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The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution

mooneater 7y ago
They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of "noise" is also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant, distracting content, and the popular platforms that do little to help us reduce that noise.
- svara 7y ago
  Exactly. I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would not have been worth the cost in the past.
  - ssivark 7y ago
    Your point about the distribution costs is true, but platforms have a huge role in shaping those costs. If they encouraged curation/filtering, the distribution costs of unwelcome content would increase. But platforms want to flood people with content for two reasons: 1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing “engagement”. 2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that they become hard to filter out. So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the blame as any other factor.
    - svara 7y ago
      True, but you're expecting the platforms to behave honorably and not in the way that maximizes their profits. My point is the platforms' business model is a consequence of the economics of online information distribution. Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content, but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on a large scale so far.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        That's a good reason to regulate some of these practices out of existence. As you say, what happens today is a natural low point in the landscape of online information distribution; the only way to raise it is to reconfigure the landscape.
- mikedilger 7y ago
  But the Internet is mostly pull not push. If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. I think FOMO has led people to make poor decisions, driving people to Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently they find themselves overwhelmed with noise. It can be somewhat addictive too since it's cheap excitement and satisfaction; but that also erodes your willpower to do actual work. I recommend disconnecting.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    > If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. This may be true in principle, but the fact that advertising exists, or even can exist, refutes this in practice.
  - andrei_says_ 7y ago
    Great idea. I’ll be back mid May.
  - Reelin 7y ago
    > If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today, there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable one when applied to an alcoholic. To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol is reasonable for me - but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that there are also many who struggle to do so. I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.
    - mercer 7y ago
      Without trying to make a particular point for or against your point, I'd argue that alcohol is most definitely not 'pull', even in a time where overt advertising for alcohol appears to be regulated. Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv. I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.
- TheFiend7 7y ago
  I would disagree with that idea that the vast amount of irrelevant and distracting content is somehow the problem. Believe it or not it's an incredibly challenging problem. Google is burned at the stake everyday for their biased response on searches when they're parsing disgusting amounts of data and attempting to minimize noise. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't honestly, because even if you can effectively minimize returns for a given query (regardless of topic), there is then information loss to some degree and therefore arguably a bias.
  - whiddershins 7y ago
    It’s not arguably a bias. It is literally a bias. People get confused about this sometimes but not all bias is bad. I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth. Everyone believes that, even flat earthers and anti-vaxxers believe that.
BitwiseFool 7y ago
I think we really need a new understanding of "Truth" and what that term really means. Individual facts can be 'true' but can be horribly misleading depending on the kind of argument that is being made, and the other 'facts' that are being presented with it. Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances. Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.
- wahern 7y ago
  The first episode of the Jerry Brown podcast describes his transition from Jesuit seminary into politics and learning to come to grips with the difference between the world of ideas and absolutes, and the world of politics: https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown It'd be banal save for the fact that he goes from such one extreme to another. EDIT: Looks like they haven't posted the first episode yet, just the 2 minute preview. I guess they're delaying the podcast in favor of the on-air broadcast.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Apparently the whole series will be published January 11th. But they ran the first episode January 9th as a special episode of Political Breakdown: https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqed/radio/politicalbreakdown/2020/01/TheNovicePB.mp3?siteplayer=true&dl=1 https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqed/radio/politicalbreakdown/2020... (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown)
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Why does this require a new understanding of truth? That seems to me like giving up. We just need to accept that perception does not always (or even often) reflect the truth, and that perception can be easily manipulated.
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
Dilute this down, the internet and social are merely tools. Humans are using them for nefarious reasons. Humans have been dicks from the beginning of time.
- pixl97 7y ago
  Humans have been dicks, but few ever have reach in their communications. Now the entire world is inner connected. This is kind of like saying people have always had rocks to throw, so nuclear weapons aren't anything new.
  - dane-pgp 7y ago
    Highlighting the difference between rocks and nuclear weapons makes a good analogy, but my favourite example is from the "harmless supernova fallacy": https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/ https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/ in particular the "Precedented, therefore harmless" variant.
carapace 7y ago
The “fake news” attack is so devastating because so much of Western media is fake news. I read Noam Chomsky's political stuff at a tender age, and, while I don't agree with his interpretation (TL;DR: "USA is Mordor") it was very eye-opening in re: American media.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  What would be a good example of that in your opinion?
  - carapace 7y ago
