7 ms·

In 2023, let’s rediscover wrongness

41 points by mpweiher 4y ago

082349872349872 4y ago
Furthermore, some wrong things are wrong in ways that are more interesting than others. An excellent example is "Ancient Aliens"*. The show is wrong, to be sure, but very careful to make wrong implications with non-wrong claims. IMO it ought to be required viewing in all elementary schools. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_110 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa... > Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement." * for those who have not seen it, each episode is a work of art, starting out with the uncontroversial, and ending with some wild hypothesis, with the "documentary format" hosts couching everything in impeccable language. A typical statement: "Ancient astronaut theorists believe X. What if it were true?"
- jagged-chisel 4y ago
  At the risk of stating the obvious, my intent is to assist other readers: > ... 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' In text (thus without inflection), one can interpret this several ways. > I never told anybody ... It wasn't Harry who spilled the beans. > I never told anybody ... But Harry had photographs to show them. > I never told anybody ... Someone has blamed Harry (for making it up? for sharing truth prematurely?) and he's trying to defend himself. Presumably, however, Al's wife never was a stripper. But this second-hand account of a statement that A) may not have existed or B) was meant to indicate it was never true, brings to the mind of the viewer/listener a different version of this woman's past and could very well indict her with a questionable history.
headsoup 4y ago
I think we could turn the Guardian article's premise around (as this article hints to) and say "it's dangerous to think people shouldn't be allowed to think about or experience wrong things." It's obvious slippery slope arguments that lead to censorship and nanny states if not worse. The correct answer is not to believe that everyone is a Netflix show away from being a conspiracy theorist, but to instead present the evidence against and counter arguments. To add to that, if people do not trust the experts, it is not because wonky shows have created distrust, it is because the experts and authorities are not behaving honestly. People aren't as stupid as the Guardian author and authorities seem to think or want them to be. People enough lies and spin they start to wonder "what else are they lying about if this is the not-even-trying-to-hide-it stuff." Hold authorities and experts to account, rather than patronise the population and then try to censor their displeasure.
- escapedmoose 4y ago
  > it is because the experts and authorities are not behaving honestly. My instinct is to agree with you, but I can’t actually think of any examples where this tends to be the case. Which experts/authorities need to be held to account?
  - mythrwy 4y ago
    "Holding to account" doesn't necessarily imply wrongdoing or having been mistaken. It simply means someone is watching and there is expected responsibility for proclamations and actions. Similar to a student or employee or a citizen or anyone else. So all of them at all times.
  - luuuzeta 4y ago
    >Which experts/authorities need to be held to account? As of more recently, I think Dr. Fauci should be held accountable for lying to the American public in the last two years, from the effectiveness of masks to the effectiveness of the CV vaccines to the effectiveness of mandates to crowning himself as the herald of science (e.g., paraphrasing "if you disagree with me, you disagree with science").
whinvik 4y ago
The article seems light, citing a single article for the outcome but I think what is very interesting about the article itself is that its an article from the Guardian asking "Why has this been allowed?". This I feel is what is problematic. Social media making this kind of statement is usual, but something like Guardian making statements like this continues to reduce the amount of trust we have in supposedly high quality media like Guardian. Personally, I am interested in more media that I can trust to say/report the right thing. And I am still searching.
keewee7 4y ago
Nah, more often than not the "wrongness" is directly harming society or some vulnerable group of people. Shows like Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse are a funnel into a world of conspiracy theories that all end up with anti-semitic conspiracy theories about "Jewish globalist elites" who want to do "white genocide".
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Can you demonstrate why this is? It seems to contradict historical observations. We've had societies based on strong sense of doctrinal orthodoxy before, and this was very limiting. Introducing a sort of right to be wrong has been instrumental to improving society and science.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I think there's a really important distinction between ideas that are simply wrong like phlogiston or perpetual motion, and things like antisemitic/white supremacist conspiracy theories (if you look into this subject you'll find that they're one in the same, with antisemitism being the foundation of white supremacist conspiracy theories) that have evolved to spread virally though a population and perpetuate bigotry and motivate violence. It's a pretty literal form of "mind virus," and they're subject to selective pressures that cause them to literally evolve to be very difficult to discard once you've accepted them. Phlogiston isn't a closed system of ideas that absorbs all criticism of it and inverts it into evidence that "they" don't want you to know about the ideas. Consider flat earth conspiracy theories (which are not nearly as harmful as white supremacist ones and I don't mean to equate them, only to pivot to a different example that's a less touchy subject); it's trivial to debunk FE arguments, and people have, exhaustively. But unlike phlogiston, that didn't make the FE stop having currency in our discourse. It's not just something wrong which will lose out in the marketplace of ideas. In the documentary "Behind the