9 ms·

Fake news is not the real problem

59 points by rwx------ 9y ago

ebcode 9y ago
"fake news"... I believe this phrase was originally coined to denote articles that were paid for/commissioned by corporations. It's like flipping through a newspaper to see some outlandish headline, and then, looking at the top of the page, seeing "paid advertisement" in tiny print. Only these days, there is no tiny print, and the entire newspaper is one big paid advertisement for the oligarchy. I know pizzagate is verboten, so I doubt Big Brother will let this through, but just in case, and with hope for the future, I'm just going to leave this here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pizzagate,fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- th0ma5 9y ago
  No you're thinking of submarine pieces. Fake news came to prominence as a term when conservative clickbait from random domains started popping up in early 2016. The left started using the term very prominently, but then when Facebook tried to crack down on it all, the right appropriated the term as a general term of derision towards non-conservative news sites.
- mtgex 9y ago
  I don't understand the argument you're making with the Google trends link. What I see is that a term which entered the common lexicon specifically to describe things such as Pizzagate is correlated with searches for the thing it describes. Is there some other point you're trying to make?
  - th0ma5 9y ago
    More chart illiteracy probably. Here's a chart zoomed in https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-09-01%202016-12-01&q=pizzagate,fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-09-01%202... and the fake news area under the curve is quite a bit larger until around the time of the election. About the most honest thing you can actually say is that around the election people just started googling it more. Big whoop. There isn't any correlation with the term "fake news" as you may glean from the first chart.
  - ebcode 9y ago
    "Fake news" was in the lexicon well before pizzagate, which you can see in the link. The point I'm trying to make is that the phrase "fake news" was pushed in place of the phrase "pizzagate", and this was done by all the major media outlets when the phrase pizzagate came to prominence. To my mind, if there had been no "pizzagate", there would have been no spike in "fake news", and we wouldn't even be talking about "fake news" today.
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      I thought the term was coined by Trump? And it seems like people who use it, use it in place of "propaganda" not "pizzagate"
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        As I recall he (mis)appropriated the term, as is his habit. It wouldn't be surprising if tomorrow he started talking about how "woke" he is and how that adjective actually doesn't mean what we think it means. "Fake news" was originally a term for news-like narratives from sources other than the news media.
      - ebcode 9y ago
        Nope, not coined by Trump. I did a bit of research. I found "fake news" in this link from 2005 on democracynow.org: https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_government_agencies_produce https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_... I'm not trying to say that people who use the term now are using it in place of "pizzagate", but that media outlets, during the months of December 2016 and early 2017, used the phrase to talk around "pizzagate"; and now "pizzagate" has faded, but "fake news" remains. I think propaganda is a more appopriate word, and we should just use that. But because of the way associations work, whenever I see "fake news", I am reminded of "pizzagate". And I know I'm not the only one.
        9y ago
ukulele 9y ago
> The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare. This is the author's premise. It would have been nice to get some discussion around why that is the case (or even that it is true), but alas the article simply states it. Ironic to provide no details given the subject matter.
- placebo 9y ago
  You're right that it would be nice if the article would provide more evidence to back that claim up (especially given the article's content), however I don't think it's such an outlandish claim if you look at the facts. To greatly oversimplify (with the inherent dangers of oversimplifying), suppose 50% of the population believes news item "A" is true while the other 50% of the population believes "not A" to be true. There could be different reasons for such a scenario, but if "A" is something that can actually be verified with relative ease, then having such a high percentage of people disputing "A" could very well imply that way too many people are more interested in holding on to an opinion that suits their agenda (be it psychological, political or other) than to seek out what is true.
- watwut 9y ago
  I mean, even engineers don't think and act like that when it comes to politics. They don't think and act like that even when it is about technology, but they are already invested and really want to be or at least be seen as right. Example 1: anyone who refuse new architecture or tech cause it is new (and that exists a lot outside startup world). Example 2: anyone who jump into new tech even when it is irrational and not ready or simply not suitable for task at hand. Example 3: all engineers who talk with utter conviction about history or art or political/social problem - after they spent like an evening on wikipedia and cherry picked whatever fit their pre-existing simple worldview. All exists and are frequent.
