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The people do it to themselves. They believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. This is still largely a free cou

• danaris 6y ago
  But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations by the various institutions of our country, it is, for want of a better term, no longer a "free market" of news.
  • katbyte 6y ago
    People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.
    • _qulr 6y ago
      Held accountable by whom? The government? Which is controlled roughly half the time by a party which you probably disagree with vehemently?
      • Barrin92 6y ago
        In countries in which the truth is defended as OP demands clowns don't tend it to make it into government in the first place, but I see your point it's hard to see how the US gets out of this cycle
        • salawat 6y ago
          Didn't Iceland literally have a clown for a mayor or something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_Gnarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_Gnarr Comedian technically, but eh.
          • jimmygrapes 6y ago
            Ukraine as well.
        • testrun 6y ago
          Which countries?
    • artificialLimbs 6y ago
      "lies shouldn't be allowed" Uh huh, and who decides what is a lie? There is a term called "slippery slope" and free speech may have been its founding issue.
      • baq 6y ago
        But who’s paying for verifying free speech full of lies? Right now the price for no verification is viewable on all news channels.
      • xienze 6y ago
        > Uh huh, and who decides what is a lie? Well obviously that would be unelected “fact checkers” who aren’t held accountable for anything and suspiciously seem to find nearly everything said by people in one particular political party to be “pants on fire” lies.
        • dane-pgp 6y ago
          > unelected “fact checkers” You're right to point out the dangers of entrusting an unaccountable group with the responsibility of determining what is and isn't true, but I'm not sure that electing the fact checkers would improve their accuracy. Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.
          • xienze 6y ago
            > Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers. Come on, I could easily remove context and/or provide a misleading "authoritative" interpretation to basically anything a Democrat says in order to brand it a lie. How new are you to this game?
      • maxerickson 6y ago
        Courts. Even USA has laws against libel and slander, it's not like the status quo is that you can just say whatever you want with no fear of consequences.
    • nsajko 6y ago
      This is an interesting point and my sibling comments are wrong: I'm sure the judiciary could provide that accountability, given new law. Even though I think Wikipedia is a failed project (because of it's own guidelines not being followed), it's actually got pretty good guidelines regarding verifiability and due weight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability I'm imagining the media could be structured upon some sort of protocol codified in law that would ensure those guidelines would be respected. However the main thing that's necessary is probably instilling some sense of duty, honor and integrity in a large number of individuals. No idea how to go about that. EDIT: in the USA the FCC actually had regulation with a similar intent in the near past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
    • mistermann 6y ago
      > People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening. I've suggested to @dang that he tries implementing a kind of experimental discussion mode like that right here on HN, where for certain types of topics he could enable this mode and see what the effect would be on the human mind. I don't know all the particulars of what changes should be included in such a mode (would be a good topic for a discussion), but the main one I would include is an additional guideline something along the lines of "Please exert some effort in restricting your statements to the discussion of reasonably conclusive true facts about physical reality." This way, when people inevitably succumb to mistaking the virtual reality in their mind (where one has supernatural powers like omniscience, the ability to read minds at scale, predict the future with precise accuracy, completely understand infinitely complex indeterminate/chaotic systems, etc) for physical reality (where we do not have these powers), such comments could be flagged and reviewed a few days later (when cooler heads prevail) in a group Post Incident Review process of some sort (maybe a zoom meeting), where we could examine our behavior from a more metaphysical perspective, the goal being to increase awareness of the fact that inaccurate beliefs about reality are not something that only members of our personal outgroups suffer from, but rather something we all suffer from. It is simply a consequence of the same base software we all run in our minds. Unfortunately, this idea seems to be rather unpopular (shocking!) - so, the beatings will continue until morale improves (or some variation of that), or until this never ending process comes to its natural conclusion. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress. https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-morphology-of-a-humorous-phrase/ https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-morpholo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHExbJGIQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHExbJGIQs https://youtu.be/smX2UtdJFq8 https://youtu.be/smX2UtdJFq8 (not recommended for filthy casuals)
      • NateEag 6y ago
        Your proposed system seems mostly unaware that bias pervades all people and therefore all systems. I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.
