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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 o

• 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.
      • 5y ago
    • sharemywin 5y ago
      people are making death threats to poll workers and local election officials.
      • ok123456 5y ago
        Then those are direct and actionable threats and are covered by real life laws. We don't need moderators filling in for real police.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      This is one of those things that is easy to worry about, but the sheer amount of possible 'consequences' from any misinformed point of view is impossible to actually estimate the likelihood of. We can collectively conjure up all sorts of bad things someone might do if they believe [xyz] but we should not give in to this kind of paranoia.
      • duxup 5y ago
        I don't buy into the idea that because estimation is hard thus it is "paranoia".
        • ok123456 5y ago
          What do you estimate Free Speech is worth?
          • duxup 5y ago
            I don't understand what that has to do with my comment. Moderation on say twitter /= free speech violations I'm assuming your comments are just random from here on out. Sorry if they're not but I"m really not following what you're saying.
            • ok123456 5y ago
              Then you're just being intentionally dense to wiggle out.
              • duxup 5y ago
                I would have to understand to know that I want to "wiggle out".
    • ok123456 5y ago
      Move to China if you want inharmonious posts removed from the internet.
      • duxup 5y ago
        Are you under the impression that moderation is just a Chinese thing or something? I don't think that makes any sense.
        • ok123456 5y ago
          No. But, moderation for the sake of the eventual societal consequences is the default in the Chinese (PRC) system. It's not necessarily a bad system. Their ideas have lifted a billion people out of poverty. But, it's not ours.
          • duxup 5y ago
            I'm not at all sure what you're trying to say, one comment seems to conflict with the next.
            • ok123456 5y ago
              I'm saying that censorship like this is incompatible with the western values as we know them. Yet this doesn't invalidate what the Chinese have accomplished. It's possible to have two conflicting ideas at the same time.
    • brimble 5y ago
      What's the likelihood of your spending a lifetime engaging with wrong people online having enough payoff to be worth it, even if it does have real consequences?
      • duxup 5y ago
        I don't think I fully understand the question. I think I've gotten a lot from spending time online... often in situations where there was a moderation system in place.
        • brimble 5y ago
          It's a question of how different the actual real world would be if one were to "stop caring that someone is wrong on the internet" versus the alternative world in which one cared very much about this. I would suggest that most of the time, the likely answer is "little to no different". In light of that, how many hours of one's life should be devoted to it? Almost none, probably. If improving the world is the goal, arguing on forums or Twitter is surely a terrible use of time and energy for most people (those with a massive audience, lots of money, fame, or any combination of those things, may be exceptions). It's similar to keeping up with day-to-day national news. How often is there something actually important and actionable that one learns only by closely following non-local news, that wouldn't have made its way through the grapevine (or down to local news) fast enough anyway? Barring people who need to trade on that information or otherwise need to be very plugged-in for their job, or what have you. Yet some people try to paint following such news closely as necessary for being a good citizen. Is it, though? If I look at it honestly, the difference between checking in on what's happening nationally (or internationally) every day, and checking in once a quarter, is practically indistinguishable, in terms of what I do and what I can realistically affect. Even once a quarter is probably more frequent than necessary to achieve approximately the maximum actual real-world benefit it is likely to provide to me. Yet people follow pundits on Twitter or read news sites daily or watch 24/7 cable news and seem to genuinely think they're a better citizen for it, rather than that they're engaging in a low-value hobby like watching daytime soap operas or following e-sports as a spectator (which are fine diversions and people should absolutely do those things if they enjoy them, but practically no-one's under the illusion that those are laudible or improving activities)
    • caenorst 5y ago
      This is so vague... Me breathing air has real consequences. You probably mean "societal" consequences, and it's also way too vague, moderating has real consequences as much as not moderating.
  • 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.