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>If there were a way to objectively quantify a news outlet or newsperson’s track record with accuracy, that might be a start. The problem with this sort of "fa

>If there were a way to objectively quantify a news outlet or newsperson’s track record with accuracy, that might be a start. The problem with this sort of "fact checking" is that its keepers are biased as well. So you need a "fact check" on a "fact check" which might lead to stack overflow eventually. Unless you can objectively judge the accuracy yourself. And track record means nothing if say a reputable news outlet is purchased by a billionaire with a political agenda. I think many people break through the walls of their echo chambers when they stumble upon some basic inconsistency and discover they are being lied to by seeing e.g. raw footage of an event vs. its media interpretation. For many people however finding the truth is not interesting or important enough. I guess echo chambers are for those who deserve them.

senectus1 5y ago
when it comes to "News" these days (ie opinion) Objectivity is highly Subjective.
donw 5y ago
A phrase that I rarely, to the point of never, hear is: "I was wrong." Followed by "Here's why, and how I realized..." Seriously, think about the last time you said this. About a position you consider contrary to your worldview. Not deeper into it -- a total, come about engines full scenario. I've had a lot of those, especially in the past two years. It's been hard to try and put those together into a cogent worldview, and mandated that I offer up some apologies to people whom I had been rude to in the past. Not to mention having to deadline more than a few people that booked a one-way flight to Nutsoland. And no, I am not referring to the "medical freedom" crowd. Pure propaganda to label them as "anti-vaxxers" when they have literally every standard vaccine on the pre-COVID schedule. I can get along with these folks, even where we disagree (If you're over 50 or have a risk factor, especially obesity, you probably want the jab). But I respect their right to choose. The "if you don't get the shot, you don't deserve to have a bank account, or a job, or the ability to travel" crowd are full-bore Nazis and don't even realize it.
- trainsplanes 5y ago
  With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), require a certain amount of money in your bank account, deny you for travel history to other certain areas, etc. A covid vaccine mandate for travel is far from radical. (Note: I didn’t downvote you)
  - donw 5y ago
    > With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. That isn't where I was going. There is a current hard push for border controls at each state boundary; e.g., even domestic flights. Not law yet, but the fact this is even being discussed is unacceptable. As was the employer mandate. > Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), Nope. All vaccinations in Japan are optional (albeit recommended, and most parents follow the standard schedule for their children). A Japanese citizen can get a Japanese passport without a single vaccine. The US has allowed Japanese citizens landing permission for a very, very long time. Sure, it may be uncommon for an unvaccinated Japanese person to travel to the US, but it was and still is entirely legal. Except for the COVID prophylaxis (which is not a vaccine, as it does not appear to confer any lasting immunity). > (Note: I didn’t downvote you) Thank you. There's more than a small contingent of organized HNers that works to bury anything that runs contrary to their nascent religion.
    - trainsplanes 5y ago
      > Nope. Absolutely wrong. Here's a list of countries and their various vaccine requirements for entry. Despite what you think, there's a lot of them and these requirements predate covid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_international_travel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_i... Obtaining a passport is completely irrelevant. Countries deny people with valid passports from entering all the time. For example, if they don't have the proper vaccines.
pdonis 5y ago
> Unless you can objectively judge the accuracy yourself. As restrictive as it seems, this is actually the only way you can depend on when push comes to shove. And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the accuracy yourself, you simply won't take the information on board. Imagine how different the incentives would be facing a news outlet or a government official if most people adopted that policy.