Eupolemos 9y ago
> The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. This is where it almost gets profound. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, in his "On Bullshit", that the greatest danger isn't lack of truth or even direct falsehoods - it is when we give up searching for truth, or don't care about speaking truthfully. I.e. Bullshit. However, whatever the people can do to demand rigour and educate themselves on the matters, pales next to a media trying to hold itself to standards. When the media gives up, we are in dire straits indeed, if not utterly lost. Where I am from in Europe, we have pretty good media standards. But at least one of our biggest newspapers is actively working to muddle the waters for a party. Without being any kind of expert, other nations do not seem so well off.
- Theodores 9y ago
  There is the Western media mindset which is as brain-washed in its own special way as the craziest of religious cults. Most of the official government history is a lie, it has been one big fight for oil and other resources, not this 'war against terror' or whatever the clown in chief says. To escape the Western media mindset usually involves being brain washed with something else. Or living in a country where the truth does not match the reality on the ground. For instance, Syria, people that live there know that what all is told on the news on the television in the West is utter rubbish written and presented by people who have made up minds and don't care. The Western media mindset is cunning in that the better educated people that read broadsheet newspapers have indoctrinated themselves further into it, even if they think of themselves as being the educated, questioning one. Most people do not have the capability to appreciate the criminality that has gone on in Washington, London and elsewhere over the years. So this criminality goes on and the Western democracies exist in their special lawless way, preparing for war and actively beating up the world for profit. The funniest bullshit is the 'al-qaeda' nonsense. Not one person has ever met an al-qaeda person even if dead people in brown parts of the world are obviously al-qaeda. In previous wars you at least knew the enemy existed, now it is just fake news that you have to believe, on the Koolaid.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    So we are just dancing puppets. Well, look at all these presidents, who didnt like the vietnam protest muppet show. Why does such a event never occur in all those other free countrys? Why was there never a reported protest against fake news in Syria, in china, in the Caliphate, in Russia? The problem is that other countrys use the public debate and free media as attack vector- and in a very subtle way undermine democracy. Its not that free markets and free speech would undermine dictatorships, quite the other way around. PS: You are free to draft and propose a better democratic system and public debate concept.
didibus 9y ago
For fun, let me suggest an absurd theory. Engineers used to be evenly distributed across non engineers, where they were able to influence family and friends with their methodical thinking. They used to be respected, seen as peers, part of the middle class like all others. Now, they've all relocated to the west. They command upper middle class salaries, most are the new rich. Eroded of their engineers, most of the country rallies behind their familiar team. Isolated and newly rich, the engineers are no longer being fed data about the average non engineer. Therefore they are applying the engineer rational to a biased subset of the data, limiting their effectiveness. And so here we are. Non engineers know the true reality of their problems, but don't have the tools to solve them. So they rally behind charlatans. While engineers have the skill set to solve problems, but no longer know the realities of the problems to solve. A dystopian future is sure to follow.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  One suspects that "engineers" (are we talking actual engineers? or those who write software?) are not so central to the beneficial functioning of society as this theory assumes. If you meant those who drive locomotives, then I withdraw my suspicion. They are important.
  - DiThi 9y ago
    Replace "engineers" by "people with the engineer mindset" and "the west" by "very populated areas".
    - throwaway080383 9y ago
      How about just replacing it with "intellectuals"?
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        Yeesh, no thanks. In this context that word calls to mind this passage from ItBwtCL: ...during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
losvedir 9y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot as news articles like this one[1] come up in my feed. This whole anti-tech Russian backlash has me so down trodden. Like who cares if Russia bought ads? Who cares if Russia uses those sites and tweets or shares a photo or whatever. I learned long ago to tune out ads and not trust anything I read on the internet, or at least read with a hefty helping of salt. I wish the outcome of all these revelations about how Russia (and I'm sure other countries or random people or corporations with various interests) was using facebook, twitter, instagram, etc, was for people to go, "oh, that's good to know. I guess I should believe whatever random posts I come across less." Not, "Uh oh! These services and ads are only for our certain, pre-approved uses, and we need to make laws enforcing that." We could have used these as a nice ol' inoculation in the meme war and improved ordinary people's understanding of just how the internet works (and doesn't work). [1] https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&stream=top-stories https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_sourc...
