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Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Promoting a good cause by allowing falsehoods to spread may seem helpful in the short

Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Promoting a good cause by allowing falsehoods to spread may seem helpful in the short term, but in doing so you're building a house on a foundation of sand. When you promote trivial falsehoods instead of calling them out, you allow your opposition to be the one who calls out those falsehoods, and thus undermine your cause. When somebody on your side says something well-meaning but wrong, you should be the one to call them out. In doing so, you deny your enemy the opportunity to do so.

jstummbillig 7y ago
This is incredibly naive in a reality, where the POTUS can contradict himself on social media – with traceable evidence dating back often not more than a week – and absolutely nothing coming of it. Right now, when it comes to public opinion and action, volume clearly beats a good signal/noise ratio. This is not an isolated issue, this happens all around the globe. Populism is on the rise. Simple beats true. Yes, you can argue this is not the way it is supposed to be, but it is how it is. But if you really care about making a change for the better, then this is most definitely not the time for deliberate narratives. You might have the peoples attention, but not their patience. If you want change, do not squander it.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  Fighting lies with more lies is short term thinking. You will ultimately erode the public's ability to recognize the truth at all. When the truth can no longer work for you because you've either divorced yourself from it or rendered the public unable to recognize it, then what do you have left? Nothing matters more than the truth.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Maybe we should take this as evidence that fighting lies with lies doesn't work, and in fact makes the problem worse?
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  You can't fight populism with populism because main draw of populism is an assertion that "everything you suspected about those people is correct, you are not doing anything wrong, all your problems are the fault of elites and all those sacrifices they want you to make are not needed, I have 3 simple fixes that would solve everything without any hardship or change whatsoever". When the core of your message is the opposite of that there is no way to phrase it in those terms. You can't join the race to the bottom and get where you need to go.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
ineedasername 7y ago
If a true fact is playing in to a false narrative, there is a problem with how it's being presented. Calling that out is just as important as calling out falsehoods.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  The article contextualizes the truth in terms of the pro-climate narrative, > "Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it." So what exactly are you calling out? Better the Atlantic be the one to call out this falsehood, than Fox News. No?
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood? Otherwise, while the article may come out acknowledging climate change, the headline comes across as click-bait that could easily be pushed into a climate-denier narrative. Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized.
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      > Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood? Because if Fox News were to call out this particular falsehood, they may very well sum it up with some bullshit like "and that's why liberals are dumb and we should burn more coal." With the Altantic, we instead have reasonable pleas to remember that climate change is a very serious issue. As for the matter of the given title: https://twitter.com/PeterBrannen1/status/1166446298897289216 https://twitter.com/PeterBrannen1/status/1166446298897289216
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        Hah, yes, good to know it at least wasn't the writer's fault for the headline. As for who calls out the falsehood, I was thinking more in the vein of "all else being equal", but I suppose you're right and all else wouldn't be equal between the various news sources.
djsumdog 7y ago
Yea, you shouldn't deny a reality because you believe in the noble lie. And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws like those enacted in Australia briefly that caused more fuel expenditure in moving ore to China for processing instead of processing it domestically. There needs to be a huge change in consumption. We need cell phones that last 10 years, not 2~3. We need to end the constant replacement cycle. Intel's shareholders should be glad when sales are below projections because the old chips are lasting longer. But this is not how our economy or industry works. It's all based about infinite growth, selling you new things, sending your e-waste to Africa to be harvested by kids and be smeltered in recycling shops without OSHA requirements or respirators, sending textile waste to Africa to be sold (but mostly burned), etc. etc. Until there is a major collapse globally and people recognize the scale of our folly of consumerism and over-consumption, people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world. And reducing overall consumption will also reduce CO2 emissions ... along with all types of other emissions. But it will take reduction. We cannot spend and buy our way out of environmental damage.
- aaron-santos 7y ago
