8 ms·

Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

79 points by dnetesn 8y ago

jawns 8y ago
"Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what's true." I am hoping that this was meant in jest. But if you look at some of the other comments in the article -- science should be funded through the government, industries that would otherwise contribute to scientific research should instead be taxed -- I'm not so sure how un-Big Brotherish these authors are. (Yes, obviously, the government already funds a good deal of science, but it sounds as if they're arguing that science funding should all be funneled through the government.)
- tertius 8y ago
  A good deal? The vast majority more like. The one variable here is that the private market does what it wants. So if government 'takes' a larger proportion of the funding 'market' it really means the private market chose. Now, making private research illegal...
  - sandwall 8y ago
    That's getting deep... Industry has specific problems, scientific findings are often ancillary to other work, i.e. problem solving. Can't tell people to stop solving problems and making discoveries. Or can you???
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      If you setup payout structures such that research becomes obviously uneconomical, you can dramatically curtail private research. Examples might include: eliminating pharma patents or capping pharma prices to 2x the raw materials and manufacturing costs.
  - rgbrenner 8y ago
    "A good deal? The vast majority more like." That just isn't true. The federal government funds no where near the majority of r&d, not even the majority of basic research. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. ... Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits. Those private sector efforts are now the dominant form of research activity in the United States, with business spending $3 on research for every $1 invested by the U.S. government. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm...
    - tertius 8y ago
      Some good data. I guess I was talking about funding research, not actually doing it. Research that is privately funded but published, as an example. Most of the research we're talking about from your data I assume is not published. I.e. not really research... (If I can go that far.) And I'm not trying to argue a technicality here to win an argument.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  They are a married couple working at UC Irvine who "been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old". They most likely are as extreme and as biased as any person could be.
  - skh 8y ago
    Papers were published in the 1800s about the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on temperature. The physics behind this is straightforward. If the couple were truly worried about this at a young age wouldn’t that suggest some level of insight and a level of maturity on their part? That you think this most likely makes as extreme as a person can be says quite a bit about your own bias.
    - porpoisely 8y ago
      Papers were published about global cooling a few decades ago. Papers were published about malthusian collapse. Papers were published saying tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, the physics of carbon dioxide on temperature is understood, but the physics of climate isn't so well understood. Hence why we don't have as great a model of it as we'd like. You can understand the concept of a bit without understanding how a system ( like the OS ) works. Also, the fact that you think a 5 year old kid read papers published in 1800s about carbon dioxide and started worrying about climate change shows your bias, not mine. A 5 year old kid worried about climate change or anti-vaccination or abortion debate or any of the hot-button political issues is someone who has been brainwashed by their parents or environment. I agree that climate change exists ( with or without humans ). I agree that humans contribute somewhat to it, but to what degree and to what ends, I know we have no clue. The only people with evangelical and zealous fervor ( on either side ) are pretty much anti-science agenda peddlers. I'm open to both sides and most importantly to fact and science. I have a feeling that you and these authors "converted" a long time a ago.
      - devonkim 8y ago
        While I can agree with your sentiment, the problem thus remains - what do we do in the face on uncertainty? If we aren’t really responsible terribly much we would be potentially wasting a lot of effort on the wrong problems (we’ll need to do this one anyway IMO - that climate change is happening and it’s a big deal) or do we spend capital and political effort on reducing our climate footprint? I don’t like either/or scenarios but laypersons in a lot of the US are increasingly frustrated with science (probably due to poor science education by default in the US) and are seeking more clearly communicated, stable answers from pop deacons.
- oytis 8y ago
  Historically philosophers were often at odds with the idea of democracy. Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. Modern philosophers are mostly pro-democratic for a number of reasons. They have to invent mental tricks to make democracy compatible with what they think is right. "Ministry of information" or separating voting (based on values) from decision making (based on facts) are examples of such tricks. IMO, if we value democracy, we'll have to agree that decisions taken democratically will sometimes be wrong. The only way to fix that without compromising the democracy, is to raise the level of an average citizen's education.