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I'm doing a dissertation on Russian propaganda, among other propagandas, so disclaimer for bias. I don't understand not caring about it, even were I not working on it. I was having discussions with friends in 2015/early 2016 where we were looking at stuff and it was obvious what was going on. The day after the election, Zuckerberg was saying it is "crazy" that Russians could have been involved. We've got something systematically wrong if the biggest tech companies in the world with all the data and resources either were oblivious to it (seems likely based on their reactions) or were aware of it but kept doing it because it made them money. By all accounts their ad tools actually made this especially easy. No country, much less one that considers itself a superpower should be willingly letting a foreign nation spread propaganda. That big moat called the Atlantic and all those resources don't matter if you you're gonna let them in the back door. This kind of naivety/ignorance is too common in the power centers of the US. Consider Obama getting outwitted by Putin and Clinton getting beat by an idiot like Trump. Maybe they aren't so clever after all. That Russia is doing that is annoying, what's offensive is that our leaders allowed it to happen, and what's disturbing is people either acting like it hasn't happened (evidence says otherwise) or just want to shrug it off. It's hard to say how much of the recent domestic unrest is being fueled by it.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Of course a writer for Techcrunch believes that fake news is not the problem. That's like the NRA saying that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The problem is that we are so deluged with inaccurate articles written by bloggers who have no real concept of journalistic integrity. We can't tell what is real and what is fake. So what happens is that people will start rejecting all news. There's no accountability for writing shitty and inaccurate articles, and that's the problem. They believe that news can be buggy like software and can be corrected later, but it's not. It should be held to a higher standard because we rely on it. All that will happen now is that people will stop believe everything they read and even worse, they're going to stop caring. That is extremely dangerous for us as a society because it means people can start doing things in broad daylight and no one will believe it or care. This appears to be what this current administration is doing and Republicans don't appear to fear the consequences, because they're right. There's a very loud minority but the vast majority are really starting to not care.
jhiska 9y ago
Another way to see it is the Internet was supposed to make sharing what one understood as truth easier; instead, what it did was democratize Chomsky's propaganda model by making entry into becoming the media much cheaper; the Internet-based media newcomers essentially copied as best as they could the traditional media's model of _imposing_ their view of reality and manufacturing consent. In this view, what we're seeing is a power struggle for influence between the media who traditionally held the power to manufacture consent and the Internet-based newcomers.
anigbrowl 9y ago
It’s the Internet’s fault, we’re told. No. Pointing out the existence of the internet as a vector for propaganda doesn't mean people are blaming the existence of the communication medium.
wh-uws 9y ago
While I agree with the articles sentiment I think missing enough with the engineers mindset is only part of the problem. I recently wrote thoughts on the rest of the problem (having honest disusssions about problems to gather the insight and data to engineer with in the first place). It was in response to a friend's social media post which read something to the effect of "Whats your most controversial opinion? No judgement" "[... It] is nearly impossible to have completely honest versions of these conversations attached to your identity today because of a mixture of - extreme militantly politically correct culture - the existence of social media itself (allowing for identification and easy witch hunts from the comfort of your home) - and in aggregate many people operating from completely different and often incompatible belief systems and sets of facts For instance try to have any conversation in public with even slightest bit of negativity about any group of humans that are not rich, male, and white. People in most of western civilization today would be hard pressed to voice any opinions because they would instantaneously be labeled a "fascist", "misogynist" , "racist", or a litany of other "-ists" with a dizzying amount of speed and force. No matter how well you argue any point you are now inextricably linked with some "-ism". Someone screenshots this opinion and posts to a group like Occupy Democrats with a person's full name... And bam life quite possibly on the way to ruin. It will affect your social and professional lives for quite some time. I feel like until we can come to some form of consensus around the state of the world and how to use observations about it to discuss it we will continue to have situations where people cannot understand each others side and constantly talk past each other to all our detriment."
