I think AP is pretty even-handed, but I think that is as much a result of their editorial process as it is of their focus on factual reporting over opinion/analysis.
Ah yeah I forgot that AP is American, it's my go-to place for non-italian news, yeah ok nevermind my reply then.. interesting the point you make about their bias, not being there and following the scenarios in person I can only read it from across the ocean so I didn't know that...
> What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue.
It seems to me like the opposite is the case, there is much less centralization than there used to be. There does seem to be some emergent synchronization of opinions but that is not the same.
I think that's what the GP means by centralized control becoming worse. That is, information is less centralized now, and the sources that used to be at the center are now complaining about the issue.
Some people refuse to look at the truth. Then again, it should be assumed that a random person, more often than not, actually cared and spent some time thinking or learning what most people take to be true. Throwing conspiracy theories to see what sticks is a lazy form of destructive behavior. Pointing fingers at people who don't explicitly disprove your claims, whether or not you know them to be true, is just a continuation of the same.
To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.
You missed the fourth option: it's neither. No-one would call it misinformation or wrongthink; rather it's false, or a lie if you're feeling judgemental. I think the person you replied to has made a good point.
What if I show you a heavily biased paper in a quack journal with impressive-looking graphs that shows the earth is a flat disc? Is this misinformation?
Most people will not have the experience to discern things like p-hacking and massaged numbers. Having experts call these things out as misinformation seems quite useful to me.
> What if I show you a heavily biased paper in a quack journal with impressive-looking graphs that shows the earth is a flat disc? Is this misinformation?
Maybe. I've not heard people calling "misinformation" in cases like that though.
I find that most complaints about 'misinformation' are rooted in ideological conformity rather than truth. Like most buzzwords, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or have an objective definition, but it does mean you should closely examine the motivations of those who are loudest about it.
The liar can produce 10 lies and demands you disprove them or they are somehow true. The burden of the liar proving their reasoning is missing.
The goal is that their opinion and your fact be treated with equal weight or the opinion has greater weight simply because they can produce more "opinions" more often than you can facts.
Yes, this. John Green mentioned in his vlog several months ago that he was not going to be answering antivax objections anymore because doing so was becoming a fulltime job and he has other work to do. This is the burden that deliberate misinformation is trying to impose: flood the zone with factual-seeming counter information, provide "data" (generally cherry-picked or out of context) to back it up and demand that it must be addressed. This is the antivax playbook. At it's worst flooding the zone with misinformation is designed to cause the populace to tire of the debate and give up trying to determine what the actual truth is.
> flood the zone with factual-seeming counter information, provide "data" (generally cherry-picked or out of context) to back it up and demand that it must be addressed.
This is also referred to as Gish Gallop and relies heavily on the bullshit asymmetry principle.
"named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution."
Interesting that there seems to be a lot of overlap between creationists and antivaxers. Creationists seem to buy into a sort of conspiratorial view of science where they claim that their "creation scientists" are purposely ignored by mainstream science which is in the grip of some kind of delusion so that they can't comprehend that creationism is the way or are in fact actively trying to subvert the idea that creationism is actually true. Extrapolate to vaccines and they easily believe that there's some kind of alternative science that hasn't been corrupted, but isn't widely known. Similar overlaps for denying climate change.
Neither. It is an assertion based on a frame of reference. The mapping systems used on my phone don't often describe geographic topography and so assert a flatness to the surface of this planet. Likewise this planet viewed from its moon would have the visual appearance of a disk. Is "The Earth is a flat disc" a helpful explanation for operating in the world? Not if you are a rocket scientist but it isn't a terrible model if you live an entire life within the vicinity of your family farm.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful”. George E. P. Box
I think it is more useful to describe the situations where:
- accusing someone of lying has no restraining impact on the person or the lie, and indeed where it might have a magnifying effect
or
- the lie is being shared by someone who has been lied to and does not know it; they aren't a liar but they are misinformers.
Calling the "Covid hasn't even been isolated" misinformation a lie, for example, requires knowing that the teller is aware they are lying. They could simply be credulous.
No -- but I take your point. I meant "with evidence" here.
The point is, many lies are a particular kind of bad faith. You can point out to the guy who, say, believes Antoine Béchamp is the last word in medicine, that he is misrepresenting Béchamp in the past, let alone misrepresenting science in the present, and that guy will argue that it is the very predictable pattern of your fact-based attempt to disprove him that is evidence of your perfidy.
When you know that person is making that argument knowing it to be false, there is no point in accusing them.
The only thing you can do is tackle the "alternative facts" as misinformation rather than as an attempt to deceive.
Because those who argue in bad faith claim injury in bad faith too. "Misinformation" is a more dispassionate approach.
That seems like a dangerous generalization that someone can use to hand-wave away any actual misinformation, which as the blog mentions, does exist and is spread (albeit by a small percentage of very prolific posters).
Misinformation exists, and it is a problem. At this point we've seen some evidence that state actors put some of it out there during the 2016/2020 elections, and it can be spread organically.
That said, it's not nearly as widespread or problematic as it's made to be by much of popular media.
If we follow the science then what does "misinformation" mean in an information theory context?
It has no meaning at all. Since it basically has no meaning it does make it quite a good word in a propaganda context. We can make this word mean whatever we want.
It is a shame we don't use the concept of noise or a noisy channel in a wider context.
How do you take on the burden of proof to prove that high ranking US officials were not involved in an organized child-sex ring involving various pizza restaurants?
> How do you take on the burden of proof to prove that high ranking US officials were not involved in an organized child-sex ring involving various pizza restaurants?
Especially after Epstein. Why would they bother with the pizza business? I guess to add some theory to the conspiracy?
Once misinformation becomes accepted as truth, or a valid mindset even, it doesn't stand out as blatant falsehood. Questioning whether 1 + 2 is actually 3 or a secret way to hide the true meaning of pi is akin to a dog chasing its tail to excercise his brain.
Nobody feels the need to label you as misinformation when you go around saying 1+1=3. They will simply know you’re a cuckoo and ignore you. The misinformation label seems to only get applied to information that could be harmful to a political party
Take the "flat earth" people. What they say is factually wrong. But there isn't a flat-earthist political party that wants to change our military deployments because our current deployments are based on a false topology of the planet, or change our immigration policy because Central America doesn't actually connect to Mexico, or something like that. There's no political agenda that flows out of the flat earth nonsense. That's what makes it "nonsense" rather than "misinformation".
On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation". That's where someone is deliberately and systematically trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say that both major political parties in the US are also running disinformation campaigns.
"Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So people care about misinformation in a way that they don't care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can cause more harm.
But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation campaigns can cause (and, in fact, are causing).
One of the worst example that I bring (unfortunately) in my mind, was from like mid-pandemic, when people around was complaining due to newspapers (in that occasion, the BBC in particular), for spreading misinformation.. and you know why they were spreading misinformation? Because they were supporting the right of chronicles by reporting about protests against coronavirus lockdown protests... this was the spreading of misinformation, newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news
I am not sure, english is not my mother tongue so I might have written something in a non-understandable way, if there's something that I might have written better let me know if you want. As for wokes -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
So "wokes" are people who are 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination'.
> newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news
So what have "wokes" got to do with anything? They are just people who aren't racist, right?
Yeah that was the starting point of the culture, and I think it's a start in order to get more documented about what they've grown into and how, so yeah they're those against racism and the likes but are also those who went against newspapers reporting news that they didn't like as written in my post
I am an anti-woke, but also gave you a starting point which explains what woke is (or was?), but I'm afraid what I wrote is not something I can link, as I wrote it was middle pandemic and going back to find posts from back then is a bit time consuming for me, then you can believe it or not, that's your choice, but I am not sure what should I do here, I guess for in depth research you can also go around the web yourself and find posts about them, last suggestion would be to look for "Woke regime"
You can also fight noble cause in a wrong way, you go with the alert against racial prejudice and discrimination in a way that causes other issues, I am against woke because they want people banned or muted or offended from platform for saying things that they don't agree with
I think you're oversimplifying serious issues there, it's not being against or pro racial prejudice, it's being against racial prejudice but also pro freedom of speech, against moderation and censorship and pro conversation
Woke culture has alienated whoever was racist, and whoever had racist idea was removed from Twitter, the result? They just created their own societies on 4chan and other QAnon channels, away from conversation and from anyone who could tell them why their ideas were wrong, the result? Racist grew their support to the point where Trump was elected president, now that Trump is banned from Twitter, he is still growing his user base, away, unmoderated, and without the opportunity to discuss
Why are you conflating freedom of speech, moderation and censorship?
Freedom of speech means the government won't come and arrest you for saying something. That's got nothing to do with wokeness or Twitter.
Twitter (et al) are commercial businesses. They have terms of service and if you don't abide to them you get kicked. It's very simple. You're not paying for it - you're not the customer.
If a pig farm discovers that some pigs have started tail-biting and annoyng the other pigs then they'll take 'em out back. Letting a minority annoy the other pigs, resulting in a less valuable product doesn't benefit them. Twitter users are the pigs, not the supermarket. it's just good business.
I'll defend to the death your right to your freedom of speech even though don't agree with it, but I'm damned if I'm going to lend you a megaphone to express it. Particularly if you're going to, say, deny the holocaust and my granparents were exterminated in it.
And as for the idea that racists are going to stop being racists if theyre not on Twitter for people tell them that they are wrong, well bless your heart.
> now that Trump is banned from Twitter, he is still growing his user base, away, unmoderated, and without the opportunity to discuss
Just come forward and say that you're a trolling woke this thing about freedom of speech and governments is like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares? Governments are people elected by people, not coffee machines elected by coffee machine so I can also be a supporter of freedom of speech within people and their neighbours outside of the boundaries of the law, also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a mainstream platform which helped alienating people towards their circle
I was not on Twitter before the explosion of woke culture, but every now and then I go to read without an account and there's a lot of verbal violence
The coffee machine bit: Governments have regulations that protect freedom of speech, and government are made of people and elected by people, if we let woke culture go ahead in their ideas that freedom of speech is ok to be limited when some ideas are expressed, how long since a enough number of politicians get elected and put that into law/change the law? So yeah freedom of speech as-is, is from the government, but it has to be protected also between people as people have the power to form ideas that change laws, because we don't elect machines
> I was not on Twitter before the explosion of woke culture, but every now and then I go to read without an account and there's a lot of verbal violence
Wait, what?! "verbal violence" - I thought you were the defender of freedom of speech? Have we switched and you're now the woke-ist snowflake who is scared of words?
I'm sure you're aware that the next bit is practically the defintion of the slippery-slope fallacy. Given that we have:
* Brazil - Bolsonaro (not woke)
* USA - Trump (not woke) until recently and the house likely to turn to the GoP (not woke) soon
* UK - Boris Johnson (about as woke as Rip Van Winkle)
* Russia - Putin (about as woke as Trump)
I dont think that we're in dange of falling into some Woke World Order anytime soon!
Can you give one soitary example (preferably your best) of a "woke" law being passed, please?
If someone is denying the holocaust you don't give him a megaphone to express it, but you also talk to him and show him proof and surely you don't kill him or censor him or incarcerate him
I don't have to talk to anyone - hey have their freedom of speech, and I have the freedom not to listen to their nonsense. Would you force me to
Has a "woke" person killed someone now? Incarcerated them? Examples, please! I mean, I know that in Germany you might get in trouble for holocaust denial, but they kind of have had some major problems with that whole area, so I have some sympathy.
Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Google says: adjective: woke; comparative adjective: woker; superlative adjective: wokest
alert to injustice in society, especially racism.
"we need to stay angry, and stay woke"
Merriam Webster: chiefly US slang : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
So, that seems to be the accepted defintion. I can't really copypasta the whole Wikipedia page now, can I.
The last sentence was not a personal attack, it was merely the logical conclusion his own appraisal of himself; "I am an anti-woke"
If you have an alterative defintion that would refute the conclusion then I'm all ears.
But still you're here getting only the definition that you want to take and ignoring all the other stuff about wokes fighting for their ideals by trying to censor, ban, fire those who have different ideas, instead of discussing... I already told you that their attention to those things is not the problem but is the attitude no?
Let's say that I am a guy, attentive to social justice, noble. Then I am that same guy who reads about someone trying to talk bad about social justice, I converse with him (good), I start calling him names, want his head, want him banned and alienated (bad)
So this is an invite to go further than the definition and that point that you egregiously understood
I've invited you to give me an alternative definition - can you just tack on an extra sentence to the Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster or Goole definitions please? Once you have defined what woke is then you can talk about what they do. Wanting people banned, censored, fired are actions that can be carried out by anyone. Vladimir Putin has people banned, censored, fired (and worse), but he's not woke, is he?
We're having a converstion, but for you to make a valid point that people are doing these thing then you need to present examples.
You couldn't/wouldn't present an example of the newspaper wokeness that you suggest is happening.
Give me just one (your best) concrete example of this woke culture in action and you'll have made a point, otherwise this is all just angels dancing on the head of pin territory.
There is a whole section called "Woke as a pejorative term", also an earlier section states: "there is no single agreed-upon definition of woke".
The point is instead of interacting with the thread to find out the contextual meaning, you decided to settle one a definition simplistic enough to conclude "op is for racism/discrimination".
First, formal logical analysis of complex semantics (which that Wikipedia page implies is the case for the word "woke") doesn't work.
Even if it did, "anti-" can refer to any aspect of something; and since there is often no distinction between a-<something> and anti-<something>, this further illustrates why trying to guess the meaning of a word doesn't work.
> If you have an alterative defintion that would refute the conclusion then I'm all ears.
It isn't just that they're alert to it, they're hyper alert to it. They even see it where it doesn't exist, and they "white knight" for it, trying to prevent people from giving offense even if nobody is actually offended.
They take "being a good person" so far that they make life hard for others instead.
The root of their beliefs is good: All people are worthy of respect and shouldn't be judged based on things out of their control.
But the lengths they go for that is just too much. They often refuse to even consider that there may be other factors that need to be taken into account as well and shout down everything that doesn't align with their view.
That makes it hard to fight against them. They've set themselves up to be seen as always being in the right, but because they refuse to have nuance, they often aren't.
Can you give an example, please? ("They take "being a good person" so far that they make life hard for others instead.", for example is a bit vague - that could apply to pious Christians, you're not against Christians, are you?)
Neither is it exclusive to the woke, or anyone else.
