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This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one side to silence the other, rather that debating the subject with definitive proof of their claims.

• lordnacho 5y ago
  That's the standard, "nice" answer to how to deal with BS. In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard? Brandolino's law comes to mind.
  • ok123456 5y ago
    Stop caring that someone is wrong on the internet?
    • vkou 5y ago
      The ostrich defense of sticking one's head in the sand only works until it doesn't.
      • ok123456 5y ago
        Bad analogy. If someone is making an argument from bad faith, that's intentional and it's a waste of time to correct them or engage them at all. All the "fact checking" links that are displayed now when you post about controversial subjects on social media platforms do very little to change minds and only reinforce the idea that there's some global narrative that's controlled by a cabal. They merely only serve to make people who already agree with the positions that are being linked to as fact checks better about spending time online.
    • duxup 5y ago
      What if it has real consequences?
      • gjs278 5y ago
      • Clubber 5y ago
        Like what?
        • vkou 5y ago
          A collapse of basic medical care, an attempted coup, a third of the country no longer believing that an election where their side didn't win can be legitimate... ... But it's difficult to get a person to care about a subject that they believe themselves to be capable of buying their way out of/ignoring the consequences of. Nothing matters to a nihilist, and they will smugly point out that we're all wasting our breath over nothing.
          • ok123456 5y ago
            Yeah, you should probably spend less time online too.
            • vkou 5y ago
              Are you saying that these things haven't happened, or are you saying that I should not care whether my father can get an 'elective' surgery done sometime this decade? Or that the next election will be ran in a fair manner?
              • Clubber 5y ago
                I think our healthcare system sucks because it sucked before the pandemic, not because of misinformation. I remember thinking COVID would really show the gaping cracks in our healthcare system, but instead, the system blamed their deficiencies on the unvaccinated. Our healthcare system, for the population as a whole, was awful before COVID. Hospitals that weren't at peak operating (read financial) capacity were shut down all over the country, which forced their patients to go to already overcrowded hospitals. The costs are/were off the charts. I don't think misinformation was the cause of it. We've been dealing with this for over two years now, yet our healthcare system hasn't increased even temporary capacity in a meaningful way to account for it.
    • adolph 5y ago
      Duty calls: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
    • ratsmack 5y ago
      Being complacent and uncaring is probably worse than being wrong.
  • ratsmack 5y ago
    Was this "Misinformation"? https://twitter.com/JermaineLong93/status/1491083866706448385 https://twitter.com/JermaineLong93/status/149108386670644838...
    • VikingCoder 5y ago
      I feel like a more fundamental question is "Who is qualified to interpret the data?" Then you can ask, "Of the qualified people, what were they saying at the time?" And if you care to dive deeper, "What evidence were they using to support their opinion?" and "What is the earliest that credible information arrived that should have changed their position?" and "Did their position change, when enough new evidence came in?" Is there some better set of questions you can think of than mine?
    • brimble 5y ago
      Wow. I haven't kept up with pro-vaccine media (I got mine, seemed like a good idea, just haven't paid attention to the messaging very much aside from health official guidelines and such) but damn that's bad. No wonder BSABing this issue is so effective. Some of that's excusable by "the best information at the time was wrong" and some of it's not even wrong but the usual thing I've seen a lot of the last couple years, where some people take a limited statement as absolute or saying more than it is and then claim the original was wrong (when it wasn't) but a good deal of that compilation appears to be indefensible.
    • pgrote 5y ago
      I wouldn't consider that misinformation. At the time those statements were made it was thought the vaccine would prevent transmission. Not a medical expert, but I always thought the reason you got a vaccine was to prevent infection. Measles vaccine is somewhere near 97% effective at stopping infection. Heck, even when the vaccines for covid first came out it was big news if there was a breakthrough infection. Fast forward to today. The general consensus is the vaccine typically prevents serious illness and death in most cases for the common variants. It doesn't do a great job preventing infection. One of the mistakes those in charge made was never admitting something like the following when new, solid information was understood: 1) We were wrong. 2) This is something we've never seen. 3) We're learning as we go. 4) It doesn't do what we said or thought it would do, but it does this. No one in real power ever says anything remotely like it. They speak in absolutes and it has gotten so bad they are choosing to misrepresent studies to suggest following a path they think is best versus admitting the studies just suck. Misinformation flagging for something like covid was never going to be practical to implement as there was so much changing on a such a limited timeframe. Toss in politics and the governing structure of the USA and it was never going to work.