danielam 9y ago
The main thrust, that we ought to value the truth, is hard to disagree with. Certainly, it would be good if instead of adopting a Machiavellian ethos in which the goal is to "win" at all costs and where the spoken and written word isn't about communicating truths but rather functions as an instrument of manipulation and power, we were at least committed to the truth even as we honestly disagree. But what's this about an "engineering mindset"? It's an incredibly bizarre thing to appeal to in this context. Engineers are not somehow the quintessential pursuers of truth -- indeed, their pragmatic approach is less about the truth of the matter and more about effectiveness. Engineers are not, by virtue of being engineers, somehow particularly competent or qualified at understanding political issues. Politics is not a technology. Indeed, viewing politics in technocratic terms is positively dystopian. Perhaps the author of the article, writing for tech media, has fallen prey to the specialist's syndrome. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Furthermore, there is more to politics than just the evidence of the matter at hand. There are things which affect politics that are not political as such. The importance of truth, the proper relations between state, society and individual, and so on.
ABCLAW 9y ago
>it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. No, it's that lowering the cost of information access also lowered the cost of DDOSing people with bullshit. It isn't that people don't care; it's that it is very inexpensive and very effective and very profitable to muddy the waters at scale.
wwweston 9y ago
Lest we as an audience be overly flattered by the "engineer's mindset," it's probably best to remind ourselves that in the field of software there are plenty of discussions and divisions that are frequently litigated in a tribal, adversarial manner. And that's just inside the field. Software engineers don't exactly end up uniformly distributed politically either. So either we don't apply the engineer's mindset all the time, or the engineer's mindset has limits itself when it comes to bringing consensus. I suspect it's both, but maybe particularly the latter: every problem human engineers care about includes human values at some level, and human values aren't equally weighted (or even shared at all) across humans. The mindset required to work on that last problem might not be engineer's mindset or lawyer's mindset.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  The first step to the road to humility is to realize that we are not the face of all engineering.
skookumchuck 9y ago
There was heavy manipulation of the media in favor of Clinton during the last election. Reddit, for example, was very active in promoting pro-Clinton news and downvoting pro-Trump news. It was so obviously an orchestrated campaign it was actually funny. CNN was relentlessly pro-Clinton. Clinton bought the machinery of the DNC to ensure her primary victory. Now, I'm not suggesting any of that is or should be illegal. But any discussion of Clinton losing because of propaganda should consider the converse.
- RickJWag 9y ago
  You're right. CNN ran comically doctored glamour shots of Hillary Clinton, every picture of Donald Trump showed him in a bad light. It's alarming that so many outlets (on the left AND the right) are trying so hard to control the minds of the masses. I hope we find better ways to de-politicize 'news' sources.
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    "better ways to de-politicize 'news' sources" There isn't a better way than free speech, which is why political speech is the most protected free speech. I've never even heard this mentioned in any of the news about the Russian propaganda, and it should be a central discussion point.
fareesh 9y ago
The discussion between Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro and Sara Fischer on the future of news is a great watch for anyone interested in this subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw
Hasknewbie 9y ago
> "The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth" I disagree. Most people have neither the time, inclination, or often the tools to "seek the truth" by themselves, and therefore they rely on the media to (in)form their views. Moreover there is such a thing as influencers and trend-setters. The media do not simply report on what people are expressing, they can also (and often very much do) set an agenda. Knowing this, it's journalists' duty to report the news accurately and not mix reporting with opinions, not manufacture or distort facts, and avoid feeding into the Outrage Economy and its endless echo chamber. By chance, I stumbled on a "meta-journalism" website just today, that analyses how mainstream print media (both left- and right-leaning) cover the news, it's pretty interesting. It's also often pretty damning. I hope they become better known: https://www.theknifemedia.com/ https://www.theknifemedia.com/
natecavanaugh 9y ago
Our post modern culture has now taken to saying things like "my truth" and "your truth", as if it can be possessed and is unique to individuals. But there does seem to be a general lack of understanding or belief that truth is outside of our personal perception. It doesn't surprise me that we can't seem to agree on what's true when we identify truth as somehow representing me or you, and therefore we have a personal stake in defending "our truth" rather than seeking "the truth" as best we can understand it.

