4 ms·

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. No, that's wrong model. Authorities have always misle

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. No, that's wrong model. Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful. What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world. > That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way. You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available. There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable. What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.

crmd 5y ago
My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work. The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.
  - crmd 5y ago
    I’m talking about the government banning unapproved narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These controls exist currently in China but not in the United States.
  - richiebful1 5y ago
    What's the evidence that the Clinton/Bush administrations wanted to censor internet content, but decided it was too expensive?
  - aksss 5y ago
    > The only thing special that the Chinese have done I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree. This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."
ARandomerDude 5y ago
>> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. > No, that's wrong model. > Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful. > What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world. I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  What's changed is our ability to detect authorities are lying to us. It's higher than it's ever been. That erodes trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to us. Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I think so too. With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view. Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      > Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class. Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)
  - 5y ago
derbOac 5y ago
Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted. Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed. Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted. Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1]. Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s [0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-surgery/about/pac-20384589 https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-... [1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/ https://www.abms.org/board-certification/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.
    - nobody9999 5y ago

crmd 5y ago

My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.

pessimizer 5y ago
Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work. The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.
- crmd 5y ago
  I’m talking about the government banning unapproved narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These controls exist currently in China but not in the United States.
- richiebful1 5y ago
  What's the evidence that the Clinton/Bush administrations wanted to censor internet content, but decided it was too expensive?
- aksss 5y ago
  > The only thing special that the Chinese have done I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree. This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."

ARandomerDude 5y ago

>> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. > No, that's wrong model. > Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful. > What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world. I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
What's changed is our ability to detect authorities are lying to us. It's higher than it's ever been. That erodes trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to us. Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I think so too. With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view. Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class. Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)
- 5y ago

derbOac 5y ago

Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted. Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed. Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.

nobody9999 5y ago
>Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted. Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1]. Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s [0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-surgery/about/pac-20384589 https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-... [1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/ https://www.abms.org/board-certification/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.
- derbOac 5y ago
  It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.
  - nobody9999 5y ago