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> 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.

• 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?
    • croon 5y ago
      Any proper fact checker states the conclusion, and then spends multiple paragraphs describing how the conclusion was made, with sources. Anyone can and should attack that reasoning or sourcing if it's lacking or faulty. It usually isn't.
      • raxxorrax 5y ago
        I find the usual fact checkers full of bias to an almost comical degree. Remeber the Russians?
        • croon 5y ago
          Statement without justification, then a non sequitor. If you have a point, make it. I am aware of the existence of Russians, what about them?
          • raxxorrax 5y ago
            non sequitur - As would be the trustworthyness of fact checkers which also lacks any justification. Some of those sites, I believe it was Snopes or Politifact proposed that the absence of Russian election interference is the lie of the year in 2016 or 2017. This was a complete web of lies to get to Trump for political reasons. Information of this is also highly obscured for political reasons. You find over 1000 of sources without any substantial info aside from some officials stating "high confidence" (translation: highly likely bullshit). "Lie of the year" - ridiculous circus for an embarrising situation.
• akvadrako 5y ago
  I agree; there is no news agency or experts I blindly trust. It's generally workable for most important things but it takes a lot of time and and practice in the skill of research. And I'm not sure enough of the populace does have the skill, time and interest to make such an approach workable in a democracy. Maybe it would be possible with much better education and tools, like high quality news sources.
• jimkleiber 5y ago
  I think there's a big if on whether most of us can objectively judge the accuracy of most things ourselves. I worry about the biases that we have and lack of experience in new and rapidly growing fields of knowledge. But mostly I worry about deep fakes. I actually believe that we may have to rely even more on trusting others in the future and less on believing our own senses. Do you believe we can objectively judge so many things?
  • cto_of_antifa 5y ago
    I don't think objectivity exists. I do think that the process of synthesizing ideas necessitates the deconstruction of all of the subjective sources existing, and moving forward regardless.
  • donw 5y ago
    This is something I talk about quite a bit. Modern society requires trust. Trust that bridges are built correctly, airplanes maintained correctly, water treated correctly, etc. No one person can manage all of that. We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will. Destroy that trust, and you destroy society. Violence destroys trust. Censorship, however packaged, destroys trust. Ignoring consent destroys trust. Lies destroy trust. Unequally applying rules destroys trust. As does being creative and selective with the truth. American institutions, public and private, have burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office, and are running on a sort of psychological credit balance that they carry with their supporters ("we don't care because our team is winning"). Historically, this does not portend great things at the next intersection.
    • jimkleiber 5y ago
      While I personally do not believe that those orgs "burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office," as I still trust many of them in terms of their skills and intentions, I greatly appreciated how, before that, you laid out your argument for trust overall, so thank you for taking the time to articulate it as you did.
• carbine 5y ago
  Unfortunately I don’t think most people are capable nor motivated enough to adopt this policy.
• saeranv 5y ago
  > 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. How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? It may seem silly, but this is the same logic that anti-vaxxers adopt. Personally, I think the actual problem[1] here is not that people aren't critical enough, it's that they don't know how to perform, contextualize and interpret research, and in particular to do this for work that lies outside of their domain-specific expertise. The kind of work graduate students learn to do: find meta-review papers, drill into the work of early pioneers, survey the current state-of-the-art, and then, after all this: identify any gaps and omissions to critique; which then gets tested in the humbling environment of advisor-meetings, conferences etc. This is why I think the people most vulnerable to this kind of "I must objectively judge the accuracy or I won't take it on board" are people who are educated enough to be comfortable with technical concepts and jargon, but are not actual domain experts and haven't done any actual research themselves. It's how you get large numbers of anti-vaccine nurses, and engineers skeptical of climate change. [1] Actually, I suspect the actual problem is the discomfort people have with reality's liberal bias, and its corresponding reflection in historically trusted media sources (i.e. BBC, CBC). Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Why do you need to judge it? If you absolutely have to make a choice about something, and that choice absolutely has to depend on some particular piece of information, then your best option is to make yourself qualified to judge that information. If you can't do that, then your next best option is to have someone you trust independently of that particular topic (such as a family member or close friend) who is qualified to judge the information and whose advice you can rely on. If neither of those two things is possible, then you should think really, really hard about whether you actually have to have that information to make the choice you have to make (or whether you absolutely have to make that particular choice, instead of finding some other choice you could make that wouldn't depend on that information). My personal experience is that, when I actually apply the above principles, I find that most of the information with which I get inundated every day, just as all of us do, is irrelevant to the actual choices I have to make. It's mostly just trying to get me to signal something, or to get me to have a strong opinion about something because some politically active group wants me to, not because I actually need to. > Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? Me personally? Not quite (there are no "underlying equations" for medicine anyway, so some of what you describe is impossible), but I try to come as close as I can. I never trust anything a doctor tells me implicitly. I always look at other sources of information. I also always ask critical questions to see if the doctor really understands the subject or is just repeating some kind of conventional wisdom that they don't actually understand. (Unfortunately the frequency of the latter in my experience with doctors is much higher than one would like.) > how to perform, contextualize and interpret research All of the things you describe are important, yes, and I do all of them. The only thing I would add is making use of cross-domain knowledge, something in which our current scientific community is, unfortunately, weak. > Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus. In some cases this is true, but I think it's a lot less frequent than many liberal advocates (or indeed advocates for any ideology) claim. Claiming "mainstream scientific consensus" for what are actually ideologically based political opinions and nothing more is a common example of the weaponizatlon of information that I referred to. (Which is not at all to say that only liberals do this: ideologues of all political persuasions do it. It has become more frequent in recent years because we have allowed politics to control more and more aspects of our lives, so the stakes in political controversies are higher and higher, and hence so are the incentives to weaponize information.)