4 ms·

Is it possible to throw out one without the other?

sqeaky 9y ago
In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust. EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.
- CWuestefeld 9y ago
  I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges. There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05". In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear. EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes. I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).
    - CM30 9y ago
      > Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. That's an interesting idea, though it then leaves a few very difficult questions that would need answering. Namely: 1. Who's a news organisation/journalist (this is already an incredibly controversial point as is)? 2. How do you prove intent? Because you could easily defend lies as mistakes on the organisation's part, which could serve as a get out clause for everything but obvious 'fake news' sites. 3. As well as perhaps the issue of who is actually within reach of your laws. The internet is global and the laws on it are localised as well.
      - sqeaky 9y ago
        I don't have any strong suggestions on point 3, but there are some tools we could leverage for the other two. We have done things like this for other industries and sometimes it works well. First, we need a list of news companies that self identify as such. Second, we need a group of people who aren't the executive or legislative branch to act as watchdogs with a solid set of rules, next we laws stating what the punishments are for lies and finally we need to limit who can say they provide "News". We have a number of non-profit groups for those that self-identify as journalists. Some of those help organize or train people. A new one could be created or one of those could create a listing of self identifying news companies. If that is unsuitable (and the FCC weren't our enemy) then the FCC could directly maintain such a list. We Good success creating such lists, consider Voting Testing Labs (labs that test voting machines), none are run by the government, but they all follow government rules. If non-profits or private groups are doing the list keeping then they have extra leverage to kick out news organizations s, but that is not strictly required. As long as someone can de-list a news company for extreme violation and punish for minor ones. This could be the courts, but doesn't have to be as long its it is not the people making the laws or holding the lists. A consortium of people from the industry would likely be an ideal list keeper, and they could also make rules without getting the involved too much. Then we need clearly spelled rules on "lying". It doesn't have to actually be lying, which requires intent, it can be a level of habitual innacuracy on a given topic. It doesn't matter if it was intentional, but if your news org kept saying something demonstrably false about one candidate or one topic the watchdogs will jump in and try to leverage the rule to punish that news org. Bonus points if we can somehow get the news companies to be watchdogging each other, again the cosortium of news organizations could help with this. Then finally "news" companies that cannot play with this kind of oversight don't get to use the word "News" to describe themselves, or in Trademarks, Logos or Names. We could also incentive people to become news organizations by providing tax breaks and using groups like the ad council to tout the advantage of news companies over entertainment companies. It would take a long time before we trusted it, but in the long I think something like this could create a stable self-correcting governing for responsible news reporting. We might have parts of this already I only have superficial knowledge that industry, this is largely transplanting ideas from other places.
- gozur88 9y ago
  >In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. When the government has laws to suppress "lying", but also gets to determine what constitutes a lie, you've pretty much abandoned any pretence of liberal democracy.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    So Canada is not a democracy because it bans False advertising and the UK is not a Democracy because it has strong Libel Laws? Perhaps you are omitting some checks or balances. In both countries one group makes the laws and another interprets them. Both are the "government" and nominally the same group but are put in power different ways, held to different standards of accountability and often controlled by opposing political parties.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      When the government gets to decide both 1) when something is false and 2) when false things are not allowed to be said, it's really only a question of time. Canada, in particular, is already notorious for its foray into Human Rights Commissions that punish you saying things that make other people unhappy. I wouldn't live there.

In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust. EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.

CWuestefeld 9y ago
I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges. There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05". In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear. EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes. I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).
  - CM30 9y ago
    > Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. That's an interesting idea, though it then leaves a few very difficult questions that would need answering. Namely: 1. Who's a news organisation/journalist (this is already an incredibly controversial point as is)? 2. How do you prove intent? Because you could easily defend lies as mistakes on the organisation's part, which could serve as a get out clause for everything but obvious 'fake news' sites. 3. As well as perhaps the issue of who is actually within reach of your laws. The internet is global and the laws on it are localised as well.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      I don't have any strong suggestions on point 3, but there are some tools we could leverage for the other two. We have done things like this for other industries and sometimes it works well. First, we need a list of news companies that self identify as such. Second, we need a group of people who aren't the executive or legislative branch to act as watchdogs with a solid set of rules, next we laws stating what the punishments are for lies and finally we need to limit who can say they provide "News". We have a number of non-profit groups for those that self-identify as journalists. Some of those help organize or train people. A new one could be created or one of those could create a listing of self identifying news companies. If that is unsuitable (and the FCC weren't our enemy) then the FCC could directly maintain such a list. We Good success creating such lists, consider Voting Testing Labs (labs that test voting machines), none are run by the government, but they all follow government rules. If non-profits or private groups are doing the list keeping then they have extra leverage to kick out news organizations s, but that is not strictly required. As long as someone can de-list a news company for extreme violation and punish for minor ones. This could be the courts, but doesn't have to be as long its it is not the people making the laws or holding the lists. A consortium of people from the industry would likely be an ideal list keeper, and they could also make rules without getting the involved too much. Then we need clearly spelled rules on "lying". It doesn't have to actually be lying, which requires intent, it can be a level of habitual innacuracy on a given topic. It doesn't matter if it was intentional, but if your news org kept saying something demonstrably false about one candidate or one topic the watchdogs will jump in and try to leverage the rule to punish that news org. Bonus points if we can somehow get the news companies to be watchdogging each other, again the cosortium of news organizations could help with this. Then finally "news" companies that cannot play with this kind of oversight don't get to use the word "News" to describe themselves, or in Trademarks, Logos or Names. We could also incentive people to become news organizations by providing tax breaks and using groups like the ad council to tout the advantage of news companies over entertainment companies. It would take a long time before we trusted it, but in the long I think something like this could create a stable self-correcting governing for responsible news reporting. We might have parts of this already I only have superficial knowledge that industry, this is largely transplanting ideas from other places.
gozur88 9y ago
>In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. When the government has laws to suppress "lying", but also gets to determine what constitutes a lie, you've pretty much abandoned any pretence of liberal democracy.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  So Canada is not a democracy because it bans False advertising and the UK is not a Democracy because it has strong Libel Laws? Perhaps you are omitting some checks or balances. In both countries one group makes the laws and another interprets them. Both are the "government" and nominally the same group but are put in power different ways, held to different standards of accountability and often controlled by opposing political parties.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    When the government gets to decide both 1) when something is false and 2) when false things are not allowed to be said, it's really only a question of time. Canada, in particular, is already notorious for its foray into Human Rights Commissions that punish you saying things that make other people unhappy. I wouldn't live there.