  • DelightOne 5y ago
    I feel like debates (especially on BS) are (or have to be?) repeated way too often, why is that anyway? Why can't it be one single tree, consisting of branches on multiple platforms, collecting, managing and curating?
    • sharemywin 5y ago
      but that would assume a system where people are concerned with facts and not they're own "personal opinions" where's the ego stroking in that solution?
      • DelightOne 5y ago
        - by helping others. Recording valuable talking points, refutations. - by understanding more and more deeply, instead of possibly less. - by having a jumpboard to learn more. - by seeing where you stand compared to the larger picture. Understanding the opposite side instead of just seeing them as enemy of ones' own opinion. - by seeing more people that argue similar to you. Requires categorization and grouping of votes. - by being able to share discussions more easily and not to be bound by a single group for answers.
  • CountSessine 5y ago
    what do you do about sealioning Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the "Gish Gallop". In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong, wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're wrong!
    • brimble 5y ago
      Sealioning is not at all the same thing as a Gish Gallop. A Gish Gallop is throwing out very weak arguments or evidence (so, bullshit) faster than a sincerely-engaging opponent can address them. Sealioning is a much more deniable tactic, relying on "just trying to have a conversation" and playing the victim when others disengage or tell you to fuck off. Simple Sealioning example: Sealioner: "Do you have anything to back up those figures for holocaust deaths? I see that thrown around a lot and I'm just not sure" (absolutely being a disengenuous piece of shit who's trying to slyly push holocaust denial, but indistinguishable from someone who is in fact curious, aside from that actually-curious people don't end up in these kinds of exchanges half as often as lying assholes do) Other person who knows exactly where this is going: "Fuck off out of here with that shit." Sealioner: "Oh my, I was just trying to ask a question. Now I'm really not sure about your position. You seem very touchy about it for someone who has the truth on their side. Can anyone help me?" A Gish Gallop of the same thing would be throwing out "references" to holocaust denial stuff faster than they can be debunked (and dutifully ignoring the debunking).
  • PaulHoule 5y ago
    Also many sorts of discourse are normative but toxic. You could say that "fake news" is harmful not because it is "fake" but because it is "news". For instance this subject got nonstop coverage on CNN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370 until Donald Trump came along and was better for ratings. Look at the subjects that constantly get flagged on Hacker News, such as: women just can't get ahead it's so awful that young people this day don't believe in free speech In both of these cases you can point to very real cases where a women was the victim of outrageous misbehavior or where a speaker came to a campus and was treated really rudely. The problem isn't with the facts of a particular incident but rather with the emotions that these topics evoke: in either case we all have our frustrations about the barriers we encounter in life and the ways we feel unheard and unsafe. Conversations like that rapidly deteriorate into people talking about their own personal pain and suffering but with the identifying information (usually) deleted so anything valuable is gone, you might feel compelled to get involved but any of the power that comes out of groundedness is gone when people are talking in generalities, about principles, either from the "liberal" viewpoint of "this situation is fundamentally unfair" or the "conservative" viewpoint that the moral accounting has to be done accurately down to three decimal places.
  • Clubber 5y ago
    >In practice, what do you do about sealioning mixed with outright lies? When does your patience run out with explaining why Trump lost the election, or whether the Queen is a lizard? Why do you care to police speech? Is it ego? It's a fool's errand.
  • mynameishere 5y ago
    I propose you find some of the liberals who still insist that Gore defeated Bush, and hone your art on convincing them of the truth first. Once you have completed that relatively simple task, move onto the fools who propose that the 2020 election was brazenly stolen in the dead of the night in each swing state via mail-in ballot harvesting.