    Well, check out Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent That's a whole book, here's a taste from The Chomsky Reader: "What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It — and Why" https://chomsky.info/reader02/ https://chomsky.info/reader02/ > Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — a simple case. Everybody understands immediately without any specialized knowledge that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That’s exactly what it is. You don’t debate it; it’s not a deep point that is difficult to understand. It isn’t necessary to know the history of Afghanistan to understand the point. All right. Now let’s take the American invasion of South Vietnam. The phrase itself is very strange. I don’t think you will ever find that phrase — I doubt if you’ll find one case in which that phrase was used in any mainstream journal, or for the most part, even in journals of the left, while the war was going on. Yet it was just as much an American invasion of South Vietnam as it is a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when nobody was paying any attention, American pilots — not just mercenaries but actual American pilots — were conducting murderous bombing raids against Vietnamese villages. That’s an American invasion of South Vietnam. The purpose of that attack was to destroy the social fabric of rural South Vietnam so as to undermine a resistance which the American-imposed client regime had evoked by its repression and was unable to control, though they had already killed perhaps eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking the political settlement called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords. > So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam. > I don’t know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They’re defending Afghanistan against capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don’t think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States invaded South Vietnam. > Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There’s a vast difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves.
webdva 7y ago
In the end—oh so tragic!—such finely dressed intellectual literature is naught but sensational marketing for the selling of a capitalism induced labor product (the author is selling a book) and the fallacious persuasion of a perceived and wishful reality that requires you to have “faith” and “certainty” rather than any scientific, consistent, and methodical evidence. Oh, but you write really well, intellectual soul! So cheer up! What does it matter?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  I see you bought a capitalism-induced labor product called a "thesaurus". Congratulation on being the first lefty commentator more obnoxious than the libertarians.
khawkins 7y ago
What we're seeing isn't a breakdown in "rationality" or "care for truth", we're seeing a global breakdown in the trust of authority. Vast numbers of people, including the president of the country and his supporters, aren't rejecting truth or rationality, they have so little faith in the supposed arbiters of truth, the mainstream media and academia, that they're willing to accept shoddy reporting that confirms their worldview. Indeed, what rational individual would trust a person who regularly shows prejudice and open contempt for their political beliefs, worldview, and concerns. Instead of trying to to repair that trust, pieces like this hand-wring about "fake news" and the rise of anti-intellectualism: "Why won't these dumb bigots listen to us? Don't they know we have their best interests at heart? If only they were more educated, like us, they'd accept our reporting and science uncritically!" People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people. The fact that so much media attention was devoted to such a trivial dispute is a testament to the devolution of national dialogue and debate. Instead of digging deep into the meat of issues that affect people and addressing the central argument, it's a never-ending labyrinth of "gotchas": "So and so was false when he said 64%, it's actually 55%." "So and so said this, and this group came out demanding an apology." This sort of reporting might be more forgivable if the rest didn't read like propaganda, twisting news stories into things that are "technically true", but designed to give readers a false impression. Media writers have realized that most read only the headline and maybe the first few lines before clicking away, and the writers see this as an opportunity to inject hyper-partisan deception into the minds of their readers this way.
- miscPerson 7y ago
  “Technically true”? The widespread defamation of Covington students makes it clear they’ll outright lie if those pesky facts don’t fit the narrative. As far as anyone can tell, the media opted to re-victimize the victims of racist harassment because they don’t like White people. That same racist group went on to murder several Jewish victims out of racial hatred, recently.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  > People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people. I expect an administration to be truthful in both important and trivial matters. If they lie about trivial ones, folks at the time knew they’d lie about important ones (see attack last week, child separation, etc)
mudil 7y ago
There is still a question about crowd size of Trump inauguration. Just because media, and in this case MIT Press, repeats something doesn't necessarily make it true. Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be seen by yourself: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inaug...
- brlewis 7y ago
  That vantage point has a limited view of the entire crowd. Here's a higher-altitude look: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-idUSKBN15600I https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-idUSKBN15... Found via https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/ https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/
  - mudil 7y ago
    Not true. That vantage point shows entire Mall, all the way to Washington Memorial. Furthermore, given the rain, the crowd size is variable depending on timing. In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way.
    - brlewis 7y ago
      >In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way Not true. From the CNN perspective, the big gaps on the right are still visible, even though what I said about the vantage point is obviously true. Here's a picture that illustrates why the Reuters photo was in a better position to show gaps than the CNN photo. Reuters CNN |||||||| | | | | | | | | | | | | Furthermore, unless Reuters misreported the times those photos were taken, it's hard to imagine any sort of timing that would ever have the Trump crowd larger than the Obama one.
    - nl 7y ago
      In the 3D CNN photo there is a tent-like white structure in the background. This looks to where 12 St Expressway passes under the National Mall[1]. In the CNN photo the square in front of it is empty on the left and right of the mall, and on the right side the second square in front of it is mostly empty too. Maybe it is slightly fuller than the pic put out by the Trump Inaugural Committee, but in the Getty Image of the Obama inauguration the crowds continue another city block at least (the photo cuts off while they are still dense, but it's much further than in the Trump photo as can be seen by aligning the curve at point [1]). Pic at [2]. Conclusion: that photo doesn't present any evidence that there were more people than claimed. In fact it strengthens the case that there were more people at the Obama inauguration. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%B001'40.9%22W/@38.889658,-77.0302247,767m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!2sWashington,+DC,+USA!3b1!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d38.8896582!4d-77.0280359 https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%... [2] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/1 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/...
