7 ms·

Seeking Truth in a Time of Misinformation

62 points by crawshaw 6y ago

jdkee 6y ago
This is a fantastic piece. I am going to share it with my students tomorrow.
- apatters 6y ago
  I disagree strenuously and I believe the piece will be damaging to the intellectual future of your students. The title is "Seeking Truth" but the author doesn't appear to be doing that. A more accurate title would be "Declaring Truth Without Supporting My Claims!" - Author makes an extraordinary, vague, unfalsifiable claim that "America is Broken," but does not provide extraordinary or rigorous evidence - Author makes the further claim that it's all the fault of Republicans, again providing little in the way of evidence - Author appeals to the authority of science, but doesn't apply the rigor of good science to his own arguments; we are ironically expected to take his own claims on faith For the most part this article is just another piece of incendiary rhetoric with little compelling evidence of anything, all it adds to the debate is emotion. The author should narrow the scope of his claims and address opposing viewpoints in good faith if he wishes to construct a credible argument. If this shit passes for academic nowadays, no wonder a growing number of Americans feel we no longer need academia. Teach your students a dialectical method instead, where opposing and specific viewpoints are presented with the requirement to make a rational, evidence-based defense of their positions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
  - chalst 6y ago
    "damaging to the intellectual future of your students" This might be true, if the teaching environment suppresses criticism of material presented. This is not what is supposed to happen, though: materials should be presented as an opportunity for critical evaluation and the multiplicity of views presented by students should provide the dialectical input needed, possibly supplemeted by interjections by the instructor if the students are showing groupthink. This is better that presenting two opposite claims and leaving it to the students to figure out on their own if one of them is correct. (Usually neither is entirely, and in real life, not every pirce of information comes helpfully accompanied by an appropriately matched opposing viewpoint). You're quick to assume the worst. Why is that?
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      Not to disagree with your overall point, but Marcuse wrote about plurality as a poor substitute for critical thought in the 60s: "Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power." The instructor's interjections provide a look-in here, but the whole presupposition is that the students have learned and sufficiently refined the capacity for critical thought inside and outside the classroom setting.
      - chalst 6y ago
        It is, of course, not any kind of substitute for critical thought. But the GP referenced dialectic by way of arguing for contrary materials to be presented in class: my point was that a living argument among the students is better for teaching dialectic than a curated selection of contrary views. The responsibility of the instructor goes beyond this elementary requirement for ensuring multiple viewpoints are presented.
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        Pluralism alone works somewhat counter to the original spirit of dissent - it means assent to one of the available groups. Which will ultimately lead to conflict unless mediated, and in conflict, bigger (or louder, or richer) usually wins, and takes all.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      That is if you assume that critical thinking is a goal of this educational system, not producing malleable effective work drones cheaply, or the slightly loftier goal of making sure USA stays ahead in advanced technologies. It has other aims too, like reducing crime indirectly and allegedly making social mobility more possible. Neither from which critical thinking skills requirement follows directly. If it were cultivating American spirit of dissent combined with cooperation and multicultural integration, the critical thinking, analysis and reading skills could follow from that. But this seems to have fallen by the wayside... Dissent without critical thinking leads to quarrel, anarchy and dissolution.
leric 6y ago
Hint: "china" didn't appear in this article.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  It did not, because there are many many threads of disinformation and I wasn't trying to catalog them all. I'm happy to engage a discussion of how to avoid misinformation specifically related to China, but not really clear what point you're trying to make here. I also think it's pretty far down on the list of threats we face right now, but understand others may feel differently about that.
  - leric 6y ago
    You are talking about disinfomation and Covid19 without mentioning the state-of-the-art player: CCP, you won't get it right. This is an advice from a native Chinese.
    - raphlinus 6y ago
      I'm not knowledgeable enough about the CCP's disinformation efforts to do the topic justice. But if you'd be willing to write something in the same general spirit as my essay, I would be more than happy to link it.
      - 411111111111111 6y ago
        well, they started off actually going to credible sources, telling them to portrait them positively. i don't know of any proof for comment-style disinformation from them, but considering that its basically impossible to prove that.... i'm not sure someone could write a good article about that. its a sad reality we live in, imo. its also telling that very few published that attempt. i doubt it was only done to germany... others likely went ahead. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-china/germany-says-china-sought-to-encourage-positive-covid-19-comments-idUSKCN2280JW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german...
sbussard 6y ago