What I would really like to see is a concrete example, which so far everyone has declined to give. It's customary to provide some actual evidence to back up claims.
"Your honor, the defendant killed the victim in cold blood"
But the judge, the prosecutor and the lawyers are all paid to give the judge stuff, we're here having a conversation, but I am not sure what kind of proof do you want and what should we do, like it's not that newspapers write article about wokes being wokes, just maybe go around on twitter or go on twitter and write something controversial like "#FuckBLM" and see what comes at you, not sure what do you want
or I mean I know what do you want, but don't know how long do you want me to reply to you, or others, like I am very patient in conversations, but I feel like don quixote and as a non native speaker I feel like you're misunderstanding what I say, genuinely or not, I guess someone here thinks not, but I think I am done, its been a few hours, you've been told things, you've been given links, and now I think it's time for you to go to explore the world by yourself... fly free
But why would I go onto Twitter and say that, unless I was a massive racist?
And why, as a doughty protector of free speech would I not be perfectly fine with anyone using their own right of freedom of speech to reply to me? Robustly.
Is it just that you want freedom without consequences? Because you're a racist? No accusing - just "asking questions".
You gave me one link - to Wikipedia, which you then seem to have an issue with the definition provided therein. And no examples. Still no examples.
Here's a link for you - about the most sensible thing I can find about woke from Oliver Dowden, Chairman of the UK Conservative party who has been talking to right wing "think tanks" (lobbying groups) in the US this week. Well, actually not him, but it might as well be. I particularly like the bit where he refuses to define what woke is - seems to be all the range. Enjoy:
Ok, I'll bite. Google "Grievance studies affair". It provides a chilling look into how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda. Is this example sufficient for you?
Thank you for providing literally the first response with a concrete example.
I shall have a read - its late here and I have to bed down shortly.
Certainly a poor peer review system is an issue that should be addressed.
Also rather worrying is the unethical nature of submitting bogus research, not getting informed consent from those being experimented on and the lack of a control group.
OK. So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!
This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.
I think that it's common knowledge that there is a bit of a crisis with peer review and reproducibility in science in general, and humanities/social science in particular. If sure that the follow-up studies which were properly conducted and controlled will confirm your suspicions. There are properly conducted follow-up studies, right? Right?
I shouldn't be churlish though; let's put prank papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs, on the board for now. Lord know's it the only thing we have so far.
If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob which stormed the seat of goverment in an insurrection and called for the hanging of the vice-president, then maybe have a rethink.
It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.
The whole thing just smacks of McCarthayism, or the satanic child-abuse hysteria of the 80s.
No doubt that there is a kook somewhere demanding paid hibernation leave for Furries, or some such nonsense, but if you claim that a weird outlier is actually representative of reality will have you finding reds under the bed everwhere and grotesque caricatures of "woke" in every wallpaper pattern you see. It is hysteria.
You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"?
So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!
> So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!
This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.
You asked for a concrete example where "woke" causes some damage, I provided one and asked "is this example sufficient for you?" You responded with a novel about unrelated things without answering my question. Let me ask again: is this example sufficient for you? Do you accept that this is an example that demonstrates that - in addition to whatever positive things woke causes in society - woke also causes some negative things in society?
> Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.
I agree a control group submitting nonsense papers of right-wing propaganda would have been necessary to prove that these woke-activism nonsense papers were published because of political activism (as opposed to not reading papers). That said, I strongly suspect that the papers were read, because these are not predatory journals that publish anything you submit. Furthermore, when you look at the papers which ARE being published, it's obvious that they tow the party line with regards to political messaging.
> papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs ... If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob ...
This is another bit of misdirection from you. You're pretending as if I'm bothered by the existence of prank papers. No, as you perfectly well know, the prank papers are not what "keeps me up at night", it's the underlying phenomena the prank papers exposed: that certain fields of science have been entirely subverted by woke political activists. The problem is - as you well know - that these fields are no longer producing science, they are producing political propaganda camouflaged as science. This is what the Grievance studies affairs demonstrated.
Also note that you are doing a whataboutism defense here as well, when you start talking about entirely unrelated things like Trump and January 6th. You're not scoring any points here.
> It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.
It's not hard to find these examples. If you actually were interested, you could find these examples yourselves in a few minutes of Googling. But you're merely pretending to be interested. Here's one case where I provided an example of a fields of science being subverted for woke political activism, and you dismiss it as "pretty weak sauce". Why would I go out of my way to provide more examples for you? You're just going to dismiss every other example just like this. You're not interested in any facts that are counter to your world view. You're merely pretending to be interested.
> You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"? So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!
I'm not interested in attemps to redefine a political movement in a dictionary sense. A movement can have a perfectly nice-sounding dictionary definition while at the same time it can cause harm in society. That doesn't imply any kind of logical contradiction.
> This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Oh, it's realy not - you presented an experiment (Grievance studies affair) as an example of "how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda".
But what you cite is a terrible, deeply flawed experiment which proves no such thing.
So in answer to your question if it wasn't obvious; no, it's not sufficient.
"I am a better parent / patriot / Christian / anti-racist / Aryan / communist / whatever than you." seems to be remarkably universal. Some people just love to create ladders of virtue and vice.
But at certain times, one of those prevails. IDK if you were alive immediately after 9/11. That was a period of unabashed jingoism. Now, 20 years later, this fever has long subsided, but there is a wave of wokism now. In 2042, there will be something different, but people generally react to contemporary trends.
Indeed. And alive immmediately before 9/11. And in the 90s, and the 80s. And the 70s.
Jingoism subsided? Really? MAGA, America First, The BNP, Britain First. Its really not gone away.
And surely an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding is to be welcomed. Unless your definition of woke is something else - no-one who is "anti-woke" will actually tell me what they think it means, just vague insinuations that "they do x" with no concrete examples.
Compared to levels of 2001-2003, the jingoism knob was definitely turned down. Even the popularity of "America first" is an indication thereof: people are no longer interested in forcible export of democracy and American power abroad. The Zeitgeist of the Bush era was one of empire building. The Zeitgeist of the current era is one of de-globalization. This is a huge difference. The former one was certainly more bloody.
As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)
Tell me how destroying an old man's career over a 33 years old article [1] can be labeled as an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding.
Or running a Twitter death gauntlet on a random Mexican driver [2].
These incidents embody "wokeness" to me, not a nicely sounding definition that was constructed to make the movement look better than it actually is.
You seem to put a lot of trust into nicely sounding definitions. Always look at practice: do those people practice what they preach?
Anyone can put together nicely sounding definitions and theories. In theory (= the Constitution), the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, where I grew up, had solid protections of personal freedoms and human rights. In practice, it didn't. It was a totalitarian state that just didn't want to state "we rule you and we will crush any dissent" in writing.
OK, I dont think that I concur with your taking of the temperature of jingoism - cerainly here, but different countries maybe.
> As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)
Because practially everyone I know, I would not consider "anti-woke". They are reasonable, not vindictive, anti-racist, feminist. I don't know if they would consider themselves woke, but certainly anyone who deploys woke as a pejorative would consider them woke. Woke has become the go-to term to demonise anything that you disagree with. the right wing headbangers in the UK will refer to our PM as woke. He really is not woke. At all. He literally has ministers out waging a "war on woke". It's a meaningless culture wars smoke screen to distract from the latest scandals and incompetence.
If you are a comms director and you become the story, it's generally accepted that you resign. He wasn't fired. Given that the role is now vacant again for the fourth time in three years it suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Given the 737 MAX crisis I would not be at all suprised if he was looking for a way out anyway.
More sympathy for the driver. Seems like a conditional warning ("if you did do it for that reason we take a dim view - please don't do it again for any reason") would have been more than sufficient. Of course, I'm sure that you'll agree that better employment rights for US workers would help to prevent summary dismissals like this, which can happen any time for any reason.
It feels like you're being disingenuous. If you've spent time on HN and other forums, I have a hard time believing you don't understand the terminology he's using. It's especially pernicious, because the OP is not a native English speaker, and so he may believe he's actually being difficult to understand, when he's really not.
I don't think so. I'm just stuggling to see why being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination is bad thing. If you would like to explain why it is, please do.
This disingenuous line of argument is reminiscent of Antifa greenwashing that was common a few years ago. Feign ignorance, pretend you have no idea what kind of people identify as Antifa, and then ask "Isn't fascism bad? So why is it bad to be anti-fascist?"
...while Antifa is literally burning down cars and shops indiscriminately...
What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing?
I said nothing about Antifa - why are you creating a straw man? Stick to woke.
If you would like to propose a new term that encompases the original defintion of woke and something else then feel free - hyer-woke, or something. Why do you want to change the defintion of words?
> What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing?
You're pretending to be wholly unfamiliar with the subject of culture wars, when in reality you are very familiar with them. That's disingenuous. The other poster seemed to have endless patience with you pretending "not to understand" and "not know" things which you know and understand perfectly well.
I don't know why you can't just stand up straight and argue for the things you believe in, instead of trying to play some mind games, lying and cheating? If your cause is worthy and your arguments are good, then surely you can achieve your goals without resorting to lies?
I really am genuinely trying to understand how woke has become the bogeyman du nos jour. It's become a hysteria - say something is woke and you ascribe some mythical attributes to it that cause people to fall into paroxisms.
Same as a bunch of strange crazes that have cropped up over the years; witch trials, spanish inquisition, mccarthayism, 80s satanic child-abuse.
Say something or someone is woke and it's like yelling "communist" in the 50s.
It's a fantastic distraction mechanism for anyone wishing to deploy it and I'm just staggered that seemingly intelligent people go into a Pavlov's dog response as soon as they hear it.
The amazing thing what I've found is practially no-one can actually put into words what they think it means.
> The amazing thing what I've found is practially no-one can actually put into words what they think it means.
Yes they have. The other poster used hundreds of words to explain it to you. You just dismiss any explanations, just as you dismiss any concrete examples of the destruction woke has caused to society. You ask for stuff, then people give it to you, then you close your eyes and ears and say you still haven't seen any of that stuff you asked for.
With respect, I haven't asked for an essay, just an update to the definition. Simply amend the following line from Merriam Webster:
chiefly US slang : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
In terms of concrete examples, going back over the thread so far all I can find (if I missed any please correct me):
) SDG&E driver.
) Boeing comms director.
*) Grievance studies affair
For the SDG&E driver, if he was performing some kind of white power salute in clearly marked company vehicle (and, let's be honest, nobody really knows if he did or not except him) then some kind of disciplinary action at work would be appropriate - it's pretty dispicable (unless you're a keen racist) and it brings the company into disrepute. A final written warning or something. But because we don't know if he did or not, a less severe meeting with HR, being reminded of the need not to bring any bad publicity to the company, we believe you are acting in good faith, but please don't do this knuckle cracking thing again - it looks bad.
What amazes me about it is that the labour laws are so lax that people can be summarily sacked without any due process. I understand that this is common practice in the US and happens all of the time. Seems to me that solution to this is to campaign for stronger employee rights. You can't uninvent smartphone cameras, and you can't stop people from posting things on twitter, but you can strengthen labour laws. This isn't a problem with woke, it's a problem with lax regulations.
As for the comms director, he resigned. That's just what comms directors do if they become the story. He wasn't sacked. If behind the scenes he was forced to resign then see previous point about labour laws and he should take them to an employment tribunal.
I find the Grievance studies thing hilarious. Clearly it is a wonderful hoax, and calls into question the quality of the review process at the journals and maybe the utility of social science (I've alwayss been a bit sceptical of calling it science, tbh). But seeing as it was a hoax and not really not a controlled experiment you can't really take away many conlcusions from it.
How anyone can read a title like "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" or "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use" without pissing themselves laughing is beyond me. I would certainly resign if I'd have waved that through without going back to the submitter and saying WTF is this.
If these are your "concrete examples of the destruction woke has caused to society", I just don't see it. An example of how lax labour laws are a bad thing, certainly. An example of calling (some) social sciences a science being a bit silly, yes.
But just look at the people crying woke all of the time, the likes of Fox and talk radio. The same people who want lax labour laws. The same people who undermine the science about vaccinations and have lead to tens (possibly hundreds?) of thousands of uneccessary deaths of people who would have survived had they got vaccinated. That is very real and raw destruction of human lives and society.
> With respect, I haven't asked for an essay, just an update to the definition. Simply amend the following line from Merriam Webster
Fine, here's how I would define woke: a political movement focusing on issues related to racial and social justice.
Are you happy with this definition? How does this help in any way?
> But just look at the people crying woke all of the time ...
Again, two wrongs don't make a right. You can't just resort to a whataboutism argument every time somebody points out something wrong your camp has done.
> Fine, here's how I would define woke: a political movement focusing on issues related to racial and social justice.
> Are you happy with this definition? How does this help in any way?
Absolutely happy. It helps because now that I know that if someone says that they are anti-woke then by definition they are anti racial and social justice. Kind of what I suspected, but good to have it confirmed.
Look, I'm a middle aged, middle class, white, straight, cisgendered (whatever that means) male. It makes no difference to me. But I know that I'm not anti-woke.
> Again, two wrongs don't make a right. You can't just resort to a whataboutism argument every time somebody points out something wrong your camp has done.
It's not whataboutery, it's just an explanation. If you don't want people to be fired from a job for specious reasons then don't don't vote for those who want lax labour laws which allow people to be fired for specious reasons (or no reason at all - which is likely far more common than anything to do with white power signs, but doesn't make the news).
If the people who don't want stronger protections for employees also happen to be the ones who are telling you that woke is the problem (definitely not the lack of rights for employees!), then maybe recalibrate your bullshit detector.
If they are also the same people who are discouraging you from getting vaccinated or maybe bleach will cure covid then run like hell - they are the real sociopaths.
If you think that woke is problem, you're being gaslit.
> Absolutely happy. It helps because now that I know that if someone says that they are anti-woke then by definition they are anti racial and social justice. Kind of what I suspected, but good to have it confirmed.
If you don't support Antifa, you must be a literal nazi. If you don't support BLM, you must think black lives don't matter. If you don't support woke, you must be anti racial and social justice. We already visited this logical fallacy, I'm not gonna explain again what's wrong with it.
Ahh, the capitals are important - they help you not to conflate things.
I might not support Antifa beause of (some of) their activities. But I'm anti-fascist because I'm not fascist.
I might not support BLM (although I'd struggle to see why) - I don't support them financially, if that counts. The opposite of beliving that black lives matter is believing that black lives don't mater.
