4 ms·

I'll repeat what I said in response to another comment: I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than

by msravi 10y ago

I'll repeat what I said in response to another comment: I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in his echo chamber. If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa. Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.

JamisonM 10y ago
[My Twitter feed gives] me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion. Given that hubris seems to be the theme of this topic I have to say this is particularly appropriate.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  One advantage if Twitter is that a lot of the primary sources(the politicians, Project Veritas, Wikileaks, etc.) all communicate using it. Another one is that you only have 140 characters, so people are more likely to link directly to a primary source. I've seen too many "news articles" that spin very weak data into a big article, with too much interpretation by the editor. A third one is that you can choose who to follow, so it's possible to have items from the other side show up in your feed. You can also choose to only follow sources that you consider high-quality. I didn't use Twitter much before, but I did start using it this election just because it was a good way to get information.
  - pg314 10y ago
    I hope you're not considering Project Veritas a high-quality source. Mr. O'Keefe has a track record of selectively and deceptively editing his video recordings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe It is telling that he is often not releasing the full, unedited video, which I would consider the primary source. Once the video has been edited, the meaning could have been altered (and in the case of Project Veritas, it often is).
  - JamisonM 10y ago
    If you regard the Twitter feed of Wikileaks a credible source of information I can't help you. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794450623404113920 https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7944506234041139...
    - MichaelBurge 10y ago
      Even if you believe the information is unreliable, surely you agree that suggesting the idea and then pointing to a particularly bad example is a dangerous confirmation bias trap? If somebody told me, "CNN is doing a segment on how Trump's rise eerily parallels Hitler's rise", it would be confirmation bias to start off assuming it's false because I like Trump, watch the segment, record all the errors in the presentation, and then use those errors to support my initial conclusion. I agree that the Spirit Cooking was better entertainment than it was credible information.
      - JamisonM 10y ago
        Sorry I do not understand what you are trying to say. Twitter is awash with garbage information and offers far more opportunities to indulge your biases than to acquire useful facts about the world. Most "primary sources" are worth less than quality analysis and most analysis of any value comes from something akin to mainstream media. They are the only actors with at least some economic interest in facts and truth, however imperfect they are.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
I think you are overestimating the intelligence of people. Like anti-vaxers who believe vaccines give their kids autism. Where does that come from? Definitely not the mainstream media, they heard some rumors... I imagine this also applies to India where the rumors can get much crazier.
- 6nf 10y ago
  The number of people who actually believe that anti-vaccine nonsense is pretty small to be honest.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    I thought so also, but the pediatrician we interviewed a few days ago said it was more common than you think. And this is in highly educated SoCal.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    It's hard to know how many of these people believed that vaccines cause autism, but MMR vaccination rates dropped quite a bit in the UK. http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-and-the-media http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a... >> In 1998−9, 88% of children had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella. By 2003−4, coverage had fallen to 80% and to 61% in some London areas.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > Definitely not the mainstream media, "Vaccines cause autism" was widely pushed by mainstream media in the UK for some time before the Lancet withdrew the paper. Here's the daily fucking fail continuing to push it in 2006: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fear-MMR-link-autism.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fe... Here's a nice review of UK press coverage: http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-and-the-media http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/16/whenjournalismkills https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/16/whenjo...
pg314 10y ago
I might be underestimating the intelligence of people, but I don't think so. Here are some sobering statistics: - 54% of the GOP electorate think President Obama is a Muslim [1] - 29% of the GOP electorate grant that President Obama was born in the United States [1] - 47% of conservatives now say the climate is changing (not that necessarily that climate change is man-made) [2] - 49% of Republicans said they do not believe in evolution [3] [1] and [3] are from publicpolicypolling, which is a democratic polling agency, so take them with a grain of salt. Now you tell me if the average Joe is good at separating the wheat from the chaff. To me it seems fully half of the conservatives/Republicans are unable to do it for scientific truths. You say that people are calling out the fallacies in your twitter feed. That gives me hope. But are the people who have been advancing the fallacious arguments changing their mind based on the evidence? [1] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_90115.pdf http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republicans-now-believe-in-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republi... [3] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_22415.pdf http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati...
projektfu 10y ago
I've had reasonably intelligent people tell me that George Soros owned all the voting machines and he was going to hand the election to Hillary. Just because someone is misinformed and gullible doesn't mean they are unintelligent. If all this countervailing info was getting to them, the wouldn't be telling me this.
- camiller 10y ago
  That's just silly, the company Soros has a stake in only has about 30% of the voting machines! Kidding aside, I don't think he would have actually been in a position to do anything to them to affect the outcome of the election.
  - projektfu 10y ago
    It's worse than that. Soros didn't have a stake in any voting machine company, but the company had an executive who served on the board of directors of a Soros charity. It's a comically tenuous connection.
somestag 10y ago
I would put it the other way around: that we're all very bad at separating truth from fiction. That's what's terrifying to me. How many people are genuinely bothered by how hard it is to find truth? How many people even think it is hard? Every caste has a different way of dealing with this uncertainty, but I'd say very few cultures systematically accept that they have no idea what's true and what is not. Every group has a different heuristic that they consider "good enough." Some groups appeal to morality (although each group has different moral guidelines). Some groups appeal to simplicity or aesthetics. Analytically oriented people tend to use probability as their crutch, telling themselves that any truth they deem "unlikely" would be a waste of time to investigate. When any of these groups is wrong, they vehemently maintain that their heuristic is appropriate and sound. They made the right decision based on what they knew, they tell themselves. The process is infallible, even if the result is unfortunate. Because the uncertainty of truth terrifies me, I try to keep an open mind. I would hope that this open mind affords me a better "truth ratio," but that's impossible to measure. Every single day I'm disheartened by how hard it is to find actual truth. Even something as simple as checking the sources on a news article can be so difficult (or impossible) that there's no practical way to judge its reasonableness. The more viewpoints you hear, the more you realize that it's impossible to discriminate between them with any sort of actual accuracy; you just rely on heuristics once again. "Oh, this girl stated her argument much more coherently than that guy, so I'm inclined to believe her." Now your heuristic is rhetoric, which may or may not have anything to do with truth. When you try to do your own research, you're swayed by the quantity of arguments or the coherency of the sources or how they match up with what you already think you know. You just make guess upon guess upon guess. At the end of the line you have academic studies, but no individual is an expert in more than a couple things, so no individual is qualified to vet/interpret/understand the vast majority of the academic literature on the subject. We just make a guess, or we appeal to probability again (i.e. "it seems to me like more academics are saying this, so that's the most likely truth. I'm going to assume anything else is wrong"). I'm not trying to downplay the importance of science or academics here; it's the best we have. But those who are "waking up" to reality after this election—if they follow the thread far enough—are destined to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: there's a limit to how "right" you can ever be.