The appeal is to “listen to these people.” Unfortunately intellect doesn’t imply integrity, and appeal to authority is what got America to where it is. I would’ve preferred a framework for critical thinking, or at least more emphasis on that aspect rather than saying “you can trust these people.” That’s what everyone is saying, PhDs everywhere. I have an unfinished PhD too, and I’m saying “find out what makes it tick” and “follow the money”
- raphlinus 6y ago
  I had another section on "is this an echo chamber?" that didn't make it into the final version. It would have gone into internal consistency and evolution of thought in the face of evidence as reasonably objective yardsticks. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to accomplish trying to establish a framework for critical thinking in a blog post. In any case, the message is much more, "I've been paying close attention and have found these people worth listening to," and I don't think "authority" is really the word I'd use to express my criteria. I mean, I had a whole section against authority, and in my penultimate graf I implore readers to do their own critical thinking and not blindly follow.
trilinearnz 6y ago
Presumably most of this applies to the issue of climate change, also.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Yes, and I refer to that at least in passing. I've observed that the political and informational environment around climate change and Covid-19 are basically identical, with the exception of about a couple orders of magnitude of time scale. That gives the opportunity to see how well arguments hold up in more or less real time, which is much less of a luxury with climate change.
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bigpumpkin 6y ago
Just look at the difference in mask recommendations between governments over time will give people a feel on how difficult it is to ascertain truths in an evolving epidemic. There is also the issue of whether the absence of evidence constitutes evidence for absence, notably surrounding the controversies regarding the effectiveness of masks and hydroxychloroquine
archagon 6y ago
Thank you for this excellent post! Out of curiosity, how much time do you spend sifting through COVID-related material every day? Or is it mostly passive (Twitter experts, etc.) at this point?
- raphlinus 6y ago
  It goes up and down depending on how busy I am with other things, but aside from keeping on top of Twitter I try to read about a paper a day. I went pretty deep into a few topics, including HCQ and trying to understand the capabilities and limitations of isothermal PCR. One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming. That's maybe I something I could expand on, because it's similar to cherry-picking but still not quite the same. In any case, I still appreciate the references because often I learn something :)
  - exmadscientist 6y ago
    >One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming. This is not unique to HN. Heck, often the data in the paper doesn't support the words in the paper! Science is hard.
mikedilger 6y ago
This author is mostly on to it. However, I'm hearing the dog that is not barking. We hear about listening to the science when it comes to COVID-19 and climate change. I totally agree. Why not also listen to the science when it comes to police shootings? And about whether George Floyd protesters further spread the virus or magically spookily didn't? We hear about criticism of the CDC, and I concur. Why not also admit the WHO made a long series of dangerous misstatements to such a degree that it's gotten hard to believe they were just accidents? IMHO the right-wing is leading the way in conspiracy theories and downright dangerous viewpoints. On this we agree. But the left-wing legacy media has its fair share of fake news as well, especially in continually to mischaracterize statements made by Trump, and in framing the narrative in extremely unhelpful ways. Why not report actual death statistics regarding race relations? Why is it never news when a black police officer shoots a white person? Our brains make inferences based on frequency of events, but the events we are bombarded with are biased in a way to lead us to wrong politically-motivated conclusions, time and time again. I'd like to think I'm in the middle. At the very least, I try to heap criticism on everybody. I'd like to see reasonable people to converge in the middle, en masse, and break America out of this dangerous partisan death spiral. This author is clearly reasonable, and on the right track, but seems to still be too much living in the main left-wing bubble and/or too afraid to criticize the left.
- mikedilger 6y ago
  I've dug further into this and have become less impressed. I'll leave just one example (I had many but I won't hog this space). Apparently this is "high end science journalism". Kai Kupferschmidt tweets this "Some people in the US actually seem to think that rising #covid19 cases won’t lead to rising deaths eventually. It’s like they are watching lightning flash across the sky thinking the thunder won‘t come crashing." Cases don't measure infections, they measure measured infections. Ramping up testing will ramp up cases even if infections do not ramp up. There is a credible theory that more cases are due to more testing, not due to more infections, and if that is true, the death rate will not follow. I don't personally accept that theory, but it's disingenuous and not "high end science journalism" when you fail to actually address the alternate theory.
  - 6y ago
hihoheythere 6y ago
Thank you, this is an important and timely article. If, however, you believe that only one faction is anti-truth, you are blind or willfully dissonant.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  I probably could have worded that a bit more clearly. I was trying to make the argument that there is an anti-truth faction and that this faction is currently in a much stronger alliance with the right. I'm under no illusions that it's exclusive to the right, though, and was thinking of adding a section on anti-vax to clarify this. In any case, I wanted to stay away from reflexive both-siderism as I've most often seen it used as a bad faith argument.
  - hihoheythere 6y ago
    Respect
  - exmadscientist 6y ago
