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Honestly I keep hearing about how we need to fix trust in the media and what not. But I am wondering if society will end up adapting. Here's what I mean. We be

Honestly I keep hearing about how we need to fix trust in the media and what not. But I am wondering if society will end up adapting. Here's what I mean. We believe that it is ideal that the media gives us clear accurate unbiased information and that is what should be happening, but what if there is an alternative that we accept that all the media is biased as hell and we adjust and filter oir credulity to match. I know that if I go to outlet #1 I'll get one story and if I go to outlet #2 I'll get a different story and knowing that I don't trust either of them completely but instead bank on being able to understand between them. Now I know some people will object that something like that isn't happening in today's world and that people are being driven to extremism but it might take a little time. What seems much scarier to me is we try and force "neutral" "fact checked" information to be the only kind and that anyone outside of that is a "threat to democracy" because for me that seems far far more worrisome.

gfodor 4y ago
I’ve often thought maybe AI will end up helping here. It might be possible to build an AI that can take in all these biased stories and digest them into something that actually has more signal than noise. Lots of possibilities: try to write a de-biased version, annotate the stories to point out the bias and rhetorical tricks used, find the set of facts that are the same across all sources and distill them, etc. not a silver bullet but seems like a rich space for exploring how to turn the garbage produced by the media into signal by leveraging the fact that these are adversarial organizations that do have some predictable constraints on what they will say.
- asow92 4y ago
  Why would the public trust an AI over an editorial team? Couldn't it be just as biased?
- kevingadd 4y ago
  How is an AI automatically going to turn bad data into good data? When in history has this been the case? So far we haven't managed to magically create an AI that can turn huge piles of bad data into good data, you see all sorts of stories about machine learning problems caused by misclassified training data, etc. Bad news stories and opinion pieces feel close to a worst case here since so many of them are subtly wrong in ways that would make it hard to even tag them clearly and accurately at scale for use as a training set. And at the end what's the AI going to do? Tag up every news story so that 60% of the text is yellow or red indicating that all of it is misleading or a lie? If an article quotes "sources" how is AI going to determine whether or not the sources are informed and whether the author is selectively quoting them?
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    You train it on last year's media, on articles and news where the actual situation is now clearer.
    - kevingadd 4y ago
      Knowing the fact a year later doesn't tell you whether a given piece was good or bad journalism, just whether it was correct. That's very different. Are you suggesting that if you train a network on last year's media plus the state of the world a year after, we'll be able to teach an AI to predict the future? The problems are around the reporting process and the reporter's motives/influences, not whether everything they say turns out to be 100% accurate. Often the facts on the ground change or the information everyone has is inaccurate, and you want reporting that clearly communicates this ambiguity and isn't actively misleading you.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    The bad vs good data dichotomy is a false frame. The problem with the media isn't that it's zero signal, its that it's low signal. Fortunately there's also signal in the differences between the reporting from the various outlets, and there's also signal in the repitition across reporting from the same outlet. For example, the more media outlets of varying political slants agree on a specific facet of a story, all other things being equal, the more likely it's true. And from there, if you can put together a firm set of things that seem highly likely to be true, you can have a scaffold to hang everything else on in a way that might be useful for understanding where the uncertainty is and its magnitude. It's this integration process that I think can possibly result in