59 points by rwx------ 9y ago

"fake news"... I believe this phrase was originally coined to denote articles that were paid for/commissioned by corporations. It's like flipping through a newspaper to see some outlandish headline, and then, looking at the top of the page, seeing "paid advertisement" in tiny print. Only these days, there is no tiny print, and the entire newspaper is one big paid advertisement for the oligarchy. I know pizzagate is verboten, so I doubt Big Brother will let this through, but just in case, and with hope for the future, I'm just going to leave this here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pizzagate,fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
th0ma5 9y ago
No you're thinking of submarine pieces. Fake news came to prominence as a term when conservative clickbait from random domains started popping up in early 2016. The left started using the term very prominently, but then when Facebook tried to crack down on it all, the right appropriated the term as a general term of derision towards non-conservative news sites.
mtgex 9y ago
I don't understand the argument you're making with the Google trends link. What I see is that a term which entered the common lexicon specifically to describe things such as Pizzagate is correlated with searches for the thing it describes. Is there some other point you're trying to make?
- th0ma5 9y ago
  More chart illiteracy probably. Here's a chart zoomed in https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-09-01%202016-12-01&q=pizzagate,fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-09-01%202... and the fake news area under the curve is quite a bit larger until around the time of the election. About the most honest thing you can actually say is that around the election people just started googling it more. Big whoop. There isn't any correlation with the term "fake news" as you may glean from the first chart.
- ebcode 9y ago
  "Fake news" was in the lexicon well before pizzagate, which you can see in the link. The point I'm trying to make is that the phrase "fake news" was pushed in place of the phrase "pizzagate", and this was done by all the major media outlets when the phrase pizzagate came to prominence. To my mind, if there had been no "pizzagate", there would have been no spike in "fake news", and we wouldn't even be talking about "fake news" today.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    I thought the term was coined by Trump? And it seems like people who use it, use it in place of "propaganda" not "pizzagate"
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      As I recall he (mis)appropriated the term, as is his habit. It wouldn't be surprising if tomorrow he started talking about how "woke" he is and how that adjective actually doesn't mean what we think it means. "Fake news" was originally a term for news-like narratives from sources other than the news media.
    - ebcode 9y ago
      Nope, not coined by Trump. I did a bit of research. I found "fake news" in this link from 2005 on democracynow.org: https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_government_agencies_produce https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_... I'm not trying to say that people who use the term now are using it in place of "pizzagate", but that media outlets, during the months of December 2016 and early 2017, used the phrase to talk around "pizzagate"; and now "pizzagate" has faded, but "fake news" remains. I think propaganda is a more appopriate word, and we should just use that. But because of the way associations work, whenever I see "fake news", I am reminded of "pizzagate". And I know I'm not the only one.
      - 9y ago

ukulele 9y ago

> The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare. This is the author's premise. It would have been nice to get some discussion around why that is the case (or even that it is true), but alas the article simply states it. Ironic to provide no details given the subject matter.

placebo 9y ago
You're right that it would be nice if the article would provide more evidence to back that claim up (especially given the article's content), however I don't think it's such an outlandish claim if you look at the facts. To greatly oversimplify (with the inherent dangers of oversimplifying), suppose 50% of the population believes news item "A" is true while the other 50% of the population believes "not A" to be true. There could be different reasons for such a scenario, but if "A" is something that can actually be verified with relative ease, then having such a high percentage of people disputing "A" could very well imply that way too many people are more interested in holding on to an opinion that suits their agenda (be it psychological, political or other) than to seek out what is true.
watwut 9y ago
I mean, even engineers don't think and act like that when it comes to politics. They don't think and act like that even when it is about technology, but they are already invested and really want to be or at least be seen as right. Example 1: anyone who refuse new architecture or tech cause it is new (and that exists a lot outside startup world). Example 2: anyone who jump into new tech even when it is irrational and not ready or simply not suitable for task at hand. Example 3: all engineers who talk with utter conviction about history or art or political/social problem - after they spent like an evening on wikipedia and cherry picked whatever fit their pre-existing simple worldview. All exists and are frequent.