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    Education isn't a cure all. Highly educated citizens can still be wrong en masse.
    - oytis 8y ago
      Well, if our education doesn't help people to be less wrong, then we need to improve it (that's what I mean by raising level of education, not just giving people diplomas). Or reconsider what we think is wrong.
    - gregknicholson 8y ago
      And it's not objective — one person's "education" is another person's "indoctrination".
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    Plato was at odds with democracy. Zeno was not. Plato's Republic, shitty as it is, survived and is still widely read as a basic philosophy text. Zeno's Republic, written in response to Plato, was lost. Go figure.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    > Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. It is also very frustrating when you think you discover what is true and what is false and have to deal with people who you think are not as smart as you are. The effects of this can be observed in social media discussions on both sides of the political divide, as well as in the words of the people in this article. It's funny watching how something said in jest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU) is turned into yet another meme about how conservatives are stupid, followed by a lecture about misinformation in media.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  In the 1950s and 1960s many developed nations had national science programmes that were much more than they are now. They didn't always capitalise on them to best effect (carbon fibre springs to mind here), despite having patents. Not always military either: Concorde, APT(Pendolino) and TGV, Ariane, hovercraft, nuclear etc. I'd link Wikipedia, but the entry on UK's National Research Development Corporation is comically short, and I can't find anything for the French equivalent on English wiki. Can't even remember the name of the equivalent US programme to link that. Nevertheless a lot of significant science and the products that stemmed from that, that wouldn't get done otherwise, came with government funding. It's a good part of the positive image of science in the immediate post war years. I would love to see some of those huge blue sky national science projects make a return. EDIT: Atrocious grammar.
  - jawns 8y ago
    I don't think the concern is about government funding of science. I think the concern is about all science funding being funneled through the government. O'Connor says science should be funded either by "the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry" -- as if the government isn't influenced! Weatherall floats the idea of "taking the money [private organizations] would be spending and redirecting it [through taxes] to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently." In my mind, government funding is at least as capricious as industry funding. Government budgets related to science research get slashed all the time for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of the work being performed or its potential impact on society. So I think you can both be very strongly in favor of government funding of these national science projects (e.g. NASA) and yet very reluctant to have the government be the sole arbiter of what gets funded.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      It's not easy. Particularly for the US where NASA gives the only sizeable national science programme remaining. In the UK, and others, most of what there was got privatised. What's left is fractional contributions to ESA, CERN etc. Much less by percentage of GDP, leaving nearly all to be done by the private sector. Thing is, I suspect government in the 1960s could have set up an independent body to oversee science funding, that actually was independent, and had a level of trust by both scientists and the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, by either political party, though my knowledge of US is somewhat more limited. Today? I don't think I, or pretty much anyone, trusts either public or private. What's left? A BDFL? Well, first find the benevolent dictator I suppose, few of the current crop are benevolent. At which point I don't know how to fix it.
- sandwall 8y ago
  From a communication with O'Conner: "Please tell me the ministry of information was just a flippant remark -- I hope that you will never promote such an idea. It sounds great, in a world run by honest individuals. But, No - not ever - has humanity demonstrated that this would be a good idea." Her response: "Yes, of course a joke. I need to learn to be more careful on the record." -- Bad joke, but better than the alternative.
  - jawns 8y ago
    Oh man. So there is some real irony here. The piece leads with the story about how Pete Hegseth declared that germs aren't real, and the interview begins with O'Conner and Weatherall joking about how people like Hegseth come to hold "wacky false beliefs." But Hegseth was asked about the remark and said of course it was a joke. So ... Hegseth makes a joke about science that O'Conner and Weatherall didn't perceive as a joke, and then O'Conner makes a joke about how a ministry of truth could help address the problem with people like Hegseth -- and that doesn't necessarily come off as a joke. I guess the key takeaway for all of us is that it can be easy to assume a joke is not a joke if doing so confirms some of our pre-existing views. So ... give people the benefit of the doubt until they erase all doubt?