    As someone who agrees in sentiment with GP (but leans similarly to you), I thought you communicated that well enough in the article. For what little my opinion's worth.
  - neel_k 6y ago
    Nowadays anti-vaccinantion is substantially a marker for being on the right, since Donald Trump ran for president while making anti-vaccination claims. This tremendously increased the popularity of antivax ideas on the right. See "Donald Trump and vaccination: The effect of political identity, conspiracist ideation and presidential tweets on vaccine hesitancy" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103119302628 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
- danaris 6y ago
  If you believe that the political right and political left in America are equally anti-truth—or even within a few orders of magnitude—then you are the one who is willfully blind. For 2 decades now, the right wing has been selling lies to build anger and get votes. It's well-documented and easily provable. The left wing (such as it is) has politicians who do what politicians do—which is to say, some of them are incapable of telling the truth to save their lives, while others are genuinely people of integrity trying to make things better—but they have absolutely not had anything like the kind of concerted effort to erase truth from existence in service of their own short-sighted ends. And the "even-handed" approach you are attempting to perpetuate is—again, demonstrably—a huge contributor to letting the Republicans get away with their many lies.
bhawks 6y ago
A significant part of the problem is social media technology and our relationship with it. The platforms encourage low effort hot takes and gamify narcissistic tendencies (likes, karma, rts, friends, followers). Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. It fosters divisiveness and tribalism at an amazing scale. I'd wager in a world without Twitter, Facebook, et al we'd have a healthier & stronger society. Humans aren't meant to communicate this way and numerous studies show the physiological toll on the individual and we are all witnessing the societal toll play out in front of us.
- lowkeynthorough 6y ago
  I’d like to make a similar argument for traditional mass media.. Readers don’t get to have nuanced discussions with content producers (journalist,editors,etc). This leads to not necessarily prosocial tendencies exhibited in, eg, the NYT doxxing of SSC or Vice not doing Naomi Wu a solid. Perhaps this is what Taleb may ascribe to a lack of skin in game? In the social web there is however the possibility of getting burned by the mob, so hmmmm.
- chalst 6y ago
  > Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. Of course this is impossible if the other party is not interested, but the format doesn't prevent engagement. The problem is that this engagement takes work and is rewarded less than the "hot takes" you describe. The literature on trust metrics that Raph has made a contribution to does suggest that the gamification can be tuned to reward constructive interactions. Given the recent advertiser boycott of Facebook, it is possible that there is now an incentive for applying these ideas in the context of popular social metrics.
  - nullc 6y ago
    Prevent might be too strong a description, but discourage deeper engagement while radically facilitating the opposite? > can be tuned Sure, maybe. But thus far they haven't been. I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects. Our online communications platforms have a much greater effect on many people than a great many drugs that we only make available by prescription do... yet we've tapped in most of the country to them on a 16-hour a day central line drip feed before we ever really began studying their effects.
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totetsu 6y ago
Some more reading on this topic: - This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality -- Peter Pomerantsev - A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy -- Nancy L. Rosenblum - Trust, Facts, And Democracy In A Polarized World [podcast ] https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/pew/ https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/pew/ - darknetdiaries EP 65: PSYOP [podcast] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/65/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/65/ (interview with psychological operations worker) - Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare -- Thomas Rid
m0zg 6y ago
I've read that 40% of all deaths as of the first week of June were in elder care homes, a lot of them in NY and NJ where C19 patients were _sent to the nursing homes_. It's not so much a partisan issue as it is absolute shit state government issue. The decision to decimate the elderly was made at the state level, without exception. Governor Cuomo in particular needs to go to jail, in spite of granting himself immunity for this.
- anon9001 6y ago
  What a good example. I heard this claim recently from a family member and decided to look it up. It sounds unbelievable and deeply disturbing that Cuomo would knowingly send infected people to be admitted to nursing homes. The way the story is told, it sounds like he's actually trying to spread the disease and kill old people. It turns out it's all spin. I'll admit it took quite a bit of digging to get beyond all the nypost/wsj/fox stories spreading misinformation. Yes, Cuomo said a COVID-19 diagnosis was not a reason to exclude patients from returning to a nursing home in March. But also, hospital bed space was absolutely critical during that time. While this was happening, about 25% of the nursing home workforce was infected anyway, and staff seems to have been the primary means of transmission. Also, after a week or so of showing symptoms, it was thought that the patients are no longer infectious to others. The reason that you, my family, and the right-wing media are going crazy over Cuomo's decision is because Trump is making it a political issue and using this as a talking point. The reality is that Cuomo arguably made the best decision possible at the time, and there wasn't really an alternative. Other