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I think there is a lot more to say about this subject. I'll give a personal example, a few months ago, a leading French newspaper (Le Monde) published a debunk

• ergot_vacation 5y ago
  "Debunking" in the modern sense mostly just means calling someone an idiot for having a different opinion than you, with an added dose of self-assured smugness because obviously "science" and "the experts" and "everybody knows" are on your side. Debunking is bad enough when it actually comes from a place of real science, because even then the self-congratulatory nature of it makes people want to punch you rather than engage in a conversation. But when "the science" is really just a bunch of anecdotes, propaganda and Just-So Stories people in certain social circles keep repeating to each other ad nauseam, it becomes a complete joke.
  • kiba 5y ago
    People are not convinced by facts and science, but by people in their trust networks. No amount of truth will ever convince someone who is predisposed to not believe you.
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      > People are not convinced by facts and science, but by people in their trust networks. This is something I strongly believe and I wish more people thought about. Do you happen to know if we have a lot of scientific evidence for it?
      • mistermann 5y ago
        At best there are some studies that show patterns, but that doesn't stop people from believing it and spreading the gospel on forums - before long, it's an axiom and no proof is needed. Omniscience has become extremely popular in the last few years as well, and I'm pretty sure there's no evidence for that at all (but I'm speculating about that, perhaps there is something out there).
        • mistermann 5y ago
          Testing 1,2,3.
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    That's not debunking, that's dismissing. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've dismissed plenty of people in my life. I don't have time to argue with and debunk Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis, nor do I think it would be productive, because in my experience almost all such people are way beyond reasoning with. Also, when such people "debate", they're often just trying to spread their propaganda to bystanders, and not engaging in any kind of good-faith argument with you. Finally, I recognize that if these people ever get power they will crush, in a very literal way, using violence, anyone who doesn't agree with them, who is not "pure" enough for them, or who stands in their way.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      I find that's a vital realization to have. It's also more than a bit sad: anybody from ANY political angle who's desperate enough will sink to this level. That said, there's some political angles that I see a lot of this from. Nazis lie, is the way I frame it to myself. I try to recognize the tells, the techniques that are being used, the pivoting and debating attitude, the historical precedents, if possible the escalation as masks are dropped and the ideological payload is hinted at or delivered. There's always a payload. Everything else is the game. Nazis lie. I'm interested in identifying them, not debating them. If I can identify them, I can identify their payload and odds are it's something I'm going to want to walk away from, and I'll do just that.
      • galaxyLogic 5y ago
        > Nazis lie. True. Nazis are ready to use violence to gain dominion over others. Lying is a form of violence, so it just makes sense for them to use it. It is easier for them to lie than use physical violence and preferably they don't get caught. Just use their power to influence. But I wonder if the paper perhaps did not consider this:: Even though correcting someone can make them defensive, the correction might be very helpful to all the other readers of the same discussion, so they don't get mislead.
        • swader999 5y ago
          Have you ever met a Nazi, a flat earther or a white supremacist? I never have, not online either. People throw these terms around like they are on every corner.
• chmod775 5y ago
  This. When you want to convince someone and win them over to your way of thinking, never ever lie, make your position out to be stronger than it really is, or treat them as anything less than an intelligent human being. If you can't do that it is better to stay silent, because speaking is likely to have the exact opposite of the intended effect. This applies to everything from parenting to political discussions.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• headmelted 5y ago
  I mean that would be nice, but it’s also unrealistic because of the imbalance in educating someone who wants to be ignorant. The problem I’ve seen is that people want others to disprove their crazy theories. Disproving anything takes substantially more time and work than just saying any old nonsense in the first place. This is made worse by the hordes of crazy/stupid people on the internet who demand (in bad faith) that everyone who disagrees with their obvious falsehoods takes the time required to provide evidence (that they’ll never accept anyway) is the biggest part of the problem. tldr; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Unfortunately most of the people spreading this kind of thing online don’t understand what actual evidence is. Try debating a flat-earther, and then explaining that we knew the Earth was round for thousands of years prior to NASA. It will not compute.
