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Is anyone else disheartened by the fact that the discussion on "snake oil" has focused around e.g. regulating clinical trials and pharmaceutical manufacturing,

by saulrh 8y ago

Is anyone else disheartened by the fact that the discussion on "snake oil" has focused around e.g. regulating clinical trials and pharmaceutical manufacturing, rather than just teaching people basic critical thinking skills and label-reading skills? Answer: No. Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them. Micro-targeting of extremist viewpoints is so effective that I tend to think of it as a low-grade basilisk attack of sorts, a political equivalent of the langford death parrot: If you don't have your special protective goggles on there is nothing you can do to keep your opinion from being pushed around in depressingly predictable ways. There are studies that demonstrate that information that you consciously and correctly refute and disregard still affects your beliefs. And that's only useful if you're perfect; there's a rather nasty ratchet effect at work on your confidence bounds, so every single error leads to a nearly permanent skew that can be used to lever you arbitrarily far away from "truth". Even if you could correctly discard information that was outside believable confidence bounds, these systems can just denial-of-service your ability to gather competing information and pull off a good Cartesian evil demon act.

Moodles 8y ago
But I think teaching kids to read the label on their food is a good idea...
- saulrh 8y ago
  It is! It's good for their health, but at a much finer grain and for different purposes than protecting them from, for example, buying beef that's full of arsenic or a bottle of tylenol 500mg +/- 2000mg. Being able to read critically is absolutely a necessary skill. But it's fallen behind as a defensive measure against outright attacks on your knowledge base. There's simply no level of critical reading that can keep your opinions correct in the face of a torrent of falsely-attributed hate speech.
  - Moodles 8y ago
    Perhaps you are right that the most effective long-term way to stop the masses believing bullshit and eating shitty food is by forcing the companies to do something about it, rather than teaching kids to think and look after themselves. I hope you're wrong, though. It just seems that teaching kids good habits early on will kill off all the bad habits, fake news nonsense at the source. Fake news would die by natural section because everyone would see through it. I hope it is possible. It would be nice to see more of a focused effort on teaching kids that anyway. Perhaps evidence shows it's futile, though. The current state of affairs is very disheartening in any case.
    - sp332 8y ago
      I was thinking about this yesterday. You can't really "see through" someone lying to you. It's already basically impossible to know if one person is lying to you if they're consistent about it, so how could you know if there were a coordinated campaign of misinformation? What critical thinking skills let you tap into an extra-sensory source of truth beyond any information you actually have access to?
      - Moodles 8y ago
        It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.
        scruple 8y ago
        It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
  - vixen99 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
- sp332 8y ago
  You realize there's a lot of regulation requiring certain information to be put on those labels, right? If there weren't real penalties, companies would never tell you half that stuff and would probably lie about the rest. https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxNPpte_6m4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxNPpte_6m4
  - Moodles 8y ago
    Yes, I am for food being labelled correctly.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    Another famous one is tic-tac listing 0g of sugar content... In their 98% sugar pills. Because they're small enough, they're legally allowed to do that. There's already a lot of lying happening now.
kingofhdds 8y ago
The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined by ads? Personally, I think people can defend themselves against lies (though it doesn't happen instantly) if they have alternatives. And that's why we should resist censorship, and not prescribe filtered news to societies.
- saulrh 8y ago
  > The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined by ads? In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys with guns. AFAIK we don't really have those problems in the US or places like the UK. Why? Because we have laws against it and game-theoretic payoff matrices involved in the enforcement and adherence to those laws that make it generally better for everyone if those laws are enforced and adhered to. I think that there probably is a regulatory solution to this. I just don't know what it looks like yet, because it's a problem domain we haven't discovered a good notation or vocabulary for and can't discuss very well. I think that efforts like this report, which attempt to carefully define "misinformation" and "disinformation" to clear up the ambiguity of "fake news", are leading us in the right direction.
  - Amezarak 8y ago
    > In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys with guns. And, of course, they are helped along with the state-controlled media that is very careful not to air "fake news" and rigorous social media censorship to make sure news and opinions that are "misinformed" or "disruptive" to public peace are not widely disseminated. The view that we need social media censorship to stop "fake news" is the view that one's owns beliefs are the ironclad, objective truth, and all other beliefs are wrong and should be censored, since they lead people away from the truth. This isn't a road you want to go down if you want to live in a liberal democracy. This isn't a new argument for those opposed to democracy even in America. At the Constitutional Convention, we had plenty of arguments like this: > Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling spirit. There's always something "new." Other commenters in this thread note that legacy media doesn't have these problems, but that's almost entirely due to the massive corporate consolidation of news media. Back in early America, newspapers were much different and more democratic, in the sense that a much wider variety of views were available; many were extremely shrill, and "fake news" was a problem. Even then, people made the same arguments for shutting them down and censoring them, and briefly succeeded with the Sedition Act, which was heavily abused to arrest people who even criticized the President. Nevertheless when the Sedition Act expired with Adams' defeat and freedom of the press was restored, America did not collapse, but prospered. Advocating for "fact control" of social media is tantamount to arguing that only the opinions and preferences of the elite are correct, and we actually need corporate control of the media to make sure we don't stray from the right opinions. This is an okay view, I guess, but it doesn't fit in a liberal democracy. But don't pretend this is a "new" problem domain. We're just dressing up old arguments in new clothes because the Internet re-democratized the media, which has for decades been captured by government (mainstream media in the US has become very close to state-controlled media thanks to the way reporting works now and the prevalence of "anonymous officials") and corporate interests.
1337biz 8y ago
>Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them. This worldview is just sad and wrong. You are dehumanizing human beings, victimizing people and trying to strip them of their agency. How can you let people vote when in your view they are incapable to make informed decisions?
- saulrh 8y ago
  Fun fact: Most people also simply cannot defend themselves against guys in tanks with machine guns and infrared cameras. I do see where you're going with the bit about justifying crimes. But at the same time, if you shout "fire" in a crowded theater, the people that tried to get out aren't responsible for the deaths of the people that were trampled in the crush. I actually don't think that "blame" is a particularly useful concept. I believe that a more effective cognitive framework is along the lines of "what action is available to us which maximizes the expected value of society". The causes of a person's crimes matter exactly as much they as they inform the likelihood of further crimes and the action that would do the most good for them and the people they affect. I think that the issue is that the kinds of attacks we're talking about now leave injuries that are persistent, invasive, and infectious, and that simplistic systems like "blame" have obvious breakage when faced with such complex scenarios. When you spam a micro-demographic with falsely-attributed hate speech, you haven't just incited a riot, you've damaged the worldviews of a bunch of people enough that they're going to require active rehabilitation to participate in civilization again. It's like you dumped something into their neighborhood that left a bunch of them with brain damage. Punishing those victims is useful only as a way to rehabilitate them. A much better solution might be to force them to go back through high school history and civics courses or something, same way you'd help the victims of the chemical dumping by sending them to the hospital instead of to jail.
  - mike_hearn 8y ago
    If you really think words can literally cause brain damage, as you obviously spend a lot of time reading and commenting online, what makes you think you aren't completely insane and shouldn't just be sent right back to school yourself? I for one think your worldview is deeply damaged, you're basically a totalitarian who has convinced themselves anyone who disagrees with you is literally suffering a brain disease.
mike_hearn 8y ago
Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them There is plenty of evidence that this belief is complete nonsense. You're asserting it as if it's fact but you have no sources or citations, and actual real world events contradict you, most obviously, Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost. If "modern advertising techniques" were really so powerful that could never have happened. Also, Google wouldn't make billions out of text ads, billions made mostly by not showing people ads for things they don't already want.