states made the same decision at the time, and based on the outbreak numbers we're seeing today, we'll see that decision again in the near future. The only other option was to let hospitals overflow their capacity. Maybe there should have been centers for COVID patients that are released from hospitals, but that's a massive logistical problem to be solved on short notice in the middle of a pandemic. Cuomo's executive order happened in March. By May, once things were getting under control, Cuomo changed that order, presumably because hospitals now had more capacity to house patients. Take a look at the curve from NY and tell me you could have made a better decision at the time: https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/ https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/ If you want a reason to be outraged at Cuomo, the real scandal here is NY state providing immunity from lawsuits to nursing homes who mishandled the outbreak. The reason you're not hearing outrage about that from right-wing press is that it's also a republican strategy. States across the country are granting lawsuit immunity to protect insurance companies and care facilities. This is the closest you're going to get to the real story, if you'd like to learn more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-deaths-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-de...
Blahagun 6y ago
I've read this article several times, each time trying to understand what the author want to say, but it's just impossible and the title is completely misleading. For months since all of this started there has been an extremely large division between not just ordinary people, but between people competent enough to discuss the issue like doctors and scientists. To be completely on one side is naive and telling people what the "truth" is is arrogant. Now there is tons of data to be working with and continuing with the narrative that we're in some serious and deadly pandemic is just ridiculous.
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raphlinus 6y ago
Some reflections, having slept on it. I am disappointed but not at all surprised that many of the reactions here are responses to my partisan position. I worked pretty hard to reduce that without compromising what I was trying to say. Certainly in the Twitter list I'm promoting I think I succeeded; it includes Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner under Trump and now advising two Republican governors on Covid-19, but doesn't have anybody (D or R) who uses their platform to push partisan political messages. But I think the reduction of everything to partisanship is one of the ways in which we're broken. It's impossible to have a productive conversation under those circumstances. I think it's a kind of learned helplessness. We don't want to solve problems ourselves, we want our political party (and institutions in general) to do it. I'm sure many of us on this thread have fantasies of our party vanquishing the other one on the political stage and carrying out our wishes. Or if our party is in power, then we reflexively want to rationalize away whatever flaws they have. (For the record, I am equally upset by what's going on in blue states and red. Seeing the numbers go up in California, where I live, is at odds with any simplistic narrative that Democrats embrace science and Republicans deny it, with direct consequences for Covid response) In any case, thanks for the responses, they're all respectful, and I appreciate that.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I would like some comments on this: I have been grappling with how to discuss issues related to covid as truthfully as possible, and I’m wondering if anyone disagrees. My intuition as a physicist says that any discussion or comparison of covid effects that look at total numbers, while true, is less meaningful than looking at these numbers normalized by population size. Both sets of numbers are true, both lead the intuition to different conclusions. What conclusion should the intuition land on? Isn’t it strange that people can argue behind truthful data to lead people to completely different conclusions?
- phroobster 6y ago
  Often when I see numbers instead of percentages in these discussions, I can’t help but think it’s intended to manipulate the reader and that the percentage wouldn’t evoke the same emotional reaction.
- sbussard 6y ago
  It makes sense to me (B.S. Physics, 2010) it’s easy to tell arbitrary stories with quantities defined up to a constant.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Both sets of numbers are meaningful, for understanding different parts of the problem. The spread of an infectious disease like Covid-19 is not a virus moving through a relatively homogeneous population, but rather the overlay of a lot of small outbreaks. Early on, when the total number of cases is small, absolute numbers are most meaningful as a basis for comparison. [1] is a thread from Mar 29 (from the brilliant visualization expert John Burn-Murdoch) arguing that absolute numbers are more predictive of "death toll one week after 10th death" and that normalizing by population only makes smaller countries look worse. But as the spread continues (a process which takes time), per-capita numbers make sense. Mr. Burn-Murdoch revised his position (see [2] for a podcast with transcript where he talks about his thinking), and now the FT graphs have a normalized option (though their focus has moved on to other metrics such as excess mortality). Carl Bergstrom also has a great thread [3] where he talks about the choice, concluding that both are valid as long as you're careful about context. HTH [1]: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244380095164420101 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244380095164420101 [2]: https://voices.media/transcript-john-burn-murdoch-senior-data-visualisation-journalist-financial-times/ https://voices.media/transcript-john-burn-murdoch-senior-dat... [3]: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1249930293928030209 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1249930293928030209