by msravi 10y ago

JamisonM 10y ago

[My Twitter feed gives] me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion. Given that hubris seems to be the theme of this topic I have to say this is particularly appropriate.

MichaelBurge 10y ago
One advantage if Twitter is that a lot of the primary sources(the politicians, Project Veritas, Wikileaks, etc.) all communicate using it. Another one is that you only have 140 characters, so people are more likely to link directly to a primary source. I've seen too many "news articles" that spin very weak data into a big article, with too much interpretation by the editor. A third one is that you can choose who to follow, so it's possible to have items from the other side show up in your feed. You can also choose to only follow sources that you consider high-quality. I didn't use Twitter much before, but I did start using it this election just because it was a good way to get information.
- pg314 10y ago
  I hope you're not considering Project Veritas a high-quality source. Mr. O'Keefe has a track record of selectively and deceptively editing his video recordings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe It is telling that he is often not releasing the full, unedited video, which I would consider the primary source. Once the video has been edited, the meaning could have been altered (and in the case of Project Veritas, it often is).
- JamisonM 10y ago
  If you regard the Twitter feed of Wikileaks a credible source of information I can't help you. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794450623404113920 https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7944506234041139...
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    Even if you believe the information is unreliable, surely you agree that suggesting the idea and then pointing to a particularly bad example is a dangerous confirmation bias trap? If somebody told me, "CNN is doing a segment on how Trump's rise eerily parallels Hitler's rise", it would be confirmation bias to start off assuming it's false because I like Trump, watch the segment, record all the errors in the presentation, and then use those errors to support my initial conclusion. I agree that the Spirit Cooking was better entertainment than it was credible information.
    - JamisonM 10y ago
      Sorry I do not understand what you are trying to say. Twitter is awash with garbage information and offers far more opportunities to indulge your biases than to acquire useful facts about the world. Most "primary sources" are worth less than quality analysis and most analysis of any value comes from something akin to mainstream media. They are the only actors with at least some economic interest in facts and truth, however imperfect they are.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

I think you are overestimating the intelligence of people. Like anti-vaxers who believe vaccines give their kids autism. Where does that come from? Definitely not the mainstream media, they heard some rumors... I imagine this also applies to India where the rumors can get much crazier.

