10 ms·

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 https://twitter.com/drvox

by uptown 9y ago

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint on anything, one much choose whom to trust. And that it's this part of the process of "understanding" which has been exploited. That people have been encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence. In this light point, when facts are irrelevant -- and if fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust then I fear for those advocating fact-backed positions. It's clear they'll face an uphill battle.

gameswithgo 9y ago
>That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand! By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.
- uptown 9y ago
  > "Raw data is freely available (noaa and others)" But still - this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others. His point isn't really even about climate change. It's about debating the merits of any position, and what sources of information you trust to reinforce your position.
  - godelski 9y ago
    > this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others I should mention that this is fairly easy to verify, at least with part of the data. For land temperatures one of the big sources they use is meteorological data gathered at airports (METAR). You know, the same data that pilots use to calculate take off and landing distances, altimeter settings, etc. So a concerned citizen could compare this these data sets and verify part of the NOAA data. Faking this data, at the airports, would cause disasters, unless you had this major conspiracy where you fixed the pilots instruments or every pilot was aware of this faking and used the real numbers. But both seem really silly since GA pilots need this information too, and frequently do hand calculations. I certainty think the verify part is essential in phrase "trust, but verify". I just want it to be clear that one can trivially verify one of the large components of the data set. [1] SFO airport data: http://www.wx-now.com/weather/wxcurrent?icao=KSFO http://www.wx-now.com/weather/wxcurrent?icao=KSFO
    - mistermann 9y ago
      Ok, but what are we verifying, the pre-adjusted numbers, or the post-adjusted numbers? And is there a document a reasonably intelligent layman can refer to to get the complete story behind how various measurements have been adjusted? For fun, sometimes I try to find someone who can explain to me where the "97% of scientists support the man-made global warming theory" statistic came from, and I'm pretty sure I found the original source, but the problem is, it doesn't say 97% of scientists support it, or that 97% of papers support it. Now, if The Informed would just be up front and admit that "ok, that particular claim is a bit imprecise to be quite honest, here's the actual story....." this would be perfectly fine with me. But when instead both official authors and any advocate I've encountered online instead doubles down on the misstatement, or refuses to answer perfectly straightforward questions but instead attacks me and starts calling me names.....well, my spider senses go off a bit. And then I read things like: "The US right, for decades now but accelerating in recent years, rejects mainstream institutions: not just science but academia, journalism, and government. It has devolved into thoroughly tribal epistemology: what is good for us is true." ....and the logical side of my brain says "well yes, that is certainly true for a lot of conservatives, but certainly not all" and then I start to notice a pattern where very few pro-AGW-thoery people seem to be able to resist saying things that are not true, when lying is absolutely not necessary in any way, and I think to myself, this whole situation seems a bit suspicious. So, partially because I'm genuinely skeptical, partially because I have quite a number of issues with the current political climate and state of discourse, and partially to return just a small portion of the cntiness I've experienced from online know-it-alls, I'm going to set my launch chair just on the other side of the "denier" line, because "fck me? Well fck you too!" Besides, the economic prospects in the future for my kids doesn't look so bright and no one seems to give two shts about that, so maybe I'm not overly motivated to care about your interests either.
- kolbe 9y ago
  You highly overestimate... ...how many people can do data analysis. ...how many people can write scripts. ...how many people know what a script is. ...how many people can do basic arithmetic. Your example of self-enrichment is perfectly fine for people with a good education, but it's insufficient at 'democracy scale' where elections are decided by voters who cannot do anything beyond trusting the people who are informing their decisions.
- DelightOne 9y ago
  > possible to self-inform Doesn't mean the self-inform is reproducible though due to obvious reasons.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This requires at least a graduate-level stats education to do "properly"!
- Maybestring 9y ago