unishark 7y ago
Politicians lying? what a shocking development. By the way one thing that always really bugged me was how every controversial law that is proposed is given a name which is pretty much the direct opposite of what it really intends to do. From the federal right down to my local city initiatives sometimes. But here's a counter-perspective on polarization: the winners don't get to control the narrative anymore. Both sides are lying rather than just the one who gets the pulpit.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  It’s not shocking that any politician would lie. But it is newsworthy when a specific politician lies. The meme you’re pushing here, that lying for politicians is par for the course and not worthy of note, is pretty destructive: An important part of political discourse is deciding what to believe when.
  - unishark 7y ago
    Hi Erik, I realize that I'm posting on a political topic about politicians. But do you really think this kind of blunt personal argument is necessary? I have to tell you it comes across as rude to me. And no I don't think it is necessarily newsworthy. A lie about the number of people in some crowd is still just a dog wagging its tail.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      What was personal about what I wrote?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  Contrary to common cynicism, it used to be extremely rare for (elected and unelected) officials to actively lie. They'd obfuscate, or refuse, or run away. But outright lies? Almost never. The problem is: given this belief, and how common it is, why should any politician not start lying, taking bribes, etc? After all, everybody thinks they do so, no matter how they actually behave.
elfexec 7y ago
First time seeing two mit submissions on the frontpage on the same day. "Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs (mit.edu)" "The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution" What are the odds?
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
When we take cycles like this [0] for granted, is it really any surprise that people lose trust and others exploit the not-really-true environment that makes up media/PR/politics. The people providing information care more about impact than accuracy, so of course the waters are polluted. [0] http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174 http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174
animoto 7y ago
Nothing can be true unless the information comes directly from the source. Media will skew information to fit their needs, and appeal to the watchers.
srmatto 7y ago
The documentary HyperNormalisation[1] argues that this deluge of low quality information is intentional. > "In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
- specialist 7y ago
  In the 1990s, an emigrate from USSR asked me to explain politics (propaganda) in the USA. She said in the USSR that there was very little information and everyone knew the government was lying but no one could guess at the truth. Having read Postman, McLuhan, Chomsky, etc, and having dabbled in media, I felt qualified to answer: In the USA, the truth was always available, but everyone is overwhelmed with information (called 'infoglut' in the 80s), so few people had the wherewithal to figure out what's what, and most people just shut down. Today, I'd say even the truth is hard to find, even for the motivated and experienced researchers.
cryptica 7y ago
I think fake news is fine. For the average person, life is way too boring and predictable. There needs to be more instability, more opportunities, less continuity. Fake news does that, it makes the system and the narrative of society uncontrollable and this is exactly what people need. We just need more different mediums through which to spread news. The alternative is an information dictatorship. Before, we were led by false centralized narratives filtered by an elite. Now at least we have the potential to find the real truth because it's all out there. It doesn't destroy critical thinking, it's the opposite, it makes critical thinking indispensable because each individual must do the work themselves. I think the problem is not fake news, the problem is that people got used to believing all the BS from authorities; they were trained to, so now they are easily fooled. Eventually, exposure to fake news will untrain us and force us to actually think for ourselves. IMO the discussion around fake news serves the interests of the elite. They don't want people to think for themselves.
- ausbah 7y ago
  You're very optimistic to think that by destroying the notion of "gatekeepers of truth", people will simply think critically for themselves. I think most people either don't know how, don't care enough, or have enough time to think long and hard about every subject. I'd wager most people rather are OK with outsourcing critical thinking on most matters to authority figures of some kind. So when people are no longer capable of recognizing legitimate sources of truth, they likely gravitate towards whatever figure aligns with their biases & beliefs. Yes there are problems with having gatekeepers of any kind, but I'd rather have that then a world where some random moron spouting conspiracy theories is taken seriously by too many people.
  - cryptica 7y ago
    On subjects that they don't understand but which affect them, I think it's better if non-experts follow their own gut instinct rather than to defer thinking to someone that they don't know who supposedly understands the subject. Human elites are liars and cheaters, the so-called expert is more likely to be a skilled con artist than a skilled expert. I trust that even so-called morons have decent common sense. Probably better than a lot of elites even.
ddmma 7y ago
While serves the purpose of controlling the masses no reason to forbit the dark patterns of targeting minds with poisoned content.
buzzkillington 7y ago
>By that, they meant they would have heard about it from creditable, independent sources. Filters (primarily, editors) worked to not only weed out the bad but to make sure the truly extraordinary real news made it to the surface. There's a lot of shadow boxing in the article. But given Epstein and MIT I can see why filters would seem like a good idea to people who used to arbiters of truth.
tu7001 7y ago
That phrase "fake news" is very disturbing, to me. I don't think this is problem at all. We've always have and will be served of false stories. That's when we can differentiate between good and bad quality sources. The polarization is a problem, but we are just in the beginning of that big world wide (the first one) technology. Hopefully we manage it.