6nf 10y ago
The number of people who actually believe that anti-vaccine nonsense is pretty small to be honest.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  I thought so also, but the pediatrician we interviewed a few days ago said it was more common than you think. And this is in highly educated SoCal.
- DanBC 10y ago
  It's hard to know how many of these people believed that vaccines cause autism, but MMR vaccination rates dropped quite a bit in the UK. http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-and-the-media http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a... >> In 1998−9, 88% of children had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella. By 2003−4, coverage had fallen to 80% and to 61% in some London areas.
DanBC 10y ago
> Definitely not the mainstream media, "Vaccines cause autism" was widely pushed by mainstream media in the UK for some time before the Lancet withdrew the paper. Here's the daily fucking fail continuing to push it in 2006: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fear-MMR-link-autism.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fe... Here's a nice review of UK press coverage: http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-and-the-media http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/16/whenjournalismkills https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/16/whenjo...

pg314 10y ago

I might be underestimating the intelligence of people, but I don't think so. Here are some sobering statistics: - 54% of the GOP electorate think President Obama is a Muslim [1] - 29% of the GOP electorate grant that President Obama was born in the United States [1] - 47% of conservatives now say the climate is changing (not that necessarily that climate change is man-made) [2] - 49% of Republicans said they do not believe in evolution [3] [1] and [3] are from publicpolicypolling, which is a democratic polling agency, so take them with a grain of salt. Now you tell me if the average Joe is good at separating the wheat from the chaff. To me it seems fully half of the conservatives/Republicans are unable to do it for scientific truths. You say that people are calling out the fallacies in your twitter feed. That gives me hope. But are the people who have been advancing the fallacious arguments changing their mind based on the evidence? [1] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_90115.pdf http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republicans-now-believe-in-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republi... [3] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_22415.pdf http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati...

projektfu 10y ago

I've had reasonably intelligent people tell me that George Soros owned all the voting machines and he was going to hand the election to Hillary. Just because someone is misinformed and gullible doesn't mean they are unintelligent. If all this countervailing info was getting to them, the wouldn't be telling me this.

camiller 10y ago
That's just silly, the company Soros has a stake in only has about 30% of the voting machines! Kidding aside, I don't think he would have actually been in a position to do anything to them to affect the outcome of the election.
- projektfu 10y ago
  It's worse than that. Soros didn't have a stake in any voting machine company, but the company had an executive who served on the board of directors of a Soros charity. It's a comically tenuous connection.

somestag 10y ago

I would put it the other way around: that we're all very bad at separating truth from fiction. That's what's terrifying to me. How many people are genuinely bothered by how hard it is to find truth? How many people even think it is hard? Every caste has a different way of dealing with this uncertainty, but I'd say very few cultures systematically accept that they have no idea what's true and what is not. Every group has a different heuristic that they consider "good enough." Some groups appeal to morality (although each group has different moral guidelines). Some groups appeal to simplicity or aesthetics. Analytically oriented people tend to use probability as their crutch, telling themselves that any truth they deem "unlikely" would be a waste of time to investigate. When any of these groups is wrong, they vehemently maintain that their heuristic is appropriate and sound. They made the right decision based on what they knew, they tell themselves. The process is infallible, even if the result is unfortunate. Because the uncertainty of truth terrifies me, I try to keep an open mind. I would hope that this open mind affords me a better "truth ratio," but that's impossible to measure. Every single day I'm disheartened by how hard it is to find actual truth. Even something as simple as checking the sources on a news article can be so difficult (or impossible) that there's no practical way to judge its reasonableness. The more viewpoints you hear, the more you realize that it's impossible to discriminate between them with any sort of actual accuracy; you just rely on heuristics once again. "Oh, this girl stated her argument much more coherently than that guy, so I'm inclined to believe her." Now your heuristic is rhetoric, which may or may not have anything to do with truth. When you try to do your own research, you're swayed by the quantity of arguments or the coherency of the sources or how they match up with what you already think you know. You just make guess upon guess upon guess. At the end of the line you have academic studies, but no individual is an expert in more than a couple things, so no individual is qualified to vet/interpret/understand the vast majority of the academic literature on the subject. We just make a guess, or we appeal to probability again (i.e. "it seems to me like more academics are saying this, so that's the most likely truth. I'm going to assume anything else is wrong"). I'm not trying to downplay the importance of science or academics here; it's the best we have. But those who are "waking up" to reality after this election—if they follow the thread far enough—are destined to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: there's a limit to how "right" you can ever be.