There is no Woke. There is only woke.
Continue to vote for the Leopards Eating Faces party, and blame "woke" when leapords eat your face. As the LEF party encourages you to.
> I might not support Antifa beause of (some of) their activities. But I'm anti-fascist because I'm not fascist.
So then perhaps you might see how someone else might not support the woke movement because of some of their activities, even if they think the goals of the movement are good?
> The opposite of beliving that black lives matter is believing that black lives don't mater.
Yes, and? Where are the people saying "black lives don't matter"? Are you implying that people who don't support BLM (due to their activities of literally burning down cities) are thinking that black lives don't matter? Can you see how a person might agree with the statement "black lives matter", while simultaneously opposing a political movement that's literally named "black lives matter"?
> There is no Woke. There is only woke.
I have no idea what kind of pedantic nitpickery this is, but woke is a political movement just as BLM is, regardless of how you capitalize words.
I'm now the second non-native English speaker in this thread that you're making fun of, for my less-than-native ability of speaking English. We can continue this discussion in Finnish if you'd prefer that.
Absolutely no idea that you were not a native English speaker - as far as I recall it's been impecable. Genuinely, hand on heart mean that (although the following sentence will be tongue in cheek).
However, if you're looking for offence where none was intended ... doesn't that mean that you're woke? That's what they do, right?
Let's just ... Finish.
(And the Italian guy, I wasn't mocking - certainly not his English - I found the first message difficult to undertand what he meant, so wanted to make sure that he was referring to what I thought he was before contining. God knows his English is better than my Itaian. Or Finnish).
Ever since a high school current events class, I have questioned the motives of the media. This was circa 2008 after the stock market crash. The common question of "why is significantly more negative news highlighted than happy news?"
What matters to me is the truth. In times of FUD(fear, uncertainty, doubt), the information dials are all set to 11. It's an absolute firehose of all the above. It's less misinformation to me, but rather too much information.
The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or scientific articles from credible authors, not opinion columnists. The internet makes me confused. Confusion gives me FUD. FUD makes the truth hard to decipher.
Although debate and dissent may help get to the truth earlier, only time will be the judge. It's unfortunate that we live in the present and can't have the truth earlier, but that's just life for ya.
> The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or..
100% this, excellent observation.
> FUD makes the truth hard to decipher
One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look at what's left.
To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But, when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.
Like I said, I'm not sure how to describe it. You kind of have to... identify, and then strip out, the emotional content of a message. (Note: don't do this all the time, but if the emotions are FUD, most of the time is a good rubric). A big part of that is identifying how someone is saying something, as opposed to what they're saying. This can be word choice, italics/bold/caps; grammatical structures, narrative structures.
That last one is large and subtle - I once called someone an "active psychological hazard" for the manipulation within their "narrative" structure; think about how good comedians build a kind of meandering story, and then apply that to an affect aside from humor, and you've got the right idea.
It's... I don't know. People tell me things, or I read them, and it forms a sort of multidimensional "shape" inside my mind. Then I lop off / rotate the shape so the emotional affects aren't present, or aren't significant, or aren't "in view". But also like I said, I don't actually know if it's working; but I think it is. I know that before I do whatever it is, I feel things; afterwards, I feel them, but at a remove, so they're more like things I could feel, if I chose to.
Does that all make any kind of sense, even a little bit?
I think the "take the emotion out" part really resonates. The idea of avoiding people who artificially "raise the stakes" is pretty interesting too, it seems like you have a sound process for this.
It sounds like you might enjoy comedy theory as this is where I learned majority of what you're talking about. Specifically improv comedy.
Thank you, I've wanted to poke into comedy for awhile now! Didn't realize there was established theory, but that makes sense.
Note that I do think "raising the stakes" is a valid explorative method - you can use it to make small details much more visible, for example - even it's not so valid as an argument. So it's not so much about avoiding people who do that, as much as it about zeroing out the impact of them doing that.
> That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about.
I don't know if misinformation is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about, not least because it really depends on the author's definition of "liberal", a word that appears to have only pejorative meaning for most people now.
But it definitely is interesting to consider whether for example QAnon has spread more quickly than the conspiracy theories that led to the First World War, not least because QAnon hasn't yet started a war. Give it time.
It's interesting to consider, but the article references multiple political scientists who've studied conspiracy theories and concluded that they don't spread faster today. Is there a reason to believe they're wrong?
I think this partially a myopic view from young people.
I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't even know how you would track it 30 years ago.
Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even more insane than Alex Jones.
It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had.
The whole process is so transparent.
We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the conspiracy so that no longer matters.
I think he's always been a problem (his Sandy Hook crisis actor lies got him into at least a little difficulty with the platforms) but his problematic nature has always fit within free speech, because he generally knows how to dial it back just inside those boundaries.
Likewise with David Icke or the more self-limiting lunacy of Kate Shemirani; these people it's better not to worry about.
Rudy Giuliani or MTG? Maybe worth worrying about because they can tip things over into riots.
> It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had.
There's no political gain to be had on either side of the Bigfoot-in-the-forest argument, in fact. Or financial gain, or notoriety, or kudos. Which is why it's really not particularly telling.
It's just a fringe belief.
Misinformation matters when its intent is to undermine democracy or governance in the public good, undermine civic or civil society, create an "other" that can be attacked, create a pretext for war or social unrest or vigilantism etc.
I don't think people who believe in Bigfoot really fit the pattern. Nor do Flat-Earthers. Though this kind of belief is an indicator of the kind of credulity that led to the huge traction gained by the Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate story and the current omniconspiracy of antivax/QAnon/stolen election/5G/Great Reset/Schwab/Soros/Gates Foundation etc.
My initial instinct was in fact to say "yes, things are faster".
But then thinking about it, what struck me as interesting is that things that feel recent, in my head, like QAnon, are rooted in manufactured falsehoods that are already six and a half years old. So it's not necessarily the case.
It might be more interesting in some ways that QAnon hasn't already started a war. Though I genuinely see no particular reason why a conspiracy theory of its type could not; it's not that difficult to imagine in the context of human history.
The biggest change is how aware we are of others' views. The internet thrives on showing you people who are "wrong".
I wish we would do away with public opinion polling as news. It does nothing to actually inform or help people, but it makes us obsessed with culture wars.
Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. Imagine if someone flashed on the screen to tell you "40% of Americans don't believe this happened, and here are all of their political views". That's what modern journalism feels like.
Same here, I was 7. Nobody was saying "did you see that fake moon landing?". It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked, but I never personally met anyone with that opinion.
>"It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked..."
Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Conspiracy theories have an incredible ability to self sustain, it is entirely possible the "moon landings were faked" theory is an old bit of Soviet propaganda that refused to die.
Misinformation is misinformation. I am certain I am misinformed about many things. The correct response to when I post misinformation is to inform.
What happened recently with the move to yellow journalism is not misinformation but rather censorship. Fact checkers end up labelling things in order to censor them.
Today he refuses to even consider talking to these ongoing protests and is going to insane extremes to shut these peaceful protests down. The only way to look at it from his point of view. He must see these people as national security threats. He genuinely believes they are racists and white supremacists. He genuinely believes they are there to overthrow the government.
Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being misinformed.
I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis. If you're convinced that's what they are.
This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well.
Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
>I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis after all.
The question though, are these protests really what he has called them? Are they really a military occupation?
>This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well.
100% true. You will find even republican ideologues have called him out on many of his bullshit things. Hell his rhetoric was toxic. Tons of improvement could happen over Trump.
>Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
It's built into our psychology, but not something out of control. Harper was in power for 9 years and never called in the military. He never demonized his political opponents. He never falsely labelled a peaceful protest as a military occupation. He never smeared political opponents as 'racists and white nationalists with unacceptable views'. He never declared a state of emergency to crush dissent.
Trudeau doesn't need the military. He gave himself to power to seize your bank account because you're a protester. No court orders. No due process.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at Monday's news conference that banks would be able freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order.
Setting aside that no one would attempt to use the term "overwhelmingly peaceful" in a politically neutral matter nowadays unless they were completely naive (it would be like saying "think of the children" in the context of actually arguing for considering childrens' welfare) the word you omitted from the last sentence ("normal") is where the bias comes into play. "Normal" in that case carries the implication that working class people as a whole agree (or should agree) with the protestors, or that anyone who disagrees with them isn't legitimately a member of the working class.
More accurately, the protests (both of the truckers and BLM) represent more narrowly defined set of political prinicples than the beliefs of more general classes, which tend not to be as homogeneous in their views as is often portrayed.
I don't think that Trump was in a misinformation bubble. Trump was in the bubble of his own narcissistic ego. Things were "true" or "false" based on how they made Trump look. Anything that threw any kind of a negative light on him was "false".
The same was true of people. People were either "the greatest" or "losers" depending on whether the last thing they said made Trump look good or not.
Trump was creating a lot of misinformation, but it wasn't because he was misinformed (at least not primarily). It was because he cared more for his image (and, I suspect, his own image of himself) rather than reality. Facts didn't matter, only image did.
I've also noticed that the term "willful ignorance" gets thrown around a lot more nowadays. There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced that what they believe is the absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.
Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical deduction. Where people differ is the fundamental "beliefs" which are treated axiomatically (taken on faith) on which the logical superstructure is built.
Edit: people also assign different "comparative value" to different things. Most value judgements involve comparing apples and oranges, but one person might have a preference for oranges and someone else might prefer the apples. Not for any "rational" reason.
To be fair, there are a lot of logical hiccups in people's reasoning too. But when you boil those away, often there is still a different value system underneath, as you suggest.
I've always used the terms "lens" or "worldview" to describe that starting point, and I think the most fruitful conversations with people I don't agree with usually stem around understanding that we do our personal calculus differently, and that doesn't make them a terrible human being. We both certainly believe that we have the correct view (or we wouldn't hold it), we're not diminishing that there is a reality where one of us is likely correct and the other is wrong, but that we don't have all of the information to say that someone is being willfully ignorant, as other replies have stated.
A more rigorous version of this can be found in the book, Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. What you're calling a lens or worldview, he calls a "vision". He precisely defines two visions that are at opposite ends of an axis and which differ only in a single assumption: an intuition about the span of human nature. He then proceeds to show how this single intuition leads by logical extrapolation when combined with unambiguous facts to lead people to opposing policy preferences.
It's really a very powerful analysis, because it's Occam's Razor compliant. The theory is simple yet has great explanatory power.
> Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical deduction.
"Some kind" is doing a lot of work there, but I think there's some truth to what you're saying. My father-in-law will pop out with some bizarro story about how global warming was invented to cover up government collaboration with aliens, or Covid-19 was created in a lab using Vince Foster's stem cells, and when my wife asks where he heard it, it'll be from some guy he met last week and talked to for a total of half an hour while he was buying a motorcycle from him. Or maybe he didn't buy the motorcycle because he didn't totally trust the guy, but he believed him about the aliens. If you or me repeated information from a source like that, we'd be doing it in bad faith, but my father-in-law does it with a kind of innocent sincerity.
There are a lot of people like my father-in-law, but there are also a lot of people who are aware that what they're saying isn't literally true, but it's a way of supporting a system that they believe is wholesome for society, or at wholesome to their own interests. So there's a spectrum much like religion, with true believers on one end, and complete unbelievers on the other end who outwardly speak and behave as if they believe, because they think it's a good story for little kids to grow up with and because they think it's an effective shared fiction to structure society around.
In a sense you could say that both my father-in-law and the college-educated conspiracy theorists are willfully ignorant. My father-in-law sincerely believes a lot of sketchy things about politics and the government, but his lack of skepticism is not completely symmetrical. He is nominally in the "they're all crooks" camp, but he is not as quick to believe really crazy stuff about Republicans as about Democrats. Against Republicans, he'll believe that they invent reasons to use military hardware because they have a cozy relationship with defense contractors. Against Democrats, he'll believe that the military invented and perfect flying saucers in the 1950s, and then Barbara Bush and Anton Levay opened a portal to hell by having butt sex in a church and we gave the flying saucers to the demons so if they crash people will just think they're aliens. (Barbara Bush was a secret Demoncrat, of course -- she was pro-abortion!)
There's a lot about my father-in-law's internal mental state that I can't figure out from the outside. When he "believes" something crazy about Democrats, he's aware that he enjoys believing and repeating it, he seems to be aware that there's a certain kind of scrutiny that it won't hold up under, but he also regards it as actionable information in the sense that he votes based on his distaste for the Democrats and he cites crazy conspiracy stuff as supporting his distaste for the Democrats.
tl;dr Most people's conclusions are based on "some kind of logical deduction" in the sense that almost any cognitive process can be described as "some kind of logical deduction."
> Most peoples' conclusions are based on some kind of logical deduction. Where people differ is the fundamental "beliefs" which are treated axiomatically (taken on faith) on which the logical superstructure is built.
This doesn’t align very well with my observations. I can’t read minds so I don’t truly know anyone else’s beliefs. However, to the extent that I can infer possible beliefs from behavior, deductive or any other form of dialectic reasoning doesn’t appear to play much of a role. Social proof and other such phenomena appear to dominate belief formation.
I’ve found that an honest and rigorous examination of one’s own beliefs reveals that they are predominantly held for emotional reasons. Often it’s as simple as avoiding the emotional discomfort of being shunned for deviating from whatever your group’s particular dogma is.
Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying.
Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
I think “lying” as more of a “your claim is outright false” while “disingenuous” lends itself to more subjective forms of misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as “violent” on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or hundreds of thousands) were violent, I’m not really lying but I’m certainly misleading people by way of my characterization.
Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is intentionally misleading when they might simply be disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed, etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree with online.
If you call someone disingenuous, then yeah, you're being offensive. But if you call the idea disingenuous, then it's much less offensive. If you phrase it like, "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common ground or at least identifying the locus of disagreement.
But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.
Ideas can't be disingenuous because they don't have intent to begin with. Therefore, if an internet comment calls an idea or an argument disingenuous, it's calling the idea-holder or argument-maker disingenuous. It may be a little more indirect, but it's still an attack.
In my observation, that word has the opposite effect of 'finding common ground', so I'm surprised to hear you say that. If finding common ground is what you want to do (which is great), there are other words that should give you even better results.
> Ideas can't be disingenuous because they don't have intent to begin with.