62 points by crawshaw 6y ago

jdkee 6y ago

This is a fantastic piece. I am going to share it with my students tomorrow.

apatters 6y ago
I disagree strenuously and I believe the piece will be damaging to the intellectual future of your students. The title is "Seeking Truth" but the author doesn't appear to be doing that. A more accurate title would be "Declaring Truth Without Supporting My Claims!" - Author makes an extraordinary, vague, unfalsifiable claim that "America is Broken," but does not provide extraordinary or rigorous evidence - Author makes the further claim that it's all the fault of Republicans, again providing little in the way of evidence - Author appeals to the authority of science, but doesn't apply the rigor of good science to his own arguments; we are ironically expected to take his own claims on faith For the most part this article is just another piece of incendiary rhetoric with little compelling evidence of anything, all it adds to the debate is emotion. The author should narrow the scope of his claims and address opposing viewpoints in good faith if he wishes to construct a credible argument. If this shit passes for academic nowadays, no wonder a growing number of Americans feel we no longer need academia. Teach your students a dialectical method instead, where opposing and specific viewpoints are presented with the requirement to make a rational, evidence-based defense of their positions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
- chalst 6y ago
  "damaging to the intellectual future of your students" This might be true, if the teaching environment suppresses criticism of material presented. This is not what is supposed to happen, though: materials should be presented as an opportunity for critical evaluation and the multiplicity of views presented by students should provide the dialectical input needed, possibly supplemeted by interjections by the instructor if the students are showing groupthink. This is better that presenting two opposite claims and leaving it to the students to figure out on their own if one of them is correct. (Usually neither is entirely, and in real life, not every pirce of information comes helpfully accompanied by an appropriately matched opposing viewpoint). You're quick to assume the worst. Why is that?
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    Not to disagree with your overall point, but Marcuse wrote about plurality as a poor substitute for critical thought in the 60s: "Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power." The instructor's interjections provide a look-in here, but the whole presupposition is that the students have learned and sufficiently refined the capacity for critical thought inside and outside the classroom setting.
    - chalst 6y ago
      It is, of course, not any kind of substitute for critical thought. But the GP referenced dialectic by way of arguing for contrary materials to be presented in class: my point was that a living argument among the students is better for teaching dialectic than a curated selection of contrary views. The responsibility of the instructor goes beyond this elementary requirement for ensuring multiple viewpoints are presented.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Pluralism alone works somewhat counter to the original spirit of dissent - it means assent to one of the available groups. Which will ultimately lead to conflict unless mediated, and in conflict, bigger (or louder, or richer) usually wins, and takes all.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    That is if you assume that critical thinking is a goal of this educational system, not producing malleable effective work drones cheaply, or the slightly loftier goal of making sure USA stays ahead in advanced technologies. It has other aims too, like reducing crime indirectly and allegedly making social mobility more possible. Neither from which critical thinking skills requirement follows directly. If it were cultivating American spirit of dissent combined with cooperation and multicultural integration, the critical thinking, analysis and reading skills could follow from that. But this seems to have fallen by the wayside... Dissent without critical thinking leads to quarrel, anarchy and dissolution.

leric 6y ago

Hint: "china" didn't appear in this article.

raphlinus 6y ago
It did not, because there are many many threads of disinformation and I wasn't trying to catalog them all. I'm happy to engage a discussion of how to avoid misinformation specifically related to China, but not really clear what point you're trying to make here. I also think it's pretty far down on the list of threats we face right now, but understand others may feel differently about that.
- leric 6y ago
  You are talking about disinfomation and Covid19 without mentioning the state-of-the-art player: CCP, you won't get it right. This is an advice from a native Chinese.
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    I'm not knowledgeable enough about the CCP's disinformation efforts to do the topic justice. But if you'd be willing to write something in the same general spirit as my essay, I would be more than happy to link it.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      well, they started off actually going to credible sources, telling them to portrait them positively. i don't know of any proof for comment-style disinformation from them, but considering that its basically impossible to prove that.... i'm not sure someone could write a good article about that. its a sad reality we live in, imo. its also telling that very few published that attempt. i doubt it was only done to germany... others likely went ahead. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-china/germany-says-china-sought-to-encourage-positive-covid-19-comments-idUSKCN2280JW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german...