  >Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". That can only tell you whether the trend is present in the raw data or only occured after some processing of the data. Don't confuse raw sensor data with reality and adjustments with artifacts. I can use a tire gauge that reads high, but that doesn't make my flat tire an artifact of data adjustment.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  I mean, using this definition, you could be 'self-informed' about ANY topic - as long as you have the skills, time, and desire to fully immerse yourself in the subject. And, as you point out, it is literally impossible to do this for every subject - even if we all had infinite aptitude to study and understand all subjects, we don't have the infinite time it would take to do that. Plus, this is an extreme waste of our resources; we specialize for a reason. We need trust, and you can only spot check that trust every now and then for things that you actually know.
- roenxi 9y ago
  What you say is true, but there are some other aspects of trust at play here. Locally, I observe City Warming of up to 30 degrees each day. Verifying that "global warming is a real _problem_ and human activities are _net negative to the human experience_" is not as easy as you are suggesting, because I need to model more than temperature over time. Also need some idea of the accuracy of the raw data. The group of people who trust that global warming is a problem correlate pretty highly with the group of people who want to shut down big chucks of our cheap energy production system and replace it with something expensive. To put people in charge who think that is acceptable is a huge leap of trust. It is very easy to see why doomsayers are not treated as credible. We've seen a huge number of them, mostly they have been wrong and so far the cheap energy solution has been wildly luxurious and successful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Clanan 9y ago
  I don't think this is good advice. An amateur investigation of a complex topic is probably worse than trusting an expert who may or may not be trustworthy. You don't know what you don't know. Sure, you grabbed (what you think is) raw data. But what if the trend or timescale was too small? What if you asked the wrong question? What if the data was artificially adjusted, or should have been but wasn't? (As NOAA has been caught doing.) You don't know these things, i.e. what is/isn't important. Now you're certain of your results, which may be completely wrong. To me, this is the SV/nerd version of an uninformed ideologue. ("Research fast and break things!") Maybe it's better to expend that effort identifying whether your go-to experts are really trustworthy, instead.
carapace 9y ago
> matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny. People are scared, way deep down where it's hard to think about, because they know on a cellular billion-year-old level that you cannot escape the weather. Once you grasp that, climate denialism is an obvious coping mechanism to prevent mass blind panic. It is a terrible thing to face the destruction of all that you love. - - - - - In any event, deepfakes are a shocking thing to have to deal with and we are sooooo unprepared. The only thing I can think of is to spread the word about it far and wide and hope for the best (meaning hopefully people and society will "innoculate" themselves against the onslaught of concrete dreams.)
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny. A very similar logic leads people to conclude "it was cold last week, so global warming is nonsense". Being able to understand the scientific case for climate change requires a level of scientific literacy and critical thinking that most people could readily develop, but isn't taught in schools.
  - carapace 9y ago
    It's not logic even slightly. Multicellular organisms have internal mechanisms to track environmental changes and forecast things like how many offspring to have. This sort of "thinking" isn't neurological, it takes place in epigenetic systems that can span generations, especially in mammals due to gestation.
- darepublic 9y ago
  I think more likely some obvious deep fakes will be circulated, people will cry about it and beg for regulations, government will step in and regulate the shit out of the internet. Congrats now we are back to getting all our news from the oh so trustworthy unbiased mainstream media.
  - 9y ago
chiefalchemist 9y ago
> "His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust..." Spot on. What the more purely science-mind can't seem to grasp is facts are only as good as the receivers' trust of the source. The irony is, there's plenty of science to support this. Yet, ironically, science too ignores itself. If Science were a brand it would be in need of a makeover. But instead of owning it's many shortcomings and past transgressions (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer. That too, as we all know is a big mistake. Sure, I side with Science. But I also know it could use an extensive education in dog fooding if it wants to regain its traction (read: credibility and trust) in the market.
- amirmc 9y ago
  > (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer. It feels like there's a conflation of science and science reporting in here somewhere. Most of the actual research output makes measured claims but the journalism around it ends up being sensationalised (yes, some researchers also participate in that but not as a rule).
  - Sevii 9y ago
    Science is science reporting. Normal people can only understand what is reported. If you want to read the actual papers, prepare to spend a couple hours to barely understand what is going on. Most people aren’t able to do that for all of the hundreds of papers published each year that could be relevant to their lives.
    - nothrabannosir 9y ago