    - sandwall 8y ago
      100% -- Awesome call out on confirmation bias. Definitely reserve judgement. I didn't blink at Hegseth's irrational remark, due to my own biases... excerpt from usa today: Hegseth says the joke is a call-out to germ obsessors to lighten up. "My half-hearted commentary to the point is, we live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell in their pockets, and they sanitize 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life," he said. "I take care of myself and all that, but I don’t obsess over everything all the time."
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  A good example of how the result will look like is any US drug commercial: thirty seconds of smiling people holding a box of "Shititol" pills, then five minutes of a boring voice reading over a list of possible complications in legally precise, but humanly incomprehensible language. The truth is all here. Will it help though?
  - RileyJames 8y ago
    Direct to consumer pharma advertising is a US phenomenon (and New Zealand apparently). So it seems like you’d be able to study the effects state by state against similar states in other countries to find out.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    I'd forbid the fictional part of drug commercials No smiling people, no BS 3D animations "inside the body", no BS claims. Want to advertise a drug? Just post a "boring voice" style of what you drug does, what its name is, what the possible complications are, etc.
    - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
      You are right and in case of drugs that indeed may be the only way, as they did with cigarettes which can only be sold in a plain dirt-colored pack with a standardized typesetting. It may not work very well with news though: you cannot ban witness interviews, live reporting and other stuff which may get very colorful and emotional.
porpoisely 8y ago
If so, why should we trust married philosophers from UC Irvine ( a highly politically biased institution )? In the article, they themselves say that an ideologically heterogeneous set of people produce higher quality articles. Wouldn't that also apply to books - especially about misinformation? "There was a recent study of Wikipedia that showed the most accurate and high quality articles were produced by an ideologically heterogeneous, diverse set of editors and writers. Does that square with your findings?" I don't watch cable news, but something tells me that the example of a princeton grad on foxnews not believing in germs is distorted or misconstrued. What's the context there? Was it in the context of "you don't have to use anti-bacterial soap" or did the guy truly say he doesn't believe in germs. It would have been great if author provided a link to the video so we can see the context. O’Connor: "I’ve been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old, and here we are 30 years later and still not doing anything about it." I think there is climate change ( with or without ) humans, but something tells me this "philosopher" isn't an unbiased thinker or writer. Especially if one was obsessed with this since they were 5 years old. What kid worries about climate change as a kindegartner. Makes me question this person's upbringing. -- How should science be funded? "Through the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry." Because governments are infallible? Because governments ( nazi germany, soviet union, china, japan, US, etc ) have such amazing track records? Even if we accept governments are infallible, how are we going to keep industry from influencing government? This is the problem with academics who have never worked and have worried about climate change since they were 5 years old. They know nothing of the real world. -- What are the best tools for good information? "Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true." Normally, I'd assume the person is joking, but the sad thing is you can't really tell from an academic working in UC Irvine. So much of the "mis/dis" information rhetoric is "mis/dis" information themselves. As philosophers, you'd think they would say teach the kids logic, reason and history rather than "joking" about ministry of information.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Germs thing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/02/11/why-fox-news-pete-hegseth-hasnt-washed-his-hands-in-10-years/#75bc689a1238 https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/02/11/why-fox-new...
travisoneill1 8y ago
Why do I keep seeing this formula? 1. Points out a problem that is fundamentally rooted in human psychology. 2. Proposes that the solution is to have the government take it over.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Because there are people out there who really, really, wants 2, and so they go out in search of problems that satisfy 1 and blast them everywhere. Hence the only question about global warming is how to cut CO2 emissions, and almost nothing on things like how to mitigate it effectively using science (like we did with everything else that was threatening us, from hunger to infections).
- tertius 8y ago
  Science is right. There is no risk in giving control of it's conclusions to an ultimate authority.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    There is risk to thinking of government as an "ultimate authority" though. (At least IMO.)