by saulrh 8y ago

Moodles 8y ago

But I think teaching kids to read the label on their food is a good idea...

saulrh 8y ago
It is! It's good for their health, but at a much finer grain and for different purposes than protecting them from, for example, buying beef that's full of arsenic or a bottle of tylenol 500mg +/- 2000mg. Being able to read critically is absolutely a necessary skill. But it's fallen behind as a defensive measure against outright attacks on your knowledge base. There's simply no level of critical reading that can keep your opinions correct in the face of a torrent of falsely-attributed hate speech.
- Moodles 8y ago
  Perhaps you are right that the most effective long-term way to stop the masses believing bullshit and eating shitty food is by forcing the companies to do something about it, rather than teaching kids to think and look after themselves. I hope you're wrong, though. It just seems that teaching kids good habits early on will kill off all the bad habits, fake news nonsense at the source. Fake news would die by natural section because everyone would see through it. I hope it is possible. It would be nice to see more of a focused effort on teaching kids that anyway. Perhaps evidence shows it's futile, though. The current state of affairs is very disheartening in any case.
  - sp332 8y ago
    I was thinking about this yesterday. You can't really "see through" someone lying to you. It's already basically impossible to know if one person is lying to you if they're consistent about it, so how could you know if there were a coordinated campaign of misinformation? What critical thinking skills let you tap into an extra-sensory source of truth beyond any information you actually have access to?
    - Moodles 8y ago
      It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.
      - scruple 8y ago
        It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
- vixen99 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
sp332 8y ago
You realize there's a lot of regulation requiring certain information to be put on those labels, right? If there weren't real penalties, companies would never tell you half that stuff and would probably lie about the rest. https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxNPpte_6m4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxNPpte_6m4
- Moodles 8y ago
  Yes, I am for food being labelled correctly.
- viraptor 8y ago
  Another famous one is tic-tac listing 0g of sugar content... In their 98% sugar pills. Because they're small enough, they're legally allowed to do that. There's already a lot of lying happening now.