I don't think that's required. If I call an idea "disingenuous" (or "misleading" for that matter), it doesn't imply that the arguer intended to mislead, but only that the idea lends itself to misinterpretation ("it seems disingenuous to suggest that the protest was violent on the basis of the actions of one or two out of tens of thousands" <- this seems about as polite as anything IMHO). But any way of suggesting that an idea is incorrect or inaccurate risks causing offense--it's a perilous enterprise and no matter which word you use, ultimately you have to lay a lot of groundwork to demonstrate good faith, common ground, etc.
Dictionaries define the word in terms of human qualities (dishonesty, insincerity, etc.), so I don't think this argument is on solid ground lexicographically :)
I don't know man. I've spoken English my whole life and I've never heard of anyone being confused about referring to an idea as 'disingenuous' or similar. :) Certainly no one (except you) has corrected me that it can only apply to people. Indeed, dictionary.com offers examples of "disingenuous" referring to ideas:
> The move has no political chance in a Democratic House, but sends a clear, though disingenuous, message about punishing supposed “extremism.”
> He would rather endorse someone with genuine doubts than someone with disingenuous beliefs.
And there are many examples in which "disingenous" refers to things other than people.
> The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant noble, which is also only something that would be said about a person
I wouldn't be surprised at all if "(dis)ingenuous" originally referred only to people but came to take on a broader meaning. This happens all the time--words are fluid on even very short timespans. Consider the verb form of impact:
> Sense of "strike forcefully against something" first recorded 1916. Figurative sense of "have a forceful effect on" is from 1935.
In only 18 years the word acquired a figurative sense (and I strongly suspect linguistic velocity--the rate of change of language--has much increased in the Internet era--although not uniformly across the lexicon). Considering your Etymonline link dates "disingenuous" to the 1650s, it would be surprising if this figurative sense hadn't developed in the intervening ~370 years.
Anyway, while I do enjoy discussing and learning about language, I have to get back to work. Thanks for the conversation, and enjoy your day! :)
The first example does refer to people. That's the point of using the word "disingenuous" there. "Sending a disingenuous message" means a message you don't really believe. The second one is hard to make sense of without more context.
Words are sort of statistical meaning clouds—people have different associations and use them differently. Regional variations play a large role. I'm pretty sure the word disingenuous does imply intent to deceive, though, and it's a significant moderation issue because it's extremely popular in internet arguments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The second one is very much about disingenuous people (and their dealings), it's from a WaPo piece headlined Deshaun Watson is taking a stand against disingenuous NFL owners. It could change the league.
Yes—there are subtle distinctions between these words ("dissimulation" is another, but that one hasn't become internet-popular). The aspect they have in common, as pvg points out, is that they all imply intent to deceive.
That’s not quite true. Lying is typically understood as actively saying something untrue. What is more typical, especially in media, is selectively sharing true information, but obscuring other true information, which would present the narrative in completely different light. This way, one can manipulate people to have misconception about the reality, without actively saying a single lie. It is still disingenuous, though, if done deliberately.
It reminds me of the House of Commons where it's permissible to lie but under no circumstances can your opponent respond by calling that lie out as a lie because that would be un-Parliamentary language. As a result, people twist themselves into all kinds of rhetorical contortions to imply someone is a liar without actually making the accusation.
I would label a statement that is technically true but highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is technically true, because you can still get COVID despite being vaccinated. However, it's misleading because the statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting it, while also significantly reducing likelihood of hospitalization and death. The statement isn't a lie, but it's certainly disingenuous.
This statement is also disingenuous. Anecdotal but from my experience those I’ve known with COVID that were not vaccinated and we’re not hospitalized.
This is part of where vaccine hesitancy comes from, it seems like you’re injecting something that’s almost useless (I won’t say it is yet) as it seems those who are healthy (read no underlying conditions, known or not) don’t have issues.
I think there's some nuance to this terminology, but overall I prefer to use the term "bad faith" when people are saying things that they know are untrue. In general, most people I hear using the term "willful ignorance" are referring to the same phenomenon of people lying to push their own narrative.
Actual ignorance is never willful, by definition of ignorance.
Willful ignorance doesn't just include lying to push a narrative. It's also an ailment of probably the majority in modern society to both be uninformed about the issues of the day and to have no interest in becoming informed. And no wonder. Being informed is hard work! For any given issue, you have to research a lot, and do it from multiple perspectives and view points, including those you don't agree with. Then you have to sort out which information you trust versus distrust, and finally synthesize your own educated opinion. Actually, you aren't even done then. You have to be willing to continue to consider opposing ideas and be willing to update your views given new information.
Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake me up.
> Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake me up.
"Red pilling" isn't waking up, it's just becoming a nativist right winger. Although the left wing calls itself "progressive" so I guess the words games are everywhere.
Yes, and I think there are two things worth considering.
First, people put their identities into their beliefs. Everything is a lifestyle choice anymore. What non-mainstream belief defines me as a person? When you make believing in the flat earth part of your identity, you get a fight or flight response when someone attacks the idea of the flat earth, because in a way, they are attacking you.
Second, it's easy to confirm your misinformation with more misinformation! I don't think people hear something once, like "the earth is flat" and just believe it. They hear it, look it up, see multiple sources saying the same things (weren't we taught to confirm stuff like this?), sprinkle in the smallest amount of plausibility - maybe a source that otherwise prints stuff you know to be true (sports scores, natural disasters, whatever) also prints something about the flat earth, and there you have it. You've done your homework. At this point admitting you're wrong means you must admit you are ignorant and were so easily duped, or that your entire education was a waste of time. It takes a very big person to do that.
It's always a little frustrating to me to see this framed as some very recent thing to do with Twitter or whatever.
People have always folded beliefs into their identities and felt embarrassed or defensive when they are challenged. Most high-profile since forever is religion.
Which brings me to another frustration, when it's presumed that there is something wrong with beliefs being involved with identity. I'm not even sure what capital-I Identity is supposed to be if not a system of beliefs about yourself and the world and how they relate.
I don't think any of this is as new as it is often assumed to be. There appears to have been a rise in "identity politics" but even this is wrong; politics has always been about identity, it's just that nationalism or socialism or other principles can be part of someone's identity. Or in other words, they are beliefs.
So maybe we are more individualistic in our politics, and maybe that is bad. Or maybe it isn't... It's probably a mixed bag!
Most people are not willing to have a Socratic style debate let alone admit they could ever be wrong. That is the root of the problem in our society today.
Hacker News is the only large forum where I see anything close to Socratic dialogues: At least a few times a week, I find myself upvoting both sides of a debate because the participants are really listening to each other and (seemingly) making a genuine effort to understand where the other side is coming from.
> There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced that what they believe is the absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.
I think they are less confident in their own ideas (politicians aren't even required to state what policies they stand for anymore!) than they are confident that the other side (or at least the cartoonish version of it presented to them via allied media) is wrong/evil.
I'm pretty convinced the Earth is round (or an oblate spheroid if you want to be pedantic about it), and I don't care if flat earthers are malicious or deluded; I'm not going to waste my time arguing with them either way.
And IMO they're largely attempts to keep Coca Cola Inc (et al) from pulling their ads because Coke doesn't want their brand on sites posting QAnon/GOP talking points.
this piece encapsulates the mindset of mainstream libs like Matty, 1 billion stupid takes, Yglesias perfectly and can be summarized as "yeah maybe these normal people were right on some things and I dismissed that without knowing anything, but I was still right to dismiss that because they're stupid".
it's now safe for Bari Weiss to ask some questions on TV that "normal people" have been asking for quite some time now and were called all sorts of things by the same people.
Exactly. I loved how even in this piece he managed to sneak in some jabs at the people he doesn't like--he just didn't call them "misinformed." Progress!
So true. Misinformation is a misnomer, it's not something that exists in opposition of information and shouldn't be compared. Like you say misinformation is something people use to achieve their goals.
The author is correct that in any debate, the prominent skeptics are often extremely well informed (joe Rogan on vaccines, in his example).
I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for misinformation.
My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff.
Once, when I was still trying to convince her to get a vaccine, I told her that after Israel’s early vaccine efforts, both cases and deaths are down heavily. Her response was to pull up a screenshot of a fox headline from a YouTube video that simply stated something like “cases up 60% after vaccination in Israel”
I don’t know the context of the headline. I’m sure in whatever context, it was accurate and not misinformation. But the actual spreaders of misinformation use skeptical talking points as weapons to spread misinformation, like the vaccine being a weapon to kill off the population for the great reset.
Anyways I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic. But skeptic talking points being mass weaponized on social media is absolutely new and uniquely enabled by modern technology.
> My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff.
This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
She was pretty normal until around 2018 on the contrary. I’m sure losing her job in 2008 and ending up socially isolated because she doesn’t speak fluent English didn’t help.
I’m not claiming ordinary and well adjusted people easily fall prey to misinformation if that’s what you’re trying to refute here.
It’s simply an observational fact that conspiracy groups wield skeptic talking points as weapons and that modern technology allows efficient dissemination of this discourse (as with any discourse).
Whether or not there’s a “misinformation problem”, per the title, is actually an empirical question that neither the author nor I have the tools to answer
There is a bit of a catch 22 here. I think you're right. Most of the garbage floating about our public discourse (and I would submit most of it is garbage) is rooted in some legitimate facts. So your MIL will get some of these skeptical headlines, perhaps with some of these more conspiratorial groups capitalizing on and embellishing the these things. I think what you say is happening is....
... but on the other side, the same thing happens. Stories such as yours get posted about and even reported on and then different organized movements build these up into narratives and use these narratives to push for the silencing of skeptical points. In the end it's really the exact same behavior: get a few facts (in context or not), build your own narrative, add a substantial amount of emotionalism so it's less about the facts anyway, and you have a ready population of true believers that for the most part won't change their views.
It's new, but it's not obvious that it actually changes what people believe, because those trying to argue against misinformation also have a much better toolkit. If someone came to you 20 years ago claiming that the chickenpox vaccine doesn't work because cases were up 60% after the rollout in Israel, how would you even begin to find contrary evidence? (How would you prove that jet fuel can compromise the integrity of steel beams?)
> those trying to argue against misinformation also have a much better toolkit.
The point of the OP is that skeptics have powerful and robust toolkits and my point is that conspiracists use these toolkits
Example: the question is whether Dr Fauci knowingly conspired to let hundreds of thousands die because he is colluding with the Chinese on enacting the great reset
The conclusion seems obviously bogus, yet you can pick a ton of arguments in favor from any skeptic of US Covid response. These tend to be very robust.
I’ve seen tons of convincing arguments on this very site about issues with US Covid response, eg that we had strong information about the risks of Covid and should have had lockdowns much earlier, that we should have advised to wear masks from the beginning, etc.
In the context of the conspiracy, each argument that US response was bungled also becomes a weapon to argue that Fauci intentionally bungled US Covid response to enact an evil agenda of widespread death.
At that point you can either argue with very well reasoned skeptic talking points, or you can dive down the ideological rabbit hole of “ok he bungled it but it wasn’t intentional / malicious”.
This is what I mean by weaponizing skeptic talking points
You should be careful about placing the blame on skeptics for misuse of their opinions by nutbags. Because the nutbags would have likely just latched onto something else. They didn't reason themselves into their crazy beliefs. So removing reasonable opinions isn't going to change their beliefs one bit.
The conspiracy theorists often latch onto proponent's factual claims and misinterpret them as supporting the conspiracy theory. A lot of conspiracy theories re vaccines will quote CDC, WHO, research papers, etc. that aren't skeptical.
> More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes.
The key thing that journalism should do is take factual information and provide context. If 99.999% of scientists claim the earth is a ball and 0.001% claim the earth is flat, for fucks sake don't present these two things as equal. With vaccines it's the same. Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much.
And the result of that lack of providing context in media (or, worse, outright and willing deception of the Alex Jones class) is what is the problem. When media or government institutions prove that they are not willing to do their job, people end up not trusting them - which then leads to the disconnect between wide swaths of the population and factual truth we're seeing.
IMO the author displays confirmation bias in the post. He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability information with a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view. If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information, that's more convincing than outright lies. And this is often the situation we are in more often than not these days. Along with an inability to spot logical fallacies in lines of reasoning.
Replace "profit driven such-and-such" with "print newspaper" and the rhetorical question works equally well.
I think the worst you can say against social media is that it feeds you low-quality highly-partisan sources if you seem to like such sources. But your ability to seek out better or contradicting information is not diminished. If anything it is far greater than it has ever been. "Stuff that is against $my_favorite_belief" is a Google search away. Wikipedia alone will usually give you a fairly balanced treatment of a topic with extensive references to diverse perspectives and evidence.
Amusingly, I fail to see how such an engine would resolve the problem. Groups of people would just choose the point of view they liked, and label the other as misinformation and... we're back to the original topic.
most americans live insular suburban lives in their bubble and when they get doses of current events they are algorithmically fed confirmation bias and especially confirmation bid that arouses them to click/engage. I.e tabloidizing the cherry picked facts that then framed with the biases that poke the viewers buttons.
We shouldn’t try to fix obesity, smoking, enforce seatbelts, gangs, local pollution, etc because all those are personal choices to live near or partake in?
Try to help as you wish, but describe the problem accurately. And understand that the people you are trying to help may resist you because you are interfering in their choices.
Some people passionately want to keep drugs like fentanyl out of the country. Others think it's impractical and efforts have done more harm than good. Still others say "hand them a clean needle".
Messing with the choices people make that you think are bad for them isn't easy.
I think you meant:
> Messing with the choices people make that scientists, sociologists, and 9 out of 10 dentists think are bad for them and society as a whole isn't easy.
I guess that my more appropriate and more relevant corrected version of the statement didnt sound like it supported the point so the original was phrased as if it’s my own non expert opinion that smoking causes cancer.
fentanyl? Are you saying that should be unregulated and freely purchasable at the local 7/11 or are you saying it should be regulated even although some people choose to do it?
Either way I’m not really sure how that supports the older points about people technically but not practically having the option to avoid misinformation means society should ignore misinformation as it’s “a personal choice”
You seem to think I'm making every possible point but the one I'm actually making.
I'm not saying it's good for people to have fentanyl or misinformation.
I'm not saying personal choices are above criticism or regulation.
I'm just saying it's hard. You're going to be intruding into how people run their lives. Many of them won't like it.
My personal take is that social media can be awfully like a drug, and we're probably going to need detox programs and support groups. Misinformation is just one small aspect of how today's social media degrades the human mind and spirit.