    - tertius 8y ago
      It was sarcasm.
  - tertius 8y ago
    This was an explanation to your question, no an statement of what I believe.
- nabla9 8y ago
  That formula is called civilization. As society grows more integrated and specialized you need to tackle the fundamental problems in human psychology. Only things that seem to have work long term are forms, rules, procedures, formalities, .. in other words, mechanism or algorithm. Market economy, private property, democracy, decision making, law and order, all of these are just mechanisms that try to squeeze peoples behaviour and interactions into forms that work. So yes, government is a big part of making it work.
sandwall 8y ago
Decent article and probably a good book (that will only be read by those who need it least). However, this idea is terrible: O’Connor: Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  I would love to see a Reddit/HN clone where it matters which people I personally vote up. I know it gets me closer to a bubble, but I don't care about that Twitter is somewhat good for this, but it's the opposite end: not diverse enough for me to get enough content.
magwa101 8y ago
Great article. I've always wondered about the respect people show for other's "belefs" in religion. Obviously no one knows what happens after death, and religion spends a lot of time preparing your "beliefs" for the inevitable. I get that. But then religions slip in a whole bunch of other shit and that becomes the religious "package" of unassailable "beliefs". It's very insidious and pretty much everyone falls for the line "Well those are my beliefs".
- Retra 8y ago
  People become corpses after death. It's not so big a mystery.
iambateman 8y ago
Misinformation on an individual basis isn’t often harmful. There are millions of demonstrably-false ideas floating around. I live 30 miles from an Alien Welcome Center...a place devoted to welcoming aliens when they appear. The problem is when fringe ideas become weaponised into culture at large. This article seems to focus more on the individual cases of misinformation rather than the more general social problem - finding ways to fight remarkable falsehood with dull truth.
oytis 8y ago
> The thing we suggest, though who knows how you implement this, is having people vote on the things they value. What if people's values depend on what they think is true?
specialist 8y ago
The remedy to "fake news" is to restore context. We've long known that believability is rooted in the esteem we hold for the messenger. The art of persuasion, sales, rhetoric, diplomacy, courtship, etc. What's new is understanding the role of context, or the lack of it. Someone recently pointed out the virality of twitter (at the extreme) is enabled by the lack of context. Use web of trust and digital signatures to add citations and ownership (copyright) to every tweet, post, image, video. Then you know precisely who said what. And if you really care about "the truth", you can follow the chain of citations back to the original source and data.
whytaka 8y ago
The Philosophy program at my alma mater focused heavily on Epistemology. Earlier on in the program I was more interested in Metaphysics and the word games that allowed for topics like the argument for God. But nearing the end I’d come to appreciate that epistemology is the root of all Philosophy. One cannot make any claims on objecthood, on morality, on logic, without at least furnishing their argument with a justification for how they think they know. Epistemology is sorely lacking in public discourse. We should seek to nurture a healthy skepticism as the first impulse in all public debate.
- mistermann 8y ago
  > I’d come to appreciate that epistemology is the root of all Philosophy I'd say most of the societal disagreements we're having right now are largely rooted in epistemology as well. Rarely are low level details discussed, and rarely is the truth of the "facts" scrutinized or examined at a level where we could gain some genuine confidence that what the general public, politicians, and & news media thinks & repeats is true, is actually true.
gdubs 8y ago
The general public has become disconnected from science. Even educated, intelligent, people get science through opinion pieces about the science, or worse yet (and more commonly?) through a headline alone. When I think about my own kids, what I want them to get more than anything else is an ability to think critically, and scientifically. People are people, and we’ll always fall prey to emotional appeals and distraction, but critical thinking and the scientific method are our way out of the fog. The other aspect is compartmentalization of science, and general information overload. It’s hard to keep up with every new study, and it’s hard to reach a deep level of understanding across such a wide array of scientific disciplines. It is why we rely on experts. We’re in a crisis due to lack of trust in the experts. Part of it is because we’ve become so removed from science we don’t know who trust. The other part is that industry has become quite effective at manipulating experts to work in their interests, eroding trust. The simple fix? I have no idea. The long view? We need to raise a generation of kids who know how to apply the scientific method, think critically, and filter through the ever growing mountain of information we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.