Curve," several of the flat earthers come up with really compelling experiments that debunk the flat earth. But they aren't actually convinced by their own results. A conspiracy theory or system of conspiracy theories survives by being an endless font of explanations that paper over the inconsistencies. Those that are unable to do this either die off or are incorporated into a larger system of theories that have more explanatory power. As a matter of free speech it shouldn't be illegal to hold or to discuss these views, but unlike ideas that are simply wrong they create and enhance hazards as they spread. They isolate people within these communities; I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone who is a hardcore conspiracy theorist, but it can be really difficult to connect and interact with them because they will have really strong responses to seemingly innocuous things, and constantly insist that you're a rube for not thinking along the same lines. This often erodes their relationships with people outside the culture of the conspiracy theory (which are often very loving & supportive places). These communities form a millieu which hate groups and fascist movements can be drawn from, not because these individual people are especially hateful, but because they've been indoctrinated into a cult-like setting where a proposition like, "there are children being held in the basement of this particular pizza parlor, someone needs to step up and save them" is taken quite seriously. You don't have to be a hateful person to show up to a pizza parlor with a gun (or commit other acts of violence) once you've developed the sincere belief that children's lives are at stake and that it's your personal responsibility to defend them. How to properly counter this phenomenon is largely an unsolved problem, and I'm not suggesting that a dictatorial approach is warranted (that'd pretty obviously backfire by seemingly validating the conspiracy), but there's more nuance here than orthodoxy vs. free exchange of ideas. We need to find a way to continue the free exchange of ideas while addressing these dangerous, emergent phenomenon. I'm currently working on software to help people create a personal epistemology, to compare theirs with others, and to collaborate on a shared epistemology. There's various reasons I think this is a good idea, but one of them is that I think being able to demonstrate what you believe and why would be beneficial to our discourse and hopefully counteract conspiracism.
luuuzeta 4y ago
>The constant hurling of these claims also causes people to adopt distorted views about the nature of human disagreement itself. Most disagreement — or most interesting disagreement — can’t be explained solely by the fact that one side is better or smarter or more accurately informed than the other. After reading _The Righteous Mind_, this is something Jonathan Haidt's book drilled down on me. The book focuses on the political and religious divide in the US primarily, and his Moral Foundation Theory shines some light on the issue: In the case of conservatives vs liberals, their moral matrices are vastly different and that's a recipe for disagreement. In Moral Foundation Theory [1], Haidt and a group of social psychologists seek to understand the variability of morality across cultures. Despite this variability, they find there are similarities and recurrent themes. They think there at least are six foundations: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/cheating, 3) Loyalty/betraying, 4) Authority/subversion, 5) Sanctity/degradation, and 6) Liberty/oppression. According to Haidt, liberals (aka leftists, Haidt uses "libertarians" for "classical liberals") respond extremely to the harm/care and liberty/opression foundations, however conservatives do not respond to these foundations as well. In fact, conservatives respond to all the foundations by the same degree while liberals respond to only two foundations. Both liberals and conservatives respond to liberty/oppression but they approach it differently. [1]: https://moralfoundations.org/ https://moralfoundations.org/
- ss108 4y ago
  Sounds like work that should be built upon, but also, the "both sides" bs it plays to is morally and intellectually weak. I'm pretty moderate (in the sense of having a weird basket of views, some quite "left", some rather "right"). I would vote for a center-right party, if we had one. I can somewhat see where the moral intuitions of both sides of the standard political divide arise from, but it's also pretty clear to me that the American political right is now marked by an almost pathological lack of empathy and compassion, as well as a blatant hatred for truth, fact, intellect, and basic good character. Morally, it's become totally inconsistent with the traditional values I believe in. While liberals definitely over-index on empathy and compassion, it's pretty clear they are more balanced overall. And at the very least, I find them incorrect in a more mundane and acceptable way. They haven't succumbed to evil.
- 4y ago
thenerdhead 4y ago
What is up with all of the policing of people's entertainment? There's some moral superiority going on with thinking a silly documentary of one guy's life work is going to harm some "vulnerable" population that isn't even statistically significant to begin with nor would cause any long term harm given the attention span on a single topic nowadays is shorter than 24 hours. Will this documentary be relevant in a year? 5 years? 10 years? Probably not. Another way of thinking about it is the show Ancient Aliens has been on air for over a decade. Did you know it is still running after its 15 minutes of fame and memes? Many articles talked about it being "fringe", but rarely did we call it conspiracy. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fabrications-and-lies-of-ancient-aliens-86294030/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fab... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory
nuc1e0n 4y ago
This is a thoughtful critique of the world-view of publications like the guardian. I think there's nothing more dangerous than wanting no viewpoints other than your own to be heard.