- donw 5y ago
  This really is the only workable stance.
- weaksauce 5y ago
  except it's not since the people misleading about things use the fact that you don't know much about the subject matter to know if they are lying or not. look at the just abject horror that is covid reporting and the right wingers screeching about socialism/communism without even knowing what it means(or if they do... caring about it).
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I agree but don't think I can imagine such a world in any meaningful detail. At least not accurately Here's one of my favourite Futurama quotes "If [blank] becomes legal, imagine the horrible things that will happen to our children, then imagine we said those things, since we couldn't think of any. As a mother, those things worry me."
- dtech 5y ago
  While a reasonable basis, I'm not sure how a society of more than say 100 people could function if everyone did that. At some point you have to trust people. I mean, have you even been to Finland? According to your philosophy you don't know if it exists then.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Sure. But then the problem becomes the highly political question of who should be trusted. If you rank people from most to least trustworthy, fact checkers just aren't at the top of the list. In today's world we can go right to the academics or people with primary sources. Why would a fact checker have any authority to declare Finland does or does not exist? It would be better to listen to someone reliable who is interested in satellites. A fact checker might easily turn out to simply be reading Wikipedia. Small Voice Does Taiwan exist?
amelius 5y ago
> I think many people break through the walls of their echo chambers when they stumble upon some basic inconsistency and discover they are being lied to by seeing e.g. raw footage of an event vs. its media interpretation. How about someone with authority pretending to be in the echo chamber, who, at some point, starts spouting inconsistent statements? Will that wake up people?
- HKH2 5y ago
  Of course not. Have you not seen how often public figures change their tune? They don't have to answer questions; they can just turn around and walk out of the room and everyone will forget.
drdeca 5y ago
Some things are objectively measurable. Now, some party might claim to have measured and obtained one value when they have not (perhaps not having made a measurement at all). But if a source’s claims are only* about the measurements they’ve made, and other parties can reasonably cheaply make the same measurements, and different parties measuring the thing in question will get results that agree, then it should be fairly doable for reputation to keep track of who is an honest source for these objectively measurements. Other claims are not so easily reducible to measurements that are cheap to independently verify. However, perhaps sometimes these other claims have implications about the measurable things, where the implication is straightforward to verify upon considering it. In this case, a fact checker could perhaps show that some claim contradicts some objectively measurable fact as reported by an independent organization which is broadly trusted to make and report on objectively measurable things which can reasonably cheaply be independently verified. Such a system would perhaps still have nothing to say about many claims we care about, but it could at least largely avoid that tower of fact checks for a restricted class of statements.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  However, even if we can fully trust the methods of empirical measurement (we shouldnt; we should critique them), quantitative information by itself isnt an analysis. it isnt an idea. its not even a interpretation. Even if measurement existed in some "true" vacuum, it would say nothing about what that thing actually means.
marton78 5y ago
"Who watches the Watchmen?
drewcoo 5y ago
> The problem with this sort of "fact checking" is that its keepers are biased as well. No, the problem is that we're not seeking facts. We're not after a scattering of data. We seek meaningful clusters of information. Being human, we often want stories built out of that information, and we find these stories much more compelling than facts. Presumably, we all enjoy sharing good, true, informative things. So when NiemanLab wants us to "share this story," we do.
hanselot 5y ago
