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"News at 11: Humanities professor shocked to discover many people disagree with mainstream academic & globalist groupthink" (and no, I don't think social scien

"News at 11: Humanities professor shocked to discover many people disagree with mainstream academic & globalist groupthink" (and no, I don't think social science is a real science) You don't need to study this stuff professionally to see what's going on here. 1) Trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time. That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example). Large federal governments like the US Federal Govt and the EU became more and more opaque, with ever larger and more byzantine bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks that seemed to create a game of tails we win, heads you lose. Judges interpret the law to suit their political preferences, not what a plain reading or common sense would seem to imply. And so on. 2) Whilst trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time, trust in the mainstream media has collapsed dramatically in relatively recent times. This too is fully deserved: people don't trust the traditional news outlets (in the USA) because they lie a lot and are nakedly biased. The difficulty of finding any national newspapers that supported Trump and the practice of outlets that had never declared before in their history declaring for the 100% globalist/liberal-elite-style Clinton, summed this phenomenon up. The subsequent artificial mass hysteria over Russia and the (dubious at best) Russian "hacking" of the election reinforced this idea: the media is as locked in a form of groupthink as Washington itself is. You can't repeatedly teach people that there are no reliable sources of information, and that conspiracy theories are sometimes real, and then act surprised when large numbers of people start seeking out alternative sources of information that more frequently support conspiracy theories.

endtime 10y ago
Whoever downvoted this: Downvoting should be for comments that are low quality or don't contribute to the conversation, not perfectly fine comments with which you disagree.
- fwn 10y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with everything the parent wrote, nor did I downvote, but maybe "I don't think social science is a real science" is not the greatest starting point for making a genuinely social point. It's like saying "I don't think physics actually exists, but here's my take on gravity."
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    Isn't that a pure opinion, of which you simply disagree? It is hardly a rare opinion at that. It's been a problem for the field since the start: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-science-an-oxymoron-will-that-ever-change/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s... There's no contradiction between having views on social issues, and believing that people who call themselves social scientists maybe aren't following the scientific process as usually understood.
    - fwn 10y ago
      Oh, he was not saying that there are bad social scientists. This is a completely valid statement to make. However, calling a discipline unscientific is not a matter of taste or opinion. There are a bunch of scientific methods and as long as you stick with them, you are scientific. No matter how well received your results are. (This, by the way, holds also true for climate science.) There is a clear contradiction between calling social science unscientific and then relying on their concepts (trust, institutions, applied law, globalism, groupthink, etc.) in the very same argument. edit: I can not answer to anyone anymore since I'm "submitting too fast. Please slow down." Sorry.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        There is something to the argument that the inability to experiment limits scientific rigor.
        NoGravitas 10y ago
        Yeah, but to a certain extent that's true of things that no one doubts are science. Evolutionary biology is limited by the fact that evolution is non-repeatable, for example. I used to be an archaeologist. Definitely a field where you can't experiment; you're studying the evidence left by the past. But good methodology in archaeology is making hypotheses about what you expect to find in a new excavation or an inadequately studied old collection, and then testing those hypotheses. Yes, there's a problem with controls, but that's not unique to social science.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I downvoted it because spreading the myth that "mainstream media is lying" is both low-quality and dangerous, and is otherwise a litany of right-wing talking points that add nothing new to the discussion. I'll gladly reconsider if OP can give me a specific example of the New York Times knowingly publishing a statement of fact, in the last year, that turned out to be wrong.
  - willholloway 10y ago