sbussard 6y ago

The appeal is to “listen to these people.” Unfortunately intellect doesn’t imply integrity, and appeal to authority is what got America to where it is. I would’ve preferred a framework for critical thinking, or at least more emphasis on that aspect rather than saying “you can trust these people.” That’s what everyone is saying, PhDs everywhere. I have an unfinished PhD too, and I’m saying “find out what makes it tick” and “follow the money”

raphlinus 6y ago
I had another section on "is this an echo chamber?" that didn't make it into the final version. It would have gone into internal consistency and evolution of thought in the face of evidence as reasonably objective yardsticks. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to accomplish trying to establish a framework for critical thinking in a blog post. In any case, the message is much more, "I've been paying close attention and have found these people worth listening to," and I don't think "authority" is really the word I'd use to express my criteria. I mean, I had a whole section against authority, and in my penultimate graf I implore readers to do their own critical thinking and not blindly follow.

trilinearnz 6y ago

Presumably most of this applies to the issue of climate change, also.

raphlinus 6y ago
Yes, and I refer to that at least in passing. I've observed that the political and informational environment around climate change and Covid-19 are basically identical, with the exception of about a couple orders of magnitude of time scale. That gives the opportunity to see how well arguments hold up in more or less real time, which is much less of a luxury with climate change.

deleted 6y ago

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bigpumpkin 6y ago

Just look at the difference in mask recommendations between governments over time will give people a feel on how difficult it is to ascertain truths in an evolving epidemic. There is also the issue of whether the absence of evidence constitutes evidence for absence, notably surrounding the controversies regarding the effectiveness of masks and hydroxychloroquine

archagon 6y ago

Thank you for this excellent post! Out of curiosity, how much time do you spend sifting through COVID-related material every day? Or is it mostly passive (Twitter experts, etc.) at this point?

raphlinus 6y ago
It goes up and down depending on how busy I am with other things, but aside from keeping on top of Twitter I try to read about a paper a day. I went pretty deep into a few topics, including HCQ and trying to understand the capabilities and limitations of isothermal PCR. One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming. That's maybe I something I could expand on, because it's similar to cherry-picking but still not quite the same. In any case, I still appreciate the references because often I learn something :)
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  >One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming. This is not unique to HN. Heck, often the data in the paper doesn't support the words in the paper! Science is hard.

mikedilger 6y ago

This author is mostly on to it. However, I'm hearing the dog that is not barking. We hear about listening to the science when it comes to COVID-19 and climate change. I totally agree. Why not also listen to the science when it comes to police shootings? And about whether George Floyd protesters further spread the virus or magically spookily didn't? We hear about criticism of the CDC, and I concur. Why not also admit the WHO made a long series of dangerous misstatements to such a degree that it's gotten hard to believe they were just accidents? IMHO the right-wing is leading the way in conspiracy theories and downright dangerous viewpoints. On this we agree. But the left-wing legacy media has its fair share of fake news as well, especially in continually to mischaracterize statements made by Trump, and in framing the narrative in extremely unhelpful ways. Why not report actual death statistics regarding race relations? Why is it never news when a black police officer shoots a white person? Our brains make inferences based on frequency of events, but the events we are bombarded with are biased in a way to lead us to wrong politically-motivated conclusions, time and time again. I'd like to think I'm in the middle. At the very least, I try to heap criticism on everybody. I'd like to see reasonable people to converge in the middle, en masse, and break America out of this dangerous partisan death spiral. This author is clearly reasonable, and on the right track, but seems to still be too much living in the main left-wing bubble and/or too afraid to criticize the left.

mikedilger 6y ago
I've dug further into this and have become less impressed. I'll leave just one example (I had many but I won't hog this space). Apparently this is "high end science journalism". Kai Kupferschmidt tweets this "Some people in the US actually seem to think that rising #covid19 cases won’t lead to rising deaths eventually. It’s like they are watching lightning flash across the sky thinking the thunder won‘t come crashing." Cases don't measure infections, they measure measured infections. Ramping up testing will ramp up cases even if infections do not ramp up. There is a credible theory that more cases are due to more testing, not due to more infections, and if that is true, the death rate will not follow. I don't personally accept that theory, but it's disingenuous and not "high end science journalism" when you fail to actually address the alternate theory.
- 6y ago

hihoheythere 6y ago

Thank you, this is an important and timely article. If, however, you believe that only one faction is anti-truth, you are blind or willfully dissonant.