I have always believed that the only way to stay ahead of the spam is to train your spam filter from an early age. To do that, submerge yourself in spam, and soon you will be able to spot the crumbs of truth littered between the sewage. ProTip: 4chan/pol is the best place to train for this. Almost 90% of threads and replies (if not more) are literally posted by bots and shills trying to push propaganda. Everyone who comes there to "deradicalize" the "terrorists" end up staying forever or taking Albert's way out. Frequently some news outlet will cherrypick the most racist and atrocious content from there and try to frame that to fit whatever narrative they are pushing on the day. 4chan is the only place left on the public net that allows some notion of what an uncensored internet used to be like. Everywhere else has been effectively destroyed by the thought police. Ironic too, since Facebook has one of the most draconian censorship policies, yet the most shared information there is all labelled misinformation (which a lot of it is). You have allowed someone else to do critical thinking on your behalf, and that means you no longer have free agency to decide for yourself. A lot of you here will never see this message, because you don't respect the dead (comments).
atoav 5y ago
I believe the first pre-condition is that people actually need to care about their opinion being reflective of the truth. This is not a natural thing to care about, because it doesn't give you social capital directly (quite the contrary: having an opinion that is reflective of the truth can hurt your social standing in many, many places). So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this?
- munificent 5y ago
  While believing the truth does not always provide social capital, it very often provides material capital, which is why humans over eons have evolved mental faculties that make us want to know true things. These faculties aren't perfect, obviously, we're just primates, but they work better than we give ourselves credit for. If I'm trying to decide which lake has the most delicious fish, the actual true answer is very important when it comes to deciding where to drop my line, regardless of whether others think I'm wrong. Reeling in dinner—confirmation from material reality—is its own reward.
- DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
  > So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this? I've never understood that sort of mentality* in the first place, and I'd be very surprised if I was the only one. So I'm guessing this isn't an "everyone" problem, but more of a "most people" problem. So maybe the question to ask would be "What makes turns people into truth-seekers vs. agreement-seekers?" * Edit to clarify: the mentality of seeking "social truth" rather than objective truth, and ignoring or denying evidence in favour of group policy.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> its keepers are biased as well More biased than average, in my observation. Often much more.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Snopes is notorious for this. There are plenty of factually true/false things being dismissed as misleading because of some motivated reasoning. Or because of some rhetorical tricks that change the definitions of terms or how something is being assessed. Even something as simple as trying to compare the cost of a Big Mac between the US and Denmark gets muddled because they bring in some indexing measure or other hand-wavy things. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/. I think a rough analogue is how theologians use scholarly and textual methods to twist the meaning of scripture into whatever they want it to say.
  - Erem 5y ago
    In your link, Snopes brought a bunch of evidence to bear: price of the Big Mac on Uber Eats in the two places, actual Menu prices in Copenhagen vs Oklahoma, then the Big Mac index, which I think you were referring to. It ends with a few more quotes from others that have reported on this issue. As a fact checking org, what was missing here and what was muddied? I thought it was a pretty clear read.
    - jdsully 5y ago
      Why would you adjust the price by the GDP? When people ask if a product costs more in a different country they don’t mean relative to the countries industrial output. Median income might be a better ratio for this but GDP makes little sense.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        Because they mean price for normal people, not price for international traders. Money can be exchanged for goods and services; the value of your money is not how much rice it can buy in Uganda or how much paper it can buy in Kazakhstan if you live in Denmark.

