5 ms·

This is a point I frequently try to make among my peers when the topic arises. Right now, in the U.S. we're seeing people's information sources splintering. Wit

This is a point I frequently try to make among my peers when the topic arises. Right now, in the U.S. we're seeing people's information sources splintering. With people attaching themselves to sources that conform to their worldview. But if you go back to before the middle of the 20th century, hundreds maybe even thousands of newspapers ruled the day. With some of the most respected papers of our day churning out tabloid crap chaff in that time (looking at you NYT). Many were little more than party organs. So it's not now that's strange. It's 1950-2000, that's the weird time, where there were a few news sources that people more or less believed in. I'm not saying we're not losing something but we are probably returning to the more common state of the "news".

swsieber 8y ago
It was a strange time because of government regulation requiring some sort of public service reporting, but I can't remember anymore detail that that...
h4b4n3r0 8y ago
>> Many were little more than party organs. Why “were”? They still largely are.
kurthr 8y ago
But then isn't it OK to blame and shame those who have engineered and monetized the public loss? It's not just the loss of some Great Truth, but the loss of even honest debate and collective acceptance of facts, or universal disgust at obvious hypocrisy and lying. Spreading disinformation for profit (and allowing trolls for clicks) is a pollution of a public good. It's as classic an example of a Tragedy of the Commons as any other. Edit: I am also saddened by the loss of sarcasm and irony. Complexity must be replaced by simplicity again.
- tim333 8y ago
  I think its generally ok to blame and shame. Zuckerberg seems fairly ashamed of some of Facebook's failings and is hiring thousands of staff to try and fix things. You wonder a bit about people who are not ashamed, if there's some way to change the incentives.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  It's a nested epistemological problem. It's impossible to first create a measurement system for "truth" which could uniformly be used to judge any series of statements. Doubly so when the topics are not mathematically rigorous in nature. On top of that, it's a major challenge to determine intention - eg. was the author of a piece of "fake news" duped, were they being malicious, is there a self-serving bias or is the author simply incompetent? Third, what is the economic and political environment that the author resides inside? Does the author have a choice of what to write unencumbered or is there a economic or political system which is unreasonably burdensome that they have to hew to? So it's not so simple to just assume that there is a unipolar evaluation that can be done when evaluating communications/persuasion/propaganda.
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  I don't think there was ever a "collective acceptance of facts". Previously the type of people that are now believing fake news were not reading or receiving news at all, or in a very narrow form. They were blocked from the debate.
tim333 8y ago
The changes since 1950-2000 are a bit of a mixed bag - there is much more fairly unbiased information available through the likes of Wikipedia say than there was. On the other hand there's all sorts of biased sensationalist stuff for those who choose that.
- DubiousPusher 8y ago
  Oh, I agree. If you're one to parse the news, seek out sources that apply journalism rigorously and just generally read a lot of sources, you can have an understanding of what's going on in the world that is unprecedented in history.
gallerdude 8y ago
To build off of that, I think what we're really in is "hyper-truth." A lot of people say we're moving away from facts, and that may be the case sometimes. But most of the time, I just think that there are so many facts now, and you can easily grab all of the ones that support your side.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  I second that. Facts aren't binary. Just because we have a lot of data doesn't mean that we automatically are able to derive truth from it. IMO any kind of system should be viewed through it's edge-cases & statistical outliers. It's where usually the truth gets questioned and often breaks down. Look at any system (social, political, etc) and the truth becomes unfortunately very fuzzy. GEB has a lot of good points that should make one question the truth in every waking moment. If one were to attempt finding the truth (whether it's the ultimate theory of everything in physics, or why a person is the way they are in psychology) then you're always dealing with infinite complexity. We're all Strange Loops
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    And we change. Nowadays everything is a goddamn statement.. I say A today, and it's over, I can never say B tomorrow. Except that we do all the time and I think it's absurd to turn people into walking theorems.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  It's the paradoxical side of internet, you have more and faster, and it's actually too much for the vast majority of people. It's my theory but before things relied on a curating system of people, that inherently kept things integrated and sensical to a point. Even if you couldn't source, check .. there was a natural amount of trust to the system that was valuable for it to exist. even for information, dosage is the poison. I tried to educate myself about medicine, and I felt like drowning, if you actually want to stay mathematically objective, you're faced with an enormous sea of 'potentially..' and theories that can come and go. Most people don't want this they just want to vent so selection occurs and group forms, faster and larger now that we have the web. Also I'd say your hyper-truth title reminds me of a sensation that I have since computers/internet became ubiquitous. We're trying to logify the whole world, everything is engineered, stored facts, backed by statistics. And it seems it became a culture, if not a cult. Nowadays most discussions will end up with 'what is your source' I'm not sure it was the same before. People would discuss, as a human relationship thing, they would try to express their views, and share, not try to make a provable thesis. I think that humans don't need 100% veracity to function, just a good amount of 'true enough' so people can get on with their daily lives, even if that mean local reality distortion, at the end of the day most of it is not life critical. And you can sense that with the news.. 24/7, many many channels, and this information is mostly noise, hoping from crysis to crysis.
maxxxxx 8y ago
I think the big difference now is that it's much easier to do centralized propaganda at scale and Facebook and others help distributing it. There always has been manipulation but we are in the process of building up the perfect surveillance and propaganda machines that are actually affordable. The Nazis and Stalin would have been happy to have the current tools.
- DubiousPusher 8y ago
  Regarding scale, I'm tempted to agree but then I think about the total circulation of all the papers owned by William Randolf Hearst and I'm not as certain.

