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It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth" They will not, and the reason has to do with language

It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth" They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :) Best of luck, guys!

debt 10y ago
Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected. Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well. I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately. Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  > Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
- tokenizer 10y ago
  Good luck, sounds absolutely insane and unworkable. AI needs "Truth" inputs. I imagine if we had this tool when George W invaded Iraq, this AI would have said Weapons Existed, being all the CIA, and Politicians said so. Isn't that how your filter works? Anti alternative media, pro establishment?
  - willstrafach 10y ago
    > being all the CIA, and Politicians said so. This comes up often and is untrue. The Intelligence Community did not have confidence in the WMD claim. Good read regarding this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intelligence/amp?client=safari http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intel...
kirykl 10y ago
An anecdote on language that happened to me earlier today: I wrote an email and said I would re-transmit something. I made a typo and wrote re-re-transmit. "re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret
euyyn 10y ago
As an example, the fake news about the guy that found the warehouse full of fake ballot boxes for Clinton: A Google Image Search of the picture in the fake article would have found the picture is much older, and isn't what the caption described. If I'm tech-savvy and skeptical, I might have done that when consuming the article, and decided on my own it was fake. Machines can do that automatically for people that aren't tech-savvy, or that don't start reading it with a skeptical mindset.
- gonmf 10y ago
  An example of fake, or misleading use of a photo, in a story that appears credible: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9293620/BBC-News-uses-Iraq-photo-to-illustrate-Syrian-massacre.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9293620/BB...
smsm42 10y ago
I don't think it has to do with language (unless by "language" you mean what I mean, in which case sorry for duplicating). I think it has to do with that a lot of what people call "truth" is a product of their opinions, feelings, hopes, desires, etc. There are facts of course - like such and such event happened or not, such and such statistical data is showing this number of not. But it is never served raw, it is always garnished with opinion. E.g. the fact is that Trump signed certain executive order. But you can say it's "Muslim ban" or "temporary restriction on admittance of nationals from terror-ridden countries". Not the same. And various "factchecking" sites are fully complicit in this and inject opinion as often as not - to the point exactly the same thing said by two different people can be deemed "mostly true" or "mostly false", moreover, exactly the same thing said by the same person can be "mostly true" and "false". You can't hope to have robots make sense of it if we can't. You can, of course, build a neural network and train it, but it would just put "robot approved" stamp on biases of whoever trained it.
astrodust 10y ago
How about a challenge to try and educate people better, to get them "immunized" against propaganda and fake news? We need more cynical takes on things. It's utterly appalling that on one side we have right-wing extremists yelling "FAKE NEWS" about CNN because CNN might get something wrong one time in ten, implying it's no different than Breitbart or Fox News which are wrong nine times in ten, and on the other we have left-leaning people beating up CNN for making mistakes and suggesting their trust is completely eroded. News organizations offer a view. You should be prepared to vet everything you read from anyone. We need to give people a toolkit to help verify stories, to develop their bullshit instinct.
- jquery 10y ago
  Say what you want about Breitbart, it's highly biased in what it chooses to report and the opinions it injects into its stories, but it usually cites and links to its sources. Something I can't say for CNN or Fox News.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Sources are one thing. Then they go and draw perverse or completely contradictory conclusions from them.
    - jquery 10y ago
      I see CNN and Fox News do the same thing, minus the sources. At least with sources you can click through and form your own opinion from the data.

debt 10y ago

Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected. Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well. I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately. Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.

dwaltrip 10y ago
> Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
tokenizer 10y ago
Good luck, sounds absolutely insane and unworkable. AI needs "Truth" inputs. I imagine if we had this tool when George W invaded Iraq, this AI would have said Weapons Existed, being all the CIA, and Politicians said so. Isn't that how your filter works? Anti alternative media, pro establishment?
- willstrafach 10y ago
  > being all the CIA, and Politicians said so. This comes up often and is untrue. The Intelligence Community did not have confidence in the WMD claim. Good read regarding this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intelligence/amp?client=safari http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intel...

kirykl 10y ago

An anecdote on language that happened to me earlier today: I wrote an email and said I would re-transmit something. I made a typo and wrote re-re-transmit. "re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret

euyyn 10y ago

As an example, the fake news about the guy that found the warehouse full of fake ballot boxes for Clinton: A Google Image Search of the picture in the fake article would have found the picture is much older, and isn't what the caption described. If I'm tech-savvy and skeptical, I might have done that when consuming the article, and decided on my own it was fake. Machines can do that automatically for people that aren't tech-savvy, or that don't start reading it with a skeptical mindset.

gonmf 10y ago
An example of fake, or misleading use of a photo, in a story that appears credible: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9293620/BBC-News-uses-Iraq-photo-to-illustrate-Syrian-massacre.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9293620/BB...

smsm42 10y ago

I don't think it has to do with language (unless by "language" you mean what I mean, in which case sorry for duplicating). I think it has to do with that a lot of what people call "truth" is a product of their opinions, feelings, hopes, desires, etc. There are facts of course - like such and such event happened or not, such and such statistical data is showing this number of not. But it is never served raw, it is always garnished with opinion. E.g. the fact is that Trump signed certain executive order. But you can say it's "Muslim ban" or "temporary restriction on admittance of nationals from terror-ridden countries". Not the same. And various "factchecking" sites are fully complicit in this and inject opinion as often as not - to the point exactly the same thing said by two different people can be deemed "mostly true" or "mostly false", moreover, exactly the same thing said by the same person can be "mostly true" and "false". You can't hope to have robots make sense of it if we can't. You can, of course, build a neural network and train it, but it would just put "robot approved" stamp on biases of whoever trained it.

astrodust 10y ago

How about a challenge to try and educate people better, to get them "immunized" against propaganda and fake news? We need more cynical takes on things. It's utterly appalling that on one side we have right-wing extremists yelling "FAKE NEWS" about CNN because CNN might get something wrong one time in ten, implying it's no different than Breitbart or Fox News which are wrong nine times in ten, and on the other we have left-leaning people beating up CNN for making mistakes and suggesting their trust is completely eroded. News organizations offer a view. You should be prepared to vet everything you read from anyone. We need to give people a toolkit to help verify stories, to develop their bullshit instinct.

jquery 10y ago
Say what you want about Breitbart, it's highly biased in what it chooses to report and the opinions it injects into its stories, but it usually cites and links to its sources. Something I can't say for CNN or Fox News.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Sources are one thing. Then they go and draw perverse or completely contradictory conclusions from them.
  - jquery 10y ago
    I see CNN and Fox News do the same thing, minus the sources. At least with sources you can click through and form your own opinion from the data.