      I wish scientific journals would start encouraging “human language”, as opposed to impenetrable thickets of mathematical gobbledygook. When I was still in academia, reading papers germane to my field was a chore. It would take considerable time to decipher a complex looking mathematical equation, only to go, “oh, they just mean X.” Basically as soon as I saw a \Sum sign, I knew the equation was pointless peacocking. This is something I hope to see gain traction with the new gust of open wind blowing through scientific reporting. Open results, accessible results, means more than just the accessibility of the PDF, if you ask me. Publicly funded research has a duty to be readable and understandable by the public, who paid for it. Or, at the very least, not more opaque than strictly necessary.
toss1 9y ago
> isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust Spot-on. This is severely exacerbated players like Google & Facebook, whose algorithms favor "engagement" and "virality", with zero regard for truth. It/s been shown [1] that falsehoods sperad faster, in part because they contain more 'surprise value'. The result is that these info vendors effectively create an editorial environment favoring falsehoods. Google has done a bit to clean it up on their search engine, e.g., the Flat Earth search generally points to debunking entries, but the same company's YouTube site contains a bunch of fakes in the top 10 results on the same search. It is no exaggeration at this point to say that these tech giants are significantly undermining our society by failing to exercise responsibility over their implicit/explicit/algorithmic editorial decisions. [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/study-false-news-spreads-faster-than-the-truth/ http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/study-false-news-s...
unabst 9y ago
> fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust Which leads to what needs to be considered the greatest sin and betrayal of all: The creating and promoting of such videos. No one creates a false video by accident. They know what they are doing, and their intentions are clear. And this is not free speech. Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech.
- jerf 9y ago
  "Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech." Another example of where a sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Historically speaking there's nothing new about false attributing speech to some authority, but people had built-in instincts to deal with people simply saying that X said Y and could treat it with some salt. But easy fake videos reverses the situation; we have built-in instincts that say we should trust the video as a reliable representation of the putative speaker, even if we in intellectually know better. Even if you flashed a warning "THIS IS A FAKE VIDEO" constantly, I bet you'd still be able to run studies that show disproportionate effects on people as a result of a sufficiently good fake video.
  - berbec 9y ago
    I remember a big deal being made of a TAS video of Mario and people assuming it was a real run.
leot 9y ago
This is similar to the pre-elightenment skepticism of alchemists. Soon after the printing press, scientific communication was invented as a way of addressing the trust issue. The internet might be forcing a similar shift. I wrote a bit more about this here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/04/wikifying-scholarly-canons/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/0...
VikingCoder 9y ago
I heartily agree with your core point. > encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence To offer up some compassion to those people, you have to remember that we're daily barraged with p=0.05 experiments getting breathless coverage in the media. "Scientists say peanut butter cures cancer." "Scientists say peanut butter causes cancer." Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?" The media's coverage of science does not portray research in the proper light, does not give context, etc. So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are skeptical of trusting "science."
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?" No, I don't remember that, because that was never actually the case. If you "remember" it, it is a false impression and you should really deeply introspect why you hold it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-co...
  - VikingCoder 9y ago
    I'm relating the perspective some people have on science. To them, it's chaotic. Answers change constantly. "Theory" is a derogatory term to them. The conversation here is not how any given fact is right or wrong. The conversation here is that "scientific facts" seem to change at a dizzying pace to them, without being tethered to reality. "Global warming?!? It's SNOWING right now!" Do cell phones cause cancer? Do vaccines cause autism? Was there cold fusion in that fish tank? Also see: https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-samuel-arbesman https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-samuel-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-from-10-years-ago-1701106456 https://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-fro... http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...
testname123 9y ago
This assumes that there is indeed no difference between fact and fiction. However, facts need to be consistent among themselves. In such a case where a fact can be disproved by a lack of consistency with directly observable phenomema, no appeal to trust is required. For eg. the earth is not flat, etc.