They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of "noise" is also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant, distracting content, and the popular platforms that do little to help us reduce that noise.

svara 7y ago
Exactly. I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would not have been worth the cost in the past.
- ssivark 7y ago
  Your point about the distribution costs is true, but platforms have a huge role in shaping those costs. If they encouraged curation/filtering, the distribution costs of unwelcome content would increase. But platforms want to flood people with content for two reasons: 1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing “engagement”. 2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that they become hard to filter out. So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the blame as any other factor.
  - svara 7y ago
    True, but you're expecting the platforms to behave honorably and not in the way that maximizes their profits. My point is the platforms' business model is a consequence of the economics of online information distribution. Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content, but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on a large scale so far.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      That's a good reason to regulate some of these practices out of existence. As you say, what happens today is a natural low point in the landscape of online information distribution; the only way to raise it is to reconfigure the landscape.
mikedilger 7y ago
But the Internet is mostly pull not push. If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. I think FOMO has led people to make poor decisions, driving people to Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently they find themselves overwhelmed with noise. It can be somewhat addictive too since it's cheap excitement and satisfaction; but that also erodes your willpower to do actual work. I recommend disconnecting.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  > If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. This may be true in principle, but the fact that advertising exists, or even can exist, refutes this in practice.
- andrei_says_ 7y ago
  Great idea. I’ll be back mid May.
- Reelin 7y ago
  > If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today, there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable one when applied to an alcoholic. To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol is reasonable for me - but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that there are also many who struggle to do so. I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.
  - mercer 7y ago
    Without trying to make a particular point for or against your point, I'd argue that alcohol is most definitely not 'pull', even in a time where overt advertising for alcohol appears to be regulated. Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv. I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.
TheFiend7 7y ago
I would disagree with that idea that the vast amount of irrelevant and distracting content is somehow the problem. Believe it or not it's an incredibly challenging problem. Google is burned at the stake everyday for their biased response on searches when they're parsing disgusting amounts of data and attempting to minimize noise. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't honestly, because even if you can effectively minimize returns for a given query (regardless of topic), there is then information loss to some degree and therefore arguably a bias.
- whiddershins 7y ago
  It’s not arguably a bias. It is literally a bias. People get confused about this sometimes but not all bias is bad. I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth. Everyone believes that, even flat earthers and anti-vaxxers believe that.

