5 ms·

What a disgustingly terrible article. Never explains what precise facts Facebook is taking into consideration as opinion, just throws around political leanings

What a disgustingly terrible article. Never explains what precise facts Facebook is taking into consideration as opinion, just throws around political leanings and pointlessly polarizes it as "climate scientists" vs "climate change deniers". This is the kind of journalism that only serves to divide the people even further by empowering their tribalism instead of trying to discuss the matter at hand.

Covzire 6y ago
More insidiously, it's another drumbeat for the idea that we need classical media gate keepers to invade people's personal space and "correct" any wrong-think. Very dangerous and unwelcome idea for a free society. The media has no valid purpose for having the power to amend private citizens conversations, we wouldn't tolerate at a bar and we shouldn't on our personal web space.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- floatrock 6y ago
  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is making you think he doesn't exist. Even without active censorship, Facebook very much is a gate keeper invading your personal space. It's just rather than building up walls around you, it's merely giving you a shovel and showering you with dopamine bursts every time you dig yourself down into your own personal hole. The end effect is the same, though -- all you hear is echos bouncing off walls around you. You just think the echos are only your own. I agree a free society shouldn't tolerate amending private citizen's conversation. However, that comes with the responsibility of recognizing the more insidious ways of doing that, such as when your attention has been hijacked with industrialized behavioral profiling. The "private citizen conversations" you hear bouncing off your walls are being algorithmically seeded by whatever brings in the most dollars the most efficiently. That's not a truly free society, that's just a very subtle form of mass indoctrination. The devil already exists out there whether you think he does or not. And when you play with the devil, the only winning move is to not play his game.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    The real hillariously devious move is the devil does not really exist as a literal thing. Yet he causes people to carry out the agenda by not only scapegoating it for their selfish desires but from countereffective attempts to fight the devil. If he was real it would be easier to learn and recognize an actual bad actor and their mechanisms. That can't be done when it is fake. Attempts to fight are always a wild goose chase when building something good is the only actual way. "The secret to my success is that I do not really exist."
  - BTCOG 6y ago
    Completely wrong. You do not have to at all use Facebook, or Twitter. They are a private website, and it is you and others who so choose to go onto their platform and post your own private information, and allow them to moderate your own private conversations. The problem is that all these people never should have allowed that from day one. I can 100% honestly say that I work professionally in network engineering and I do not and have never used Twitter, Facebook, or even a LinkedIn profile. They are not required, they are information silos and you've chosen to go into someone else's domain and host your private thoughts there for others to moderate. That's the problem. Create your own hosted website like the web is made for, and keep your conversation and your own personal control there. Period.
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  >More insidiously, it's another drumbeat for the idea that we need classical media gate keepers to invade people's personal space and "correct" any wrong-think. Very dangerous and unwelcome idea for a free society. We desperately need some mechanism for correcting bad thinking based on falsehoods. You can believe whatever you want if your beliefs have no effect on me, but the world has become so complex and interconnected that it's very difficult to point to something and say "your opinion on this has no consequences for other people." Vaccines? Herd immunity is effected. Not vaccinating your child has little impact on yourself, but if enough people do it, it effects the entire civilization. What should be done about this? This article is about one of the biggest, climate change. Every political issue is shaded with the brush of ideology, and that has come at the cost of actual facts and thinking. There is the old saying "strict adherence to rules is nothing more than an excuse to avoid thinking." The same thing can be said to ideology. It is natural that the mediums we have for disseminating information should have responsibility for the integrity of that information. But I am looking forward to hearing what you would suggest such a mechanism would be.