Eupolemos 9y ago

> The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. This is where it almost gets profound. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, in his "On Bullshit", that the greatest danger isn't lack of truth or even direct falsehoods - it is when we give up searching for truth, or don't care about speaking truthfully. I.e. Bullshit. However, whatever the people can do to demand rigour and educate themselves on the matters, pales next to a media trying to hold itself to standards. When the media gives up, we are in dire straits indeed, if not utterly lost. Where I am from in Europe, we have pretty good media standards. But at least one of our biggest newspapers is actively working to muddle the waters for a party. Without being any kind of expert, other nations do not seem so well off.

Theodores 9y ago
There is the Western media mindset which is as brain-washed in its own special way as the craziest of religious cults. Most of the official government history is a lie, it has been one big fight for oil and other resources, not this 'war against terror' or whatever the clown in chief says. To escape the Western media mindset usually involves being brain washed with something else. Or living in a country where the truth does not match the reality on the ground. For instance, Syria, people that live there know that what all is told on the news on the television in the West is utter rubbish written and presented by people who have made up minds and don't care. The Western media mindset is cunning in that the better educated people that read broadsheet newspapers have indoctrinated themselves further into it, even if they think of themselves as being the educated, questioning one. Most people do not have the capability to appreciate the criminality that has gone on in Washington, London and elsewhere over the years. So this criminality goes on and the Western democracies exist in their special lawless way, preparing for war and actively beating up the world for profit. The funniest bullshit is the 'al-qaeda' nonsense. Not one person has ever met an al-qaeda person even if dead people in brown parts of the world are obviously al-qaeda. In previous wars you at least knew the enemy existed, now it is just fake news that you have to believe, on the Koolaid.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  So we are just dancing puppets. Well, look at all these presidents, who didnt like the vietnam protest muppet show. Why does such a event never occur in all those other free countrys? Why was there never a reported protest against fake news in Syria, in china, in the Caliphate, in Russia? The problem is that other countrys use the public debate and free media as attack vector- and in a very subtle way undermine democracy. Its not that free markets and free speech would undermine dictatorships, quite the other way around. PS: You are free to draft and propose a better democratic system and public debate concept.

didibus 9y ago

For fun, let me suggest an absurd theory. Engineers used to be evenly distributed across non engineers, where they were able to influence family and friends with their methodical thinking. They used to be respected, seen as peers, part of the middle class like all others. Now, they've all relocated to the west. They command upper middle class salaries, most are the new rich. Eroded of their engineers, most of the country rallies behind their familiar team. Isolated and newly rich, the engineers are no longer being fed data about the average non engineer. Therefore they are applying the engineer rational to a biased subset of the data, limiting their effectiveness. And so here we are. Non engineers know the true reality of their problems, but don't have the tools to solve them. So they rally behind charlatans. While engineers have the skill set to solve problems, but no longer know the realities of the problems to solve. A dystopian future is sure to follow.

jessaustin 9y ago
One suspects that "engineers" (are we talking actual engineers? or those who write software?) are not so central to the beneficial functioning of society as this theory assumes. If you meant those who drive locomotives, then I withdraw my suspicion. They are important.
- DiThi 9y ago
  Replace "engineers" by "people with the engineer mindset" and "the west" by "very populated areas".
  - throwaway080383 9y ago
    How about just replacing it with "intellectuals"?
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Yeesh, no thanks. In this context that word calls to mind this passage from ItBwtCL: ...during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

losvedir 9y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot as news articles like this one[1] come up in my feed. This whole anti-tech Russian backlash has me so down trodden. Like who cares if Russia bought ads? Who cares if Russia uses those sites and tweets or shares a photo or whatever. I learned long ago to tune out ads and not trust anything I read on the internet, or at least read with a hefty helping of salt. I wish the outcome of all these revelations about how Russia (and I'm sure other countries or random people or corporations with various interests) was using facebook, twitter, instagram, etc, was for people to go, "oh, that's good to know. I guess I should believe whatever random posts I come across less." Not, "Uh oh! These services and ads are only for our certain, pre-approved uses, and we need to make laws enforcing that." We could have used these as a nice ol' inoculation in the meme war and improved ordinary people's understanding of just how the internet works (and doesn't work). [1] https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&stream=top-stories https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_sourc...