senectus1 5y ago

when it comes to "News" these days (ie opinion) Objectivity is highly Subjective.

donw 5y ago

A phrase that I rarely, to the point of never, hear is: "I was wrong." Followed by "Here's why, and how I realized..." Seriously, think about the last time you said this. About a position you consider contrary to your worldview. Not deeper into it -- a total, come about engines full scenario. I've had a lot of those, especially in the past two years. It's been hard to try and put those together into a cogent worldview, and mandated that I offer up some apologies to people whom I had been rude to in the past. Not to mention having to deadline more than a few people that booked a one-way flight to Nutsoland. And no, I am not referring to the "medical freedom" crowd. Pure propaganda to label them as "anti-vaxxers" when they have literally every standard vaccine on the pre-COVID schedule. I can get along with these folks, even where we disagree (If you're over 50 or have a risk factor, especially obesity, you probably want the jab). But I respect their right to choose. The "if you don't get the shot, you don't deserve to have a bank account, or a job, or the ability to travel" crowd are full-bore Nazis and don't even realize it.

trainsplanes 5y ago
With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), require a certain amount of money in your bank account, deny you for travel history to other certain areas, etc. A covid vaccine mandate for travel is far from radical. (Note: I didn’t downvote you)
- donw 5y ago
  > With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. That isn't where I was going. There is a current hard push for border controls at each state boundary; e.g., even domestic flights. Not law yet, but the fact this is even being discussed is unacceptable. As was the employer mandate. > Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), Nope. All vaccinations in Japan are optional (albeit recommended, and most parents follow the standard schedule for their children). A Japanese citizen can get a Japanese passport without a single vaccine. The US has allowed Japanese citizens landing permission for a very, very long time. Sure, it may be uncommon for an unvaccinated Japanese person to travel to the US, but it was and still is entirely legal. Except for the COVID prophylaxis (which is not a vaccine, as it does not appear to confer any lasting immunity). > (Note: I didn’t downvote you) Thank you. There's more than a small contingent of organized HNers that works to bury anything that runs contrary to their nascent religion.
  - trainsplanes 5y ago
    > Nope. Absolutely wrong. Here's a list of countries and their various vaccine requirements for entry. Despite what you think, there's a lot of them and these requirements predate covid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_international_travel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_i... Obtaining a passport is completely irrelevant. Countries deny people with valid passports from entering all the time. For example, if they don't have the proper vaccines.

pdonis 5y ago

> Unless you can objectively judge the accuracy yourself. As restrictive as it seems, this is actually the only way you can depend on when push comes to shove. And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the accuracy yourself, you simply won't take the information on board. Imagine how different the incentives would be facing a news outlet or a government official if most people adopted that policy.

donw 5y ago
This really is the only workable stance.
weaksauce 5y ago
except it's not since the people misleading about things use the fact that you don't know much about the subject matter to know if they are lying or not. look at the just abject horror that is covid reporting and the right wingers screeching about socialism/communism without even knowing what it means(or if they do... caring about it).
beebeepka 5y ago
I agree but don't think I can imagine such a world in any meaningful detail. At least not accurately Here's one of my favourite Futurama quotes "If [blank] becomes legal, imagine the horrible things that will happen to our children, then imagine we said those things, since we couldn't think of any. As a mother, those things worry me."
dtech 5y ago
While a reasonable basis, I'm not sure how a society of more than say 100 people could function if everyone did that. At some point you have to trust people. I mean, have you even been to Finland? According to your philosophy you don't know if it exists then.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Sure. But then the problem becomes the highly political question of who should be trusted. If you rank people from most to least trustworthy, fact checkers just aren't at the top of the list. In today's world we can go right to the academics or people with primary sources. Why would a fact checker have any authority to declare Finland does or does not exist? It would be better to listen to someone reliable who is interested in satellites. A fact checker might easily turn out to simply be reading Wikipedia. Small Voice Does Taiwan exist?

amelius 5y ago

> I think many people break through the walls of their echo chambers when they stumble upon some basic inconsistency and discover they are being lied to by seeing e.g. raw footage of an event vs. its media interpretation. How about someone with authority pretending to be in the echo chamber, who, at some point, starts spouting inconsistent statements? Will that wake up people?

HKH2 5y ago
Of course not. Have you not seen how often public figures change their tune? They don't have to answer questions; they can just turn around and walk out of the room and everyone will forget.

drdeca 5y ago

Some things are objectively measurable. Now, some party might claim to have measured and obtained one value when they have not (perhaps not having made a measurement at all). But if a source’s claims are only* about the measurements they’ve made, and other parties can reasonably cheaply make the same measurements, and different parties measuring the thing in question will get results that agree, then it should be fairly doable for reputation to keep track of who is an honest source for these objectively measurements. Other claims are not so easily reducible to measurements that are cheap to independently verify. However, perhaps sometimes these other claims have implications about the measurable things, where the implication is straightforward to verify upon considering it. In this case, a fact checker could perhaps show that some claim contradicts some objectively measurable fact as reported by an independent organization which is broadly trusted to make and report on objectively measurable things which can reasonably cheaply be independently verified. Such a system would perhaps still have nothing to say about many claims we care about, but it could at least largely avoid that tower of fact checks for a restricted class of statements.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago
However, even if we can fully trust the methods of empirical measurement (we shouldnt; we should critique them), quantitative information by itself isnt an analysis. it isnt an idea. its not even a interpretation. Even if measurement existed in some "true" vacuum, it would say nothing about what that thing actually means.