BitwiseFool 7y ago

I think we really need a new understanding of "Truth" and what that term really means. Individual facts can be 'true' but can be horribly misleading depending on the kind of argument that is being made, and the other 'facts' that are being presented with it. Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances. Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.

wahern 7y ago
The first episode of the Jerry Brown podcast describes his transition from Jesuit seminary into politics and learning to come to grips with the difference between the world of ideas and absolutes, and the world of politics: https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown It'd be banal save for the fact that he goes from such one extreme to another. EDIT: Looks like they haven't posted the first episode yet, just the 2 minute preview. I guess they're delaying the podcast in favor of the on-air broadcast.
- wahern 7y ago
  Apparently the whole series will be published January 11th. But they ran the first episode January 9th as a special episode of Political Breakdown: https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqed/radio/politicalbreakdown/2020/01/TheNovicePB.mp3?siteplayer=true&dl=1 https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqed/radio/politicalbreakdown/2020... (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown)
nerdponx 7y ago
Why does this require a new understanding of truth? That seems to me like giving up. We just need to accept that perception does not always (or even often) reflect the truth, and that perception can be easily manipulated.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

Dilute this down, the internet and social are merely tools. Humans are using them for nefarious reasons. Humans have been dicks from the beginning of time.

pixl97 7y ago
Humans have been dicks, but few ever have reach in their communications. Now the entire world is inner connected. This is kind of like saying people have always had rocks to throw, so nuclear weapons aren't anything new.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  Highlighting the difference between rocks and nuclear weapons makes a good analogy, but my favourite example is from the "harmless supernova fallacy": https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/ https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/ in particular the "Precedented, therefore harmless" variant.

carapace 7y ago

The “fake news” attack is so devastating because so much of Western media is fake news. I read Noam Chomsky's political stuff at a tender age, and, while I don't agree with his interpretation (TL;DR: "USA is Mordor") it was very eye-opening in re: American media.

BubRoss 7y ago
What would be a good example of that in your opinion?
- carapace 7y ago
  Well, check out Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent That's a whole book, here's a taste from The Chomsky Reader: "What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It — and Why" https://chomsky.info/reader02/ https://chomsky.info/reader02/ > Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — a simple case. Everybody understands immediately without any specialized knowledge that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That’s exactly what it is. You don’t debate it; it’s not a deep point that is difficult to understand. It isn’t necessary to know the history of Afghanistan to understand the point. All right. Now let’s take the American invasion of South Vietnam. The phrase itself is very strange. I don’t think you will ever find that phrase — I doubt if you’ll find one case in which that phrase was used in any mainstream journal, or for the most part, even in journals of the left, while the war was going on. Yet it was just as much an American invasion of South Vietnam as it is a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when nobody was paying any attention, American pilots — not just mercenaries but actual American pilots — were conducting murderous bombing raids against Vietnamese villages. That’s an American invasion of South Vietnam. The purpose of that attack was to destroy the social fabric of rural South Vietnam so as to undermine a resistance which the American-imposed client regime had evoked by its repression and was unable to control, though they had already killed perhaps eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking the political settlement called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords. > So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam. > I don’t know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They’re defending Afghanistan against capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don’t think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States invaded South Vietnam. > Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There’s a vast difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves.

webdva 7y ago

In the end—oh so tragic!—such finely dressed intellectual literature is naught but sensational marketing for the selling of a capitalism induced labor product (the author is selling a book) and the fallacious persuasion of a perceived and wishful reality that requires you to have “faith” and “certainty” rather than any scientific, consistent, and methodical evidence. Oh, but you write really well, intellectual soul! So cheer up! What does it matter?

