3 ms·

It is certainly worse since everyone could publish themselves easily and quickly. At the time of paper papers, where you actually needed access to a printing pr

by Ma8ee 7y ago

It is certainly worse since everyone could publish themselves easily and quickly. At the time of paper papers, where you actually needed access to a printing press and physical distribution network, there were much fewer actors, and each of them had to take at least some care of their reputation. Not to mention that they were easy to localize, so they could actually be sued for the most blatant smears. But then of course, propaganda and misinformation are probably as old as mankind. It's just that the scale has changed.

Jeff_Brown 7y ago
Could be a tech solution to the reputation problem? Some kind of distributed social media- and wikipedia-like system where information is signed by its author(s), and where people are able to produce metadata rating the factuality of information and authors. Currently people can create such information, of course. But liars routinely deny well-documented things in their past, and those denials are effective to their intended audience. And currently someone can debunk a lie, but there's no systematic way to find everyone who testifies that it's untrue. And while finding all of a claim's supporters and debunkers would be a great first step, a truly good (i.e. skeptical) reader would want to be able to find their arguments, too. I'm skeptical that current AI could automate the job of indexing that information -- understanding controversial arguments seems likely to require true intelligence. I happen to have made a system[1] in which indexing any kind of data or metadata is extremely easy, requiring little more than knowing some natural language. (Deciding what kind of information you want to encode is hard, but once you've decided that, encoding it is easy.) [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  I don't think the reputation problem is particulary hard or need any fancy technical solutions. If I read something on NYTimes.com I know that the information there is true most of the time (even thought it do happen that they screw up). The job of good journalism is to vet their sources, finding collaborating evidence and listen to those that have different claims. If I read something from a source I don't know anything about, I must keep in mind that what I'm reading just might not be true.
  - Jeff_Brown 7y ago
    Absolutely, that is the job of journalists. But if we face an information apocalypse, it's because many people can't distinguish between good and bad journalism. If the data journalists base their work on was open, I believe we could do better. > If I read something from a source I don't know anything about, I must keep in mind that what I'm reading just might not be true. Indeed, that's what you should do, given current constraints. You shouldn't verify by repeating the work the journalist did, because you'd never have time for anything else. But you shouldn't have to repeat it -- it could be available. They already did the work; all they'd need to do is encode it in a readable, searchable way. Moreover such a system would let us leverage far more peoples' input. While the barriers for entry have fallen sharply, it's still hard to build a readership, because it takes a while to convince people to trust you. If it were easier to evaluate the output of budding bloggers, they wouldn't have to waste a decade shouting into the void before making a difference. (The death of local news is a big problem. This might help, among other problems, that one.) And, hopefully, through the same mechanism, it would become harder for a propoganda outlet to establish themselves.
  - turk73 7y ago
    You shouldn't, though. The NY Times has been up the statists' ass since its beginning. They have always provided cover to the elites like the Rockefellers, Tammany Hall, all of them, really. They would have been Loyalists during the Revolution, perhaps they are Globalists today, after all. The NY Times is the modern incarnation of the phrase "Yellow Journalism" and notably helped like the US into the Spanish American war, especially in the invasion of Puerto Rico which was done to serve private business interests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism So you see, "fake news" has been going on a long, long time and you are simply historically ignorant. So ignorant in fact, that you probably don't even know how propaganda helped extinguish the lives of millions of Jews--"just get on the train, you are being forcefully re-settled for your own safety" they were told over and over and believed it, despite the rumors, because it came from an official source. Then they were gassed and shoved in mass graves while the gold was extracted from their dead skulls, melted down, and shipped off to Switzerland where it still keeps the same rich families in power today. Only the publicly known bit players got sorted out in that war. The rest are still at large. The entire world as we know it, as we are taught to know it, is a lie.
- knzhou 7y ago
  This simply doesn’t work because “information”, in the form of news articles and blog posts, consists of 10% actual facts and 90% narrative framing. As such, any distributed rating of factuality will instantly devolve into a rating of popularity, because modern information is simply not made of facts. And we already have popularity ratings and they don’t work for truth.
  - Jeff_Brown 7y ago
    > news articles and blog posts, consists of 10% actual facts and 90% narrative framing Agreed! That's part of my motivation. A federated knowledge graph would allow people to distill the kernels of insight from the fluff and share the good stuff. > we already have popularity ratings and they don’t work for truth. I envision no algorithm to rate truth. I'm skeptical it's possible (but interested in suggestions). I just want people to be operationalize their definition of truth. I'd like you to be able to search for economic forecasts by people with PhDs from Harvard made prior to the last interest rate hike. Or statements regarding the West Bank agreed upon by a majority of Israelis and a majority of Palestinians. Or incoherent rates by an orange man-child with his head up his ass. I can't guarantee a good index and search engine would be used the right way. I just think it would be better if we could get our hands dirty, rather than hoping Google does the right thing.
    - Jeff_Brown 7y ago
      Part of my aim is that the data behind counterarguments be as easy to reach as the opinion they led to. It's one thing for me to see that 30% of users think vaccines cause hemmorhoid-face. It's another if I can see that their beliefs can all be traced (after factoring out cycles within that community) to a single no-longer-licensed proctologist.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