raphlinus 6y ago
I probably could have worded that a bit more clearly. I was trying to make the argument that there is an anti-truth faction and that this faction is currently in a much stronger alliance with the right. I'm under no illusions that it's exclusive to the right, though, and was thinking of adding a section on anti-vax to clarify this. In any case, I wanted to stay away from reflexive both-siderism as I've most often seen it used as a bad faith argument.
- hihoheythere 6y ago
  Respect
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  As someone who agrees in sentiment with GP (but leans similarly to you), I thought you communicated that well enough in the article. For what little my opinion's worth.
- neel_k 6y ago
  Nowadays anti-vaccinantion is substantially a marker for being on the right, since Donald Trump ran for president while making anti-vaccination claims. This tremendously increased the popularity of antivax ideas on the right. See "Donald Trump and vaccination: The effect of political identity, conspiracist ideation and presidential tweets on vaccine hesitancy" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103119302628 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
danaris 6y ago
If you believe that the political right and political left in America are equally anti-truth—or even within a few orders of magnitude—then you are the one who is willfully blind. For 2 decades now, the right wing has been selling lies to build anger and get votes. It's well-documented and easily provable. The left wing (such as it is) has politicians who do what politicians do—which is to say, some of them are incapable of telling the truth to save their lives, while others are genuinely people of integrity trying to make things better—but they have absolutely not had anything like the kind of concerted effort to erase truth from existence in service of their own short-sighted ends. And the "even-handed" approach you are attempting to perpetuate is—again, demonstrably—a huge contributor to letting the Republicans get away with their many lies.

bhawks 6y ago

A significant part of the problem is social media technology and our relationship with it. The platforms encourage low effort hot takes and gamify narcissistic tendencies (likes, karma, rts, friends, followers). Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. It fosters divisiveness and tribalism at an amazing scale. I'd wager in a world without Twitter, Facebook, et al we'd have a healthier & stronger society. Humans aren't meant to communicate this way and numerous studies show the physiological toll on the individual and we are all witnessing the societal toll play out in front of us.

lowkeynthorough 6y ago
I’d like to make a similar argument for traditional mass media.. Readers don’t get to have nuanced discussions with content producers (journalist,editors,etc). This leads to not necessarily prosocial tendencies exhibited in, eg, the NYT doxxing of SSC or Vice not doing Naomi Wu a solid. Perhaps this is what Taleb may ascribe to a lack of skin in game? In the social web there is however the possibility of getting burned by the mob, so hmmmm.
chalst 6y ago
> Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. Of course this is impossible if the other party is not interested, but the format doesn't prevent engagement. The problem is that this engagement takes work and is rewarded less than the "hot takes" you describe. The literature on trust metrics that Raph has made a contribution to does suggest that the gamification can be tuned to reward constructive interactions. Given the recent advertiser boycott of Facebook, it is possible that there is now an incentive for applying these ideas in the context of popular social metrics.
- nullc 6y ago
  Prevent might be too strong a description, but discourage deeper engagement while radically facilitating the opposite? > can be tuned Sure, maybe. But thus far they haven't been. I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects. Our online communications platforms have a much greater effect on many people than a great many drugs that we only make available by prescription do... yet we've tapped in most of the country to them on a 16-hour a day central line drip feed before we ever really began studying their effects.

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totetsu 6y ago

Some more reading on this topic: - This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality -- Peter Pomerantsev - A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy -- Nancy L. Rosenblum - Trust, Facts, And Democracy In A Polarized World [podcast ] https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/pew/ https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/pew/ - darknetdiaries EP 65: PSYOP [podcast] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/65/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/65/ (interview with psychological operations worker) - Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare -- Thomas Rid

m0zg 6y ago

I've read that 40% of all deaths as of the first week of June were in elder care homes, a lot of them in NY and NJ where C19 patients were _sent to the nursing homes_. It's not so much a partisan issue as it is absolute shit state government issue. The decision to decimate the elderly was made at the state level, without exception. Governor Cuomo in particular needs to go to jail, in spite of granting himself immunity for this.