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
I see you bought a capitalism-induced labor product called a "thesaurus". Congratulation on being the first lefty commentator more obnoxious than the libertarians.

khawkins 7y ago

What we're seeing isn't a breakdown in "rationality" or "care for truth", we're seeing a global breakdown in the trust of authority. Vast numbers of people, including the president of the country and his supporters, aren't rejecting truth or rationality, they have so little faith in the supposed arbiters of truth, the mainstream media and academia, that they're willing to accept shoddy reporting that confirms their worldview. Indeed, what rational individual would trust a person who regularly shows prejudice and open contempt for their political beliefs, worldview, and concerns. Instead of trying to to repair that trust, pieces like this hand-wring about "fake news" and the rise of anti-intellectualism: "Why won't these dumb bigots listen to us? Don't they know we have their best interests at heart? If only they were more educated, like us, they'd accept our reporting and science uncritically!" People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people. The fact that so much media attention was devoted to such a trivial dispute is a testament to the devolution of national dialogue and debate. Instead of digging deep into the meat of issues that affect people and addressing the central argument, it's a never-ending labyrinth of "gotchas": "So and so was false when he said 64%, it's actually 55%." "So and so said this, and this group came out demanding an apology." This sort of reporting might be more forgivable if the rest didn't read like propaganda, twisting news stories into things that are "technically true", but designed to give readers a false impression. Media writers have realized that most read only the headline and maybe the first few lines before clicking away, and the writers see this as an opportunity to inject hyper-partisan deception into the minds of their readers this way.

miscPerson 7y ago
“Technically true”? The widespread defamation of Covington students makes it clear they’ll outright lie if those pesky facts don’t fit the narrative. As far as anyone can tell, the media opted to re-victimize the victims of racist harassment because they don’t like White people. That same racist group went on to murder several Jewish victims out of racial hatred, recently.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people. I expect an administration to be truthful in both important and trivial matters. If they lie about trivial ones, folks at the time knew they’d lie about important ones (see attack last week, child separation, etc)

mudil 7y ago

There is still a question about crowd size of Trump inauguration. Just because media, and in this case MIT Press, repeats something doesn't necessarily make it true. Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be seen by yourself: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inaug...

brlewis 7y ago
That vantage point has a limited view of the entire crowd. Here's a higher-altitude look: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-idUSKBN15600I https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-idUSKBN15... Found via https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/ https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/
- mudil 7y ago
  Not true. That vantage point shows entire Mall, all the way to Washington Memorial. Furthermore, given the rain, the crowd size is variable depending on timing. In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    >In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way Not true. From the CNN perspective, the big gaps on the right are still visible, even though what I said about the vantage point is obviously true. Here's a picture that illustrates why the Reuters photo was in a better position to show gaps than the CNN photo. Reuters CNN |||||||| | | | | | | | | | | | | Furthermore, unless Reuters misreported the times those photos were taken, it's hard to imagine any sort of timing that would ever have the Trump crowd larger than the Obama one.
  - nl 7y ago
    In the 3D CNN photo there is a tent-like white structure in the background. This looks to where 12 St Expressway passes under the National Mall[1]. In the CNN photo the square in front of it is empty on the left and right of the mall, and on the right side the second square in front of it is mostly empty too. Maybe it is slightly fuller than the pic put out by the Trump Inaugural Committee, but in the Getty Image of the Obama inauguration the crowds continue another city block at least (the photo cuts off while they are still dense, but it's much further than in the Trump photo as can be seen by aligning the curve at point [1]). Pic at [2]. Conclusion: that photo doesn't present any evidence that there were more people than claimed. In fact it strengthens the case that there were more people at the Obama inauguration. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%B001'40.9%22W/@38.889658,-77.0302247,767m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!2sWashington,+DC,+USA!3b1!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d38.8896582!4d-77.0280359 https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%... [2] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/1 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/...

unishark 7y ago

Politicians lying? what a shocking development. By the way one thing that always really bugged me was how every controversial law that is proposed is given a name which is pretty much the direct opposite of what it really intends to do. From the federal right down to my local city initiatives sometimes. But here's a counter-perspective on polarization: the winners don't get to control the narrative anymore. Both sides are lying rather than just the one who gets the pulpit.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
It’s not shocking that any politician would lie. But it is newsworthy when a specific politician lies. The meme you’re pushing here, that lying for politicians is par for the course and not worthy of note, is pretty destructive: An important part of political discourse is deciding what to believe when.
- unishark 7y ago
  Hi Erik, I realize that I'm posting on a political topic about politicians. But do you really think this kind of blunt personal argument is necessary? I have to tell you it comes across as rude to me. And no I don't think it is necessarily newsworthy. A lie about the number of people in some crowd is still just a dog wagging its tail.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    What was personal about what I wrote?
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Contrary to common cynicism, it used to be extremely rare for (elected and unelected) officials to actively lie. They'd obfuscate, or refuse, or run away. But outright lies? Almost never. The problem is: given this belief, and how common it is, why should any politician not start lying, taking bribes, etc? After all, everybody thinks they do so, no matter how they actually behave.