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    The best mechanism against bad ideas is to allow trustworthy people who can speak clearly and honestly about those ideas to do so. The first amendment, in addition to freedom of speech, was supposed to enshrine the idea of a free press so that the two could keep the government in check. The press was supposed to allow honest trustworthy people to become known and to inform the public about issues of the day, and allow their honesty to be questioned and put on trial. The press chose a different path long ago, favoring one political party to an extreme degree where instead of the public's ability to test the honesty of politicians and pundits, we are simply to be told without question, mostly along party lines, what the truth is. Simply adding more power to the press will without a doubt make every problem in America much, much worse in the long run.
    - jmcqk6 6y ago
      First of all, talking about "the press" as though it's some monolithic entity is just wrong. "The Press" is made up of thousands and thousands of uncoordinated organizations and people. There are still honest and trustworthy members of "the press" out there and available. Just as each individual member of "the press" has a responsibility and duty to serve that role well, we also have a shared responsibility to hold them to that standard. What we are facing here is a not just a failure of "the press", but a failure across society as a whole. We mostly don't want to do the right thing, which means putting aside our egos and focusing on what is actually true. We want to do the thing that feels good, which is getting confirmation of our current beliefs as righteous. "The press" is not responsible for this feeling, but some of them definitely benefit from it. >allow trustworthy people who can speak clearly and honestly about those ideas to do so And who, exactly, is going to make these decisions about who is "allowed" to speak or not? What, exactly, is that mechanism?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wl 6y ago
Here's the Daily Wire article (paywall, so here's a mirror): https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-beha... And here's a reasonable analysis of what it gets wrong: https://sciencefeedback.co/evaluation/article-by-michael-shellenberger-mixes-accurate-and-inaccurate-claims-in-support-of-a-misleading-and-overly-simplistic-argumentation-about-climate-change/ https://sciencefeedback.co/evaluation/article-by-michael-she... Flagging it as misleading seems fair. I cannot find the Washington Examiner oped in question.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  The "reasonable analysis" is hilarious. E.g.: climate change is affecting wildfires, BUT fires have decreased. Says a Geography professor from Swansea. This kind of stuff only serves to create more doubt about climate science and, unfortunately among some people, science in general.
  - wl 6y ago
    Your summary of his comment is misleading because you omit his explanation of how both are true. > “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003″. > It is correct that the total global area burned has OVERALL declined over the last decades, BUT this is incorrectly used to argue that climate change is not affecting wildfires. The overall decrease is largely due a substantial reduction in flammable vegetation in African grasslands arising from human land use changes.
  - vangelis 6y ago
    I'd hope HN posters would understand that systems aren't that simple and read the full content of that analysis.
- SaltyLemonZest 6y ago
  The analysis is, ironically, guilty of the same cherry-picking it accuses the original article of. The checkers identify two false claims and two misleading ones out of Shellenberger's bulleted list of twelve "facts few people know". But the summary never engages with the article's core claim, that climate change won't be the end of the world or of human society even though many in the general public think it will. The first checker explicitly agrees with that claim! There's also a larger question here. If claims which dispute scientific consensus are fact-checkably false, what does that mean for scientific debate? If Facebook had been created in the 60s, would Freudianism have been forever locked in as an effective form of psychiatry?