        • mistermann 6y ago
  • _qulr 6y ago
    I would argue that this is the result of a free market of news. These media organizations only exist because they tell people what they want to hear. There's a huge market for that. In order to peddle anything, you have to get people to listen first, and you can't take listeners for granted in a society where the media is not controlled by the government.
    • jmfldn 6y ago
      If only it were that simple, that it's just serving people what they want. Running with that idea for a second, isn't what people want partly a function of propaganda, brainwashing and so on. The narratives that we're fed are largely those of the rich and powerful or, in the case of fringe views on social media, those of often unqualified people at best (and lunatics at worst). The metaphor of a market of people autonomously choosing news obfuscates a much more complex reality about why so many people want to hear nonsense or views that undermine their own interests?
      • _qulr 6y ago
        You're correct that the reality is much more complex. To expand, I would say that people are indeed susceptible to propaganda, but only propaganda of a certain kind. It has to reinforce their preexisting biases. You can't just force any propaganda on any arbitrary person, that's not going to work. That's why I say people do it to themselves. They come to trust the public figures who tell them specifically what they specifically want to hear, and then this trust and good feeling can be exploited for other purposes. That's not unique to any one political party. All political partisans are susceptible to propaganda, but only party-specific propaganda. There are different forms of propaganda on different sides that would never work on the other side.
        • danaris 6y ago
          Mm, I think that's true in some circumstances. However, if people are put in a situation where the only information they have access to—or the only information given an official sanction—is the propaganda, then whether or not it conflicts with their existing biases, they're pretty unlikely to be able to refute it. Especially not over a long period of time. Also worth noting that saying people "do it to themselves" only applies to adults: the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children: providing an "official sanction" to only the propaganda that agrees with their biases, thus ensuring that their children grow up molded in the same way, with no easy way to make an informed choice for themselves.
  • dageshi 6y ago
    News is basically a cheap form of entertainment nowadays. The clue really is in the name, it's just "new stuff" and humans seem hardwired to always want to be consuming "new stuff".
  • giantg2 6y ago
    The genuine sources have issues like bias or sloppy investigating, that leads to outright lies too. For years the media was representing the gender wage gap as being a man and women in the same job with all attributes other than gender being equal (even Obama said this during a state of the union). That clearly isn't what the BLS study says (difference in occupations, in part, drive the wage gap on an aggregate level). https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/31/great-news-ladies-the-gender-pay-gap-is-a-myth/?sh=1bdef0bc3b34 https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/31/grea...
    • bitwize 6y ago
      Yes, all other things being equal including level of experience, a woman makes about 98% as a man. But how many women are afforded the opportunities to attain the job and life experience it takes to make as much as a man at the same job? Once again -- stop thinking equality and start thinking equity.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Considering women obtain degrees at a higher rate than men, I'd say there's just as much opportunity. If you are alluding to family constraints, having a family is a choice. I'm a man with a family and I have seen many opportunities disappear as a result of my decision to have a family.
        • bitwize 6y ago
          The U.S. lost 140,000 jobs last month. All of them -- 100% -- were held by women. Women simply do not have the same opportunities that men do in this country.
  • salawat 6y ago
    >But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations Where are these "genuine journalistic organizations" defined except in our own minds? There is no journalist licence. There is no license to publish. You have a printer, and someone to buy what you print out? Congratulations! You're a journalist! In the U.S. anyway.
    • andromeduck 6y ago
      As it should be. I like to think of journalism as the softest science in that it has a lot of subtlety - hidden connections and dimensions - but ultimately the objective is to be able to infer the state of the world at some time - be it past, present of future - based on some partial information. And just like in regular science, collective knowledge can be leveraged and built upon if enough people take it upon themselves to do spot checks verifying the accuracy of accounts of events to which you might have an informational advantage. This can be via witnessing events first hand or have pre existing depth or via direct consumption of the raw primaries or just going on a dive.