aaron-lebo 9y ago
I'm doing a dissertation on Russian propaganda, among other propagandas, so disclaimer for bias. I don't understand not caring about it, even were I not working on it. I was having discussions with friends in 2015/early 2016 where we were looking at stuff and it was obvious what was going on. The day after the election, Zuckerberg was saying it is "crazy" that Russians could have been involved. We've got something systematically wrong if the biggest tech companies in the world with all the data and resources either were oblivious to it (seems likely based on their reactions) or were aware of it but kept doing it because it made them money. By all accounts their ad tools actually made this especially easy. No country, much less one that considers itself a superpower should be willingly letting a foreign nation spread propaganda. That big moat called the Atlantic and all those resources don't matter if you you're gonna let them in the back door. This kind of naivety/ignorance is too common in the power centers of the US. Consider Obama getting outwitted by Putin and Clinton getting beat by an idiot like Trump. Maybe they aren't so clever after all. That Russia is doing that is annoying, what's offensive is that our leaders allowed it to happen, and what's disturbing is people either acting like it hasn't happened (evidence says otherwise) or just want to shrug it off. It's hard to say how much of the recent domestic unrest is being fueled by it.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Of course a writer for Techcrunch believes that fake news is not the problem. That's like the NRA saying that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The problem is that we are so deluged with inaccurate articles written by bloggers who have no real concept of journalistic integrity. We can't tell what is real and what is fake. So what happens is that people will start rejecting all news. There's no accountability for writing shitty and inaccurate articles, and that's the problem. They believe that news can be buggy like software and can be corrected later, but it's not. It should be held to a higher standard because we rely on it. All that will happen now is that people will stop believe everything they read and even worse, they're going to stop caring. That is extremely dangerous for us as a society because it means people can start doing things in broad daylight and no one will believe it or care. This appears to be what this current administration is doing and Republicans don't appear to fear the consequences, because they're right. There's a very loud minority but the vast majority are really starting to not care.

jhiska 9y ago

Another way to see it is the Internet was supposed to make sharing what one understood as truth easier; instead, what it did was democratize Chomsky's propaganda model by making entry into becoming the media much cheaper; the Internet-based media newcomers essentially copied as best as they could the traditional media's model of _imposing_ their view of reality and manufacturing consent. In this view, what we're seeing is a power struggle for influence between the media who traditionally held the power to manufacture consent and the Internet-based newcomers.

anigbrowl 9y ago

It’s the Internet’s fault, we’re told. No. Pointing out the existence of the internet as a vector for propaganda doesn't mean people are blaming the existence of the communication medium.

wh-uws 9y ago

While I agree with the articles sentiment I think missing enough with the engineers mindset is only part of the problem. I recently wrote thoughts on the rest of the problem (having honest disusssions about problems to gather the insight and data to engineer with in the first place). It was in response to a friend's social media post which read something to the effect of "Whats your most controversial opinion? No judgement" "[... It] is nearly impossible to have completely honest versions of these conversations attached to your identity today because of a mixture of - extreme militantly politically correct culture - the existence of social media itself (allowing for identification and easy witch hunts from the comfort of your home) - and in aggregate many people operating from completely different and often incompatible belief systems and sets of facts For instance try to have any conversation in public with even slightest bit of negativity about any group of humans that are not rich, male, and white. People in most of western civilization today would be hard pressed to voice any opinions because they would instantaneously be labeled a "fascist", "misogynist" , "racist", or a litany of other "-ists" with a dizzying amount of speed and force. No matter how well you argue any point you are now inextricably linked with some "-ism". Someone screenshots this opinion and posts to a group like Occupy Democrats with a person's full name... And bam life quite possibly on the way to ruin. It will affect your social and professional lives for quite some time. I feel like until we can come to some form of consensus around the state of the world and how to use observations about it to discuss it we will continue to have situations where people cannot understand each others side and constantly talk past each other to all our detriment."