  • dang 5y ago
    Anyone who wants seriously to look at this problem needs to grapple with the following: preferring one's beliefs to counterevidence is not just a property of "crazy/stupid people", but of humans in general, including oneself and everyone on one's own side. This is a difficult fact to face, and to the extent one can face it, I think it changes everything. Even if one makes the smallest beginning at doing so, it already starts to change everything. For this we have to stop pointing the finger at the others—their ridiculous beliefs, their preposterous disregard of evidence—and face that we ourselves are the same way. It's not that the other side does it more; it is simply that it is easier—much easier—to see it in them. If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness. (I don't mean you personally, of course, I mean all of us.) And let's be honest: we all feel that we don't do it as much. I feel that myself even as I write this. A timeless essay on this is Orwell's "Looking Back at the Spanish War" (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel..., discussed last year at [1]). The depth of consciousness that Orwell reached in that essay is profound, but its profundity is obscured by how simply he states it, and no doubt also by the fact that we all think we already know it and are the exception to what he describes. Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed. --- Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. [1] Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 - Nov 2020 (128 comments)
• newacct583 5y ago
  Arrgh, you're doing it too! The core essence of a conspiracy theory, the thing that demands it be debunked, is that it's unfounded. It's an attractive idea without evidence, and one of the tools used in propagating it is to flip the script and point out that the absence of evidence is in fact "absence of disproof", and thus... evidence. So what are you doing? You're taking an assertion without support (that covid is a lab leak) and then framing it as a legitimate argument by pointing out (1) that it is "not that clear cut" (by which I assume you mean that there's no evidence but not disproof either) and (2) that people who say that it doesn't have support were somehow arguing in bad faith with "poorly constructed" arguments. This isn't a legitimate fact under dispute. It's just not. There's no evidence, literally, beyond the mailing address of the lab. > In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as possible. In my opinion an argument debunking something should be done with simple facts, irrespective of political concomity. Being wrong isn't a political opinion.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    > that it is "not that clear cut" (by which I assume you mean that there's no evidence but not disproof either) They're referring to a post made here the other day suggesting that there may actually be evidence that is was a lab leak.
    • newacct583 5y ago
      And you're doing it too! Saying there "may actually be evidence" is not saying there is evidence. There is no evidence. The WHO conceded that more investigation is needed in a report that deemed the lab leak hypothesis "extremely unlikely". But to the conspiracist mind, any statement other than an unambiguous "THIS IS UNCONTROVERTABLY FALSE" becomes twisted into something that sounds like evidence for the conspiracy. Which is why debunkings need to be firm and clear. Admitting that something is possible in theory is just nodding to people who want to hear something very different.
      • guerrilla 5y ago
• orblivion 5y ago
  Particularly when newspapers say XYZ "has been debunked" as if it's an objective claim. But since I don't have any hope that all debunking be rigorous as you describe, I'd prefer that a context-free, objective "debunked" not every be claimed. Rather they should say "x debunked it, you can see here" sort of thing. It's just an argument like any other. But maybe there was a time when such things really were just about as good as objective?
  • exporectomy 5y ago
    It's awful that newspapers have started injecting opinions like that into stories. For instance, when there's a protest, they'll sometimes point out that the protestors' claims are wrong. It used to be that they just quoted what they were saying at left it to the reader to judge but now they do this patronizing lecturing. "Hey reader, it's important that you know who's the goodies and who's the baddies. Trust us to tell you because we're journalists, the fountain of truth and rightness.".
    • mannykannot 5y ago
      If an entity makes a claim that is demonstrably false, pointing that out is not an injection of opinion, it is part of the news.
      • exporectomy 5y ago
        It's actually extremely rare for journalists to state facts as simply being true. They're almost always presented as being a quote from some expert or authority or whatever. Even obvious things like after a car accident "The car was seen upside down" not "The car flipped over" because they don't really know for sure how it got that way or even if it was some optical illusion. That's honest reporting. They're not trying to push any agenda about how cars end up appearing to be upside down so they don't have to beat us over the head with it.
        • mannykannot 5y ago
          This appears to be a rather different issue than the one you started with - are you you now objecting to journalists being careful not to inject anything that might be construed as their personal opinion? There are obvious reasons why journalists would do that. With regard to your example here, it does not fit your original situation of a claim being being corrected - and it is a remarkably small issue to ge worked up about. As far as I can tell, nothing in your latest post has anything to do with the claim in the post you are nominally replying to.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  One trick journalists use, is they cite each other. They'll write something like according to WP, so and so did this. You're supposed to believe because WP is a credible newspaper. They'll do this in a circle, and cite each other. I guess this is where the term circle of lies comes from. The real problem is that appeal to authority works so well. Japan has a 99% conviction rate, because their culture is so differential to Authority. The state brings on an expert witness, and the jurors accept it as fact. Its how humans work. You would think people are critical thinkers. Sadly, more often than not, people will defer their thinking to someone with higher status.
• bloaf 5y ago
  Another issue: If you frame your goal as "stop the spread of disinformation" rather than "convince people to return to the fold," is this result even perverse? If you can make all the people who believe in crazy conspiracies act in a toxic and obviously partisan way, does it limit their ability to spread their ideas? I.e. does debunking push people outside the overton window?