On the other hand, social media isn't heroin, it's human interaction. Regulating a material thing with no legitimate uses is a lot more straightforward.
And to be honest, I am very skeptical of central authorities arbitrating what is truth. Historically this is a cure worse than the disease.
Oops I didn’t realize you agreed with the overall point because I thought it would be, I can’t think of a more political term, being pedantic by trying to correct the higher comment to say that it’s actually not hard to find different viewpoints from a technical standpoint just immensely difficult and challenging considering psychology and human nature such that it’s unrealistic for the majority of people to do. I didn’t really see what the point of making that observation was unless it was to argue against the main point.
Currently, there is a middleman that's looking to present you with "engaging" information wherever you look. There is so much information available that you always need a sorting mechanism
Engaging being straw man arguments to dunk on, with people dunking on them
> If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information, that's more convincing than outright lies.
I think it's exactly the opposite. It's far easier to convince with outright lies than with carefully chosen facts, because those lies are crafted to match what you want to believe. That's what false conspiracy theories are born of.
Everyone is subject to that bias, even people that consider themselves highly logical.
It starts becoming a problem when it is manipulated to channel broadly held but not expressed resentments.
This is common in ethnically fractured developing societies, where a rumor about something someone in group x did to someone in group y could turn into a coup or war, but it seems that developed societies are no longer immune either.
Not all contradicting points of view are created equal. Just because someone can make up a contradicting position doesn't mean it's got any relevance or merit. Couching a meritless position in pseudoscience doesn't make it any better.
The problem we too often see is people, mass media especially, trying to appear "fair" by airing statistically unrepresentative positions just because they are contrary to some mainstream position. There's not two equal sides to all positions. Even when there are two (multiple) sides not all of them have statistically significant representation or are equally rigorous.
Just because I'm not seeking out arguments claiming COVID vaccines have 5G or the Earth is flat doesn't mean I have a lower ability to seek out contrary opinions. It just means I've got some basic scientific literacy and a bullshit filter.
The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook Whatsapp and their recently target telegram.
I don't think that's right.
Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it.
In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread in their social circle.
The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected you or made you personally angry/offended.
Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government as "just a few crazy people" for years even
when it wasn't just a few people anymore (e.g. Reichsbürger).
Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party).
And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure.
But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence.
The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated.
And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact.
This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction.
And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple, distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason.
Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting with honest open communication they decided they needed to be even more manipulative to protect society.
Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2).
(2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation
(1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.
> increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories
I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything.
I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along.
The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?"
In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.
This 100% my experience in Germany as well. Thank you for articulating it so well.
There is zero political skill of anticipating counter-reactions in the government.
The perfect example of this phenomenon was the discussion around vaccine mandates. In 2020, mainstream politics dismissed all mentions of vaccine mandates as dangerous misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracy theorists.
In 2022, mainstream politics is in favor vaccine mandates, and brands mandate opponents as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a complete disaster.
It is important to remember that the media seems to only call out "misinformation" when it is from sources that threaten their market, Have you seen any apology for their failure to uncover the lies that got us into needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want to be lead into collective insanity any more.
If you didn't buy that Iraq had WMDs and that there was a BinLaden to Saddam connection, you were on the side of misinformation. The entire media and political establishment was at odds with your take.
If you clamp down on misinformation, you're doing nothing more than allowing the establishment to be wrong without consequence, and creating consequence when the average person is wrong.
No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War.
Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything else works in favor of power.
This isn't about who's right and who wrong.
Its about power. It's about who's allowed the freedom to be wrong and who isn't. Who has the ability to manipulate the public and who doesn't.
And the power to dictate that is the power to win every public debate no matter how much merit you do or don't have.
Wow you stepped on every single information landmine possible.
The NYT had commentators reporting on what they thought was true. They have done many years of introspection about their rule in the Iraq war, this is not what "perpetuator of misinformation" do - they double down.
> Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
What is one thing either site has gotten wrong (objectively, not your opinion) and refuses to correct ? Everyone makes mistakes, how we respond to those mistakes is the distinction we should care about.
> This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power.
Sounds like projection of what you believe the digital information space to be.
Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating . . . while confirming the Free Beacon reporting as entirely true. Here’s how they explained it:
> In 2022, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substance abuse harm reduction grant did require recipients to provide safer smoking kits to existing drug users. In distributing grants, priority would be given to applicants serving historically underserved communities. However what’s false is this was just one of around 20 components of the grant program and far from its most prominent or important one.
Snopes claims that the news about smoking kits is true. It’s just not important.
> While a description of the HHS grants stated that the grantees would be required to buy materials like safe smoking kits and supplies to "enhance harm reduction efforts," such kits and supplies are just a few of the many materials that grantees can utilize.
> The Free Beacon reported that a source told them the crack kits could specifically include pipes, and the story went viral
No offense but if you asked me to make up a typical right wing red meat outrage generating story, this would be it.
> Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating
You didn't link to Snopes, instead "leadstories.com" which i've never heard of. Where is the source from Snopes itself?
Also "Mostly False" sounds right, as it was just the pipe detail that is in dispute, no? At best this is a nuance argument of a somewhat complicated story about policy (which itself is complicated) - far from the "clear example of a false story" I asked for.
> Also "Mostly False" sounds right, as it was just the pipe detail that is in dispute, no?
In fact this passage articulates why "mostly false" is accurate, the framing done by right wing media was purposefully and misleading (and leaning on emotionally/racially charged language like "crack pipe"):
> Collectively, these articles gave readers a grossly misleading and reductive presentation of what was a real substance abuse harm reduction grant overseen by the Biden administration in early 2022. We are issuing a rating of “Mostly False.”
> It’s true that the grant description required the provision of smoking kits — an established component of harm reduction strategy — but in reality, those kits constituted just one of several sub-components of an even longer list of requirements for grant recipients. In other words, while outraged media coverage focused almost exclusively on “crack pipes,” this was actually only a very small part of the program.
I asked you for a solid example of something objectively wrong that hasn't been corrected, you gave me something that is at best nuanced and deserving of more clarification.
> Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
Not here they didn't.
I'd ask for another example, but if this is the best you have to prove that "fake news" is out to get you, I think we've dispelled that thoroughly.
I find it odd that nobody seems to mention the similarities between all this and religion. Widespread belief in things that can't possibly be true. Adherents can't be persuaded otherwise despite incontrovertible evidence. Sounds familiar? Perhaps it's baked into the firmware.
There have been endless comparisons of Trumpism to a cult, which at first seemed a bit extreme until we saw tens of millions of Americans believe more and more fantastical lies over the course of the last 5 years. Now, I can't imagine how we can describe it as anything other than a cult.
As someone that works on moderation of an online platform I can tell you that lots and lots of misinformation exists and is read by millions of people. On vaccines many people actually believe the microchip, 5G, magnetic, secret ingredients, fetal tissue, vaccines shedding, Bill Gates stuff. Misinformation affects real people's actions in dangerous ways, I don't know what downplaying its existence accomplishes.
An important measure of "misinformation" is who benefits if the information is actually true or false. Also valuable to identify who has the financial capacity to influence the sources of "truth".
In my opinion, the "misinformation problem" breaks down into a couple of separate causes. Mainly the odd inability of people not being able to view a comment that they disagree with and not try to "correct" that person (highly related to the inability people have to let the other person have the last word) and simple tribalism.
I don't know what to do about the "inability not to respond" issue, I suffer from that myself. On the tribalism issue, I strongly suggest becoming the equivalent of a nomadic wanderer. When someone posts something about a topic I strongly agree with, I don't assume I will agree with everything else they might say. The same goes for posts about something I strongly disagree with. Being too caught up in tribalism leads to inoffensive posts from the other tribe causing a knee-jerk reaction to say something, anything, to put them in their place even if the person completely agree with what the other person just posted. Hence, the rise of "whataboutism".
I try to take on a view of comments posted in which I don't care who the other person is, what other beliefs they might have good or bad, and just reply to the comment at hand. If the comment is full of insults I just ignore them and pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those. This would seem to be a good way to have less conflict in conversations on the internet but in my experience you need very thick skin to go this route because you are an outsider to all groups, meaning you are a target for everyone. There are people who will stop insulting you when you calmly reply to their points and ignore their jibes, but not as many as a younger more naive version of myself would have expected, unfortunately.
This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as everyone else, so I slip at times.
> pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those
100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you don't have to do that. You can pick up just the parts you want to reply to.
I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored with bias. This is funny and sad!
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadI agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither?
What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue.
On the other side, you have governance structures that require the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the populace.
Both work hand in hand - one provides the message the other the megaphone. In the past 2 years, the government has bankrolled the largest campaign in history, and the media have been willing recipients.
Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions.
Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.
If you force Fox, CNBC, CNN to create an agency of news reporting where each one oversee the content created, in order to be as objective as possible, then I think the society in US would benefit
In Italy those newspapers do money by selling copies containing the premium content, which is like reports, opinion articles, more in depth opinion articles etc, which people is still interested in, but for news and facts then ANSA is the source of truth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silv...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016344370936116...
But the scope of my reply was about "who owns the truth?" and yeah you need a place where people can go and check facts that are checked by peers of other point of view
I would tell you about my literature professor, he would walk around with multiple newspapers under his armpit and suggest that "If you want to try to get the truth you need to get the same fact from multiple point of view and try to get it in the middle"
It seems to me like the opposite is the case, there is much less centralization than there used to be. There does seem to be some emergent synchronization of opinions but that is not the same.
'these guys are just stupid' as they engage in overt deception and manipulation to even make such an accusation.
The Earth is a flat disc.
Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.
> Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
You missed the fourth option: it's neither. No-one would call it misinformation or wrongthink; rather it's false, or a lie if you're feeling judgemental. I think the person you replied to has made a good point.
Most people will not have the experience to discern things like p-hacking and massaged numbers. Having experts call these things out as misinformation seems quite useful to me.
Maybe. I've not heard people calling "misinformation" in cases like that though.
The liar can produce 10 lies and demands you disprove them or they are somehow true. The burden of the liar proving their reasoning is missing.
The goal is that their opinion and your fact be treated with equal weight or the opinion has greater weight simply because they can produce more "opinions" more often than you can facts.
This is also referred to as Gish Gallop and relies heavily on the bullshit asymmetry principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Interesting that there seems to be a lot of overlap between creationists and antivaxers. Creationists seem to buy into a sort of conspiratorial view of science where they claim that their "creation scientists" are purposely ignored by mainstream science which is in the grip of some kind of delusion so that they can't comprehend that creationism is the way or are in fact actively trying to subvert the idea that creationism is actually true. Extrapolate to vaccines and they easily believe that there's some kind of alternative science that hasn't been corrupted, but isn't widely known. Similar overlaps for denying climate change.
> Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?
Neither. It is an assertion based on a frame of reference. The mapping systems used on my phone don't often describe geographic topography and so assert a flatness to the surface of this planet. Likewise this planet viewed from its moon would have the visual appearance of a disk. Is "The Earth is a flat disc" a helpful explanation for operating in the world? Not if you are a rocket scientist but it isn't a terrible model if you live an entire life within the vicinity of your family farm.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful”. George E. P. Box
https://www.lacan.upc.edu/admoreWeb/2018/05/all-models-are-w...
- accusing someone of lying has no restraining impact on the person or the lie, and indeed where it might have a magnifying effect
or
- the lie is being shared by someone who has been lied to and does not know it; they aren't a liar but they are misinformers.
Calling the "Covid hasn't even been isolated" misinformation a lie, for example, requires knowing that the teller is aware they are lying. They could simply be credulous.
Should an accusation alone have that effect?
The point is, many lies are a particular kind of bad faith. You can point out to the guy who, say, believes Antoine Béchamp is the last word in medicine, that he is misrepresenting Béchamp in the past, let alone misrepresenting science in the present, and that guy will argue that it is the very predictable pattern of your fact-based attempt to disprove him that is evidence of your perfidy.
When you know that person is making that argument knowing it to be false, there is no point in accusing them.
The only thing you can do is tackle the "alternative facts" as misinformation rather than as an attempt to deceive.
Because those who argue in bad faith claim injury in bad faith too. "Misinformation" is a more dispassionate approach.
Misinformation exists, and it is a problem. At this point we've seen some evidence that state actors put some of it out there during the 2016/2020 elections, and it can be spread organically.
That said, it's not nearly as widespread or problematic as it's made to be by much of popular media.
you just got fact checked
It has no meaning at all. Since it basically has no meaning it does make it quite a good word in a propaganda context. We can make this word mean whatever we want.
It is a shame we don't use the concept of noise or a noisy channel in a wider context.
Or any of the various other QAnon work.
Especially after Epstein. Why would they bother with the pizza business? I guess to add some theory to the conspiracy?
On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation". That's where someone is deliberately and systematically trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say that both major political parties in the US are also running disinformation campaigns.
"Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So people care about misinformation in a way that they don't care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can cause more harm.
But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation campaigns can cause (and, in fact, are causing).
I'll admit that I found parsing the whole comment rather difficult so I may have missed something, but what are "wokes"?
So "wokes" are people who are 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination'.
> newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news
So what have "wokes" got to do with anything? They are just people who aren't racist, right?
Again, maybe I have misunderstood.
And, perhaps to clarify further, do you consider yourself woke, or anti-woke?
I think you're oversimplifying serious issues there, it's not being against or pro racial prejudice, it's being against racial prejudice but also pro freedom of speech, against moderation and censorship and pro conversation
Woke culture has alienated whoever was racist, and whoever had racist idea was removed from Twitter, the result? They just created their own societies on 4chan and other QAnon channels, away from conversation and from anyone who could tell them why their ideas were wrong, the result? Racist grew their support to the point where Trump was elected president, now that Trump is banned from Twitter, he is still growing his user base, away, unmoderated, and without the opportunity to discuss
so yeah I am against wokes
Why are you conflating freedom of speech, moderation and censorship?
Freedom of speech means the government won't come and arrest you for saying something. That's got nothing to do with wokeness or Twitter.
Twitter (et al) are commercial businesses. They have terms of service and if you don't abide to them you get kicked. It's very simple. You're not paying for it - you're not the customer.
If a pig farm discovers that some pigs have started tail-biting and annoyng the other pigs then they'll take 'em out back. Letting a minority annoy the other pigs, resulting in a less valuable product doesn't benefit them. Twitter users are the pigs, not the supermarket. it's just good business.
