11 ms·

Consensus not censorship

58 points by SubiculumCode 4y ago

epgui 4y ago
There's a big part of the argument here that is that what is and isn't misinformation is largely unknowable by any individual, and that different people disagree on different experts' authority. But that's just not true. It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them from confusing other people too. It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information. The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to that level, as a society, is extremely low.
- kodyo 4y ago
  Corporate media institutions have been more wrong for longer and on a far larger scale than Infowars. Why single it out?
  - epgui 4y ago
    Because combatting mis/dis-information is largely a problem at the tail-end of the distribution (ie.: the crazier, most unhinged end of it). It's one thing to argue with each other about complicated nuances, it's another thing when people feed bleach to their children because someone on the internet told them it would help with the autism.
    - kodyo 4y ago
      I’m willing to let stupid people sacrifice themselves rather than sacrifice everybody else’s freedom.
      - epgui 4y ago
        That's nice, except sometimes innocent people are the victim. Like the children. Or, in the context of a pandemic, all the other people who are exposed because Bob and Steve won't put a mask on or get a jab.
        kodyo 4y ago
        People were censored and deplatformed for being more correct than the public health experts.
        epgui 4y ago
        You'll have to provide examples of this, because I don't think that's clear and obvious.
        kodyo 4y ago
        Journalist Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter for saying the covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. He was correct.
        epgui 4y ago
        Except that's not exactly true either, depending on how you look at it. At the population-scale, they do prevent infection and transmission, and they prevent it very very well. This particular individual has said many other things during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a much broader line of messaging that was, broadly speaking, both incorrect and harmful. (I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of interest.)
        kodyo 4y ago
        Alright we’ll I’m opposed to censorship over pissy word-mincing. He wasn’t wrong.
        4y ago
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Literally, "Think of the Children!" Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century nonsense you can think of. The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's some glowing words on a box.
      - epgui 4y ago
        > Parents have claimed religious exceptions Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs and that risks are within certain boundaries. You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at large.
        ok123456 4y ago
        Most of that boils down to very politely asking the parents to follow the recommended standard of care. Unless there's outright abuse, like broken bones without a satisfactory explanation, there's no real intervention. You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish child goes to the pediatrician?
        epgui 4y ago
        I would guess not very often! But as with anything, you have to think about how things scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population, and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on TikTok. :) If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about doing something about it. None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be considered as if it did.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      I feel like Infowars can only exist as part of an ecosystem of misinformation. It's easier to talk about, because it's dumb, but it's probably not the most vital thing to address. If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism, then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists are faking school schootings?
    - rhdunn 4y ago
      Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example: 1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1]. 2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2] 3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3] Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement. There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports. Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on. Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people who thought the world would end, and people who were preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred, people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part because of the way the media overhyped the issues and failed to properly convey the potential problems to readers/viewers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_portrayal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_po... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 [3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in-climate-reporting-reveals-bbcs-sensitivity-to-political-pressure/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in...
      - epgui 4y ago
        > not only located to the fringe/tail-end This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree that it's a problem in the extremes.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    That's quite a claim. Any [reliable] sources to back it up?
    - kodyo 4y ago
      I’m not here to convince you. I can tell you that if there’s a desire to combat misinformation, clean up the institutional dishonesty, secrecy and never ending shilling for the establishment that causes mistrust.
      - ok123456 4y ago
        So the plan to increase trust in our institutions is to control how you can criticize them, and label any dissent "disinformation?"
    - ctoth 4y ago
      I'll play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq... Or has Infowars started a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people which I haven't happened to read about?
      - epgui 4y ago
        How does this point to a special failing of the media? Judith was let go and prosecuted, was she not? What other system of publication would have prevented these things? How is infowars protected from things like this, and how can anyone argue that it has an overall better track record?
        ctoth 4y ago