  > people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world I'm a bit more pessimistic. Consumerism and over-consumption is an open-eyed march toward doom. Educating (even by collapse) doesn't change the failure to coordinate. When the incentives are structured to trade values for temporary rosperity "The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- journalctl 7y ago
  Localized pollution and climate change are different issues. Both are bad, but you can’t equate “lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China” and the dramatic changes expected if the models are correct. Whataboutism isn’t helpful here (or anywhere, really). Climate change IS an issue, and it’s only going to get worse. Ten-year cell phones won’t make a lick of difference if we continue burning fossil fuels, and lakes of sludge will seem like Club Med in comparison to rising global temperatures.
wutbrodo 7y ago
It's been really interesting to me to see how the concept that lying in support of your preferred narrative is the correct way to engage publicly with a problem has evolved over the last few years. It seems like only a few years ago that people who admitted to this strategy were roundly condemned. Now, it's a completely normal view to go out of your way to openly endorse lying about eg science as a moral course of action (this is far from the first time I've seen this expressed, and it extends to journalists and other figures with reputations to think about). I wonder if in a few years, we'll have tipped fully over to condemning those who publish or report science that doesn't fit a preferred narrative (though this already happens to some degree, as with Case and Deaton's study on white working class mortality). It's of a piece with the general decline in liberalism of the last 10 years (as another example, take the reputation of free speech as a concept), but I guess what I'm describing is how grotesquely fascinating it is to see a society and its institutions so rapidly lose their connection to basic decency and honesty. I'm not naive enough to think this was some hyperstable equilibrium, but it's fascinating to see how rapidly it happens.
- obelos 7y ago
  “Put simply, our first suggestion is _don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth_.”[1] Climate denialism is the proverbial firehose of lies. Finely parsing words to maintain some Panglossian notion of a market dominated by rational choice of information-rich actors is not going to turn us away from disaster. [1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Thank you, this is a thoughtful response. That being said, the argument you're linking to, while quite sound, doesn't disagree with me. It's saying that, when rebutting concerted propaganda, simply making the truth available in an undirected manner and hoping people will find it isn't enough: you have to make an effort to get it to the right places at the right time. There's no endorsement therein of suppressing or falsifying facts. Slavish dedication to narrative over truth is putting the cart before the horse: any number of movements that we now remember as grotesque, "alternative facts"-driven impediments to society's progress started out on relatively sound epistemic footing and failed to adapt. The beauty of the scientific method (and the scientific establishment, when it's functioning well) is that it allows us to gracefully transition away from narratives that are increasingly anachronistic or incompatible with our observations. To go back to your link, consider what defines "propaganda": is it disliking conclusions, or is it indifference towards truth? I'd argue that your link defines it as the latter. For many of us, the conflict isn't between the good set of lies and the bad set of lies, it's between those who intentionally embrace and propagate lies and those who strive for an accurate model of the world. Anyone who's skimmed a history book can tell you that the "good" and "bad" labels don't tend to be very persistent... (the 20th century and it's hundred million dead of utopianism is rich with examples of this).
strainer 7y ago
But its not a falsehood to call the Amazon "lungs of the Earth" - its an illustration of the fact that the Amazon, until perhaps recently has been the "largest residual terrestrial carbon sink on the planet"[1] The article opens with this headline which is false: "Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply." If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes. It would take millennia to complete but its not an outcome which is valid to describe in an educational or truth straightening context as "not a dent". [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"
- ehvatum 7y ago
  If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes Over what timescale? If you burned every speck of organic matter on the planet, and then you came back in 10,000 years, how much O2 would be in the atmosphere? The article under discussion seems to suggest about 20%.
  - strainer 7y ago
    I dont know if it would take ten thousand years or ten billion years for all the free oxygen in atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere to be depleted. But all of it is here and maintained by the sum total of interconnected living things and it would all go without it.
blablabla123 7y ago
> Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Yeah but some narratives of the truth can become absurd. And so is this article. The problem right now is not an undersupply of O2 but an oversupply of CO2. In that sense the Amazon is actually part of the earth's lung. Unfortunately the article leaves out the information to which proportion forest contributes as CO2 sink. And also that alternative uses of the area might turn it actually into a CO2 source. That's maybe not intentional but not exactly relevant and therefore misleading.