I'll defend to the death your right to your freedom of speech even though don't agree with it, but I'm damned if I'm going to lend you a megaphone to express it. Particularly if you're going to, say, deny the holocaust and my granparents were exterminated in it.
And as for the idea that racists are going to stop being racists if theyre not on Twitter for people tell them that they are wrong, well bless your heart.
> now that Trump is banned from Twitter, he is still growing his user base, away, unmoderated, and without the opportunity to discuss
I thought that you were against moderation?
Anyone who cares about reality? Because that's all freedom of speech is. If you break ToS, tough.
I don't follow the coffee machine bit, sorry.
> also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a mainstream platform which helped alienating people towards their circle
Glad you agree that Twitter can do whatever it wants. Maybe it sucks, but that's a free market for you!
Can I take it that you were banned from Twitter? If so, why?
The coffee machine bit: Governments have regulations that protect freedom of speech, and government are made of people and elected by people, if we let woke culture go ahead in their ideas that freedom of speech is ok to be limited when some ideas are expressed, how long since a enough number of politicians get elected and put that into law/change the law? So yeah freedom of speech as-is, is from the government, but it has to be protected also between people as people have the power to form ideas that change laws, because we don't elect machines
Wait, what?! "verbal violence" - I thought you were the defender of freedom of speech? Have we switched and you're now the woke-ist snowflake who is scared of words?
I'm sure you're aware that the next bit is practically the defintion of the slippery-slope fallacy. Given that we have:
* Brazil - Bolsonaro (not woke) * USA - Trump (not woke) until recently and the house likely to turn to the GoP (not woke) soon * UK - Boris Johnson (about as woke as Rip Van Winkle) * Russia - Putin (about as woke as Trump)
I dont think that we're in dange of falling into some Woke World Order anytime soon!
Can you give one soitary example (preferably your best) of a "woke" law being passed, please?
Has a "woke" person killed someone now? Incarcerated them? Examples, please! I mean, I know that in Germany you might get in trouble for holocaust denial, but they kind of have had some major problems with that whole area, so I have some sympathy.
The article you were pointed to contained far more information than that.
Choosing to treat that one sentence as a strict definition doesn't really hold up.
Your last sentence sound like a personal attack, which makes me think you aren't arguing in good faith.
Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Google says: adjective: woke; comparative adjective: woker; superlative adjective: wokest
Merriam Webster: chiefly US slang : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)So, that seems to be the accepted defintion. I can't really copypasta the whole Wikipedia page now, can I.
The last sentence was not a personal attack, it was merely the logical conclusion his own appraisal of himself; "I am an anti-woke"
If you have an alterative defintion that would refute the conclusion then I'm all ears.
Let's say that I am a guy, attentive to social justice, noble. Then I am that same guy who reads about someone trying to talk bad about social justice, I converse with him (good), I start calling him names, want his head, want him banned and alienated (bad)
So this is an invite to go further than the definition and that point that you egregiously understood
We're having a converstion, but for you to make a valid point that people are doing these thing then you need to present examples.
You couldn't/wouldn't present an example of the newspaper wokeness that you suggest is happening.
Give me just one (your best) concrete example of this woke culture in action and you'll have made a point, otherwise this is all just angels dancing on the head of pin territory.
There is a whole section called "Woke as a pejorative term", also an earlier section states: "there is no single agreed-upon definition of woke".
The point is instead of interacting with the thread to find out the contextual meaning, you decided to settle one a definition simplistic enough to conclude "op is for racism/discrimination".
First, formal logical analysis of complex semantics (which that Wikipedia page implies is the case for the word "woke") doesn't work.
Even if it did, "anti-" can refer to any aspect of something; and since there is often no distinction between a-<something> and anti-<something>, this further illustrates why trying to guess the meaning of a word doesn't work.
> If you have an alterative defintion that would refute the conclusion then I'm all ears.
Given by wccrawford in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349172
Which also calls into question your disingenuity:
> I'm just stuggling to see why being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination is bad thing
wccrawford pretty clearly explained it, but here you are reverting back to ignorance.
They take "being a good person" so far that they make life hard for others instead.
The root of their beliefs is good: All people are worthy of respect and shouldn't be judged based on things out of their control.
But the lengths they go for that is just too much. They often refuse to even consider that there may be other factors that need to be taken into account as well and shout down everything that doesn't align with their view.
That makes it hard to fight against them. They've set themselves up to be seen as always being in the right, but because they refuse to have nuance, they often aren't.
What I would really like to see is a concrete example, which so far everyone has declined to give. It's customary to provide some actual evidence to back up claims.
"Your honor, the defendant killed the victim in cold blood"
"I see, proceed with your evidence"
"Meh, go find it for yourself."
or I mean I know what do you want, but don't know how long do you want me to reply to you, or others, like I am very patient in conversations, but I feel like don quixote and as a non native speaker I feel like you're misunderstanding what I say, genuinely or not, I guess someone here thinks not, but I think I am done, its been a few hours, you've been told things, you've been given links, and now I think it's time for you to go to explore the world by yourself... fly free
And why, as a doughty protector of free speech would I not be perfectly fine with anyone using their own right of freedom of speech to reply to me? Robustly.
Is it just that you want freedom without consequences? Because you're a racist? No accusing - just "asking questions".
You gave me one link - to Wikipedia, which you then seem to have an issue with the definition provided therein. And no examples. Still no examples.
Here's a link for you - about the most sensible thing I can find about woke from Oliver Dowden, Chairman of the UK Conservative party who has been talking to right wing "think tanks" (lobbying groups) in the US this week. Well, actually not him, but it might as well be. I particularly like the bit where he refuses to define what woke is - seems to be all the range. Enjoy:
https://twitter.com/mattgreencomedy/status/14936111188996956...
Thank you for providing literally the first response with a concrete example.
I shall have a read - its late here and I have to bed down shortly.
Certainly a poor peer review system is an issue that should be addressed.
Also rather worrying is the unethical nature of submitting bogus research, not getting informed consent from those being experimented on and the lack of a control group.
Is this the best example you have?
This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.
I think that it's common knowledge that there is a bit of a crisis with peer review and reproducibility in science in general, and humanities/social science in particular. If sure that the follow-up studies which were properly conducted and controlled will confirm your suspicions. There are properly conducted follow-up studies, right? Right?
I shouldn't be churlish though; let's put prank papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs, on the board for now. Lord know's it the only thing we have so far.
If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob which stormed the seat of goverment in an insurrection and called for the hanging of the vice-president, then maybe have a rethink.
It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.
The whole thing just smacks of McCarthayism, or the satanic child-abuse hysteria of the 80s.
No doubt that there is a kook somewhere demanding paid hibernation leave for Furries, or some such nonsense, but if you claim that a weird outlier is actually representative of reality will have you finding reds under the bed everwhere and grotesque caricatures of "woke" in every wallpaper pattern you see. It is hysteria.
You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"?
So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!
This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.
You asked for a concrete example where "woke" causes some damage, I provided one and asked "is this example sufficient for you?" You responded with a novel about unrelated things without answering my question. Let me ask again: is this example sufficient for you? Do you accept that this is an example that demonstrates that - in addition to whatever positive things woke causes in society - woke also causes some negative things in society?
> Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.
I agree a control group submitting nonsense papers of right-wing propaganda would have been necessary to prove that these woke-activism nonsense papers were published because of political activism (as opposed to not reading papers). That said, I strongly suspect that the papers were read, because these are not predatory journals that publish anything you submit. Furthermore, when you look at the papers which ARE being published, it's obvious that they tow the party line with regards to political messaging.
> papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs ... If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob ...
This is another bit of misdirection from you. You're pretending as if I'm bothered by the existence of prank papers. No, as you perfectly well know, the prank papers are not what "keeps me up at night", it's the underlying phenomena the prank papers exposed: that certain fields of science have been entirely subverted by woke political activists. The problem is - as you well know - that these fields are no longer producing science, they are producing political propaganda camouflaged as science. This is what the Grievance studies affairs demonstrated.
Also note that you are doing a whataboutism defense here as well, when you start talking about entirely unrelated things like Trump and January 6th. You're not scoring any points here.
> It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.
It's not hard to find these examples. If you actually were interested, you could find these examples yourselves in a few minutes of Googling. But you're merely pretending to be interested. Here's one case where I provided an example of a fields of science being subverted for woke political activism, and you dismiss it as "pretty weak sauce". Why would I go out of my way to provide more examples for you? You're just going to dismiss every other example just like this. You're not interested in any facts that are counter to your world view. You're merely pretending to be interested.
> You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"? So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!
I'm not interested in attemps to redefine a political movement in a dictionary sense. A movement can have a perfectly nice-sounding dictionary definition while at the same time it can cause harm in society. That doesn't imply any kind of logical contradiction.
Oh, it's realy not - you presented an experiment (Grievance studies affair) as an example of "how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda".
But what you cite is a terrible, deeply flawed experiment which proves no such thing.
So in answer to your question if it wasn't obvious; no, it's not sufficient.
"I am a better parent / patriot / Christian / anti-racist / Aryan / communist / whatever than you." seems to be remarkably universal. Some people just love to create ladders of virtue and vice.
But at certain times, one of those prevails. IDK if you were alive immediately after 9/11. That was a period of unabashed jingoism. Now, 20 years later, this fever has long subsided, but there is a wave of wokism now. In 2042, there will be something different, but people generally react to contemporary trends.
Jingoism subsided? Really? MAGA, America First, The BNP, Britain First. Its really not gone away.
And surely an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding is to be welcomed. Unless your definition of woke is something else - no-one who is "anti-woke" will actually tell me what they think it means, just vague insinuations that "they do x" with no concrete examples.
As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)
Tell me how destroying an old man's career over a 33 years old article [1] can be labeled as an increase in empathy, tolerance and understanding.
Or running a Twitter death gauntlet on a random Mexican driver [2].
These incidents embody "wokeness" to me, not a nicely sounding definition that was constructed to make the movement look better than it actually is.
You seem to put a lot of trust into nicely sounding definitions. Always look at practice: do those people practice what they preach?
Anyone can put together nicely sounding definitions and theories. In theory (= the Constitution), the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, where I grew up, had solid protections of personal freedoms and human rights. In practice, it didn't. It was a totalitarian state that just didn't want to state "we rule you and we will crush any dissent" in writing.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation-idUSKB...
[2] https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
> As to the woke, whose self-definitions you seem to be taking at face value. (Why?)
Because practially everyone I know, I would not consider "anti-woke". They are reasonable, not vindictive, anti-racist, feminist. I don't know if they would consider themselves woke, but certainly anyone who deploys woke as a pejorative would consider them woke. Woke has become the go-to term to demonise anything that you disagree with. the right wing headbangers in the UK will refer to our PM as woke. He really is not woke. At all. He literally has ministers out waging a "war on woke". It's a meaningless culture wars smoke screen to distract from the latest scandals and incompetence.
If you are a comms director and you become the story, it's generally accepted that you resign. He wasn't fired. Given that the role is now vacant again for the fourth time in three years it suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Given the 737 MAX crisis I would not be at all suprised if he was looking for a way out anyway.
More sympathy for the driver. Seems like a conditional warning ("if you did do it for that reason we take a dim view - please don't do it again for any reason") would have been more than sufficient. Of course, I'm sure that you'll agree that better employment rights for US workers would help to prevent summary dismissals like this, which can happen any time for any reason.
...while Antifa is literally burning down cars and shops indiscriminately...
I said nothing about Antifa - why are you creating a straw man? Stick to woke.
If you would like to propose a new term that encompases the original defintion of woke and something else then feel free - hyer-woke, or something. Why do you want to change the defintion of words?
And, are you a fascist?
You're pretending to be wholly unfamiliar with the subject of culture wars, when in reality you are very familiar with them. That's disingenuous. The other poster seemed to have endless patience with you pretending "not to understand" and "not know" things which you know and understand perfectly well.
I don't know why you can't just stand up straight and argue for the things you believe in, instead of trying to play some mind games, lying and cheating? If your cause is worthy and your arguments are good, then surely you can achieve your goals without resorting to lies?
Same as a bunch of strange crazes that have cropped up over the years; witch trials, spanish inquisition, mccarthayism, 80s satanic child-abuse.
Say something or someone is woke and it's like yelling "communist" in the 50s.
It's a fantastic distraction mechanism for anyone wishing to deploy it and I'm just staggered that seemingly intelligent people go into a Pavlov's dog response as soon as they hear it.
The amazing thing what I've found is practially no-one can actually put into words what they think it means.
Yes they have. The other poster used hundreds of words to explain it to you. You just dismiss any explanations, just as you dismiss any concrete examples of the destruction woke has caused to society. You ask for stuff, then people give it to you, then you close your eyes and ears and say you still haven't seen any of that stuff you asked for.
chiefly US slang : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
In terms of concrete examples, going back over the thread so far all I can find (if I missed any please correct me):
) SDG&E driver.
) Boeing comms director.
*) Grievance studies affair
For the SDG&E driver, if he was performing some kind of white power salute in clearly marked company vehicle (and, let's be honest, nobody really knows if he did or not except him) then some kind of disciplinary action at work would be appropriate - it's pretty dispicable (unless you're a keen racist) and it brings the company into disrepute. A final written warning or something. But because we don't know if he did or not, a less severe meeting with HR, being reminded of the need not to bring any bad publicity to the company, we believe you are acting in good faith, but please don't do this knuckle cracking thing again - it looks bad.
What amazes me about it is that the labour laws are so lax that people can be summarily sacked without any due process. I understand that this is common practice in the US and happens all of the time. Seems to me that solution to this is to campaign for stronger employee rights. You can't uninvent smartphone cameras, and you can't stop people from posting things on twitter, but you can strengthen labour laws. This isn't a problem with woke, it's a problem with lax regulations.
As for the comms director, he resigned. That's just what comms directors do if they become the story. He wasn't sacked. If behind the scenes he was forced to resign then see previous point about labour laws and he should take them to an employment tribunal.
I find the Grievance studies thing hilarious. Clearly it is a wonderful hoax, and calls into question the quality of the review process at the journals and maybe the utility of social science (I've alwayss been a bit sceptical of calling it science, tbh). But seeing as it was a hoax and not really not a controlled experiment you can't really take away many conlcusions from it.