        Let's hear from James Risen, reporter at the Times at the time. :) > What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it. As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign. So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten writers into following the narrative. The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not sure what you're looking for.
- junofan 4y ago
  Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president [1]. What if Bob and Steve see Nature as a political organization? Are they incorrect? Should they be silenced? [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x
  - epgui 4y ago
    If bob and steve are going around saying Nature is very political, they're wrong, but who cares? If bob and steve are going around telling people masks are harmful (and that's causing the mistaken belief to spread), then bob and steve are causing direct harm, and their voice amplifier should be taken away. Nobody is going to put duct tape on their mouth.
    - junofan 4y ago
      I see you’re coming from a good place. I just think taking away voice amplifiers (smashing the printing press, so to speak) hasn’t turned out well in the past, and I don’t see a strong enough reason to start doing that now.
      - epgui 4y ago
        I think there's a very clear line we can draw between different categories of smashing the printing press: - "banning books because they criticize the government" - "banning books because they have immoral content" And on the other hand: - "shutting down a viral video with advice dangerous to individuals, where protecting the public from direct physical harm is the goal" I don't know of any instances in History where we looked back at the latter in disapproval.
        junofan 4y ago
        What we look back in disapproval upon is empowering a group to do the silencing. I think because those who do the silencing usually end up silencing their own critics.
n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative means. >Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not. False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.
- paulddraper 4y ago
  The Means Justify the Ends
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem? This essay is much more thought out and rational than your flame-bait response.
  - kodyo 4y ago
    You’re a censor if you try to censor it.
  - justforaskin 4y ago
    The flame bait response, as you put it, is more terse than the article. We’ve seen the appeal to authority and the censoring of those who questioned the science writ large over Covid. We’ve seen it heavily on this platform. Censoring things that have facts is wrong.
    - SubiculumCode 4y ago
      but the article is not even advocating censorship.
zozbot234 4y ago
> We could use "permissioned blockchains" (which involve no speculative financial tokens or environmentally destructive "mining") ubiquitously in important institutions to notarize almost everything This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Or a database. Anyone using the words "permissioned" or "private" doesn't really want a blockchain. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468
  - klabb3 4y ago
    There's an intermediate option which is overlooked: tamper proof-ness/transparency logs/signed actions. Ie the writer is traditional central authority but the readers can store and later prove that the authority acted incorrectly/maliciously, should that be the case. For instance, you have traditional moderation. No hate speech etc. It works fine. Then you see that your comment was removed but it was only a dissenting opinion. You can then prove to others they removed it. The idea is to keep the authority in check through transparency. This also works well for promises of discounts, overbooking of tickets, non-spoofable reviews, etc.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      Yes! Write-once + read-many + no-update/delete tables are reasonably-common in databases as well, and some databases natively support a ledger table type that enables updates and deletes while also providing tamper-proof evidence of all changes.
    - mike_hock 4y ago
      As long as transgressions actually have consequences.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Paul Frazee & others had some good threads last fall/winter about smart contracts/public transaction logs without central/concensus blockchains[1]. Individuals with their own willingness to declare their stuff. Edit: Oh this got followed up on Paul's direction is a little different than expected; Ii has come out a little less self sovereign than I expected. But, here's[2] Vitra. His follow up.ppst talks about Execution Transparency[3]. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462489933734723595 https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/146248993373472359... [2] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-blockchains-fc54603df754 https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-blockc... [3] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-hosted-smart-contracts-using-secure-append-only-logs-51c35b3d057f https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-hosted-...
kastagg 4y ago
On one hand, there are people who say "flood the zone with shit" and regularly signal boost memes from Stormfront. On the other hand, there are people who think that the New York Times is a newspaper of record and want to fight misinformation. Obviously, there's wrongdoing on both sides here. Instead of fighting Stormfront, why don't we create state-backed committees at community colleges which label populist, right-leaning viewpoints as academic consensus?
- ttpphd 4y ago
  Hilarious!
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Nevertheless, we had a functional polity in that era, with dissidence, yes, but also with broad consensus about what was true, false, and subject to reasonable contestation. As someone who often felt dissident, I can tell you that it sucked. Lots of important values and ideas got no meaningful hearing outside of very ghettoized information spaces. At the same time, it was a much more livable society beyond the frontiers of ones own dissidence. There was a lot one could get away with just taking for granted, as an individual trying to make sense of the world. Collectively, politically, we were a much more capable society, we had a stronger shared basis for action in the common good. The church of network television was consistent with an era of bipartisanship, and with experiments in policy—which were often mistaken, in part due to the narrow and blinkered information environment that framed them! But at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to, and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity that was always there.