useful artifacts. It can be (and is) done by humans, of course, but at a coarse grain and is fundamentally resource constrained. I suspect if this kind of process could be systematized and cover all outputs by all media outlets, that could be something materially better. A lot of the resistence to what I'm saying stems from jumping to conclusions around what, exactly, these artifacts would be. The point would be to try many different kinds of artifacts. The ones that are obviously a bad idea are obviously bad ideas. But there are many that are not obviously good or obviously bad, such as having AI introduce additional cross-references, applying labels to various forms of rhetoric that are used to trick people, etc. Also, I said "AI" not "machine learning" and not "classifiers" and not "neural networks." I'm talking in this case very literally about AI in the broad sense.
w-j-w 4y ago
jl6 4y ago
> I know that if I go to outlet #1 I'll get one story and if I go to outlet #2 I'll get a different story and knowing that I don't trust either of them completely but instead bank on being able to understand between them. This isn’t how media bias works. It is rare for media outlets to publish outright lies; if a fact is presented as a fact, it probably is a fact. The following techniques are much bigger sources of bias: 1. Opinions masquerading as facts. Not always easy to spot. 2. Selective publishing of stories. Outlet #1 and Outlet #2 make radically different choices about what stories to cover. Fact checkers are powerless against these patterns of deceit, so a strategy that focuses on facts will win the battle but lose the war.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  1. I don't think is to hard. In fact a handy metric I use is "is someone trying to predict what will happen in the future, or ascribing to someone else certain motives, or an ability to read someone else's mind?" If so that's an oponion, as is any phrase that includes the word "likely", "probably" "possibly" "estimated that" or "experts say" any of those mean someone is trying to pass opinion off as fact. As for #2 if it is small enough to be ignored then it probably wasn't super important, whereas if it is significant everyone is going to be arguing about it. The realization came when I realized despite all of the news stories I scoured about things I usually got the same consistent facts and most of the rest of the story was just either 1) quoting yahoos off the street/Twitter or 2) people trying to predict the future or push an agenda. Start looking for it in the news you consume it becomes pretty easy to detect pretty quickly.
- shswkna 4y ago
  I can argue that choosing what stories are important and which not, is a matter of what one values. I as the editor/owner of a media house might find it important that politician A has ties to company X. Another media house might think, this isn’t important and find it more valuable for the public to know that a law is to be passed that will limit my freedom to do business as I please. Neither is wrong or right. I suggest that everything is an “opinion” of a sort, even the publishing of verified facts .
- tootie 4y ago
jjoonathan 4y ago
Careful, center-seeking strategies on their own tend to incentivize extremism because they systematically under-weight correct positions within the Overton window while they over-weight incorrect extreme positions designed to nudge the Overton window. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an excellent idea to seek out both sides, but developing and applying trust heuristics is critical or the strategy is easy to exploit. Nothing has improved my respect for traditional media as much as the evolution of my trust heuristics for alternative media.
swayvil 4y ago
The idea that a profit-motivated entity can be trusted to deliver honest facts seems rather absurd on the face of it.
rainsford 4y ago
> We believe that it is ideal that the media gives us clear accurate unbiased information and that is what should be happening... I think the problem is that most people don't really believe that. I mean they'll claim that's their platonic ideal if asked, but in private their information consuming habits will be wall-to-wall Newsmax and straight up unhinged Youtube channels. Their goal isn't to arrive at accurate facts that reflect reality, whether it's through finding unbiased information sources or interpolating between conflicting biases as you suggested. They want the bias, just in their preferred direction.