    What is really dangerous is the mainstream media (NY Times, Washington Post) running stories based solely on anonymous sources. The public has no capacity to vet the credibility of anonymously sourced claims. Almost all of the current media narrative on the Russian story comes from stories with nothing more than "American officials say". Remember that "American officials said" that Iraq definitely had WMD. Public support for the invasion was built solely on anonymously sourced news. American officials were actually politically motivated ideologues manufacturing consent, with journalists at the New York Times like Judith Wilson playing the part of the useful idiot. The same thing is happening right now. This [1] New York Times story is a perfect example. There is no place for anonymous sources on issues of war and peace in a republic. Allowing this low a bar for journalistic evidence leaves us completely vulnerable to manipulation. [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nunes-intelligence-reports.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nune...
    - matt4077 10y ago
      The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all. And people misunderstand the mechanism here: journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources. They know the names, and they build relationships with these sources. The sources/treacherous illoyal leakers/whistleblowers are career politicians or officials, and their relationship with someone at the Journal or the Times is equally valuable for them. Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate. See for example "leak zero" of Flynn talking to the ambassador. We'll see about the example you added on Nunes' sources, but it seems like that information also has multiple confirmations by now. I'd also like to point out that you're moving the goalpost and not answering my question, and that I actually thought about a specific exclusion of the NYT's failure on WMDs because it's getting old. I also seem to remember that it was a very-much-not-anonymous Colin Powell who made the WMD case to the UN which actually allowed the US to invade.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
nl 10y ago
That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example) Modern institutions may or may not be trustworthy, but AFAIK they weren't laughing off "vast conspiracies" which later turned out to be true. For example, I'm not aware of any mainstream media which laughed about the echelon program which later turned out to be true. It's true that mainstream media didn't write about these theories, but one can easily argue that was reasonable given the lack of evidence. It's important to note that details matter when reporting news, and these details were unknown prior to Snowden. It's also true that often the details get ignored (as one can see by the number of people who think that the PRISM program says that Google/Apple conspired with the NSA when in-fact it says the opposite), but I'm not sure that is completely the media's fault.
- ozmodiar 10y ago
  I first heard about the Echelon/5 eyes network on 60 Minutes some time in the early 90's. I remember controversy about it flagging people for mentioning "bomb" in phone calls, so I would say I did hear about it from the main stream media. People still called it a crazy conspiracy theory when I brought it up, but I usually attributed that to them not watching enough news, not watching too much.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    I'm still pretty sure the stories about flagging calls for mentioning keywords in the 90's were urban legends. The sort of computing power to do that didn't exist then. It's a conspiracy theory pasted onto a kernel of truth (Echelon). Even after snowden there is a lot of the same stuff going on. The stuff he leaked sure didn't show that the NSA was doing some sort of active analysis on all communications. Though at least now it's probably within the realm of technical possibility.
therpe1 10y ago
Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere. And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-media-surged-republicans-trust-in-news-cratered/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi... [2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...
- uncle_d 10y ago
  To counter your assertion that it's just "the right wing" who have lost trust in the MSM, I would direct your attention towards: https://www.off-guardian.org https://www.off-guardian.org
- CM30 10y ago
  Trust in the media is also extremely low among those voting for independents, and only half decent among Democrats: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media... If 51% trust in the media is seen as 'good' for the left wing, then standards have really fallen.
  - therpe1 10y ago
    If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).) And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right. My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery. [1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...