How anyone can read a title like "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" or "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use" without pissing themselves laughing is beyond me. I would certainly resign if I'd have waved that through without going back to the submitter and saying WTF is this.
If these are your "concrete examples of the destruction woke has caused to society", I just don't see it. An example of how lax labour laws are a bad thing, certainly. An example of calling (some) social sciences a science being a bit silly, yes.
But just look at the people crying woke all of the time, the likes of Fox and talk radio. The same people who want lax labour laws. The same people who undermine the science about vaccinations and have lead to tens (possibly hundreds?) of thousands of uneccessary deaths of people who would have survived had they got vaccinated. That is very real and raw destruction of human lives and society.
Fine, here's how I would define woke: a political movement focusing on issues related to racial and social justice.
Are you happy with this definition? How does this help in any way?
> But just look at the people crying woke all of the time ...
Again, two wrongs don't make a right. You can't just resort to a whataboutism argument every time somebody points out something wrong your camp has done.
> Are you happy with this definition? How does this help in any way?
Absolutely happy. It helps because now that I know that if someone says that they are anti-woke then by definition they are anti racial and social justice. Kind of what I suspected, but good to have it confirmed.
Look, I'm a middle aged, middle class, white, straight, cisgendered (whatever that means) male. It makes no difference to me. But I know that I'm not anti-woke.
> Again, two wrongs don't make a right. You can't just resort to a whataboutism argument every time somebody points out something wrong your camp has done.
It's not whataboutery, it's just an explanation. If you don't want people to be fired from a job for specious reasons then don't don't vote for those who want lax labour laws which allow people to be fired for specious reasons (or no reason at all - which is likely far more common than anything to do with white power signs, but doesn't make the news).
If the people who don't want stronger protections for employees also happen to be the ones who are telling you that woke is the problem (definitely not the lack of rights for employees!), then maybe recalibrate your bullshit detector.
If they are also the same people who are discouraging you from getting vaccinated or maybe bleach will cure covid then run like hell - they are the real sociopaths.
If you think that woke is problem, you're being gaslit.
If you don't support Antifa, you must be a literal nazi. If you don't support BLM, you must think black lives don't matter. If you don't support woke, you must be anti racial and social justice. We already visited this logical fallacy, I'm not gonna explain again what's wrong with it.
I might not support Antifa beause of (some of) their activities. But I'm anti-fascist because I'm not fascist.
I might not support BLM (although I'd struggle to see why) - I don't support them financially, if that counts. The opposite of beliving that black lives matter is believing that black lives don't mater.
There is no Woke. There is only woke.
Continue to vote for the Leopards Eating Faces party, and blame "woke" when leapords eat your face. As the LEF party encourages you to.
So then perhaps you might see how someone else might not support the woke movement because of some of their activities, even if they think the goals of the movement are good?
> The opposite of beliving that black lives matter is believing that black lives don't mater.
Yes, and? Where are the people saying "black lives don't matter"? Are you implying that people who don't support BLM (due to their activities of literally burning down cities) are thinking that black lives don't matter? Can you see how a person might agree with the statement "black lives matter", while simultaneously opposing a political movement that's literally named "black lives matter"?
> There is no Woke. There is only woke.
I have no idea what kind of pedantic nitpickery this is, but woke is a political movement just as BLM is, regardless of how you capitalize words.
However, if you're looking for offence where none was intended ... doesn't that mean that you're woke? That's what they do, right?
Let's just ... Finish.
(And the Italian guy, I wasn't mocking - certainly not his English - I found the first message difficult to undertand what he meant, so wanted to make sure that he was referring to what I thought he was before contining. God knows his English is better than my Itaian. Or Finnish).
What matters to me is the truth. In times of FUD(fear, uncertainty, doubt), the information dials are all set to 11. It's an absolute firehose of all the above. It's less misinformation to me, but rather too much information.
The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or scientific articles from credible authors, not opinion columnists. The internet makes me confused. Confusion gives me FUD. FUD makes the truth hard to decipher.
Although debate and dissent may help get to the truth earlier, only time will be the judge. It's unfortunate that we live in the present and can't have the truth earlier, but that's just life for ya.
100% this, excellent observation.
> FUD makes the truth hard to decipher
One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look at what's left.
To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But, when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.
That last one is large and subtle - I once called someone an "active psychological hazard" for the manipulation within their "narrative" structure; think about how good comedians build a kind of meandering story, and then apply that to an affect aside from humor, and you've got the right idea.
It's... I don't know. People tell me things, or I read them, and it forms a sort of multidimensional "shape" inside my mind. Then I lop off / rotate the shape so the emotional affects aren't present, or aren't significant, or aren't "in view". But also like I said, I don't actually know if it's working; but I think it is. I know that before I do whatever it is, I feel things; afterwards, I feel them, but at a remove, so they're more like things I could feel, if I chose to.
Does that all make any kind of sense, even a little bit?
It sounds like you might enjoy comedy theory as this is where I learned majority of what you're talking about. Specifically improv comedy.
Note that I do think "raising the stakes" is a valid explorative method - you can use it to make small details much more visible, for example - even it's not so valid as an argument. So it's not so much about avoiding people who do that, as much as it about zeroing out the impact of them doing that.
> That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about.
I don't know if misinformation is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about, not least because it really depends on the author's definition of "liberal", a word that appears to have only pejorative meaning for most people now.
But it definitely is interesting to consider whether for example QAnon has spread more quickly than the conspiracy theories that led to the First World War, not least because QAnon hasn't yet started a war. Give it time.
I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't even know how you would track it 30 years ago.
Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even more insane than Alex Jones.
It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had.
The whole process is so transparent.
We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the conspiracy so that no longer matters.
Likewise with David Icke or the more self-limiting lunacy of Kate Shemirani; these people it's better not to worry about.
Rudy Giuliani or MTG? Maybe worth worrying about because they can tip things over into riots.
There's no political gain to be had on either side of the Bigfoot-in-the-forest argument, in fact. Or financial gain, or notoriety, or kudos. Which is why it's really not particularly telling.
It's just a fringe belief.
Misinformation matters when its intent is to undermine democracy or governance in the public good, undermine civic or civil society, create an "other" that can be attacked, create a pretext for war or social unrest or vigilantism etc.
I don't think people who believe in Bigfoot really fit the pattern. Nor do Flat-Earthers. Though this kind of belief is an indicator of the kind of credulity that led to the huge traction gained by the Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate story and the current omniconspiracy of antivax/QAnon/stolen election/5G/Great Reset/Schwab/Soros/Gates Foundation etc.
My initial instinct was in fact to say "yes, things are faster".
But then thinking about it, what struck me as interesting is that things that feel recent, in my head, like QAnon, are rooted in manufactured falsehoods that are already six and a half years old. So it's not necessarily the case.
It might be more interesting in some ways that QAnon hasn't already started a war. Though I genuinely see no particular reason why a conspiracy theory of its type could not; it's not that difficult to imagine in the context of human history.
I wish we would do away with public opinion polling as news. It does nothing to actually inform or help people, but it makes us obsessed with culture wars.
Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. Imagine if someone flashed on the screen to tell you "40% of Americans don't believe this happened, and here are all of their political views". That's what modern journalism feels like.
What is your basis for this? Were you alive then? I was. I watched the first Moon landing on television. Nobody was talking about how it was faked.
Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).
Conspiracy theories have an incredible ability to self sustain, it is entirely possible the "moon landings were faked" theory is an old bit of Soviet propaganda that refused to die.
"A July1970 poll found 30% of Americans declaring Apollo 11 to be a fake."
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_millions-still-believe-1969-mo...
Couldn't find the original source.
It looks to be something like US 6% of the population at the moment (Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/Landing-Man-Moon-Publics-V... )
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
What happened recently with the move to yellow journalism is not misinformation but rather censorship. Fact checkers end up labelling things in order to censor them.
The interesting thing on my mind in regards to Canada. Trudeau has changed. He would take on people head on at town halls and challenging questions: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-...
Today he refuses to even consider talking to these ongoing protests and is going to insane extremes to shut these peaceful protests down. The only way to look at it from his point of view. He must see these people as national security threats. He genuinely believes they are racists and white supremacists. He genuinely believes they are there to overthrow the government.
Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being misinformed.
This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well.
Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
The question though, are these protests really what he has called them? Are they really a military occupation?
>This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well.
100% true. You will find even republican ideologues have called him out on many of his bullshit things. Hell his rhetoric was toxic. Tons of improvement could happen over Trump.
>Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
It's built into our psychology, but not something out of control. Harper was in power for 9 years and never called in the military. He never demonized his political opponents. He never falsely labelled a peaceful protest as a military occupation. He never smeared political opponents as 'racists and white nationalists with unacceptable views'. He never declared a state of emergency to crush dissent.
Trudeau doesn't need the military. He gave himself to power to seize your bank account because you're a protester. No court orders. No due process.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at Monday's news conference that banks would be able freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order.
Definitely not. Every large scale protest has its provocateurs and outliers. Using the outliers to frame the 99% is dishonest to say the least.
To any neutral observer they are overwhelmingly peaceful and represent the working class.
This isn't a neutral observation. "overwhelmingly peaceful and represent normal working class people" exposes a politically-motivated bias.
To a neutral observer the BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and represent the administrative class.
To a neutral observer the trucker protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and represent the working class.
More accurately, the protests (both of the truckers and BLM) represent more narrowly defined set of political prinicples than the beliefs of more general classes, which tend not to be as homogeneous in their views as is often portrayed.
The same was true of people. People were either "the greatest" or "losers" depending on whether the last thing they said made Trump look good or not.
Trump was creating a lot of misinformation, but it wasn't because he was misinformed (at least not primarily). It was because he cared more for his image (and, I suspect, his own image of himself) rather than reality. Facts didn't matter, only image did.
Edit: people also assign different "comparative value" to different things. Most value judgements involve comparing apples and oranges, but one person might have a preference for oranges and someone else might prefer the apples. Not for any "rational" reason.
It's really a very powerful analysis, because it's Occam's Razor compliant. The theory is simple yet has great explanatory power.
"Some kind" is doing a lot of work there, but I think there's some truth to what you're saying. My father-in-law will pop out with some bizarro story about how global warming was invented to cover up government collaboration with aliens, or Covid-19 was created in a lab using Vince Foster's stem cells, and when my wife asks where he heard it, it'll be from some guy he met last week and talked to for a total of half an hour while he was buying a motorcycle from him. Or maybe he didn't buy the motorcycle because he didn't totally trust the guy, but he believed him about the aliens. If you or me repeated information from a source like that, we'd be doing it in bad faith, but my father-in-law does it with a kind of innocent sincerity.
There are a lot of people like my father-in-law, but there are also a lot of people who are aware that what they're saying isn't literally true, but it's a way of supporting a system that they believe is wholesome for society, or at wholesome to their own interests. So there's a spectrum much like religion, with true believers on one end, and complete unbelievers on the other end who outwardly speak and behave as if they believe, because they think it's a good story for little kids to grow up with and because they think it's an effective shared fiction to structure society around.
In a sense you could say that both my father-in-law and the college-educated conspiracy theorists are willfully ignorant. My father-in-law sincerely believes a lot of sketchy things about politics and the government, but his lack of skepticism is not completely symmetrical. He is nominally in the "they're all crooks" camp, but he is not as quick to believe really crazy stuff about Republicans as about Democrats. Against Republicans, he'll believe that they invent reasons to use military hardware because they have a cozy relationship with defense contractors. Against Democrats, he'll believe that the military invented and perfect flying saucers in the 1950s, and then Barbara Bush and Anton Levay opened a portal to hell by having butt sex in a church and we gave the flying saucers to the demons so if they crash people will just think they're aliens. (Barbara Bush was a secret Demoncrat, of course -- she was pro-abortion!)
There's a lot about my father-in-law's internal mental state that I can't figure out from the outside. When he "believes" something crazy about Democrats, he's aware that he enjoys believing and repeating it, he seems to be aware that there's a certain kind of scrutiny that it won't hold up under, but he also regards it as actionable information in the sense that he votes based on his distaste for the Democrats and he cites crazy conspiracy stuff as supporting his distaste for the Democrats.
tl;dr Most people's conclusions are based on "some kind of logical deduction" in the sense that almost any cognitive process can be described as "some kind of logical deduction."
This doesn’t align very well with my observations. I can’t read minds so I don’t truly know anyone else’s beliefs. However, to the extent that I can infer possible beliefs from behavior, deductive or any other form of dialectic reasoning doesn’t appear to play much of a role. Social proof and other such phenomena appear to dominate belief formation.
I’ve found that an honest and rigorous examination of one’s own beliefs reveals that they are predominantly held for emotional reasons. Often it’s as simple as avoiding the emotional discomfort of being shunned for deviating from whatever your group’s particular dogma is.
Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.
In my observation, that word has the opposite effect of 'finding common ground', so I'm surprised to hear you say that. If finding common ground is what you want to do (which is great), there are other words that should give you even better results.
I don't think that's required. If I call an idea "disingenuous" (or "misleading" for that matter), it doesn't imply that the arguer intended to mislead, but only that the idea lends itself to misinterpretation ("it seems disingenuous to suggest that the protest was violent on the basis of the actions of one or two out of tens of thousands" <- this seems about as polite as anything IMHO). But any way of suggesting that an idea is incorrect or inaccurate risks causing offense--it's a perilous enterprise and no matter which word you use, ultimately you have to lay a lot of groundwork to demonstrate good faith, common ground, etc.
That's my $0.02, anyway.
The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant noble, which is also only something that would be said about a person (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ingenuous).
> The move has no political chance in a Democratic House, but sends a clear, though disingenuous, message about punishing supposed “extremism.”
> He would rather endorse someone with genuine doubts than someone with disingenuous beliefs.
And there are many examples in which "disingenous" refers to things other than people.
> The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant noble, which is also only something that would be said about a person
I wouldn't be surprised at all if "(dis)ingenuous" originally referred only to people but came to take on a broader meaning. This happens all the time--words are fluid on even very short timespans. Consider the verb form of impact:
> Sense of "strike forcefully against something" first recorded 1916. Figurative sense of "have a forceful effect on" is from 1935.
In only 18 years the word acquired a figurative sense (and I strongly suspect linguistic velocity--the rate of change of language--has much increased in the Internet era--although not uniformly across the lexicon). Considering your Etymonline link dates "disingenuous" to the 1650s, it would be surprising if this figurative sense hadn't developed in the intervening ~370 years.