marton78 5y ago

"Who watches the Watchmen?

drewcoo 5y ago

> The problem with this sort of "fact checking" is that its keepers are biased as well. No, the problem is that we're not seeking facts. We're not after a scattering of data. We seek meaningful clusters of information. Being human, we often want stories built out of that information, and we find these stories much more compelling than facts. Presumably, we all enjoy sharing good, true, informative things. So when NiemanLab wants us to "share this story," we do.

hanselot 5y ago

I have always believed that the only way to stay ahead of the spam is to train your spam filter from an early age. To do that, submerge yourself in spam, and soon you will be able to spot the crumbs of truth littered between the sewage. ProTip: 4chan/pol is the best place to train for this. Almost 90% of threads and replies (if not more) are literally posted by bots and shills trying to push propaganda. Everyone who comes there to "deradicalize" the "terrorists" end up staying forever or taking Albert's way out. Frequently some news outlet will cherrypick the most racist and atrocious content from there and try to frame that to fit whatever narrative they are pushing on the day. 4chan is the only place left on the public net that allows some notion of what an uncensored internet used to be like. Everywhere else has been effectively destroyed by the thought police. Ironic too, since Facebook has one of the most draconian censorship policies, yet the most shared information there is all labelled misinformation (which a lot of it is). You have allowed someone else to do critical thinking on your behalf, and that means you no longer have free agency to decide for yourself. A lot of you here will never see this message, because you don't respect the dead (comments).

atoav 5y ago

I believe the first pre-condition is that people actually need to care about their opinion being reflective of the truth. This is not a natural thing to care about, because it doesn't give you social capital directly (quite the contrary: having an opinion that is reflective of the truth can hurt your social standing in many, many places). So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this?

munificent 5y ago
While believing the truth does not always provide social capital, it very often provides material capital, which is why humans over eons have evolved mental faculties that make us want to know true things. These faculties aren't perfect, obviously, we're just primates, but they work better than we give ourselves credit for. If I'm trying to decide which lake has the most delicious fish, the actual true answer is very important when it comes to deciding where to drop my line, regardless of whether others think I'm wrong. Reeling in dinner—confirmation from material reality—is its own reward.
DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
> So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this? I've never understood that sort of mentality* in the first place, and I'd be very surprised if I was the only one. So I'm guessing this isn't an "everyone" problem, but more of a "most people" problem. So maybe the question to ask would be "What makes turns people into truth-seekers vs. agreement-seekers?" * Edit to clarify: the mentality of seeking "social truth" rather than objective truth, and ignoring or denying evidence in favour of group policy.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> its keepers are biased as well More biased than average, in my observation. Often much more.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Snopes is notorious for this. There are plenty of factually true/false things being dismissed as misleading because of some motivated reasoning. Or because of some rhetorical tricks that change the definitions of terms or how something is being assessed. Even something as simple as trying to compare the cost of a Big Mac between the US and Denmark gets muddled because they bring in some indexing measure or other hand-wavy things. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/. I think a rough analogue is how theologians use scholarly and textual methods to twist the meaning of scripture into whatever they want it to say.
- Erem 5y ago
  In your link, Snopes brought a bunch of evidence to bear: price of the Big Mac on Uber Eats in the two places, actual Menu prices in Copenhagen vs Oklahoma, then the Big Mac index, which I think you were referring to. It ends with a few more quotes from others that have reported on this issue. As a fact checking org, what was missing here and what was muddied? I thought it was a pretty clear read.
  - jdsully 5y ago
    Why would you adjust the price by the GDP? When people ask if a product costs more in a different country they don’t mean relative to the countries industrial output. Median income might be a better ratio for this but GDP makes little sense.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Because they mean price for normal people, not price for international traders. Money can be exchanged for goods and services; the value of your money is not how much rice it can buy in Uganda or how much paper it can buy in Kazakhstan if you live in Denmark.