79 points by dnetesn 8y ago

"Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what's true." I am hoping that this was meant in jest. But if you look at some of the other comments in the article -- science should be funded through the government, industries that would otherwise contribute to scientific research should instead be taxed -- I'm not so sure how un-Big Brotherish these authors are. (Yes, obviously, the government already funds a good deal of science, but it sounds as if they're arguing that science funding should all be funneled through the government.)

tertius 8y ago
A good deal? The vast majority more like. The one variable here is that the private market does what it wants. So if government 'takes' a larger proportion of the funding 'market' it really means the private market chose. Now, making private research illegal...
- sandwall 8y ago
  That's getting deep... Industry has specific problems, scientific findings are often ancillary to other work, i.e. problem solving. Can't tell people to stop solving problems and making discoveries. Or can you???
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    If you setup payout structures such that research becomes obviously uneconomical, you can dramatically curtail private research. Examples might include: eliminating pharma patents or capping pharma prices to 2x the raw materials and manufacturing costs.
- rgbrenner 8y ago
  "A good deal? The vast majority more like." That just isn't true. The federal government funds no where near the majority of r&d, not even the majority of basic research. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. ... Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits. Those private sector efforts are now the dominant form of research activity in the United States, with business spending $3 on research for every $1 invested by the U.S. government. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm...
  - tertius 8y ago
    Some good data. I guess I was talking about funding research, not actually doing it. Research that is privately funded but published, as an example. Most of the research we're talking about from your data I assume is not published. I.e. not really research... (If I can go that far.) And I'm not trying to argue a technicality here to win an argument.
porpoisely 8y ago
They are a married couple working at UC Irvine who "been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old". They most likely are as extreme and as biased as any person could be.
- skh 8y ago
  Papers were published in the 1800s about the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on temperature. The physics behind this is straightforward. If the couple were truly worried about this at a young age wouldn’t that suggest some level of insight and a level of maturity on their part? That you think this most likely makes as extreme as a person can be says quite a bit about your own bias.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    Papers were published about global cooling a few decades ago. Papers were published about malthusian collapse. Papers were published saying tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, the physics of carbon dioxide on temperature is understood, but the physics of climate isn't so well understood. Hence why we don't have as great a model of it as we'd like. You can understand the concept of a bit without understanding how a system ( like the OS ) works. Also, the fact that you think a 5 year old kid read papers published in 1800s about carbon dioxide and started worrying about climate change shows your bias, not mine. A 5 year old kid worried about climate change or anti-vaccination or abortion debate or any of the hot-button political issues is someone who has been brainwashed by their parents or environment. I agree that climate change exists ( with or without humans ). I agree that humans contribute somewhat to it, but to what degree and to what ends, I know we have no clue. The only people with evangelical and zealous fervor ( on either side ) are pretty much anti-science agenda peddlers. I'm open to both sides and most importantly to fact and science. I have a feeling that you and these authors "converted" a long time a ago.
    - devonkim 8y ago
      While I can agree with your sentiment, the problem thus remains - what do we do in the face on uncertainty? If we aren’t really responsible terribly much we would be potentially wasting a lot of effort on the wrong problems (we’ll need to do this one anyway IMO - that climate change is happening and it’s a big deal) or do we spend capital and political effort on reducing our climate footprint? I don’t like either/or scenarios but laypersons in a lot of the US are increasingly frustrated with science (probably due to poor science education by default in the US) and are seeking more clearly communicated, stable answers from pop deacons.
oytis 8y ago
Historically philosophers were often at odds with the idea of democracy. Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. Modern philosophers are mostly pro-democratic for a number of reasons. They have to invent mental tricks to make democracy compatible with what they think is right. "Ministry of information" or separating voting (based on values) from decision making (based on facts) are examples of such tricks. IMO, if we value democracy, we'll have to agree that decisions taken democratically will sometimes be wrong. The only way to fix that without compromising the democracy, is to raise the level of an average citizen's education.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Education isn't a cure all. Highly educated citizens can still be wrong en masse.
  - oytis 8y ago
    Well, if our education doesn't help people to be less wrong, then we need to improve it (that's what I mean by raising level of education, not just giving people diplomas). Or reconsider what we think is wrong.
  - gregknicholson 8y ago
    And it's not objective — one person's "education" is another person's "indoctrination".
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Plato was at odds with democracy. Zeno was not. Plato's Republic, shitty as it is, survived and is still widely read as a basic philosophy text. Zeno's Republic, written in response to Plato, was lost. Go figure.
- mistermann 8y ago
  > Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. It is also very frustrating when you think you discover what is true and what is false and have to deal with people who you think are not as smart as you are. The effects of this can be observed in social media discussions on both sides of the political divide, as well as in the words of the people in this article. It's funny watching how something said in jest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU) is turned into yet another meme about how conservatives are stupid, followed by a lecture about misinformation in media.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
In the 1950s and 1960s many developed nations had national science programmes that were much more than they are now. They didn't always capitalise on them to best effect (carbon fibre springs to mind here), despite having patents. Not always military either: Concorde, APT(Pendolino) and TGV, Ariane, hovercraft, nuclear etc. I'd link Wikipedia, but the entry on UK's National Research Development Corporation is comically short, and I can't find anything for the French equivalent on English wiki. Can't even remember the name of the equivalent US programme to link that. Nevertheless a lot of significant science and the products that stemmed from that, that wouldn't get done otherwise, came with government funding. It's a good part of the positive image of science in the immediate post war years. I would love to see some of those huge blue sky national science projects make a return. EDIT: Atrocious grammar.
- jawns 8y ago
  I don't think the concern is about government funding of science. I think the concern is about all science funding being funneled through the government. O'Connor says science should be funded either by "the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry" -- as if the government isn't influenced! Weatherall floats the idea of "taking the money [private organizations] would be spending and redirecting it [through taxes] to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently." In my mind, government funding is at least as capricious as industry funding. Government budgets related to science research get slashed all the time for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of the work being performed or its potential impact on society. So I think you can both be very strongly in favor of government funding of these national science projects (e.g. NASA) and yet very reluctant to have the government be the sole arbiter of what gets funded.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    It's not easy. Particularly for the US where NASA gives the only sizeable national science programme remaining. In the UK, and others, most of what there was got privatised. What's left is fractional contributions to ESA, CERN etc. Much less by percentage of GDP, leaving nearly all to be done by the private sector. Thing is, I suspect government in the 1960s could have set up an independent body to oversee science funding, that actually was independent, and had a level of trust by both scientists and the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, by either political party, though my knowledge of US is somewhat more limited. Today? I don't think I, or pretty much anyone, trusts either public or private. What's left? A BDFL? Well, first find the benevolent dictator I suppose, few of the current crop are benevolent. At which point I don't know how to fix it.
sandwall 8y ago
From a communication with O'Conner: "Please tell me the ministry of information was just a flippant remark -- I hope that you will never promote such an idea. It sounds great, in a world run by honest individuals. But, No - not ever - has humanity demonstrated that this would be a good idea." Her response: "Yes, of course a joke. I need to learn to be more careful on the record." -- Bad joke, but better than the alternative.
- jawns 8y ago
  Oh man. So there is some real irony here. The piece leads with the story about how Pete Hegseth declared that germs aren't real, and the interview begins with O'Conner and Weatherall joking about how people like Hegseth come to hold "wacky false beliefs." But Hegseth was asked about the remark and said of course it was a joke. So ... Hegseth makes a joke about science that O'Conner and Weatherall didn't perceive as a joke, and then O'Conner makes a joke about how a ministry of truth could help address the problem with people like Hegseth -- and that doesn't necessarily come off as a joke. I guess the key takeaway for all of us is that it can be easy to assume a joke is not a joke if doing so confirms some of our pre-existing views. So ... give people the benefit of the doubt until they erase all doubt?
  - sandwall 8y ago
    100% -- Awesome call out on confirmation bias. Definitely reserve judgement. I didn't blink at Hegseth's irrational remark, due to my own biases... excerpt from usa today: Hegseth says the joke is a call-out to germ obsessors to lighten up. "My half-hearted commentary to the point is, we live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell in their pockets, and they sanitize 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life," he said. "I take care of myself and all that, but I don’t obsess over everything all the time."
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
A good example of how the result will look like is any US drug commercial: thirty seconds of smiling people holding a box of "Shititol" pills, then five minutes of a boring voice reading over a list of possible complications in legally precise, but humanly incomprehensible language. The truth is all here. Will it help though?
- RileyJames 8y ago
  Direct to consumer pharma advertising is a US phenomenon (and New Zealand apparently). So it seems like you’d be able to study the effects state by state against similar states in other countries to find out.
- coldtea 8y ago
  I'd forbid the fictional part of drug commercials No smiling people, no BS 3D animations "inside the body", no BS claims. Want to advertise a drug? Just post a "boring voice" style of what you drug does, what its name is, what the possible complications are, etc.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    You are right and in case of drugs that indeed may be the only way, as they did with cigarettes which can only be sold in a plain dirt-colored pack with a standardized typesetting. It may not work very well with news though: you cannot ban witness interviews, live reporting and other stuff which may get very colorful and emotional.