- em-bee 4y ago
  at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present this is the critical part. only with consensus is it possible to try things, and fix failures without shaming those that supported the idea. elsewhere the author mentions multi party systems as an improvement over the two party situation. well, yes, but, in the end, any party system makes consensus difficult. even when there are coalitions, they mostly mean that one party agrees to support one issue against their own interests if the other party will support one of theirs. this kind of vote trading is not helpful. really the only way to get consensus is to completely abolish the concept of parties altogether. it's the same issue with unions. they are necessary today because employers do not act in the best interest of their employees. but unions and employers are in a constant struggle fighting each other, and consensus is not possible. but only consensus is able to ensure that a company operates to everyones benefit.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Climate Citizen Assemblies are a thing similar to the first suggestion https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-climate-citizens-assemblies/ https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This is a weird kind of reflection/parallel to the Powell Memorandum from 1971: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me... > Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States. > It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans. > Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  You mean like a biazarro-world reflection where everything is weird, wrong, and backwards? Or are you saying the pieces are somehow similar?
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Reflection as in they are both saying "There's a lot of people out there saying crazy stuff, what should we do to counter that?", but it seems likely to me that the crazy stuff we have now is a direct result of what this memo inspired, and that is partly because the memo itself is crazy, and all the people on campuses complaining about the environment that it's complaining about were right.
drewcoo 4y ago
This cherry picks what's traditional. In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer. (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s. Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those people lived in the south, of course. https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-rights-struggle-views-virginia-and-mississippi/ https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-ri... I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  The article also rejects this.
Julesman 4y ago
IT'S A TRAP! Seriously. I love the intent here. But in my view the whole premise is epistemologically wrong. (A word I'm almost educated enough to use.) Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage. This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things that subtract a lot from growth are not included. And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history do not match our mainstream perception of national character at all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social change are not supported by the majority. Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth consensus. What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its experts? Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I think the overton window plays a part and it's certainly an interesting window to look at the problem of misinformation thorough, but I think that we are seeing something that's even more painful to think about. We are seeing where people believe authority is derived from. The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto others. The author believes authority can be derived via consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation" believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by their religious leaders). If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I supposed to share a world view with someone who believes authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus be reached? Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally incompatible axioms about the world and how information is determined to be true. The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.
jancsika 4y ago
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  There is a certain irony in your surface level critique of an article trying to address such a deep topic.
- chrispeel 4y ago
  What browser and OS are you using? I think the website was created about 20 years ago (and looks like it), yet I see no problems with the font
- dogmatism 4y ago
  you know, CSS is a thing change it to something more readable
hunglee2 4y ago
> We develop sincere beliefs about the world that flatter, or at least are reconcilable with, the preconditions of our own well-being. one of many beautifully written lines. An outstanding essay for the quality of thinking and writing
zackees 4y ago
hayst4ck 4y ago
https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you will see. From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky. Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals to your own. Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will destroy it. That's why countries have militaries. As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos. How do you defeat that?
- woojoo666 4y ago
  > As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. Consensus based systems assume that bad actors make up less than 50% of the political power. As long as that is true, Consensusville should be able to fight off the chaos from bad actors
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
asimops 4y ago
Its an interesting article and while I didn't have the time to think the topic through - so I will not share my thoughts on the subject - there are some points in it, which I will definetly think about. What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very inaccessible. To me it felt like some words and phrases where deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could benefit from some more simple english.
pickovven 4y ago
I find articles like this - and the fact they make the front page of HN - pretty illustrative of how "misinformation" is nowhere close to our biggest media problem. Misinformation is downstream from retrograde political views and basic historical literacy. The solution isn't a better media ecosystem. It's better social relations.