jstummbillig 7y ago

This is incredibly naive in a reality, where the POTUS can contradict himself on social media – with traceable evidence dating back often not more than a week – and absolutely nothing coming of it. Right now, when it comes to public opinion and action, volume clearly beats a good signal/noise ratio. This is not an isolated issue, this happens all around the globe. Populism is on the rise. Simple beats true. Yes, you can argue this is not the way it is supposed to be, but it is how it is. But if you really care about making a change for the better, then this is most definitely not the time for deliberate narratives. You might have the peoples attention, but not their patience. If you want change, do not squander it.

partialrecall 7y ago
Fighting lies with more lies is short term thinking. You will ultimately erode the public's ability to recognize the truth at all. When the truth can no longer work for you because you've either divorced yourself from it or rendered the public unable to recognize it, then what do you have left? Nothing matters more than the truth.
merpnderp 7y ago
Maybe we should take this as evidence that fighting lies with lies doesn't work, and in fact makes the problem worse?
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
You can't fight populism with populism because main draw of populism is an assertion that "everything you suspected about those people is correct, you are not doing anything wrong, all your problems are the fault of elites and all those sacrifices they want you to make are not needed, I have 3 simple fixes that would solve everything without any hardship or change whatsoever". When the core of your message is the opposite of that there is no way to phrase it in those terms. You can't join the race to the bottom and get where you need to go.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

ineedasername 7y ago

If a true fact is playing in to a false narrative, there is a problem with how it's being presented. Calling that out is just as important as calling out falsehoods.

partialrecall 7y ago
The article contextualizes the truth in terms of the pro-climate narrative, > "Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it." So what exactly are you calling out? Better the Atlantic be the one to call out this falsehood, than Fox News. No?
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood? Otherwise, while the article may come out acknowledging climate change, the headline comes across as click-bait that could easily be pushed into a climate-denier narrative. Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    > Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood? Because if Fox News were to call out this particular falsehood, they may very well sum it up with some bullshit like "and that's why liberals are dumb and we should burn more coal." With the Altantic, we instead have reasonable pleas to remember that climate change is a very serious issue. As for the matter of the given title: https://twitter.com/PeterBrannen1/status/1166446298897289216 https://twitter.com/PeterBrannen1/status/1166446298897289216
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      Hah, yes, good to know it at least wasn't the writer's fault for the headline. As for who calls out the falsehood, I was thinking more in the vein of "all else being equal", but I suppose you're right and all else wouldn't be equal between the various news sources.

djsumdog 7y ago

Yea, you shouldn't deny a reality because you believe in the noble lie. And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws like those enacted in Australia briefly that caused more fuel expenditure in moving ore to China for processing instead of processing it domestically. There needs to be a huge change in consumption. We need cell phones that last 10 years, not 2~3. We need to end the constant replacement cycle. Intel's shareholders should be glad when sales are below projections because the old chips are lasting longer. But this is not how our economy or industry works. It's all based about infinite growth, selling you new things, sending your e-waste to Africa to be harvested by kids and be smeltered in recycling shops without OSHA requirements or respirators, sending textile waste to Africa to be sold (but mostly burned), etc. etc. Until there is a major collapse globally and people recognize the scale of our folly of consumerism and over-consumption, people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world. And reducing overall consumption will also reduce CO2 emissions ... along with all types of other emissions. But it will take reduction. We cannot spend and buy our way out of environmental damage.