porpoisely 8y ago

If so, why should we trust married philosophers from UC Irvine ( a highly politically biased institution )? In the article, they themselves say that an ideologically heterogeneous set of people produce higher quality articles. Wouldn't that also apply to books - especially about misinformation? "There was a recent study of Wikipedia that showed the most accurate and high quality articles were produced by an ideologically heterogeneous, diverse set of editors and writers. Does that square with your findings?" I don't watch cable news, but something tells me that the example of a princeton grad on foxnews not believing in germs is distorted or misconstrued. What's the context there? Was it in the context of "you don't have to use anti-bacterial soap" or did the guy truly say he doesn't believe in germs. It would have been great if author provided a link to the video so we can see the context. O’Connor: "I’ve been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old, and here we are 30 years later and still not doing anything about it." I think there is climate change ( with or without ) humans, but something tells me this "philosopher" isn't an unbiased thinker or writer. Especially if one was obsessed with this since they were 5 years old. What kid worries about climate change as a kindegartner. Makes me question this person's upbringing. -- How should science be funded? "Through the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry." Because governments are infallible? Because governments ( nazi germany, soviet union, china, japan, US, etc ) have such amazing track records? Even if we accept governments are infallible, how are we going to keep industry from influencing government? This is the problem with academics who have never worked and have worried about climate change since they were 5 years old. They know nothing of the real world. -- What are the best tools for good information? "Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true." Normally, I'd assume the person is joking, but the sad thing is you can't really tell from an academic working in UC Irvine. So much of the "mis/dis" information rhetoric is "mis/dis" information themselves. As philosophers, you'd think they would say teach the kids logic, reason and history rather than "joking" about ministry of information.

pjc50 8y ago
Germs thing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/02/11/why-fox-news-pete-hegseth-hasnt-washed-his-hands-in-10-years/#75bc689a1238 https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/02/11/why-fox-new...

travisoneill1 8y ago

Why do I keep seeing this formula? 1. Points out a problem that is fundamentally rooted in human psychology. 2. Proposes that the solution is to have the government take it over.

tomjen3 8y ago
Because there are people out there who really, really, wants 2, and so they go out in search of problems that satisfy 1 and blast them everywhere. Hence the only question about global warming is how to cut CO2 emissions, and almost nothing on things like how to mitigate it effectively using science (like we did with everything else that was threatening us, from hunger to infections).
tertius 8y ago
Science is right. There is no risk in giving control of it's conclusions to an ultimate authority.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  There is risk to thinking of government as an "ultimate authority" though. (At least IMO.)
  - tertius 8y ago
    It was sarcasm.
- tertius 8y ago
  This was an explanation to your question, no an statement of what I believe.
nabla9 8y ago
That formula is called civilization. As society grows more integrated and specialized you need to tackle the fundamental problems in human psychology. Only things that seem to have work long term are forms, rules, procedures, formalities, .. in other words, mechanism or algorithm. Market economy, private property, democracy, decision making, law and order, all of these are just mechanisms that try to squeeze peoples behaviour and interactions into forms that work. So yes, government is a big part of making it work.