58 points by SubiculumCode 4y ago

There's a big part of the argument here that is that what is and isn't misinformation is largely unknowable by any individual, and that different people disagree on different experts' authority. But that's just not true. It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them from confusing other people too. It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information. The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to that level, as a society, is extremely low.

kodyo 4y ago
Corporate media institutions have been more wrong for longer and on a far larger scale than Infowars. Why single it out?
- epgui 4y ago
  Because combatting mis/dis-information is largely a problem at the tail-end of the distribution (ie.: the crazier, most unhinged end of it). It's one thing to argue with each other about complicated nuances, it's another thing when people feed bleach to their children because someone on the internet told them it would help with the autism.
  - kodyo 4y ago
    I’m willing to let stupid people sacrifice themselves rather than sacrifice everybody else’s freedom.
    - epgui 4y ago
      That's nice, except sometimes innocent people are the victim. Like the children. Or, in the context of a pandemic, all the other people who are exposed because Bob and Steve won't put a mask on or get a jab.
      - kodyo 4y ago
        People were censored and deplatformed for being more correct than the public health experts.
        epgui 4y ago
        You'll have to provide examples of this, because I don't think that's clear and obvious.
        kodyo 4y ago
        Journalist Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter for saying the covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. He was correct.
        epgui 4y ago
        Except that's not exactly true either, depending on how you look at it. At the population-scale, they do prevent infection and transmission, and they prevent it very very well. This particular individual has said many other things during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a much broader line of messaging that was, broadly speaking, both incorrect and harmful. (I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of interest.)
        kodyo 4y ago
        Alright we’ll I’m opposed to censorship over pissy word-mincing. He wasn’t wrong.
        4y ago
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Literally, "Think of the Children!" Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century nonsense you can think of. The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's some glowing words on a box.
    - epgui 4y ago
      > Parents have claimed religious exceptions Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs and that risks are within certain boundaries. You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at large.
      - ok123456 4y ago
        Most of that boils down to very politely asking the parents to follow the recommended standard of care. Unless there's outright abuse, like broken bones without a satisfactory explanation, there's no real intervention. You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish child goes to the pediatrician?
        epgui 4y ago
        I would guess not very often! But as with anything, you have to think about how things scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population, and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on TikTok. :) If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about doing something about it. None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be considered as if it did.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I feel like Infowars can only exist as part of an ecosystem of misinformation. It's easier to talk about, because it's dumb, but it's probably not the most vital thing to address. If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism, then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists are faking school schootings?
  - rhdunn 4y ago
    Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example: 1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1]. 2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2] 3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3] Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement. There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports. Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on. Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people who thought the world would end, and people who were preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred, people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part because of the way the media overhyped the issues and failed to properly convey the potential problems to readers/viewers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_portrayal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_po... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 [3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in-climate-reporting-reveals-bbcs-sensitivity-to-political-pressure/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in...
    - epgui 4y ago
      > not only located to the fringe/tail-end This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree that it's a problem in the extremes.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  That's quite a claim. Any [reliable] sources to back it up?
  - kodyo 4y ago
    I’m not here to convince you. I can tell you that if there’s a desire to combat misinformation, clean up the institutional dishonesty, secrecy and never ending shilling for the establishment that causes mistrust.
    - ok123456 4y ago
      So the plan to increase trust in our institutions is to control how you can criticize them, and label any dissent "disinformation?"
  - ctoth 4y ago
    I'll play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq... Or has Infowars started a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people which I haven't happened to read about?
    - epgui 4y ago
      How does this point to a special failing of the media? Judith was let go and prosecuted, was she not? What other system of publication would have prevented these things? How is infowars protected from things like this, and how can anyone argue that it has an overall better track record?
      - ctoth 4y ago
        Let's hear from James Risen, reporter at the Times at the time. :) > What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it. As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign. So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten writers into following the narrative. The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not sure what you're looking for.
junofan 4y ago
Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president [1]. What if Bob and Steve see Nature as a political organization? Are they incorrect? Should they be silenced? [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x
- epgui 4y ago
  If bob and steve are going around saying Nature is very political, they're wrong, but who cares? If bob and steve are going around telling people masks are harmful (and that's causing the mistaken belief to spread), then bob and steve are causing direct harm, and their voice amplifier should be taken away. Nobody is going to put duct tape on their mouth.
  - junofan 4y ago
    I see you’re coming from a good place. I just think taking away voice amplifiers (smashing the printing press, so to speak) hasn’t turned out well in the past, and I don’t see a strong enough reason to start doing that now.
    - epgui 4y ago
      I think there's a very clear line we can draw between different categories of smashing the printing press: - "banning books because they criticize the government" - "banning books because they have immoral content" And on the other hand: - "shutting down a viral video with advice dangerous to individuals, where protecting the public from direct physical harm is the goal" I don't know of any instances in History where we looked back at the latter in disapproval.
      - junofan 4y ago
        What we look back in disapproval upon is empowering a group to do the silencing. I think because those who do the silencing usually end up silencing their own critics.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago

Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative means. >Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not. False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.

paulddraper 4y ago
The Means Justify the Ends
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SubiculumCode 4y ago
Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem? This essay is much more thought out and rational than your flame-bait response.
- kodyo 4y ago
  You’re a censor if you try to censor it.
- justforaskin 4y ago
  The flame bait response, as you put it, is more terse than the article. We’ve seen the appeal to authority and the censoring of those who questioned the science writ large over Covid. We’ve seen it heavily on this platform. Censoring things that have facts is wrong.
  - SubiculumCode 4y ago
    but the article is not even advocating censorship.

zozbot234 4y ago

> We could use "permissioned blockchains" (which involve no speculative financial tokens or environmentally destructive "mining") ubiquitously in important institutions to notarize almost everything This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.

CharlesW 4y ago
Or a database. Anyone using the words "permissioned" or "private" doesn't really want a blockchain. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468
- klabb3 4y ago
  There's an intermediate option which is overlooked: tamper proof-ness/transparency logs/signed actions. Ie the writer is traditional central authority but the readers can store and later prove that the authority acted incorrectly/maliciously, should that be the case. For instance, you have traditional moderation. No hate speech etc. It works fine. Then you see that your comment was removed but it was only a dissenting opinion. You can then prove to others they removed it. The idea is to keep the authority in check through transparency. This also works well for promises of discounts, overbooking of tickets, non-spoofable reviews, etc.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Yes! Write-once + read-many + no-update/delete tables are reasonably-common in databases as well, and some databases natively support a ledger table type that enables updates and deletes while also providing tamper-proof evidence of all changes.
  - mike_hock 4y ago
    As long as transgressions actually have consequences.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Paul Frazee & others had some good threads last fall/winter about smart contracts/public transaction logs without central/concensus blockchains[1]. Individuals with their own willingness to declare their stuff. Edit: Oh this got followed up on Paul's direction is a little different than expected; Ii has come out a little less self sovereign than I expected. But, here's[2] Vitra. His follow up.ppst talks about Execution Transparency[3]. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462489933734723595 https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/146248993373472359... [2] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-blockchains-fc54603df754 https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-blockc... [3] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-hosted-smart-contracts-using-secure-append-only-logs-51c35b3d057f https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-hosted-...

kastagg 4y ago

On one hand, there are people who say "flood the zone with shit" and regularly signal boost memes from Stormfront. On the other hand, there are people who think that the New York Times is a newspaper of record and want to fight misinformation. Obviously, there's wrongdoing on both sides here. Instead of fighting Stormfront, why don't we create state-backed committees at community colleges which label populist, right-leaning viewpoints as academic consensus?

ttpphd 4y ago
Hilarious!