swsieber 8y ago

It was a strange time because of government regulation requiring some sort of public service reporting, but I can't remember anymore detail that that...

h4b4n3r0 8y ago

>> Many were little more than party organs. Why “were”? They still largely are.

kurthr 8y ago

But then isn't it OK to blame and shame those who have engineered and monetized the public loss? It's not just the loss of some Great Truth, but the loss of even honest debate and collective acceptance of facts, or universal disgust at obvious hypocrisy and lying. Spreading disinformation for profit (and allowing trolls for clicks) is a pollution of a public good. It's as classic an example of a Tragedy of the Commons as any other. Edit: I am also saddened by the loss of sarcasm and irony. Complexity must be replaced by simplicity again.

tim333 8y ago
I think its generally ok to blame and shame. Zuckerberg seems fairly ashamed of some of Facebook's failings and is hiring thousands of staff to try and fix things. You wonder a bit about people who are not ashamed, if there's some way to change the incentives.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
It's a nested epistemological problem. It's impossible to first create a measurement system for "truth" which could uniformly be used to judge any series of statements. Doubly so when the topics are not mathematically rigorous in nature. On top of that, it's a major challenge to determine intention - eg. was the author of a piece of "fake news" duped, were they being malicious, is there a self-serving bias or is the author simply incompetent? Third, what is the economic and political environment that the author resides inside? Does the author have a choice of what to write unencumbered or is there a economic or political system which is unreasonably burdensome that they have to hew to? So it's not so simple to just assume that there is a unipolar evaluation that can be done when evaluating communications/persuasion/propaganda.
PunchTornado 8y ago
I don't think there was ever a "collective acceptance of facts". Previously the type of people that are now believing fake news were not reading or receiving news at all, or in a very narrow form. They were blocked from the debate.

tim333 8y ago

The changes since 1950-2000 are a bit of a mixed bag - there is much more fairly unbiased information available through the likes of Wikipedia say than there was. On the other hand there's all sorts of biased sensationalist stuff for those who choose that.

DubiousPusher 8y ago
Oh, I agree. If you're one to parse the news, seek out sources that apply journalism rigorously and just generally read a lot of sources, you can have an understanding of what's going on in the world that is unprecedented in history.

gallerdude 8y ago

To build off of that, I think what we're really in is "hyper-truth." A lot of people say we're moving away from facts, and that may be the case sometimes. But most of the time, I just think that there are so many facts now, and you can easily grab all of the ones that support your side.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
I second that. Facts aren't binary. Just because we have a lot of data doesn't mean that we automatically are able to derive truth from it. IMO any kind of system should be viewed through it's edge-cases & statistical outliers. It's where usually the truth gets questioned and often breaks down. Look at any system (social, political, etc) and the truth becomes unfortunately very fuzzy. GEB has a lot of good points that should make one question the truth in every waking moment. If one were to attempt finding the truth (whether it's the ultimate theory of everything in physics, or why a person is the way they are in psychology) then you're always dealing with infinite complexity. We're all Strange Loops
- agumonkey 8y ago
  And we change. Nowadays everything is a goddamn statement.. I say A today, and it's over, I can never say B tomorrow. Except that we do all the time and I think it's absurd to turn people into walking theorems.
agumonkey 8y ago
It's the paradoxical side of internet, you have more and faster, and it's actually too much for the vast majority of people. It's my theory but before things relied on a curating system of people, that inherently kept things integrated and sensical to a point. Even if you couldn't source, check .. there was a natural amount of trust to the system that was valuable for it to exist. even for information, dosage is the poison. I tried to educate myself about medicine, and I felt like drowning, if you actually want to stay mathematically objective, you're faced with an enormous sea of 'potentially..' and theories that can come and go. Most people don't want this they just want to vent so selection occurs and group forms, faster and larger now that we have the web. Also I'd say your hyper-truth title reminds me of a sensation that I have since computers/internet became ubiquitous. We're trying to logify the whole world, everything is engineered, stored facts, backed by statistics. And it seems it became a culture, if not a cult. Nowadays most discussions will end up with 'what is your source' I'm not sure it was the same before. People would discuss, as a human relationship thing, they would try to express their views, and share, not try to make a provable thesis. I think that humans don't need 100% veracity to function, just a good amount of 'true enough' so people can get on with their daily lives, even if that mean local reality distortion, at the end of the day most of it is not life critical. And you can sense that with the news.. 24/7, many many channels, and this information is mostly noise, hoping from crysis to crysis.

maxxxxx 8y ago

I think the big difference now is that it's much easier to do centralized propaganda at scale and Facebook and others help distributing it. There always has been manipulation but we are in the process of building up the perfect surveillance and propaganda machines that are actually affordable. The Nazis and Stalin would have been happy to have the current tools.

DubiousPusher 8y ago
Regarding scale, I'm tempted to agree but then I think about the total circulation of all the papers owned by William Randolf Hearst and I'm not as certain.