sandwall 8y ago

Decent article and probably a good book (that will only be read by those who need it least). However, this idea is terrible: O’Connor: Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true.

xiphias2 8y ago
I would love to see a Reddit/HN clone where it matters which people I personally vote up. I know it gets me closer to a bubble, but I don't care about that Twitter is somewhat good for this, but it's the opposite end: not diverse enough for me to get enough content.

magwa101 8y ago

Great article. I've always wondered about the respect people show for other's "belefs" in religion. Obviously no one knows what happens after death, and religion spends a lot of time preparing your "beliefs" for the inevitable. I get that. But then religions slip in a whole bunch of other shit and that becomes the religious "package" of unassailable "beliefs". It's very insidious and pretty much everyone falls for the line "Well those are my beliefs".

Retra 8y ago
People become corpses after death. It's not so big a mystery.

iambateman 8y ago

Misinformation on an individual basis isn’t often harmful. There are millions of demonstrably-false ideas floating around. I live 30 miles from an Alien Welcome Center...a place devoted to welcoming aliens when they appear. The problem is when fringe ideas become weaponised into culture at large. This article seems to focus more on the individual cases of misinformation rather than the more general social problem - finding ways to fight remarkable falsehood with dull truth.

oytis 8y ago

> The thing we suggest, though who knows how you implement this, is having people vote on the things they value. What if people's values depend on what they think is true?

specialist 8y ago

The remedy to "fake news" is to restore context. We've long known that believability is rooted in the esteem we hold for the messenger. The art of persuasion, sales, rhetoric, diplomacy, courtship, etc. What's new is understanding the role of context, or the lack of it. Someone recently pointed out the virality of twitter (at the extreme) is enabled by the lack of context. Use web of trust and digital signatures to add citations and ownership (copyright) to every tweet, post, image, video. Then you know precisely who said what. And if you really care about "the truth", you can follow the chain of citations back to the original source and data.

whytaka 8y ago

The Philosophy program at my alma mater focused heavily on Epistemology. Earlier on in the program I was more interested in Metaphysics and the word games that allowed for topics like the argument for God. But nearing the end I’d come to appreciate that epistemology is the root of all Philosophy. One cannot make any claims on objecthood, on morality, on logic, without at least furnishing their argument with a justification for how they think they know. Epistemology is sorely lacking in public discourse. We should seek to nurture a healthy skepticism as the first impulse in all public debate.

mistermann 8y ago
> I’d come to appreciate that epistemology is the root of all Philosophy I'd say most of the societal disagreements we're having right now are largely rooted in epistemology as well. Rarely are low level details discussed, and rarely is the truth of the "facts" scrutinized or examined at a level where we could gain some genuine confidence that what the general public, politicians, and & news media thinks & repeats is true, is actually true.

gdubs 8y ago

The general public has become disconnected from science. Even educated, intelligent, people get science through opinion pieces about the science, or worse yet (and more commonly?) through a headline alone. When I think about my own kids, what I want them to get more than anything else is an ability to think critically, and scientifically. People are people, and we’ll always fall prey to emotional appeals and distraction, but critical thinking and the scientific method are our way out of the fog. The other aspect is compartmentalization of science, and general information overload. It’s hard to keep up with every new study, and it’s hard to reach a deep level of understanding across such a wide array of scientific disciplines. It is why we rely on experts. We’re in a crisis due to lack of trust in the experts. Part of it is because we’ve become so removed from science we don’t know who trust. The other part is that industry has become quite effective at manipulating experts to work in their interests, eroding trust. The simple fix? I have no idea. The long view? We need to raise a generation of kids who know how to apply the scientific method, think critically, and filter through the ever growing mountain of information we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.