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Nevertheless, we had a functional polity in that era, with dissidence, yes, but also with broad consensus about what was true, false, and subject to reasonable contestation. As someone who often felt dissident, I can tell you that it sucked. Lots of important values and ideas got no meaningful hearing outside of very ghettoized information spaces. At the same time, it was a much more livable society beyond the frontiers of ones own dissidence. There was a lot one could get away with just taking for granted, as an individual trying to make sense of the world. Collectively, politically, we were a much more capable society, we had a stronger shared basis for action in the common good. The church of network television was consistent with an era of bipartisanship, and with experiments in policy—which were often mistaken, in part due to the narrow and blinkered information environment that framed them! But at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to, and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity that was always there.

em-bee 4y ago
at least things could be tried, which is more than we can say for our polity at present this is the critical part. only with consensus is it possible to try things, and fix failures without shaming those that supported the idea. elsewhere the author mentions multi party systems as an improvement over the two party situation. well, yes, but, in the end, any party system makes consensus difficult. even when there are coalitions, they mostly mean that one party agrees to support one issue against their own interests if the other party will support one of theirs. this kind of vote trading is not helpful. really the only way to get consensus is to completely abolish the concept of parties altogether. it's the same issue with unions. they are necessary today because employers do not act in the best interest of their employees. but unions and employers are in a constant struggle fighting each other, and consensus is not possible. but only consensus is able to ensure that a company operates to everyones benefit.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Climate Citizen Assemblies are a thing similar to the first suggestion https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-climate-citizens-assemblies/ https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-...

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This is a weird kind of reflection/parallel to the Powell Memorandum from 1971: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me... > Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States. > It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans. > Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”

DangitBobby 4y ago
You mean like a biazarro-world reflection where everything is weird, wrong, and backwards? Or are you saying the pieces are somehow similar?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Reflection as in they are both saying "There's a lot of people out there saying crazy stuff, what should we do to counter that?", but it seems likely to me that the crazy stuff we have now is a direct result of what this memo inspired, and that is partly because the memo itself is crazy, and all the people on campuses complaining about the environment that it's complaining about were right.

drewcoo 4y ago

This cherry picks what's traditional. In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer. (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s. Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those people lived in the south, of course. https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-rights-struggle-views-virginia-and-mississippi/ https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-ri... I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.

SubiculumCode 4y ago
The article also rejects this.

Julesman 4y ago

IT'S A TRAP! Seriously. I love the intent here. But in my view the whole premise is epistemologically wrong. (A word I'm almost educated enough to use.) Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage. This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things that subtract a lot from growth are not included. And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history do not match our mainstream perception of national character at all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social change are not supported by the majority. Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth consensus. What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its experts? Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.

hayst4ck 4y ago
I think the overton window plays a part and it's certainly an interesting window to look at the problem of misinformation thorough, but I think that we are seeing something that's even more painful to think about. We are seeing where people believe authority is derived from. The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto others. The author believes authority can be derived via consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation" believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by their religious leaders). If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I supposed to share a world view with someone who believes authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus be reached? Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally incompatible axioms about the world and how information is determined to be true. The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.

jancsika 4y ago

SubiculumCode 4y ago
There is a certain irony in your surface level critique of an article trying to address such a deep topic.
chrispeel 4y ago
What browser and OS are you using? I think the website was created about 20 years ago (and looks like it), yet I see no problems with the font
dogmatism 4y ago
you know, CSS is a thing change it to something more readable

hunglee2 4y ago

> We develop sincere beliefs about the world that flatter, or at least are reconcilable with, the preconditions of our own well-being. one of many beautifully written lines. An outstanding essay for the quality of thinking and writing

zackees 4y ago

hayst4ck 4y ago

https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you will see. From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky. Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals to your own. Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will destroy it. That's why countries have militaries. As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos. How do you defeat that?

woojoo666 4y ago
> As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. Consensus based systems assume that bad actors make up less than 50% of the political power. As long as that is true, Consensusville should be able to fight off the chaos from bad actors
- hayst4ck 4y ago

asimops 4y ago

Its an interesting article and while I didn't have the time to think the topic through - so I will not share my thoughts on the subject - there are some points in it, which I will definetly think about. What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very inaccessible. To me it felt like some words and phrases where deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could benefit from some more simple english.

pickovven 4y ago

I find articles like this - and the fact they make the front page of HN - pretty illustrative of how "misinformation" is nowhere close to our biggest media problem. Misinformation is downstream from retrograde political views and basic historical literacy. The solution isn't a better media ecosystem. It's better social relations.