elfexec 7y ago

First time seeing two mit submissions on the frontpage on the same day. "Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs (mit.edu)" "The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution" What are the odds?

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

When we take cycles like this [0] for granted, is it really any surprise that people lose trust and others exploit the not-really-true environment that makes up media/PR/politics. The people providing information care more about impact than accuracy, so of course the waters are polluted. [0] http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174 http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174

animoto 7y ago

Nothing can be true unless the information comes directly from the source. Media will skew information to fit their needs, and appeal to the watchers.

srmatto 7y ago

The documentary HyperNormalisation[1] argues that this deluge of low quality information is intentional. > "In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

specialist 7y ago
In the 1990s, an emigrate from USSR asked me to explain politics (propaganda) in the USA. She said in the USSR that there was very little information and everyone knew the government was lying but no one could guess at the truth. Having read Postman, McLuhan, Chomsky, etc, and having dabbled in media, I felt qualified to answer: In the USA, the truth was always available, but everyone is overwhelmed with information (called 'infoglut' in the 80s), so few people had the wherewithal to figure out what's what, and most people just shut down. Today, I'd say even the truth is hard to find, even for the motivated and experienced researchers.

cryptica 7y ago

I think fake news is fine. For the average person, life is way too boring and predictable. There needs to be more instability, more opportunities, less continuity. Fake news does that, it makes the system and the narrative of society uncontrollable and this is exactly what people need. We just need more different mediums through which to spread news. The alternative is an information dictatorship. Before, we were led by false centralized narratives filtered by an elite. Now at least we have the potential to find the real truth because it's all out there. It doesn't destroy critical thinking, it's the opposite, it makes critical thinking indispensable because each individual must do the work themselves. I think the problem is not fake news, the problem is that people got used to believing all the BS from authorities; they were trained to, so now they are easily fooled. Eventually, exposure to fake news will untrain us and force us to actually think for ourselves. IMO the discussion around fake news serves the interests of the elite. They don't want people to think for themselves.

ausbah 7y ago
You're very optimistic to think that by destroying the notion of "gatekeepers of truth", people will simply think critically for themselves. I think most people either don't know how, don't care enough, or have enough time to think long and hard about every subject. I'd wager most people rather are OK with outsourcing critical thinking on most matters to authority figures of some kind. So when people are no longer capable of recognizing legitimate sources of truth, they likely gravitate towards whatever figure aligns with their biases & beliefs. Yes there are problems with having gatekeepers of any kind, but I'd rather have that then a world where some random moron spouting conspiracy theories is taken seriously by too many people.
- cryptica 7y ago
  On subjects that they don't understand but which affect them, I think it's better if non-experts follow their own gut instinct rather than to defer thinking to someone that they don't know who supposedly understands the subject. Human elites are liars and cheaters, the so-called expert is more likely to be a skilled con artist than a skilled expert. I trust that even so-called morons have decent common sense. Probably better than a lot of elites even.

ddmma 7y ago

While serves the purpose of controlling the masses no reason to forbit the dark patterns of targeting minds with poisoned content.

buzzkillington 7y ago

>By that, they meant they would have heard about it from creditable, independent sources. Filters (primarily, editors) worked to not only weed out the bad but to make sure the truly extraordinary real news made it to the surface. There's a lot of shadow boxing in the article. But given Epstein and MIT I can see why filters would seem like a good idea to people who used to arbiters of truth.

tu7001 7y ago

That phrase "fake news" is very disturbing, to me. I don't think this is problem at all. We've always have and will be served of false stories. That's when we can differentiate between good and bad quality sources. The polarization is a problem, but we are just in the beginning of that big world wide (the first one) technology. Hopefully we manage it.