anon9001 6y ago
What a good example. I heard this claim recently from a family member and decided to look it up. It sounds unbelievable and deeply disturbing that Cuomo would knowingly send infected people to be admitted to nursing homes. The way the story is told, it sounds like he's actually trying to spread the disease and kill old people. It turns out it's all spin. I'll admit it took quite a bit of digging to get beyond all the nypost/wsj/fox stories spreading misinformation. Yes, Cuomo said a COVID-19 diagnosis was not a reason to exclude patients from returning to a nursing home in March. But also, hospital bed space was absolutely critical during that time. While this was happening, about 25% of the nursing home workforce was infected anyway, and staff seems to have been the primary means of transmission. Also, after a week or so of showing symptoms, it was thought that the patients are no longer infectious to others. The reason that you, my family, and the right-wing media are going crazy over Cuomo's decision is because Trump is making it a political issue and using this as a talking point. The reality is that Cuomo arguably made the best decision possible at the time, and there wasn't really an alternative. Other states made the same decision at the time, and based on the outbreak numbers we're seeing today, we'll see that decision again in the near future. The only other option was to let hospitals overflow their capacity. Maybe there should have been centers for COVID patients that are released from hospitals, but that's a massive logistical problem to be solved on short notice in the middle of a pandemic. Cuomo's executive order happened in March. By May, once things were getting under control, Cuomo changed that order, presumably because hospitals now had more capacity to house patients. Take a look at the curve from NY and tell me you could have made a better decision at the time: https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/ https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/ If you want a reason to be outraged at Cuomo, the real scandal here is NY state providing immunity from lawsuits to nursing homes who mishandled the outbreak. The reason you're not hearing outrage about that from right-wing press is that it's also a republican strategy. States across the country are granting lawsuit immunity to protect insurance companies and care facilities. This is the closest you're going to get to the real story, if you'd like to learn more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-deaths-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-de...

Blahagun 6y ago

I've read this article several times, each time trying to understand what the author want to say, but it's just impossible and the title is completely misleading. For months since all of this started there has been an extremely large division between not just ordinary people, but between people competent enough to discuss the issue like doctors and scientists. To be completely on one side is naive and telling people what the "truth" is is arrogant. Now there is tons of data to be working with and continuing with the narrative that we're in some serious and deadly pandemic is just ridiculous.

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raphlinus 6y ago

Some reflections, having slept on it. I am disappointed but not at all surprised that many of the reactions here are responses to my partisan position. I worked pretty hard to reduce that without compromising what I was trying to say. Certainly in the Twitter list I'm promoting I think I succeeded; it includes Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner under Trump and now advising two Republican governors on Covid-19, but doesn't have anybody (D or R) who uses their platform to push partisan political messages. But I think the reduction of everything to partisanship is one of the ways in which we're broken. It's impossible to have a productive conversation under those circumstances. I think it's a kind of learned helplessness. We don't want to solve problems ourselves, we want our political party (and institutions in general) to do it. I'm sure many of us on this thread have fantasies of our party vanquishing the other one on the political stage and carrying out our wishes. Or if our party is in power, then we reflexively want to rationalize away whatever flaws they have. (For the record, I am equally upset by what's going on in blue states and red. Seeing the numbers go up in California, where I live, is at odds with any simplistic narrative that Democrats embrace science and Republicans deny it, with direct consequences for Covid response) In any case, thanks for the responses, they're all respectful, and I appreciate that.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I would like some comments on this: I have been grappling with how to discuss issues related to covid as truthfully as possible, and I’m wondering if anyone disagrees. My intuition as a physicist says that any discussion or comparison of covid effects that look at total numbers, while true, is less meaningful than looking at these numbers normalized by population size. Both sets of numbers are true, both lead the intuition to different conclusions. What conclusion should the intuition land on? Isn’t it strange that people can argue behind truthful data to lead people to completely different conclusions?

phroobster 6y ago
Often when I see numbers instead of percentages in these discussions, I can’t help but think it’s intended to manipulate the reader and that the percentage wouldn’t evoke the same emotional reaction.
sbussard 6y ago
It makes sense to me (B.S. Physics, 2010) it’s easy to tell arbitrary stories with quantities defined up to a constant.
raphlinus 6y ago
Both sets of numbers are meaningful, for understanding different parts of the problem. The spread of an infectious disease like Covid-19 is not a virus moving through a relatively homogeneous population, but rather the overlay of a lot of small outbreaks. Early on, when the total number of cases is small, absolute numbers are most meaningful as a basis for comparison. [1] is a thread from Mar 29 (from the brilliant visualization expert John Burn-Murdoch) arguing that absolute numbers are more predictive of "death toll one week after 10th death" and that normalizing by population only makes smaller countries look worse. But as the spread continues (a process which takes time), per-capita numbers make sense. Mr. Burn-Murdoch revised his position (see [2] for a podcast with transcript where he talks about his thinking), and now the FT graphs have a normalized option (though their focus has moved on to other metrics such as excess mortality). Carl Bergstrom also has a great thread [3] where he talks about the choice, concluding that both are valid as long as you're careful about context. HTH [1]: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244380095164420101 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244380095164420101 [2]: https://voices.media/transcript-john-burn-murdoch-senior-data-visualisation-journalist-financial-times/ https://voices.media/transcript-john-burn-murdoch-senior-dat... [3]: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1249930293928030209 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1249930293928030209