gfodor 4y ago

I’ve often thought maybe AI will end up helping here. It might be possible to build an AI that can take in all these biased stories and digest them into something that actually has more signal than noise. Lots of possibilities: try to write a de-biased version, annotate the stories to point out the bias and rhetorical tricks used, find the set of facts that are the same across all sources and distill them, etc. not a silver bullet but seems like a rich space for exploring how to turn the garbage produced by the media into signal by leveraging the fact that these are adversarial organizations that do have some predictable constraints on what they will say.

asow92 4y ago
Why would the public trust an AI over an editorial team? Couldn't it be just as biased?
kevingadd 4y ago
How is an AI automatically going to turn bad data into good data? When in history has this been the case? So far we haven't managed to magically create an AI that can turn huge piles of bad data into good data, you see all sorts of stories about machine learning problems caused by misclassified training data, etc. Bad news stories and opinion pieces feel close to a worst case here since so many of them are subtly wrong in ways that would make it hard to even tag them clearly and accurately at scale for use as a training set. And at the end what's the AI going to do? Tag up every news story so that 60% of the text is yellow or red indicating that all of it is misleading or a lie? If an article quotes "sources" how is AI going to determine whether or not the sources are informed and whether the author is selectively quoting them?
- WalterSear 4y ago
  You train it on last year's media, on articles and news where the actual situation is now clearer.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Knowing the fact a year later doesn't tell you whether a given piece was good or bad journalism, just whether it was correct. That's very different. Are you suggesting that if you train a network on last year's media plus the state of the world a year after, we'll be able to teach an AI to predict the future? The problems are around the reporting process and the reporter's motives/influences, not whether everything they say turns out to be 100% accurate. Often the facts on the ground change or the information everyone has is inaccurate, and you want reporting that clearly communicates this ambiguity and isn't actively misleading you.
- gfodor 4y ago
  The bad vs good data dichotomy is a false frame. The problem with the media isn't that it's zero signal, its that it's low signal. Fortunately there's also signal in the differences between the reporting from the various outlets, and there's also signal in the repitition across reporting from the same outlet. For example, the more media outlets of varying political slants agree on a specific facet of a story, all other things being equal, the more likely it's true. And from there, if you can put together a firm set of things that seem highly likely to be true, you can have a scaffold to hang everything else on in a way that might be useful for understanding where the uncertainty is and its magnitude. It's this integration process that I think can possibly result in useful artifacts. It can be (and is) done by humans, of course, but at a coarse grain and is fundamentally resource constrained. I suspect if this kind of process could be systematized and cover all outputs by all media outlets, that could be something materially better. A lot of the resistence to what I'm saying stems from jumping to conclusions around what, exactly, these artifacts would be. The point would be to try many different kinds of artifacts. The ones that are obviously a bad idea are obviously bad ideas. But there are many that are not obviously good or obviously bad, such as having AI introduce additional cross-references, applying labels to various forms of rhetoric that are used to trick people, etc. Also, I said "AI" not "machine learning" and not "classifiers" and not "neural networks." I'm talking in this case very literally about AI in the broad sense.

w-j-w 4y ago

jl6 4y ago

> I know that if I go to outlet #1 I'll get one story and if I go to outlet #2 I'll get a different story and knowing that I don't trust either of them completely but instead bank on being able to understand between them. This isn’t how media bias works. It is rare for media outlets to publish outright lies; if a fact is presented as a fact, it probably is a fact. The following techniques are much bigger sources of bias: 1. Opinions masquerading as facts. Not always easy to spot. 2. Selective publishing of stories. Outlet #1 and Outlet #2 make radically different choices about what stories to cover. Fact checkers are powerless against these patterns of deceit, so a strategy that focuses on facts will win the battle but lose the war.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
1. I don't think is to hard. In fact a handy metric I use is "is someone trying to predict what will happen in the future, or ascribing to someone else certain motives, or an ability to read someone else's mind?" If so that's an oponion, as is any phrase that includes the word "likely", "probably" "possibly" "estimated that" or "experts say" any of those mean someone is trying to pass opinion off as fact. As for #2 if it is small enough to be ignored then it probably wasn't super important, whereas if it is significant everyone is going to be arguing about it. The realization came when I realized despite all of the news stories I scoured about things I usually got the same consistent facts and most of the rest of the story was just either 1) quoting yahoos off the street/Twitter or 2) people trying to predict the future or push an agenda. Start looking for it in the news you consume it becomes pretty easy to detect pretty quickly.
shswkna 4y ago
I can argue that choosing what stories are important and which not, is a matter of what one values. I as the editor/owner of a media house might find it important that politician A has ties to company X. Another media house might think, this isn’t important and find it more valuable for the public to know that a law is to be passed that will limit my freedom to do business as I please. Neither is wrong or right. I suggest that everything is an “opinion” of a sort, even the publishing of verified facts .
tootie 4y ago

jjoonathan 4y ago

Careful, center-seeking strategies on their own tend to incentivize extremism because they systematically under-weight correct positions within the Overton window while they over-weight incorrect extreme positions designed to nudge the Overton window. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an excellent idea to seek out both sides, but developing and applying trust heuristics is critical or the strategy is easy to exploit. Nothing has improved my respect for traditional media as much as the evolution of my trust heuristics for alternative media.

swayvil 4y ago

The idea that a profit-motivated entity can be trusted to deliver honest facts seems rather absurd on the face of it.

rainsford 4y ago

> We believe that it is ideal that the media gives us clear accurate unbiased information and that is what should be happening... I think the problem is that most people don't really believe that. I mean they'll claim that's their platonic ideal if asked, but in private their information consuming habits will be wall-to-wall Newsmax and straight up unhinged Youtube channels. Their goal isn't to arrive at accurate facts that reflect reality, whether it's through finding unbiased information sources or interpolating between conflicting biases as you suggested. They want the bias, just in their preferred direction.