      • salawat 6y ago
        Absolutely. I agree, and did not intend to imply ist should be otherwise. We must all be journalists in a sense, as each of us is to the societal macro-organism as a single sigmoidal node is to a neural network. It's why I think the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" is actually a severely underrated aspect of reasonable behavior as a human being.
    • danaris 6y ago
      I would say it's a matter of intent, and of capability. Intent, in that the organization, and the people making it up, genuinely seek to find truth and publish it, rather than seeking to push one agenda or another regardless of the facts. And capability, in that they can, in fact, do the research and possibly fieldwork necessary to get truths that are interesting enough to be worth publishing, as opposed to just reposting stories someone else researched, whatever their truth value. Having the intent described above but not the capability makes you something of an aggregator. Having neither capability nor intent makes you, more or less, a partisan blogger. Having the capability to be journalistic but the intent to push an agenda regardless of the truth makes you an incredibly dangerous propaganda outfit.
• ako 6y ago
  Agree that this is nothing new. Manipulation of people through misinformation has been the rule for a long time. What do you think religion is? Manipulation of people through misinformation to coerce people into behavior which benefits society.
  • thisismyswamp 6y ago
    *Benefits a very small part of society, you mean
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Both. Organized religion has always been an instrument of control and fostered inequality, but it also glued societies together and provided an incentive structure that promoted selfless behavior.
  • camhart 6y ago
    Yes, horrible things have, at times, been done in the name of religion. But to claim that religion, generally speaking, is all about manipulation through misinformation is wrong.
    • ako 6y ago
      I'm not even stating horrible things were done. Religion is just a management tool to align people's actions in a way that benefits the society they live in, and help it succeed in competition with other societies. A lot of the effects of religion have been mostly positive, but in its core it's based on misinformation.
      • camhart 6y ago
        I take issue with the generalization that all religions are based on misinformation.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• scythe 6y ago
  We talk about filter bubbles of information, but there are also filter bubbles of association. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with people who agree with you about almost everything. People don't simply consume information and form ideas like a summary-generator. There's a strong component of imitation and rehearsal that is disrupted when the patterns of engagement with other people are drastically changed.
  • sputknick 6y ago
    I agree with this "bubble of association" idea, and it doesn't have to start out political. Its just easier than ever to surround yourself with people like you. We have all kinds of segregation in who we live near, and who we associate with. The fact that its less about race than at anytime in history makes it easy for this segregation to hide itself. I live in a red state, but during the election my kids counted the signs in neighbors yards, it was 3:1 Biden. I work in tech, and so do most people in my well off, blue neighborhood. We are racially diverse, but segregated from people who don't think like us. I bet most people in here work at companies that are predominantly liberal or libertarian. I bet most people live in well off neighborhoods surrounded by college educated, worldly people with very little to fear from the world.
• phs318u 6y ago
  > They believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. > nobody is tied down in a chair and forced to watch certain TV shows or listen to certain radio shows for hours, days, weeks, months at a time, to the exclusion of all else. Doesn’t this behaviour sound familiar? To me it sounds like addiction. What has changed is not our capacity to become addicted but the willingness of some to exploit this weakness for money and/or power. From the internet outrage generators to the social media outrage amplifiers. The addictiveness of outrage is now fully weaponised by those who have fully succumbed to the addictiveness of power and money. No handbrakes. No filters. No conscience. Lots of self denial, self delusion, self-justification. The collision of these two addictions will destroy us if not unwound. EDIT: auto-correct correction.
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  School. Nobody is tied down to a chair but children are challenged to think critically on a daily basis. A good education should produce a balanced and well rounded adult. I teach CS ages 14 to 18 and all teachers have pastoral care responsibilities. I teach much more than just the curriculum. Some lessons — tutorials — are dedicated to general education. A highlight from last term was tackling the question “is being gay the same as being a paedophile?” It was asked earnestly and in context. It was my pleasure to answer, ask them more questions, and get them to think about consent and what is and isn’t ok for society to ban.