Anyway, while I do enjoy discussing and learning about language, I have to get back to work. Thanks for the conversation, and enjoy your day! :)
Words are sort of statistical meaning clouds—people have different associations and use them differently. Regional variations play a large role. I'm pretty sure the word disingenuous does imply intent to deceive, though, and it's a significant moderation issue because it's extremely popular in internet arguments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/02/01/deshaun-wat...
Just like 'shut your lying mouth' is, in fact, calling someone a liar and not merely an observation about some independent attribute of their piehole.
Since internet commenters basically can't ever know that about each other, they're not allowed to direct those words at each other here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I would label a statement that is technically true but highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is technically true, because you can still get COVID despite being vaccinated. However, it's misleading because the statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting it, while also significantly reducing likelihood of hospitalization and death. The statement isn't a lie, but it's certainly disingenuous.
This is part of where vaccine hesitancy comes from, it seems like you’re injecting something that’s almost useless (I won’t say it is yet) as it seems those who are healthy (read no underlying conditions, known or not) don’t have issues.
Actual ignorance is never willful, by definition of ignorance.
Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake me up.
"Red pilling" isn't waking up, it's just becoming a nativist right winger. Although the left wing calls itself "progressive" so I guess the words games are everywhere.
First, people put their identities into their beliefs. Everything is a lifestyle choice anymore. What non-mainstream belief defines me as a person? When you make believing in the flat earth part of your identity, you get a fight or flight response when someone attacks the idea of the flat earth, because in a way, they are attacking you.
Second, it's easy to confirm your misinformation with more misinformation! I don't think people hear something once, like "the earth is flat" and just believe it. They hear it, look it up, see multiple sources saying the same things (weren't we taught to confirm stuff like this?), sprinkle in the smallest amount of plausibility - maybe a source that otherwise prints stuff you know to be true (sports scores, natural disasters, whatever) also prints something about the flat earth, and there you have it. You've done your homework. At this point admitting you're wrong means you must admit you are ignorant and were so easily duped, or that your entire education was a waste of time. It takes a very big person to do that.
People have always folded beliefs into their identities and felt embarrassed or defensive when they are challenged. Most high-profile since forever is religion.
Which brings me to another frustration, when it's presumed that there is something wrong with beliefs being involved with identity. I'm not even sure what capital-I Identity is supposed to be if not a system of beliefs about yourself and the world and how they relate.
I don't think any of this is as new as it is often assumed to be. There appears to have been a rise in "identity politics" but even this is wrong; politics has always been about identity, it's just that nationalism or socialism or other principles can be part of someone's identity. Or in other words, they are beliefs.
So maybe we are more individualistic in our politics, and maybe that is bad. Or maybe it isn't... It's probably a mixed bag!
I think they are less confident in their own ideas (politicians aren't even required to state what policies they stand for anymore!) than they are confident that the other side (or at least the cartoonish version of it presented to them via allied media) is wrong/evil.
Gotta make sure people only see trusted news sources that say the right things.
it's now safe for Bari Weiss to ask some questions on TV that "normal people" have been asking for quite some time now and were called all sorts of things by the same people.
We will see more articles like this.
I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for misinformation.
My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff.
Once, when I was still trying to convince her to get a vaccine, I told her that after Israel’s early vaccine efforts, both cases and deaths are down heavily. Her response was to pull up a screenshot of a fox headline from a YouTube video that simply stated something like “cases up 60% after vaccination in Israel”
I don’t know the context of the headline. I’m sure in whatever context, it was accurate and not misinformation. But the actual spreaders of misinformation use skeptical talking points as weapons to spread misinformation, like the vaccine being a weapon to kill off the population for the great reset.
Anyways I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic. But skeptic talking points being mass weaponized on social media is absolutely new and uniquely enabled by modern technology.
This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
I’m not claiming ordinary and well adjusted people easily fall prey to misinformation if that’s what you’re trying to refute here.
It’s simply an observational fact that conspiracy groups wield skeptic talking points as weapons and that modern technology allows efficient dissemination of this discourse (as with any discourse).
Whether or not there’s a “misinformation problem”, per the title, is actually an empirical question that neither the author nor I have the tools to answer
... but on the other side, the same thing happens. Stories such as yours get posted about and even reported on and then different organized movements build these up into narratives and use these narratives to push for the silencing of skeptical points. In the end it's really the exact same behavior: get a few facts (in context or not), build your own narrative, add a substantial amount of emotionalism so it's less about the facts anyway, and you have a ready population of true believers that for the most part won't change their views.
I’ve written about this in a different context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172467#30178198
The point of the OP is that skeptics have powerful and robust toolkits and my point is that conspiracists use these toolkits
Example: the question is whether Dr Fauci knowingly conspired to let hundreds of thousands die because he is colluding with the Chinese on enacting the great reset
The conclusion seems obviously bogus, yet you can pick a ton of arguments in favor from any skeptic of US Covid response. These tend to be very robust.
I’ve seen tons of convincing arguments on this very site about issues with US Covid response, eg that we had strong information about the risks of Covid and should have had lockdowns much earlier, that we should have advised to wear masks from the beginning, etc.
In the context of the conspiracy, each argument that US response was bungled also becomes a weapon to argue that Fauci intentionally bungled US Covid response to enact an evil agenda of widespread death.
At that point you can either argue with very well reasoned skeptic talking points, or you can dive down the ideological rabbit hole of “ok he bungled it but it wasn’t intentional / malicious”.
This is what I mean by weaponizing skeptic talking points
1. Acquire some jet fuel, burn it, and measure its burning temperature.
2. Acquire a steel beam, hit it with a hammer, heat it up to the burning temperature of jet fuel, then hit it with a hammer again.
3. Wonder why I just wasted $1000 and a hammer on something that the conspiracy theorists will label “doctored footage”.
The conspiracy theorists often latch onto proponent's factual claims and misinterpret them as supporting the conspiracy theory. A lot of conspiracy theories re vaccines will quote CDC, WHO, research papers, etc. that aren't skeptical.
To be clear, I’ll repeat myself:
> I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic
The key thing that journalism should do is take factual information and provide context. If 99.999% of scientists claim the earth is a ball and 0.001% claim the earth is flat, for fucks sake don't present these two things as equal. With vaccines it's the same. Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much.
And the result of that lack of providing context in media (or, worse, outright and willing deception of the Alex Jones class) is what is the problem. When media or government institutions prove that they are not willing to do their job, people end up not trusting them - which then leads to the disconnect between wide swaths of the population and factual truth we're seeing.
Sure, but cut them off and then they cry censorship. "They wouldn't be trying to silence us if they weren't hiding something!"
just most humans nerver do so
they at most look for badly done cintradicting arguments to confirm their few
This is a baffling claim. Why on earth would you believe that people now have a lower ability to seek out contradicting points of view?
I think the worst you can say against social media is that it feeds you low-quality highly-partisan sources if you seem to like such sources. But your ability to seek out better or contradicting information is not diminished. If anything it is far greater than it has ever been. "Stuff that is against $my_favorite_belief" is a Google search away. Wikipedia alone will usually give you a fairly balanced treatment of a topic with extensive references to diverse perspectives and evidence.
The algorithms feed people stuff that confirms their beliefs because that's what they like.
It's all about preferences and choices, not ability.
Some people passionately want to keep drugs like fentanyl out of the country. Others think it's impractical and efforts have done more harm than good. Still others say "hand them a clean needle".
Messing with the choices people make that you think are bad for them isn't easy.
I guess that my more appropriate and more relevant corrected version of the statement didnt sound like it supported the point so the original was phrased as if it’s my own non expert opinion that smoking causes cancer.
fentanyl? Are you saying that should be unregulated and freely purchasable at the local 7/11 or are you saying it should be regulated even although some people choose to do it?
Either way I’m not really sure how that supports the older points about people technically but not practically having the option to avoid misinformation means society should ignore misinformation as it’s “a personal choice”
I'm not saying it's good for people to have fentanyl or misinformation.
I'm not saying personal choices are above criticism or regulation.
I'm just saying it's hard. You're going to be intruding into how people run their lives. Many of them won't like it.
My personal take is that social media can be awfully like a drug, and we're probably going to need detox programs and support groups. Misinformation is just one small aspect of how today's social media degrades the human mind and spirit.
On the other hand, social media isn't heroin, it's human interaction. Regulating a material thing with no legitimate uses is a lot more straightforward.
And to be honest, I am very skeptical of central authorities arbitrating what is truth. Historically this is a cure worse than the disease.
Thinking that mushes together a clear view of the situation and what we should do about it has a poor chance of success in my experience.
Engaging being straw man arguments to dunk on, with people dunking on them
I think it's exactly the opposite. It's far easier to convince with outright lies than with carefully chosen facts, because those lies are crafted to match what you want to believe. That's what false conspiracy theories are born of.
Everyone is subject to that bias, even people that consider themselves highly logical.
It starts becoming a problem when it is manipulated to channel broadly held but not expressed resentments.
This is common in ethnically fractured developing societies, where a rumor about something someone in group x did to someone in group y could turn into a coup or war, but it seems that developed societies are no longer immune either.
The problem we too often see is people, mass media especially, trying to appear "fair" by airing statistically unrepresentative positions just because they are contrary to some mainstream position. There's not two equal sides to all positions. Even when there are two (multiple) sides not all of them have statistically significant representation or are equally rigorous.
Just because I'm not seeking out arguments claiming COVID vaccines have 5G or the Earth is flat doesn't mean I have a lower ability to seek out contrary opinions. It just means I've got some basic scientific literacy and a bullshit filter.
I don't think that's right.
Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it.
In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread in their social circle.
The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected you or made you personally angry/offended.
Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government as "just a few crazy people" for years even when it wasn't just a few people anymore (e.g. Reichsbürger).
Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party).
And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure.
But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence.
The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated.
And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact.
This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction.
And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple, distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason.
Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting with honest open communication they decided they needed to be even more manipulative to protect society.
Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2).
(2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation
(1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.
I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything.
I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along.
The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?"
In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.
There is zero political skill of anticipating counter-reactions in the government.
The perfect example of this phenomenon was the discussion around vaccine mandates. In 2020, mainstream politics dismissed all mentions of vaccine mandates as dangerous misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracy theorists.
In 2022, mainstream politics is in favor vaccine mandates, and brands mandate opponents as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a complete disaster.
I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want to be lead into collective insanity any more.
If you clamp down on misinformation, you're doing nothing more than allowing the establishment to be wrong without consequence, and creating consequence when the average person is wrong.
No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War.
Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything else works in favor of power.
This isn't about who's right and who wrong.
Its about power. It's about who's allowed the freedom to be wrong and who isn't. Who has the ability to manipulate the public and who doesn't.
And the power to dictate that is the power to win every public debate no matter how much merit you do or don't have.
The NYT had commentators reporting on what they thought was true. They have done many years of introspection about their rule in the Iraq war, this is not what "perpetuator of misinformation" do - they double down.
> Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
What is one thing either site has gotten wrong (objectively, not your opinion) and refuses to correct ? Everyone makes mistakes, how we respond to those mistakes is the distinction we should care about.
> This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power.
Sounds like projection of what you believe the digital information space to be.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-f...
Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating . . . while confirming the Free Beacon reporting as entirely true. Here’s how they explained it:
> In 2022, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substance abuse harm reduction grant did require recipients to provide safer smoking kits to existing drug users. In distributing grants, priority would be given to applicants serving historically underserved communities. However what’s false is this was just one of around 20 components of the grant program and far from its most prominent or important one.
Snopes claims that the news about smoking kits is true. It’s just not important.
Or here’s Facebook’s “Partly False” Fact Check (https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/02/fact-check-biden-...) that also confirms the Free Beacon reporting:
> While a description of the HHS grants stated that the grantees would be required to buy materials like safe smoking kits and supplies to "enhance harm reduction efforts," such kits and supplies are just a few of the many materials that grantees can utilize.
This happens all the time.
No offense but if you asked me to make up a typical right wing red meat outrage generating story, this would be it.
> Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating
You didn't link to Snopes, instead "leadstories.com" which i've never heard of. Where is the source from Snopes itself?
Also "Mostly False" sounds right, as it was just the pipe detail that is in dispute, no? At best this is a nuance argument of a somewhat complicated story about policy (which itself is complicated) - far from the "clear example of a false story" I asked for.
> Also "Mostly False" sounds right, as it was just the pipe detail that is in dispute, no?
In fact this passage articulates why "mostly false" is accurate, the framing done by right wing media was purposefully and misleading (and leaning on emotionally/racially charged language like "crack pipe"):
> Collectively, these articles gave readers a grossly misleading and reductive presentation of what was a real substance abuse harm reduction grant overseen by the Biden administration in early 2022. We are issuing a rating of “Mostly False.”
> It’s true that the grant description required the provision of smoking kits — an established component of harm reduction strategy — but in reality, those kits constituted just one of several sub-components of an even longer list of requirements for grant recipients. In other words, while outraged media coverage focused almost exclusively on “crack pipes,” this was actually only a very small part of the program.
I asked you for a solid example of something objectively wrong that hasn't been corrected, you gave me something that is at best nuanced and deserving of more clarification.
> Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.
Not here they didn't.
I'd ask for another example, but if this is the best you have to prove that "fake news" is out to get you, I think we've dispelled that thoroughly.
I don't know what to do about the "inability not to respond" issue, I suffer from that myself. On the tribalism issue, I strongly suggest becoming the equivalent of a nomadic wanderer. When someone posts something about a topic I strongly agree with, I don't assume I will agree with everything else they might say. The same goes for posts about something I strongly disagree with. Being too caught up in tribalism leads to inoffensive posts from the other tribe causing a knee-jerk reaction to say something, anything, to put them in their place even if the person completely agree with what the other person just posted. Hence, the rise of "whataboutism".
I try to take on a view of comments posted in which I don't care who the other person is, what other beliefs they might have good or bad, and just reply to the comment at hand. If the comment is full of insults I just ignore them and pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those. This would seem to be a good way to have less conflict in conversations on the internet but in my experience you need very thick skin to go this route because you are an outsider to all groups, meaning you are a target for everyone. There are people who will stop insulting you when you calmly reply to their points and ignore their jibes, but not as many as a younger more naive version of myself would have expected, unfortunately.
This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as everyone else, so I slip at times.
100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you don't have to do that. You can pick up just the parts you want to reply to.
Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it.
If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.