aaron-santos 7y ago
> people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world I'm a bit more pessimistic. Consumerism and over-consumption is an open-eyed march toward doom. Educating (even by collapse) doesn't change the failure to coordinate. When the incentives are structured to trade values for temporary rosperity "The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
journalctl 7y ago
Localized pollution and climate change are different issues. Both are bad, but you can’t equate “lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China” and the dramatic changes expected if the models are correct. Whataboutism isn’t helpful here (or anywhere, really). Climate change IS an issue, and it’s only going to get worse. Ten-year cell phones won’t make a lick of difference if we continue burning fossil fuels, and lakes of sludge will seem like Club Med in comparison to rising global temperatures.

wutbrodo 7y ago

It's been really interesting to me to see how the concept that lying in support of your preferred narrative is the correct way to engage publicly with a problem has evolved over the last few years. It seems like only a few years ago that people who admitted to this strategy were roundly condemned. Now, it's a completely normal view to go out of your way to openly endorse lying about eg science as a moral course of action (this is far from the first time I've seen this expressed, and it extends to journalists and other figures with reputations to think about). I wonder if in a few years, we'll have tipped fully over to condemning those who publish or report science that doesn't fit a preferred narrative (though this already happens to some degree, as with Case and Deaton's study on white working class mortality). It's of a piece with the general decline in liberalism of the last 10 years (as another example, take the reputation of free speech as a concept), but I guess what I'm describing is how grotesquely fascinating it is to see a society and its institutions so rapidly lose their connection to basic decency and honesty. I'm not naive enough to think this was some hyperstable equilibrium, but it's fascinating to see how rapidly it happens.

obelos 7y ago
“Put simply, our first suggestion is _don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth_.”[1] Climate denialism is the proverbial firehose of lies. Finely parsing words to maintain some Panglossian notion of a market dominated by rational choice of information-rich actors is not going to turn us away from disaster. [1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Thank you, this is a thoughtful response. That being said, the argument you're linking to, while quite sound, doesn't disagree with me. It's saying that, when rebutting concerted propaganda, simply making the truth available in an undirected manner and hoping people will find it isn't enough: you have to make an effort to get it to the right places at the right time. There's no endorsement therein of suppressing or falsifying facts. Slavish dedication to narrative over truth is putting the cart before the horse: any number of movements that we now remember as grotesque, "alternative facts"-driven impediments to society's progress started out on relatively sound epistemic footing and failed to adapt. The beauty of the scientific method (and the scientific establishment, when it's functioning well) is that it allows us to gracefully transition away from narratives that are increasingly anachronistic or incompatible with our observations. To go back to your link, consider what defines "propaganda": is it disliking conclusions, or is it indifference towards truth? I'd argue that your link defines it as the latter. For many of us, the conflict isn't between the good set of lies and the bad set of lies, it's between those who intentionally embrace and propagate lies and those who strive for an accurate model of the world. Anyone who's skimmed a history book can tell you that the "good" and "bad" labels don't tend to be very persistent... (the 20th century and it's hundred million dead of utopianism is rich with examples of this).

strainer 7y ago

But its not a falsehood to call the Amazon "lungs of the Earth" - its an illustration of the fact that the Amazon, until perhaps recently has been the "largest residual terrestrial carbon sink on the planet"[1] The article opens with this headline which is false: "Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply." If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes. It would take millennia to complete but its not an outcome which is valid to describe in an educational or truth straightening context as "not a dent". [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"

ehvatum 7y ago
If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes Over what timescale? If you burned every speck of organic matter on the planet, and then you came back in 10,000 years, how much O2 would be in the atmosphere? The article under discussion seems to suggest about 20%.
- strainer 7y ago
  I dont know if it would take ten thousand years or ten billion years for all the free oxygen in atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere to be depleted. But all of it is here and maintained by the sum total of interconnected living things and it would all go without it.

blablabla123 7y ago

> Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Yeah but some narratives of the truth can become absurd. And so is this article. The problem right now is not an undersupply of O2 but an oversupply of CO2. In that sense the Amazon is actually part of the earth's lung. Unfortunately the article leaves out the information to which proportion forest contributes as CO2 sink. And also that alternative uses of the area might turn it actually into a CO2 source. That's maybe not intentional but not exactly relevant and therefore misleading.