by uptown 9y ago

gameswithgo 9y ago

>That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand! By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.

uptown 9y ago
> "Raw data is freely available (noaa and others)" But still - this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others. His point isn't really even about climate change. It's about debating the merits of any position, and what sources of information you trust to reinforce your position.
- godelski 9y ago
  > this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others I should mention that this is fairly easy to verify, at least with part of the data. For land temperatures one of the big sources they use is meteorological data gathered at airports (METAR). You know, the same data that pilots use to calculate take off and landing distances, altimeter settings, etc. So a concerned citizen could compare this these data sets and verify part of the NOAA data. Faking this data, at the airports, would cause disasters, unless you had this major conspiracy where you fixed the pilots instruments or every pilot was aware of this faking and used the real numbers. But both seem really silly since GA pilots need this information too, and frequently do hand calculations. I certainty think the verify part is essential in phrase "trust, but verify". I just want it to be clear that one can trivially verify one of the large components of the data set. [1] SFO airport data: http://www.wx-now.com/weather/wxcurrent?icao=KSFO http://www.wx-now.com/weather/wxcurrent?icao=KSFO
  - mistermann 9y ago
    Ok, but what are we verifying, the pre-adjusted numbers, or the post-adjusted numbers? And is there a document a reasonably intelligent layman can refer to to get the complete story behind how various measurements have been adjusted? For fun, sometimes I try to find someone who can explain to me where the "97% of scientists support the man-made global warming theory" statistic came from, and I'm pretty sure I found the original source, but the problem is, it doesn't say 97% of scientists support it, or that 97% of papers support it. Now, if The Informed would just be up front and admit that "ok, that particular claim is a bit imprecise to be quite honest, here's the actual story....." this would be perfectly fine with me. But when instead both official authors and any advocate I've encountered online instead doubles down on the misstatement, or refuses to answer perfectly straightforward questions but instead attacks me and starts calling me names.....well, my spider senses go off a bit. And then I read things like: "The US right, for decades now but accelerating in recent years, rejects mainstream institutions: not just science but academia, journalism, and government. It has devolved into thoroughly tribal epistemology: what is good for us is true." ....and the logical side of my brain says "well yes, that is certainly true for a lot of conservatives, but certainly not all" and then I start to notice a pattern where very few pro-AGW-thoery people seem to be able to resist saying things that are not true, when lying is absolutely not necessary in any way, and I think to myself, this whole situation seems a bit suspicious. So, partially because I'm genuinely skeptical, partially because I have quite a number of issues with the current political climate and state of discourse, and partially to return just a small portion of the cntiness I've experienced from online know-it-alls, I'm going to set my launch chair just on the other side of the "denier" line, because "fck me? Well fck you too!" Besides, the economic prospects in the future for my kids doesn't look so bright and no one seems to give two shts about that, so maybe I'm not overly motivated to care about your interests either.
kolbe 9y ago
You highly overestimate... ...how many people can do data analysis. ...how many people can write scripts. ...how many people know what a script is. ...how many people can do basic arithmetic. Your example of self-enrichment is perfectly fine for people with a good education, but it's insufficient at 'democracy scale' where elections are decided by voters who cannot do anything beyond trusting the people who are informing their decisions.
DelightOne 9y ago
> possible to self-inform Doesn't mean the self-inform is reproducible though due to obvious reasons.
pjc50 9y ago
> some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This requires at least a graduate-level stats education to do "properly"!
Maybestring 9y ago
>Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". That can only tell you whether the trend is present in the raw data or only occured after some processing of the data. Don't confuse raw sensor data with reality and adjustments with artifacts. I can use a tire gauge that reads high, but that doesn't make my flat tire an artifact of data adjustment.
cortesoft 9y ago
I mean, using this definition, you could be 'self-informed' about ANY topic - as long as you have the skills, time, and desire to fully immerse yourself in the subject. And, as you point out, it is literally impossible to do this for every subject - even if we all had infinite aptitude to study and understand all subjects, we don't have the infinite time it would take to do that. Plus, this is an extreme waste of our resources; we specialize for a reason. We need trust, and you can only spot check that trust every now and then for things that you actually know.
roenxi 9y ago
What you say is true, but there are some other aspects of trust at play here. Locally, I observe City Warming of up to 30 degrees each day. Verifying that "global warming is a real _problem_ and human activities are _net negative to the human experience_" is not as easy as you are suggesting, because I need to model more than temperature over time. Also need some idea of the accuracy of the raw data. The group of people who trust that global warming is a problem correlate pretty highly with the group of people who want to shut down big chucks of our cheap energy production system and replace it with something expensive. To put people in charge who think that is acceptable is a huge leap of trust. It is very easy to see why doomsayers are not treated as credible. We've seen a huge number of them, mostly they have been wrong and so far the cheap energy solution has been wildly luxurious and successful.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Clanan 9y ago
I don't think this is good advice. An amateur investigation of a complex topic is probably worse than trusting an expert who may or may not be trustworthy. You don't know what you don't know. Sure, you grabbed (what you think is) raw data. But what if the trend or timescale was too small? What if you asked the wrong question? What if the data was artificially adjusted, or should have been but wasn't? (As NOAA has been caught doing.) You don't know these things, i.e. what is/isn't important. Now you're certain of your results, which may be completely wrong. To me, this is the SV/nerd version of an uninformed ideologue. ("Research fast and break things!") Maybe it's better to expend that effort identifying whether your go-to experts are really trustworthy, instead.

