10 ms·

What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others. Some believe the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA. Some believe the earth is flat. Some

What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others. Some believe the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA. Some believe the earth is flat. Some believe a Nigerian prince got their email address from their dead friend’s cousin’s mother’s embassy and is about to send them a billion dollars. How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit? If your main objection to censorship is that it is used to hide the truth, why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit and distributors that enable that behaviour? Just as the left–right political spectrum is actually more of a circle than a straight line, it seems to me that the spectrum of censorship vs free speech is also a circle. A bad actor may obfuscate truth through censorship; a bad actor may also obfuscate truth through massive volumes of misinformation. The latter is what is happening here. It’s a denial of service attack on human brains, and like a DoS attack, the only way to weather it is to filter the malicious traffic—you can’t just add capacity in the form of “good counterpoints” since human brains can’t scale like that.

timeeater 6y ago
" why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit" That analogy is simply incorrect. You can spend your life on YouTube watching cat videos, no conspiracy theory in sight. Nobody can force you to watch their video on YouTube. So nobody has a megaphone in YouTube. Only YouTube itself has the megaphone, they can choose what to push to people. It is NOT TV where you have a single stream that everybody watched, and if you insert shit, everybody watches it.
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  It's crazy. I started writing why I disagreed based on my visceral reaction to the topic. But as I constructed my arguments, they were not sound. So I suppose I agree? Hm. The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.
  - timeeater 6y ago
    Personally I am not from the US, and I don't know that the government is spewing lies. What makes you so sure? And if you are so sure, why are you worried people could be swayed by the lies - why not make them equally sure with the information you have? However, I am happy with letting the courts decide. Where is the problem? I have seen lies from all big political parties in the US.
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      it's funny the lies this time are coming not from the government but from the opposition and their propaganda machinery. I'd never consider myself government supporter, but with Trump it's like the last bastion before the country is overrun with far-left SJW hordes swayed by misinformation. It's ironic the ultimate win for democracy manifests itself in stolen elections.
      - Eldt 6y ago
        It's funny how from my perspective the reality is quite nearly the exact opposite of what you puport
        bra-ket 6y ago
        yeah, there are 80M people like you and just 74M like me, congratulations. Both groups are influenced by media and social circles but the first group tends to trust others opinions more, methinks. The fact mainstream media was pretty much unified in anti-Trump stance strengthen that theory. If every day for 4 years you hear just how bad is the orange man (from someone you trust) it would definitely shape a certain reality in ones mind.
        Applejinx 6y ago
        Well, I have a belief system that's coherent and arrived at through my personal experience, which had me thinking very poorly of the 'orange man' LONG before it became a political thing. In fact, I'm damn horrified at how far the guy got, and I think I understand quite well how it was done. It's not just some abstract 'otherwise neutral orange man' whose identity is entirely constructed by news media, and that's a strange argument to make. I think many people thought 'Al Capone bad' too, particularly if he'd robbed them or shot somebody they liked. I'm sure the greedy news media HELPED people get mad at Al Capone, and that there were redeeming factors in the guy, but the notion that there were automatically as many redeeming factors in Capone as in everybody else is NOT sensible. Maybe he just was mean, and sucked. Likewise with 'orange man'. Way before he was a political figure, he was mean and sucked REALLY bad relative to my sense of how things work in the world. Some people just suck very, very much. If you assume anyone who has success automatically does not suck, I admire your optimism but I sure don't share it. Seems to me that without considerable oversight, the opposite is usually true, and that the worst people, entities, companies etc. win. Hence, the invention of means of oversight, and the attempt to codify what's good and bad.
- RussianCow 6y ago
  You have a good point, but I think you're downplaying the power of clickbait. I consider myself a relatively smart, educated, and rational person, and I can't tell you the number of outlandish headlines I've clicked on just to see what they say.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    The thing with censorship is they aren't going to censor the clickbait. Google knows exactly what clickbait looks like and they could have purged it years ago with a few algorithm tweaks that nobody would have minded. They're going to censor stuff that makes people ask hard-to-answer questions and/or challenge consensus positions. That sounds like a good idea until it clicks that good scientists ask hard to answer questions and challenge consensus positions. Censorship is fundamentally anti-evidence. People can't present evidence that the channel owners don't like, and people can't model how to handle untrue opinions in conversation because they never come up.