• michael1999 5y ago
  What would you call someone printing and distributed flyers helpfully informing a neighbourhood that Election Day falls on May 5 when the actual Election Day is on May 4?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • foolfoolz 5y ago
    a moron. if someone tells you the golden gate bridge has an emergency exit that goes straight to the water are you going to take it?
    • DowsingSpoon 5y ago
      Your argument doesn’t make the point you think it does. If someone maliciously placed convincing fake road signs on the road then they could easily cause severe injury or death. This would be a serious problem, not to be taken lightly.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    The vast majority of 'anti-disinformation' campaigns are not restricted to, or even concentrated around, the scenario you have given.
  • kyleblarson 5y ago
    What would you call the president of the US saying "Let me repeat, if you are fully vaccinated you no longer need to wear a mask" in May of 2021? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SkzTa8HRDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SkzTa8HRDk
    • depaya 5y ago
      Are you trying to imply this was a lie or misinformation? Conditions continue to evolve, as do recommendations by experts. The President of the US is listening to experts.
    • 5y ago
• miss_info 5y ago
• Xylakant 5y ago
  The problem that I currently see rampant is that “definite proof” is hard to come by. There are a lot of people that use a set of alternate facts and call these definite proof. I’m afraid that with some people, I’m no longer arguing about how to interpret certain data, but we’re on a level where we cannot even agree that we are observing the same universe. And I honestly don’t have an answer to that problem. Second to that: Data can change as we gather more knowledge about something. Covid is a prime example - in the beginning, very little was known. Some theories turned out to be mostly true, others didn’t hold up. Some advice was sound, other not. Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn’t do anything.
  • RoddaWallPro 5y ago
    This doesn't really move the conversation forward, but an important point to make (I think) is that we as a species have never agreed that we're observing the same universe. Think of all the wildly different beliefs that have co-existed (though certainly not peacefully!) at the same times throughout history. It's a feature of all reality, not a bug of the _current_ reality (I say this because some people seem to think we're in a new & novel time of history where no one agrees on anything because of "the internet" or "misinformation", but I don't think that's the case. Humans have always disagree on what reality is).
  • sharemywin 5y ago
    And alot of the definite proof is obtuse and not readily readable.
  • 0x7E3 5y ago
    > Still, some people point back and use the evolving knowledge as argument that nothing is knowable and we shouldn’t do anything. And some people point back and use the censorship of people who turned out to be correct as an argument that we were way too quick to leverage the 'misinformation' label to suppress the truth.
  • clayg 5y ago
    I have this theory that what-about-ism as a debate technique, elevated by more readily available un-helpful "facts" (e.g. single varient evaluation of complex system), hased cause people to forget the utility of facts. When you and I have a REAL disagrement about something importand and complex the FACTS that we can both agree on and take for granted are what ENABLES us to find a new higher resolution understanding - we can get further because we can focus. I try to look out for what-about-ism disguised as refuting evidence, and approach people's belief epistemologically.
• glial 5y ago
  We've inherited this rationalist idea that people form opinions as the result of careful consideration and weighing of evidence. This is mostly false. Evidence suggests that people form ideas from (1) group-membership and (2) repetition. If this is true, imagine you were a person trying to influence public opinion and had access to social media. An obvious strategy would be to... 1. Create an account with clear political affiliations (american flags, laser eyes, pronouns, etc in the bio). This establishes group membership. 2. Repeat a basic message over and over and over. This is exactly what we're seeing. I'm 100% for allowing free and open debates. I'm not for bot- or state-controlled accounts trying to sway public opinion.
• CamperBob2 5y ago
  This whole concept of "misinformation" is the attempt of one side to silence the other, rather that debating the subject with definitive proof of their claims The problem here is that it takes far more effort to refute bullshit than it does to spread it. With all of the unknowns of many of these current subjects, I would think open debate presenting theories from various sources would help find common ground. What happens in reality is that whoever asserts greater certainty has the upper hand, particularly in the absence of genuine authority. Science is (correctly) reluctant to make unconditional promises, while con artists have no such hangups.