carapace 9y ago

> matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny. People are scared, way deep down where it's hard to think about, because they know on a cellular billion-year-old level that you cannot escape the weather. Once you grasp that, climate denialism is an obvious coping mechanism to prevent mass blind panic. It is a terrible thing to face the destruction of all that you love. - - - - - In any event, deepfakes are a shocking thing to have to deal with and we are sooooo unprepared. The only thing I can think of is to spread the word about it far and wide and hope for the best (meaning hopefully people and society will "innoculate" themselves against the onslaught of concrete dreams.)

jdietrich 9y ago
>But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny. A very similar logic leads people to conclude "it was cold last week, so global warming is nonsense". Being able to understand the scientific case for climate change requires a level of scientific literacy and critical thinking that most people could readily develop, but isn't taught in schools.
- carapace 9y ago
  It's not logic even slightly. Multicellular organisms have internal mechanisms to track environmental changes and forecast things like how many offspring to have. This sort of "thinking" isn't neurological, it takes place in epigenetic systems that can span generations, especially in mammals due to gestation.
darepublic 9y ago
I think more likely some obvious deep fakes will be circulated, people will cry about it and beg for regulations, government will step in and regulate the shit out of the internet. Congrats now we are back to getting all our news from the oh so trustworthy unbiased mainstream media.
- 9y ago

chiefalchemist 9y ago

> "His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust..." Spot on. What the more purely science-mind can't seem to grasp is facts are only as good as the receivers' trust of the source. The irony is, there's plenty of science to support this. Yet, ironically, science too ignores itself. If Science were a brand it would be in need of a makeover. But instead of owning it's many shortcomings and past transgressions (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer. That too, as we all know is a big mistake. Sure, I side with Science. But I also know it could use an extensive education in dog fooding if it wants to regain its traction (read: credibility and trust) in the market.