by Ma8ee 7y ago

Jeff_Brown 7y ago

Could be a tech solution to the reputation problem? Some kind of distributed social media- and wikipedia-like system where information is signed by its author(s), and where people are able to produce metadata rating the factuality of information and authors. Currently people can create such information, of course. But liars routinely deny well-documented things in their past, and those denials are effective to their intended audience. And currently someone can debunk a lie, but there's no systematic way to find everyone who testifies that it's untrue. And while finding all of a claim's supporters and debunkers would be a great first step, a truly good (i.e. skeptical) reader would want to be able to find their arguments, too. I'm skeptical that current AI could automate the job of indexing that information -- understanding controversial arguments seems likely to require true intelligence. I happen to have made a system[1] in which indexing any kind of data or metadata is extremely easy, requiring little more than knowing some natural language. (Deciding what kind of information you want to encode is hard, but once you've decided that, encoding it is easy.) [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode

Ma8ee 7y ago
I don't think the reputation problem is particulary hard or need any fancy technical solutions. If I read something on NYTimes.com I know that the information there is true most of the time (even thought it do happen that they screw up). The job of good journalism is to vet their sources, finding collaborating evidence and listen to those that have different claims. If I read something from a source I don't know anything about, I must keep in mind that what I'm reading just might not be true.
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago
  Absolutely, that is the job of journalists. But if we face an information apocalypse, it's because many people can't distinguish between good and bad journalism. If the data journalists base their work on was open, I believe we could do better. > If I read something from a source I don't know anything about, I must keep in mind that what I'm reading just might not be true. Indeed, that's what you should do, given current constraints. You shouldn't verify by repeating the work the journalist did, because you'd never have time for anything else. But you shouldn't have to repeat it -- it could be available. They already did the work; all they'd need to do is encode it in a readable, searchable way. Moreover such a system would let us leverage far more peoples' input. While the barriers for entry have fallen sharply, it's still hard to build a readership, because it takes a while to convince people to trust you. If it were easier to evaluate the output of budding bloggers, they wouldn't have to waste a decade shouting into the void before making a difference. (The death of local news is a big problem. This might help, among other problems, that one.) And, hopefully, through the same mechanism, it would become harder for a propoganda outlet to establish themselves.
- turk73 7y ago
  You shouldn't, though. The NY Times has been up the statists' ass since its beginning. They have always provided cover to the elites like the Rockefellers, Tammany Hall, all of them, really. They would have been Loyalists during the Revolution, perhaps they are Globalists today, after all. The NY Times is the modern incarnation of the phrase "Yellow Journalism" and notably helped like the US into the Spanish American war, especially in the invasion of Puerto Rico which was done to serve private business interests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism So you see, "fake news" has been going on a long, long time and you are simply historically ignorant. So ignorant in fact, that you probably don't even know how propaganda helped extinguish the lives of millions of Jews--"just get on the train, you are being forcefully re-settled for your own safety" they were told over and over and believed it, despite the rumors, because it came from an official source. Then they were gassed and shoved in mass graves while the gold was extracted from their dead skulls, melted down, and shipped off to Switzerland where it still keeps the same rich families in power today. Only the publicly known bit players got sorted out in that war. The rest are still at large. The entire world as we know it, as we are taught to know it, is a lie.
knzhou 7y ago
This simply doesn’t work because “information”, in the form of news articles and blog posts, consists of 10% actual facts and 90% narrative framing. As such, any distributed rating of factuality will instantly devolve into a rating of popularity, because modern information is simply not made of facts. And we already have popularity ratings and they don’t work for truth.
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago
  > news articles and blog posts, consists of 10% actual facts and 90% narrative framing Agreed! That's part of my motivation. A federated knowledge graph would allow people to distill the kernels of insight from the fluff and share the good stuff. > we already have popularity ratings and they don’t work for truth. I envision no algorithm to rate truth. I'm skeptical it's possible (but interested in suggestions). I just want people to be operationalize their definition of truth. I'd like you to be able to search for economic forecasts by people with PhDs from Harvard made prior to the last interest rate hike. Or statements regarding the West Bank agreed upon by a majority of Israelis and a majority of Palestinians. Or incoherent rates by an orange man-child with his head up his ass. I can't guarantee a good index and search engine would be used the right way. I just think it would be better if we could get our hands dirty, rather than hoping Google does the right thing.
  - Jeff_Brown 7y ago
    Part of my aim is that the data behind counterarguments be as easy to reach as the opinion they led to. It's one thing for me to see that 30% of users think vaccines cause hemmorhoid-face. It's another if I can see that their beliefs can all be traced (after factoring out cycles within that community) to a single no-longer-licensed proctologist.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]