6 ms·

What I've noticed is that folks are taking a pretty healthy mistrust of the establishment and turning it into the opposite extreme without realizing what they'r

by nilkn 10y ago

What I've noticed is that folks are taking a pretty healthy mistrust of the establishment and turning it into the opposite extreme without realizing what they're doing. Instead of maintaining skepticism towards both the establishment and anti-establishment (of which Trump was a part), they do two things: (1) elevate their moderate mistrust of the establishment into total, exhaustive mistrust (i.e., they assume everything from the establishment is a lie with a malicious motive). (2) place total, exhaustive trust into the anti-establishment (i.e., Trump is perfect, every cabinet pick is perfect, every EO is perfect, everything Spicer says is completely true, everything Trump says is completely true, etc.). It's this extreme warping of trust which causes people to be so incredibly susceptible to genuine fake news. When you combine (1) and (2), you end up with conspiracy theories and lots of people who sincerely believe them with no evidence. The idea that Clinton is/was running pedophilia and child sex trafficking rings out of pizza shops is a great example.

csallen 10y ago
I've seen the same. There's a stunning lack of nuance in public thought. Thinking in degrees is difficult, so things get reduced to good vs evil, black vs white, all or nothing. Even amongst friends I respect, I have a hard time getting people to do the hard work of looking past high level simplifications and enumerating specific costs and benefits of any decision or proposal.
- nojvek 10y ago
  We are getting to a point where "trust" is the biggest issue. Can you trust govt, big corporations, universities? It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear. We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma. I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her. Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business. I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    How would an AI know the truth? In the short term, only by comparing an article under review to "trusted" sources. But if there were any such sources available to tell us the ground truth, we wouldn't need the AI.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I can totally imagine AI knowing the truth, by the virtue of throwing lots of compute at Bayesian inference. The more difficult question, I think, is: why should an average Joe trust the (presumably government or corporate) AI over their favourite worldview-confirming sources?
      - leereeves 10y ago
        Bayesian inference based on what evidence?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Observational. Reality has to add up to a coherent whole, so I imagine a sufficiently smart AI getting a good picture of it through just observing a lot.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        coldtea 10y ago
        There's no truth in most matters, just perspectives and interests. Truth is not an inherent reality of the universe. There is matter and energy in various juxtapositions, but no 'truth', except if by truth we mean correctly describing a physical order of things. But that's hardly the interesting part or what we usually want to know when we speak of truth. At best, truth in things like politics and such requires a definition first, and so the problem of what's true is just moved to "according to whose definition?". Is "wealthfare harmful", for example, is not about knowing or not knowing its cost, but more about whether you think the costs are justified. One can legitimately believe that poor people should be left to rot if they can't afford healthcare, for example. Second, why would an "advanced AI" stick to the truth any more than a human would? Especially if distorting it brings large benefits for it?
- Melk 10y ago
  I know it's not popular to say but I blame the Internet. When people start getting their news from social media and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window. It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government. The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.
  - spangry 10y ago
    I'm not sure I believe this myself, but just to throw out a more optimistic alternative, could we perhaps teach people how to use the internet to research, corroborate information, apply critical thought etc.? Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor. Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies. I also blame the institutions themselves. The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]: Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities. Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what? Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up? Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency? Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ... Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flynn-trump-fake-news-clinton.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn... [1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-priest-molests-200-d/ http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey [3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-iraq/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...
pfranz 10y ago
Yup. I was listening to someone talk about the anti-vaccine movement as coming from a mistrust in big-pharma. They were also talking about how are brain plays these association games that have bad wiring. They gave the example, "A warehouse burned down that was improperly storing flammable materials." Your brain implies there was a fire started from flammable materials. Even after later facts revealed that there wasn't any flammable material the brain still implies that it was started by flammable materials. That means you can convince them things they knew were incorrect, but they'll still believe incorrectly about certain aspects. ./flush_cache.sh
- stdbrouw 10y ago
  It's known as belief perseverance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance). A well-studied recent example is how people changed their beliefs after it became known that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as was first suspected: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.4414&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586... (PDF)
ordbajsare 10y ago
Government is distilled evil
tajen 10y ago
Well there has also been a long story of abusing trust on the good people's side. For example on feminism (where I've unwillingly studied the topic), the feminist version of the story is broadcasted loudly and men who don't agree are fired – happens to both laymen and CEOs. It's one thing to want equal rights and opportunities for everyone, it's another thing to impose unfair advantages. To me, people's unbeatable trust for Trump's racism and sexism just shows people are fed up with that. To me, whether in US or Europe, people start rejecting "facts" because the centrist people take them hostage with "vote reasonably, and we'll shove more illegal immigration down your throats, more Europe, more women rights, more Muslims, etc". So people go up the chain of politics and reach back to journalism which allowed these politics to exist, namely every article titled "SCIENTISTS PROVE AGAIN THAT MEN ARE PAID 31% MORE THAN WOMEN!" where you had to dive deep in the text to notice that this wasn't for equal work. It's not that they trust Trump, it's that parties from left to right have entirely abused this trust to exhaustion, and journalism has badly participated.