amirmc 9y ago
> (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer. It feels like there's a conflation of science and science reporting in here somewhere. Most of the actual research output makes measured claims but the journalism around it ends up being sensationalised (yes, some researchers also participate in that but not as a rule).
- Sevii 9y ago
  Science is science reporting. Normal people can only understand what is reported. If you want to read the actual papers, prepare to spend a couple hours to barely understand what is going on. Most people aren’t able to do that for all of the hundreds of papers published each year that could be relevant to their lives.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    I wish scientific journals would start encouraging “human language”, as opposed to impenetrable thickets of mathematical gobbledygook. When I was still in academia, reading papers germane to my field was a chore. It would take considerable time to decipher a complex looking mathematical equation, only to go, “oh, they just mean X.” Basically as soon as I saw a \Sum sign, I knew the equation was pointless peacocking. This is something I hope to see gain traction with the new gust of open wind blowing through scientific reporting. Open results, accessible results, means more than just the accessibility of the PDF, if you ask me. Publicly funded research has a duty to be readable and understandable by the public, who paid for it. Or, at the very least, not more opaque than strictly necessary.

toss1 9y ago

> isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust Spot-on. This is severely exacerbated players like Google & Facebook, whose algorithms favor "engagement" and "virality", with zero regard for truth. It/s been shown [1] that falsehoods sperad faster, in part because they contain more 'surprise value'. The result is that these info vendors effectively create an editorial environment favoring falsehoods. Google has done a bit to clean it up on their search engine, e.g., the Flat Earth search generally points to debunking entries, but the same company's YouTube site contains a bunch of fakes in the top 10 results on the same search. It is no exaggeration at this point to say that these tech giants are significantly undermining our society by failing to exercise responsibility over their implicit/explicit/algorithmic editorial decisions. [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/study-false-news-spreads-faster-than-the-truth/ http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/study-false-news-s...

unabst 9y ago

> fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust Which leads to what needs to be considered the greatest sin and betrayal of all: The creating and promoting of such videos. No one creates a false video by accident. They know what they are doing, and their intentions are clear. And this is not free speech. Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech.

jerf 9y ago
"Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech." Another example of where a sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Historically speaking there's nothing new about false attributing speech to some authority, but people had built-in instincts to deal with people simply saying that X said Y and could treat it with some salt. But easy fake videos reverses the situation; we have built-in instincts that say we should trust the video as a reliable representation of the putative speaker, even if we in intellectually know better. Even if you flashed a warning "THIS IS A FAKE VIDEO" constantly, I bet you'd still be able to run studies that show disproportionate effects on people as a result of a sufficiently good fake video.
- berbec 9y ago
  I remember a big deal being made of a TAS video of Mario and people assuming it was a real run.

leot 9y ago

This is similar to the pre-elightenment skepticism of alchemists. Soon after the printing press, scientific communication was invented as a way of addressing the trust issue. The internet might be forcing a similar shift. I wrote a bit more about this here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/04/wikifying-scholarly-canons/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/0...

VikingCoder 9y ago

I heartily agree with your core point. > encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence To offer up some compassion to those people, you have to remember that we're daily barraged with p=0.05 experiments getting breathless coverage in the media. "Scientists say peanut butter cures cancer." "Scientists say peanut butter causes cancer." Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?" The media's coverage of science does not portray research in the proper light, does not give context, etc. So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are skeptical of trusting "science."

throwaway5752 9y ago
Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?" No, I don't remember that, because that was never actually the case. If you "remember" it, it is a false impression and you should really deeply introspect why you hold it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-co...
- VikingCoder 9y ago
  I'm relating the perspective some people have on science. To them, it's chaotic. Answers change constantly. "Theory" is a derogatory term to them. The conversation here is not how any given fact is right or wrong. The conversation here is that "scientific facts" seem to change at a dizzying pace to them, without being tethered to reality. "Global warming?!? It's SNOWING right now!" Do cell phones cause cancer? Do vaccines cause autism? Was there cold fusion in that fish tank? Also see: https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-samuel-arbesman https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-samuel-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-from-10-years-ago-1701106456 https://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-fro... http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...

testname123 9y ago

This assumes that there is indeed no difference between fact and fiction. However, facts need to be consistent among themselves. In such a case where a fact can be disproved by a lack of consistency with directly observable phenomema, no appeal to trust is required. For eg. the earth is not flat, etc.