  - timeeater 6y ago
    Even if you click on the clickbait, it doesn't imply that you automatically believe everything it delivers.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Indeed you probably clicked on it because it seemed unbelievable
- pjc50 6y ago
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8360073/More-60-people-joining-extremist-groups-Facebook-pages-recommended-algorithms.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8360073/More-60-peo... (caution Daily Mail; mildly NSFW sidebar) "internal ⁦@Facebook⁩ research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation." So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it". I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.
  - timeeater 6y ago
    The 60% number sounds big, but how many people actually joined groups with extremist content? Without that context, the 60% doesn't say much. It also doesn't say why people joined those groups. Maybe they are just curious to see what the crazy people are up to.
  - BrandonMarc 6y ago
    ... and Facebook's recommendation would be based on their prior activity. If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups. In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
    - pbourke 6y ago
      > If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups. The whole point of recommendation algorithms is to find missing edges in the graph, so it can easily lead you to misinformation in 1 or 2 hops. Think of it this way: the misinformation content is highly valuable - it generates a lot of engagement. There is always a “potential energy” (people like you also liked...) between low-value content and high-value content that the platforms are attempting to convert to “kinetic energy” (engagement - views, clicks, comments) in order to monetize it. The goal is to find the shortest path to the high value content.
georgeplusplus 6y ago
>> What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others Sounds like we have an education problem then. Censorship of a viewpoint and media that displays a giant FACT/FALSE in its headline amplifies exactly the problem you wish to solve.
mlang23 6y ago
We are talking about an adult audience, right? They are allowed to vote. So you have to assume they are independent enough to make their own decisions. Period. Your argument for censorship sounds a lot like patronisation.
- ako 6y ago
  I think you can argue that that assumption is wrong, and that that is also the biggest problem with democracy and voting. You are asking people to vote on a topic they are often not well informed on, or are unwilling/unable to spend time to educate themselves thoroughly. Also anybody of a certain age is allowed to vote, regardless their level of education, and their ability to make sound decisions. If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
  - bloodorange 6y ago
    Driving on public roads is a privilege. Voting is a right.
  - galangalalgol 6y ago
    In the US you vote on people, not policy. Most people can't understand all the ramifications of a policy, but a lot of people can spot a crooked liar if the know them a little, we do it every day. That is why I like the older idea of picking state legislators and letting them pick the president and maybe the senators. And up the number of people in the house. The idea is that you should know or know a lot of people who know the person you are voting for. Media won't come into it, civics education won't come into it. It will be like picking a plumber in your neighborhood.
    - cicero 6y ago
      If both of the candidates are crooked liars, how do you choose? I picked the party that I think is closer to being right.
  - mlang23 6y ago
raxxorrax 6y ago
These are extreme cases where you think there is consent on any single example, but it is still not a good argument for a general case.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit? I don't. I also don't believe the people at companies like YouTube are any likely to be better than myself or the average person.
- csnover 6y ago
  It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit. All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html [2] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html (table of contents)
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit. The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to. > All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. This is precisely why no person can be expected to perform this role as a gatekeeper of truth. Thanks for your links, I'm a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. With regard to [1], there's no reliable test to see where a person is on the psych spectrum, even heavy doses of introspection can lead to limited and imperfect insight, and its likely the case that the same person will move up and down on the psych spectrum depending on a variety of factors. Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.