kingofhdds 8y ago

The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined by ads? Personally, I think people can defend themselves against lies (though it doesn't happen instantly) if they have alternatives. And that's why we should resist censorship, and not prescribe filtered news to societies.

saulrh 8y ago
> The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined by ads? In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys with guns. AFAIK we don't really have those problems in the US or places like the UK. Why? Because we have laws against it and game-theoretic payoff matrices involved in the enforcement and adherence to those laws that make it generally better for everyone if those laws are enforced and adhered to. I think that there probably is a regulatory solution to this. I just don't know what it looks like yet, because it's a problem domain we haven't discovered a good notation or vocabulary for and can't discuss very well. I think that efforts like this report, which attempt to carefully define "misinformation" and "disinformation" to clear up the ambiguity of "fake news", are leading us in the right direction.
- Amezarak 8y ago
  > In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys with guns. And, of course, they are helped along with the state-controlled media that is very careful not to air "fake news" and rigorous social media censorship to make sure news and opinions that are "misinformed" or "disruptive" to public peace are not widely disseminated. The view that we need social media censorship to stop "fake news" is the view that one's owns beliefs are the ironclad, objective truth, and all other beliefs are wrong and should be censored, since they lead people away from the truth. This isn't a road you want to go down if you want to live in a liberal democracy. This isn't a new argument for those opposed to democracy even in America. At the Constitutional Convention, we had plenty of arguments like this: > Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling spirit. There's always something "new." Other commenters in this thread note that legacy media doesn't have these problems, but that's almost entirely due to the massive corporate consolidation of news media. Back in early America, newspapers were much different and more democratic, in the sense that a much wider variety of views were available; many were extremely shrill, and "fake news" was a problem. Even then, people made the same arguments for shutting them down and censoring them, and briefly succeeded with the Sedition Act, which was heavily abused to arrest people who even criticized the President. Nevertheless when the Sedition Act expired with Adams' defeat and freedom of the press was restored, America did not collapse, but prospered. Advocating for "fact control" of social media is tantamount to arguing that only the opinions and preferences of the elite are correct, and we actually need corporate control of the media to make sure we don't stray from the right opinions. This is an okay view, I guess, but it doesn't fit in a liberal democracy. But don't pretend this is a "new" problem domain. We're just dressing up old arguments in new clothes because the Internet re-democratized the media, which has for decades been captured by government (mainstream media in the US has become very close to state-controlled media thanks to the way reporting works now and the prevalence of "anonymous officials") and corporate interests.

1337biz 8y ago

>Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them. This worldview is just sad and wrong. You are dehumanizing human beings, victimizing people and trying to strip them of their agency. How can you let people vote when in your view they are incapable to make informed decisions?

saulrh 8y ago
Fun fact: Most people also simply cannot defend themselves against guys in tanks with machine guns and infrared cameras. I do see where you're going with the bit about justifying crimes. But at the same time, if you shout "fire" in a crowded theater, the people that tried to get out aren't responsible for the deaths of the people that were trampled in the crush. I actually don't think that "blame" is a particularly useful concept. I believe that a more effective cognitive framework is along the lines of "what action is available to us which maximizes the expected value of society". The causes of a person's crimes matter exactly as much they as they inform the likelihood of further crimes and the action that would do the most good for them and the people they affect. I think that the issue is that the kinds of attacks we're talking about now leave injuries that are persistent, invasive, and infectious, and that simplistic systems like "blame" have obvious breakage when faced with such complex scenarios. When you spam a micro-demographic with falsely-attributed hate speech, you haven't just incited a riot, you've damaged the worldviews of a bunch of people enough that they're going to require active rehabilitation to participate in civilization again. It's like you dumped something into their neighborhood that left a bunch of them with brain damage. Punishing those victims is useful only as a way to rehabilitate them. A much better solution might be to force them to go back through high school history and civics courses or something, same way you'd help the victims of the chemical dumping by sending them to the hospital instead of to jail.
- mike_hearn 8y ago
  If you really think words can literally cause brain damage, as you obviously spend a lot of time reading and commenting online, what makes you think you aren't completely insane and shouldn't just be sent right back to school yourself? I for one think your worldview is deeply damaged, you're basically a totalitarian who has convinced themselves anyone who disagrees with you is literally suffering a brain disease.

mike_hearn 8y ago

Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them There is plenty of evidence that this belief is complete nonsense. You're asserting it as if it's fact but you have no sources or citations, and actual real world events contradict you, most obviously, Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost. If "modern advertising techniques" were really so powerful that could never have happened. Also, Google wouldn't make billions out of text ads, billions made mostly by not showing people ads for things they don't already want.