danielam 9y ago

The main thrust, that we ought to value the truth, is hard to disagree with. Certainly, it would be good if instead of adopting a Machiavellian ethos in which the goal is to "win" at all costs and where the spoken and written word isn't about communicating truths but rather functions as an instrument of manipulation and power, we were at least committed to the truth even as we honestly disagree. But what's this about an "engineering mindset"? It's an incredibly bizarre thing to appeal to in this context. Engineers are not somehow the quintessential pursuers of truth -- indeed, their pragmatic approach is less about the truth of the matter and more about effectiveness. Engineers are not, by virtue of being engineers, somehow particularly competent or qualified at understanding political issues. Politics is not a technology. Indeed, viewing politics in technocratic terms is positively dystopian. Perhaps the author of the article, writing for tech media, has fallen prey to the specialist's syndrome. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Furthermore, there is more to politics than just the evidence of the matter at hand. There are things which affect politics that are not political as such. The importance of truth, the proper relations between state, society and individual, and so on.

ABCLAW 9y ago

>it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. No, it's that lowering the cost of information access also lowered the cost of DDOSing people with bullshit. It isn't that people don't care; it's that it is very inexpensive and very effective and very profitable to muddy the waters at scale.

wwweston 9y ago

Lest we as an audience be overly flattered by the "engineer's mindset," it's probably best to remind ourselves that in the field of software there are plenty of discussions and divisions that are frequently litigated in a tribal, adversarial manner. And that's just inside the field. Software engineers don't exactly end up uniformly distributed politically either. So either we don't apply the engineer's mindset all the time, or the engineer's mindset has limits itself when it comes to bringing consensus. I suspect it's both, but maybe particularly the latter: every problem human engineers care about includes human values at some level, and human values aren't equally weighted (or even shared at all) across humans. The mindset required to work on that last problem might not be engineer's mindset or lawyer's mindset.

Apocryphon 9y ago
The first step to the road to humility is to realize that we are not the face of all engineering.

skookumchuck 9y ago

There was heavy manipulation of the media in favor of Clinton during the last election. Reddit, for example, was very active in promoting pro-Clinton news and downvoting pro-Trump news. It was so obviously an orchestrated campaign it was actually funny. CNN was relentlessly pro-Clinton. Clinton bought the machinery of the DNC to ensure her primary victory. Now, I'm not suggesting any of that is or should be illegal. But any discussion of Clinton losing because of propaganda should consider the converse.

RickJWag 9y ago
You're right. CNN ran comically doctored glamour shots of Hillary Clinton, every picture of Donald Trump showed him in a bad light. It's alarming that so many outlets (on the left AND the right) are trying so hard to control the minds of the masses. I hope we find better ways to de-politicize 'news' sources.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  "better ways to de-politicize 'news' sources" There isn't a better way than free speech, which is why political speech is the most protected free speech. I've never even heard this mentioned in any of the news about the Russian propaganda, and it should be a central discussion point.

fareesh 9y ago

The discussion between Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro and Sara Fischer on the future of news is a great watch for anyone interested in this subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw

Hasknewbie 9y ago

> "The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth" I disagree. Most people have neither the time, inclination, or often the tools to "seek the truth" by themselves, and therefore they rely on the media to (in)form their views. Moreover there is such a thing as influencers and trend-setters. The media do not simply report on what people are expressing, they can also (and often very much do) set an agenda. Knowing this, it's journalists' duty to report the news accurately and not mix reporting with opinions, not manufacture or distort facts, and avoid feeding into the Outrage Economy and its endless echo chamber. By chance, I stumbled on a "meta-journalism" website just today, that analyses how mainstream print media (both left- and right-leaning) cover the news, it's pretty interesting. It's also often pretty damning. I hope they become better known: https://www.theknifemedia.com/ https://www.theknifemedia.com/

natecavanaugh 9y ago

Our post modern culture has now taken to saying things like "my truth" and "your truth", as if it can be possessed and is unique to individuals. But there does seem to be a general lack of understanding or belief that truth is outside of our personal perception. It doesn't surprise me that we can't seem to agree on what's true when we identify truth as somehow representing me or you, and therefore we have a personal stake in defending "our truth" rather than seeking "the truth" as best we can understand it.