by nilkn 10y ago

csallen 10y ago

I've seen the same. There's a stunning lack of nuance in public thought. Thinking in degrees is difficult, so things get reduced to good vs evil, black vs white, all or nothing. Even amongst friends I respect, I have a hard time getting people to do the hard work of looking past high level simplifications and enumerating specific costs and benefits of any decision or proposal.

nojvek 10y ago
We are getting to a point where "trust" is the biggest issue. Can you trust govt, big corporations, universities? It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear. We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma. I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her. Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business. I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
- leereeves 10y ago
  How would an AI know the truth? In the short term, only by comparing an article under review to "trusted" sources. But if there were any such sources available to tell us the ground truth, we wouldn't need the AI.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I can totally imagine AI knowing the truth, by the virtue of throwing lots of compute at Bayesian inference. The more difficult question, I think, is: why should an average Joe trust the (presumably government or corporate) AI over their favourite worldview-confirming sources?
    - leereeves 10y ago
      Bayesian inference based on what evidence?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Observational. Reality has to add up to a coherent whole, so I imagine a sufficiently smart AI getting a good picture of it through just observing a lot.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        coldtea 10y ago
        There's no truth in most matters, just perspectives and interests. Truth is not an inherent reality of the universe. There is matter and energy in various juxtapositions, but no 'truth', except if by truth we mean correctly describing a physical order of things. But that's hardly the interesting part or what we usually want to know when we speak of truth. At best, truth in things like politics and such requires a definition first, and so the problem of what's true is just moved to "according to whose definition?". Is "wealthfare harmful", for example, is not about knowing or not knowing its cost, but more about whether you think the costs are justified. One can legitimately believe that poor people should be left to rot if they can't afford healthcare, for example. Second, why would an "advanced AI" stick to the truth any more than a human would? Especially if distorting it brings large benefits for it?
Melk 10y ago
I know it's not popular to say but I blame the Internet. When people start getting their news from social media and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window. It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government. The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.
- spangry 10y ago
  I'm not sure I believe this myself, but just to throw out a more optimistic alternative, could we perhaps teach people how to use the internet to research, corroborate information, apply critical thought etc.? Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.
- x0x0 10y ago
  There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor. Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies. I also blame the institutions themselves. The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]: Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities. Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what? Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up? Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency? Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ... Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flynn-trump-fake-news-clinton.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn... [1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-priest-molests-200-d/ http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey [3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-iraq/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...

pfranz 10y ago

Yup. I was listening to someone talk about the anti-vaccine movement as coming from a mistrust in big-pharma. They were also talking about how are brain plays these association games that have bad wiring. They gave the example, "A warehouse burned down that was improperly storing flammable materials." Your brain implies there was a fire started from flammable materials. Even after later facts revealed that there wasn't any flammable material the brain still implies that it was started by flammable materials. That means you can convince them things they knew were incorrect, but they'll still believe incorrectly about certain aspects. ./flush_cache.sh

stdbrouw 10y ago
It's known as belief perseverance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance). A well-studied recent example is how people changed their beliefs after it became known that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as was first suspected: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.4414&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586... (PDF)

ordbajsare 10y ago

Government is distilled evil

tajen 10y ago

Well there has also been a long story of abusing trust on the good people's side. For example on feminism (where I've unwillingly studied the topic), the feminist version of the story is broadcasted loudly and men who don't agree are fired – happens to both laymen and CEOs. It's one thing to want equal rights and opportunities for everyone, it's another thing to impose unfair advantages. To me, people's unbeatable trust for Trump's racism and sexism just shows people are fed up with that. To me, whether in US or Europe, people start rejecting "facts" because the centrist people take them hostage with "vote reasonably, and we'll shove more illegal immigration down your throats, more Europe, more women rights, more Muslims, etc". So people go up the chain of politics and reach back to journalism which allowed these politics to exist, namely every article titled "SCIENTISTS PROVE AGAIN THAT MEN ARE PAID 31% MORE THAN WOMEN!" where you had to dive deep in the text to notice that this wasn't for equal work. It's not that they trust Trump, it's that parties from left to right have entirely abused this trust to exhaustion, and journalism has badly participated.