endtime 10y ago

Whoever downvoted this: Downvoting should be for comments that are low quality or don't contribute to the conversation, not perfectly fine comments with which you disagree.

fwn 10y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with everything the parent wrote, nor did I downvote, but maybe "I don't think social science is a real science" is not the greatest starting point for making a genuinely social point. It's like saying "I don't think physics actually exists, but here's my take on gravity."
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Isn't that a pure opinion, of which you simply disagree? It is hardly a rare opinion at that. It's been a problem for the field since the start: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-science-an-oxymoron-will-that-ever-change/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s... There's no contradiction between having views on social issues, and believing that people who call themselves social scientists maybe aren't following the scientific process as usually understood.
  - fwn 10y ago
    Oh, he was not saying that there are bad social scientists. This is a completely valid statement to make. However, calling a discipline unscientific is not a matter of taste or opinion. There are a bunch of scientific methods and as long as you stick with them, you are scientific. No matter how well received your results are. (This, by the way, holds also true for climate science.) There is a clear contradiction between calling social science unscientific and then relying on their concepts (trust, institutions, applied law, globalism, groupthink, etc.) in the very same argument. edit: I can not answer to anyone anymore since I'm "submitting too fast. Please slow down." Sorry.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      There is something to the argument that the inability to experiment limits scientific rigor.
      - NoGravitas 10y ago
        Yeah, but to a certain extent that's true of things that no one doubts are science. Evolutionary biology is limited by the fact that evolution is non-repeatable, for example. I used to be an archaeologist. Definitely a field where you can't experiment; you're studying the evidence left by the past. But good methodology in archaeology is making hypotheses about what you expect to find in a new excavation or an inadequately studied old collection, and then testing those hypotheses. Yes, there's a problem with controls, but that's not unique to social science.
matt4077 10y ago
I downvoted it because spreading the myth that "mainstream media is lying" is both low-quality and dangerous, and is otherwise a litany of right-wing talking points that add nothing new to the discussion. I'll gladly reconsider if OP can give me a specific example of the New York Times knowingly publishing a statement of fact, in the last year, that turned out to be wrong.
- willholloway 10y ago
  What is really dangerous is the mainstream media (NY Times, Washington Post) running stories based solely on anonymous sources. The public has no capacity to vet the credibility of anonymously sourced claims. Almost all of the current media narrative on the Russian story comes from stories with nothing more than "American officials say". Remember that "American officials said" that Iraq definitely had WMD. Public support for the invasion was built solely on anonymously sourced news. American officials were actually politically motivated ideologues manufacturing consent, with journalists at the New York Times like Judith Wilson playing the part of the useful idiot. The same thing is happening right now. This [1] New York Times story is a perfect example. There is no place for anonymous sources on issues of war and peace in a republic. Allowing this low a bar for journalistic evidence leaves us completely vulnerable to manipulation. [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nunes-intelligence-reports.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nune...
  - matt4077 10y ago
    The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all. And people misunderstand the mechanism here: journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources. They know the names, and they build relationships with these sources. The sources/treacherous illoyal leakers/whistleblowers are career politicians or officials, and their relationship with someone at the Journal or the Times is equally valuable for them. Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate. See for example "leak zero" of Flynn talking to the ambassador. We'll see about the example you added on Nunes' sources, but it seems like that information also has multiple confirmations by now. I'd also like to point out that you're moving the goalpost and not answering my question, and that I actually thought about a specific exclusion of the NYT's failure on WMDs because it's getting old. I also seem to remember that it was a very-much-not-anonymous Colin Powell who made the WMD case to the UN which actually allowed the US to invade.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

nl 10y ago

That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example) Modern institutions may or may not be trustworthy, but AFAIK they weren't laughing off "vast conspiracies" which later turned out to be true. For example, I'm not aware of any mainstream media which laughed about the echelon program which later turned out to be true. It's true that mainstream media didn't write about these theories, but one can easily argue that was reasonable given the lack of evidence. It's important to note that details matter when reporting news, and these details were unknown prior to Snowden. It's also true that often the details get ignored (as one can see by the number of people who think that the PRISM program says that Google/Apple conspired with the NSA when in-fact it says the opposite), but I'm not sure that is completely the media's fault.

ozmodiar 10y ago
I first heard about the Echelon/5 eyes network on 60 Minutes some time in the early 90's. I remember controversy about it flagging people for mentioning "bomb" in phone calls, so I would say I did hear about it from the main stream media. People still called it a crazy conspiracy theory when I brought it up, but I usually attributed that to them not watching enough news, not watching too much.
- rhino369 10y ago
  I'm still pretty sure the stories about flagging calls for mentioning keywords in the 90's were urban legends. The sort of computing power to do that didn't exist then. It's a conspiracy theory pasted onto a kernel of truth (Echelon). Even after snowden there is a lot of the same stuff going on. The stuff he leaked sure didn't show that the NSA was doing some sort of active analysis on all communications. Though at least now it's probably within the realm of technical possibility.

therpe1 10y ago

Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere. And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-media-surged-republicans-trust-in-news-cratered/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi... [2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...

uncle_d 10y ago
To counter your assertion that it's just "the right wing" who have lost trust in the MSM, I would direct your attention towards: https://www.off-guardian.org https://www.off-guardian.org
CM30 10y ago
Trust in the media is also extremely low among those voting for independents, and only half decent among Democrats: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media... If 51% trust in the media is seen as 'good' for the left wing, then standards have really fallen.
- therpe1 10y ago
  If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).) And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right. My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery. [1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...