4 ms·

We used to rely on gossip and hearsay to determine what was true. Now we rely on social media and search engines. Which are basically just gossip and hearsay am

by briga 9y ago

We used to rely on gossip and hearsay to determine what was true. Now we rely on social media and search engines. Which are basically just gossip and hearsay amplified a million-fold. One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. I do like the fact that people are finally starting to take a closer look at the hold algorithms hold over our lives. Maybe tech companies are going to start addressing some of their flaws.

saas_co_de 9y ago
> crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source this may be true in the sense that if you have a lot of news reports it is more likely that one of them might be accurate but in terms of the average accuracy of a single report I am sure it is much lower. the current internet information free-for-all seems to me to mostly be pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. the effect of this is not some kind of enlightened skepticism but that people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane, because they have no criterion for judging the accuracy of information.
- yorwba 9y ago
  How does > pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. cause > people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane ? I'd say that both of those are possible extremes of not being able to tell which sources are trustworthy, i.e. some will distrust all sources equally, and some will trust all sources equally. Which extreme someone tends to likely depends on their subject-matter experience. E.g. when I was a child, my parents bought me a time-travel comic (the German series Mosaik) which always had some background information on the epoch. I always enjoyed reading that and trusted the accuracy of their description. When they had an issue on April Fool's, it took my parents a while to convince me that giant tunnel-boring ladybirds on the moon were not real. Nowadays I'm obviously better able to distinguish truth from falsehood, but if I'm just learning about something for the first time, I might easily be taken for a fool again.
qiemem 9y ago
> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. The problem with this is that people only have time to check a limited number of sources. Furthermore, many orders of magnitude more sources means that there are many orders of sources that are dangerously wrong as well. Thus, if someone sees a number articles/tweets/posts/whatever from a variety of people espousing that the Texas church shooter was an antifa commie starting the revolution, they are much more likely to believe it. On top this, with so many sources, people need methods of filtering, and, of course, one of our primary methods of filtering is to find communities/people we tend to agree with. Thus, the now cliche echo chambers are born. These communities are furthermore highly susceptible to manipulation (see the russian facebook ads). Furthermore, this makes the system fairly easy to take advantage of. If a number of people that seem unrelated online engage in a coordinated effort to spread a particular message, they can do it with ease, since when you see the same message from multiple, seemingly unrelated sources, you're much more likely to believe it. So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message.
- briga 9y ago
  >So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message. That's sort of what I was getting at. At heart, these new technologies aren't necessarily more reliable than what we had before. But on the other hand, I think that at the very least they're not any less reliable either. Simply by having more people reaching a consensus on something, you're probably going to have some great diversity of opinion. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that there are four factors that determine whether or not a crowd will be able to make intelligent decisions: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and mechanisms for aggregation of collective judgement. Not to be self-congratulatory, but I think that's part of the reason communities like HN produce more intelligent and well-reasoned content than, say, an NRA fan club on Facebook.
zby 9y ago
> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. That was true before people learned how to game the system.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  What do you mean ? To me crowd sourced information is still more reliable than most sources.
amelius 9y ago
> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. I don't think that is true at all in general. If the opinions are divided like 50/50, perhaps yes, but what if it's 75/25 or 1-versus-the-rest? Also, most people find themselves effectively in massive echo-chambers, and the amplification factor of resonant opinions may not be very predictable.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Not sure who you are referring to when you say "we" relied on gossip and hearsay to determine what's true. I clocked my share of years of life before google was even born and I have no recollection of the times you are referring to, very rarely gossip/hearsay were hold as truth. Maybe you are refferring to times before reading and writing was a thing ? Nowadays I do not rely on social medie as I do not even have "social media" (care to explain what this buzzword means? I still have found a sense to this word). I do use the web and search engine to search for information but I do not hold what I found as truth and I can usually recognize bunk when I see some. There are some people with an ability to think and some even have access to critical thinking.

by briga 9y ago

saas_co_de 9y ago

> crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source this may be true in the sense that if you have a lot of news reports it is more likely that one of them might be accurate but in terms of the average accuracy of a single report I am sure it is much lower. the current internet information free-for-all seems to me to mostly be pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. the effect of this is not some kind of enlightened skepticism but that people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane, because they have no criterion for judging the accuracy of information.

yorwba 9y ago
How does > pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. cause > people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane ? I'd say that both of those are possible extremes of not being able to tell which sources are trustworthy, i.e. some will distrust all sources equally, and some will trust all sources equally. Which extreme someone tends to likely depends on their subject-matter experience. E.g. when I was a child, my parents bought me a time-travel comic (the German series Mosaik) which always had some background information on the epoch. I always enjoyed reading that and trusted the accuracy of their description. When they had an issue on April Fool's, it took my parents a while to convince me that giant tunnel-boring ladybirds on the moon were not real. Nowadays I'm obviously better able to distinguish truth from falsehood, but if I'm just learning about something for the first time, I might easily be taken for a fool again.

qiemem 9y ago

> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. The problem with this is that people only have time to check a limited number of sources. Furthermore, many orders of magnitude more sources means that there are many orders of sources that are dangerously wrong as well. Thus, if someone sees a number articles/tweets/posts/whatever from a variety of people espousing that the Texas church shooter was an antifa commie starting the revolution, they are much more likely to believe it. On top this, with so many sources, people need methods of filtering, and, of course, one of our primary methods of filtering is to find communities/people we tend to agree with. Thus, the now cliche echo chambers are born. These communities are furthermore highly susceptible to manipulation (see the russian facebook ads). Furthermore, this makes the system fairly easy to take advantage of. If a number of people that seem unrelated online engage in a coordinated effort to spread a particular message, they can do it with ease, since when you see the same message from multiple, seemingly unrelated sources, you're much more likely to believe it. So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message.

briga 9y ago
>So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message. That's sort of what I was getting at. At heart, these new technologies aren't necessarily more reliable than what we had before. But on the other hand, I think that at the very least they're not any less reliable either. Simply by having more people reaching a consensus on something, you're probably going to have some great diversity of opinion. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that there are four factors that determine whether or not a crowd will be able to make intelligent decisions: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and mechanisms for aggregation of collective judgement. Not to be self-congratulatory, but I think that's part of the reason communities like HN produce more intelligent and well-reasoned content than, say, an NRA fan club on Facebook.

zby 9y ago

> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. That was true before people learned how to game the system.

bigbugbag 9y ago
What do you mean ? To me crowd sourced information is still more reliable than most sources.

amelius 9y ago

> One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. I don't think that is true at all in general. If the opinions are divided like 50/50, perhaps yes, but what if it's 75/25 or 1-versus-the-rest? Also, most people find themselves effectively in massive echo-chambers, and the amplification factor of resonant opinions may not be very predictable.

bigbugbag 9y ago

Not sure who you are referring to when you say "we" relied on gossip and hearsay to determine what's true. I clocked my share of years of life before google was even born and I have no recollection of the times you are referring to, very rarely gossip/hearsay were hold as truth. Maybe you are refferring to times before reading and writing was a thing ? Nowadays I do not rely on social medie as I do not even have "social media" (care to explain what this buzzword means? I still have found a sense to this word). I do use the web and search engine to search for information but I do not hold what I found as truth and I can usually recognize bunk when I see some. There are some people with an ability to think and some even have access to critical thinking.