timeeater 6y ago

" why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit" That analogy is simply incorrect. You can spend your life on YouTube watching cat videos, no conspiracy theory in sight. Nobody can force you to watch their video on YouTube. So nobody has a megaphone in YouTube. Only YouTube itself has the megaphone, they can choose what to push to people. It is NOT TV where you have a single stream that everybody watched, and if you insert shit, everybody watches it.

bonestormii_ 6y ago
It's crazy. I started writing why I disagreed based on my visceral reaction to the topic. But as I constructed my arguments, they were not sound. So I suppose I agree? Hm. The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.
- timeeater 6y ago
  Personally I am not from the US, and I don't know that the government is spewing lies. What makes you so sure? And if you are so sure, why are you worried people could be swayed by the lies - why not make them equally sure with the information you have? However, I am happy with letting the courts decide. Where is the problem? I have seen lies from all big political parties in the US.
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    it's funny the lies this time are coming not from the government but from the opposition and their propaganda machinery. I'd never consider myself government supporter, but with Trump it's like the last bastion before the country is overrun with far-left SJW hordes swayed by misinformation. It's ironic the ultimate win for democracy manifests itself in stolen elections.
    - Eldt 6y ago
      It's funny how from my perspective the reality is quite nearly the exact opposite of what you puport
      - bra-ket 6y ago
        yeah, there are 80M people like you and just 74M like me, congratulations. Both groups are influenced by media and social circles but the first group tends to trust others opinions more, methinks. The fact mainstream media was pretty much unified in anti-Trump stance strengthen that theory. If every day for 4 years you hear just how bad is the orange man (from someone you trust) it would definitely shape a certain reality in ones mind.
        Applejinx 6y ago
        Well, I have a belief system that's coherent and arrived at through my personal experience, which had me thinking very poorly of the 'orange man' LONG before it became a political thing. In fact, I'm damn horrified at how far the guy got, and I think I understand quite well how it was done. It's not just some abstract 'otherwise neutral orange man' whose identity is entirely constructed by news media, and that's a strange argument to make. I think many people thought 'Al Capone bad' too, particularly if he'd robbed them or shot somebody they liked. I'm sure the greedy news media HELPED people get mad at Al Capone, and that there were redeeming factors in the guy, but the notion that there were automatically as many redeeming factors in Capone as in everybody else is NOT sensible. Maybe he just was mean, and sucked. Likewise with 'orange man'. Way before he was a political figure, he was mean and sucked REALLY bad relative to my sense of how things work in the world. Some people just suck very, very much. If you assume anyone who has success automatically does not suck, I admire your optimism but I sure don't share it. Seems to me that without considerable oversight, the opposite is usually true, and that the worst people, entities, companies etc. win. Hence, the invention of means of oversight, and the attempt to codify what's good and bad.
RussianCow 6y ago
You have a good point, but I think you're downplaying the power of clickbait. I consider myself a relatively smart, educated, and rational person, and I can't tell you the number of outlandish headlines I've clicked on just to see what they say.
- roenxi 6y ago
  The thing with censorship is they aren't going to censor the clickbait. Google knows exactly what clickbait looks like and they could have purged it years ago with a few algorithm tweaks that nobody would have minded. They're going to censor stuff that makes people ask hard-to-answer questions and/or challenge consensus positions. That sounds like a good idea until it clicks that good scientists ask hard to answer questions and challenge consensus positions. Censorship is fundamentally anti-evidence. People can't present evidence that the channel owners don't like, and people can't model how to handle untrue opinions in conversation because they never come up.
- timeeater 6y ago
  Even if you click on the clickbait, it doesn't imply that you automatically believe everything it delivers.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Indeed you probably clicked on it because it seemed unbelievable
pjc50 6y ago
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8360073/More-60-people-joining-extremist-groups-Facebook-pages-recommended-algorithms.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8360073/More-60-peo... (caution Daily Mail; mildly NSFW sidebar) "internal ⁦@Facebook⁩ research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation." So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it". I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.
- timeeater 6y ago
  The 60% number sounds big, but how many people actually joined groups with extremist content? Without that context, the 60% doesn't say much. It also doesn't say why people joined those groups. Maybe they are just curious to see what the crazy people are up to.
- BrandonMarc 6y ago
  ... and Facebook's recommendation would be based on their prior activity. If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups. In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
  - pbourke 6y ago
    > If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups. The whole point of recommendation algorithms is to find missing edges in the graph, so it can easily lead you to misinformation in 1 or 2 hops. Think of it this way: the misinformation content is highly valuable - it generates a lot of engagement. There is always a “potential energy” (people like you also liked...) between low-value content and high-value content that the platforms are attempting to convert to “kinetic energy” (engagement - views, clicks, comments) in order to monetize it. The goal is to find the shortest path to the high value content.

georgeplusplus 6y ago

>> What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others Sounds like we have an education problem then. Censorship of a viewpoint and media that displays a giant FACT/FALSE in its headline amplifies exactly the problem you wish to solve.

mlang23 6y ago

We are talking about an adult audience, right? They are allowed to vote. So you have to assume they are independent enough to make their own decisions. Period. Your argument for censorship sounds a lot like patronisation.

ako 6y ago
I think you can argue that that assumption is wrong, and that that is also the biggest problem with democracy and voting. You are asking people to vote on a topic they are often not well informed on, or are unwilling/unable to spend time to educate themselves thoroughly. Also anybody of a certain age is allowed to vote, regardless their level of education, and their ability to make sound decisions. If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
- bloodorange 6y ago
  Driving on public roads is a privilege. Voting is a right.
- galangalalgol 6y ago
  In the US you vote on people, not policy. Most people can't understand all the ramifications of a policy, but a lot of people can spot a crooked liar if the know them a little, we do it every day. That is why I like the older idea of picking state legislators and letting them pick the president and maybe the senators. And up the number of people in the house. The idea is that you should know or know a lot of people who know the person you are voting for. Media won't come into it, civics education won't come into it. It will be like picking a plumber in your neighborhood.
  - cicero 6y ago
    If both of the candidates are crooked liars, how do you choose? I picked the party that I think is closer to being right.
- mlang23 6y ago

raxxorrax 6y ago

These are extreme cases where you think there is consent on any single example, but it is still not a good argument for a general case.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit? I don't. I also don't believe the people at companies like YouTube are any likely to be better than myself or the average person.

csnover 6y ago
It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit. All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html [2] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html (table of contents)
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit. The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to. > All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. This is precisely why no person can be expected to perform this role as a gatekeeper of truth. Thanks for your links, I'm a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. With regard to [1], there's no reliable test to see where a person is on the psych spectrum, even heavy doses of introspection can lead to limited and imperfect insight, and its likely the case that the same person will move up and down on the psych spectrum depending on a variety of factors. Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.