Covzire 6y ago

More insidiously, it's another drumbeat for the idea that we need classical media gate keepers to invade people's personal space and "correct" any wrong-think. Very dangerous and unwelcome idea for a free society. The media has no valid purpose for having the power to amend private citizens conversations, we wouldn't tolerate at a bar and we shouldn't on our personal web space.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
floatrock 6y ago
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is making you think he doesn't exist. Even without active censorship, Facebook very much is a gate keeper invading your personal space. It's just rather than building up walls around you, it's merely giving you a shovel and showering you with dopamine bursts every time you dig yourself down into your own personal hole. The end effect is the same, though -- all you hear is echos bouncing off walls around you. You just think the echos are only your own. I agree a free society shouldn't tolerate amending private citizen's conversation. However, that comes with the responsibility of recognizing the more insidious ways of doing that, such as when your attention has been hijacked with industrialized behavioral profiling. The "private citizen conversations" you hear bouncing off your walls are being algorithmically seeded by whatever brings in the most dollars the most efficiently. That's not a truly free society, that's just a very subtle form of mass indoctrination. The devil already exists out there whether you think he does or not. And when you play with the devil, the only winning move is to not play his game.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The real hillariously devious move is the devil does not really exist as a literal thing. Yet he causes people to carry out the agenda by not only scapegoating it for their selfish desires but from countereffective attempts to fight the devil. If he was real it would be easier to learn and recognize an actual bad actor and their mechanisms. That can't be done when it is fake. Attempts to fight are always a wild goose chase when building something good is the only actual way. "The secret to my success is that I do not really exist."
- BTCOG 6y ago
  Completely wrong. You do not have to at all use Facebook, or Twitter. They are a private website, and it is you and others who so choose to go onto their platform and post your own private information, and allow them to moderate your own private conversations. The problem is that all these people never should have allowed that from day one. I can 100% honestly say that I work professionally in network engineering and I do not and have never used Twitter, Facebook, or even a LinkedIn profile. They are not required, they are information silos and you've chosen to go into someone else's domain and host your private thoughts there for others to moderate. That's the problem. Create your own hosted website like the web is made for, and keep your conversation and your own personal control there. Period.
jmcqk6 6y ago
>More insidiously, it's another drumbeat for the idea that we need classical media gate keepers to invade people's personal space and "correct" any wrong-think. Very dangerous and unwelcome idea for a free society. We desperately need some mechanism for correcting bad thinking based on falsehoods. You can believe whatever you want if your beliefs have no effect on me, but the world has become so complex and interconnected that it's very difficult to point to something and say "your opinion on this has no consequences for other people." Vaccines? Herd immunity is effected. Not vaccinating your child has little impact on yourself, but if enough people do it, it effects the entire civilization. What should be done about this? This article is about one of the biggest, climate change. Every political issue is shaded with the brush of ideology, and that has come at the cost of actual facts and thinking. There is the old saying "strict adherence to rules is nothing more than an excuse to avoid thinking." The same thing can be said to ideology. It is natural that the mediums we have for disseminating information should have responsibility for the integrity of that information. But I am looking forward to hearing what you would suggest such a mechanism would be.
- Covzire 6y ago
  The best mechanism against bad ideas is to allow trustworthy people who can speak clearly and honestly about those ideas to do so. The first amendment, in addition to freedom of speech, was supposed to enshrine the idea of a free press so that the two could keep the government in check. The press was supposed to allow honest trustworthy people to become known and to inform the public about issues of the day, and allow their honesty to be questioned and put on trial. The press chose a different path long ago, favoring one political party to an extreme degree where instead of the public's ability to test the honesty of politicians and pundits, we are simply to be told without question, mostly along party lines, what the truth is. Simply adding more power to the press will without a doubt make every problem in America much, much worse in the long run.
  - jmcqk6 6y ago
    First of all, talking about "the press" as though it's some monolithic entity is just wrong. "The Press" is made up of thousands and thousands of uncoordinated organizations and people. There are still honest and trustworthy members of "the press" out there and available. Just as each individual member of "the press" has a responsibility and duty to serve that role well, we also have a shared responsibility to hold them to that standard. What we are facing here is a not just a failure of "the press", but a failure across society as a whole. We mostly don't want to do the right thing, which means putting aside our egos and focusing on what is actually true. We want to do the thing that feels good, which is getting confirmation of our current beliefs as righteous. "The press" is not responsible for this feeling, but some of them definitely benefit from it. >allow trustworthy people who can speak clearly and honestly about those ideas to do so And who, exactly, is going to make these decisions about who is "allowed" to speak or not? What, exactly, is that mechanism?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wl 6y ago

Here's the Daily Wire article (paywall, so here's a mirror): https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-beha... And here's a reasonable analysis of what it gets wrong: https://sciencefeedback.co/evaluation/article-by-michael-shellenberger-mixes-accurate-and-inaccurate-claims-in-support-of-a-misleading-and-overly-simplistic-argumentation-about-climate-change/ https://sciencefeedback.co/evaluation/article-by-michael-she... Flagging it as misleading seems fair. I cannot find the Washington Examiner oped in question.

lazyjones 6y ago
The "reasonable analysis" is hilarious. E.g.: climate change is affecting wildfires, BUT fires have decreased. Says a Geography professor from Swansea. This kind of stuff only serves to create more doubt about climate science and, unfortunately among some people, science in general.
- wl 6y ago
  Your summary of his comment is misleading because you omit his explanation of how both are true. > “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003″. > It is correct that the total global area burned has OVERALL declined over the last decades, BUT this is incorrectly used to argue that climate change is not affecting wildfires. The overall decrease is largely due a substantial reduction in flammable vegetation in African grasslands arising from human land use changes.
- vangelis 6y ago
  I'd hope HN posters would understand that systems aren't that simple and read the full content of that analysis.
SaltyLemonZest 6y ago
The analysis is, ironically, guilty of the same cherry-picking it accuses the original article of. The checkers identify two false claims and two misleading ones out of Shellenberger's bulleted list of twelve "facts few people know". But the summary never engages with the article's core claim, that climate change won't be the end of the world or of human society even though many in the general public think it will. The first checker explicitly agrees with that claim! There's also a larger question here. If claims which dispute scientific consensus are fact-checkably false, what does that mean for scientific debate? If Facebook had been created in the 60s, would Freudianism have been forever locked in as an effective form of psychiatry?