41 points by mpweiher 4y ago

Furthermore, some wrong things are wrong in ways that are more interesting than others. An excellent example is "Ancient Aliens"*. The show is wrong, to be sure, but very careful to make wrong implications with non-wrong claims. IMO it ought to be required viewing in all elementary schools. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_110 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa... > Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement." * for those who have not seen it, each episode is a work of art, starting out with the uncontroversial, and ending with some wild hypothesis, with the "documentary format" hosts couching everything in impeccable language. A typical statement: "Ancient astronaut theorists believe X. What if it were true?"

jagged-chisel 4y ago
At the risk of stating the obvious, my intent is to assist other readers: > ... 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' In text (thus without inflection), one can interpret this several ways. > I never told anybody ... It wasn't Harry who spilled the beans. > I never told anybody ... But Harry had photographs to show them. > I never told anybody ... Someone has blamed Harry (for making it up? for sharing truth prematurely?) and he's trying to defend himself. Presumably, however, Al's wife never was a stripper. But this second-hand account of a statement that A) may not have existed or B) was meant to indicate it was never true, brings to the mind of the viewer/listener a different version of this woman's past and could very well indict her with a questionable history.

headsoup 4y ago

I think we could turn the Guardian article's premise around (as this article hints to) and say "it's dangerous to think people shouldn't be allowed to think about or experience wrong things." It's obvious slippery slope arguments that lead to censorship and nanny states if not worse. The correct answer is not to believe that everyone is a Netflix show away from being a conspiracy theorist, but to instead present the evidence against and counter arguments. To add to that, if people do not trust the experts, it is not because wonky shows have created distrust, it is because the experts and authorities are not behaving honestly. People aren't as stupid as the Guardian author and authorities seem to think or want them to be. People enough lies and spin they start to wonder "what else are they lying about if this is the not-even-trying-to-hide-it stuff." Hold authorities and experts to account, rather than patronise the population and then try to censor their displeasure.

escapedmoose 4y ago
> it is because the experts and authorities are not behaving honestly. My instinct is to agree with you, but I can’t actually think of any examples where this tends to be the case. Which experts/authorities need to be held to account?
- mythrwy 4y ago
  "Holding to account" doesn't necessarily imply wrongdoing or having been mistaken. It simply means someone is watching and there is expected responsibility for proclamations and actions. Similar to a student or employee or a citizen or anyone else. So all of them at all times.
- luuuzeta 4y ago
  >Which experts/authorities need to be held to account? As of more recently, I think Dr. Fauci should be held accountable for lying to the American public in the last two years, from the effectiveness of masks to the effectiveness of the CV vaccines to the effectiveness of mandates to crowning himself as the herald of science (e.g., paraphrasing "if you disagree with me, you disagree with science").

whinvik 4y ago

The article seems light, citing a single article for the outcome but I think what is very interesting about the article itself is that its an article from the Guardian asking "Why has this been allowed?". This I feel is what is problematic. Social media making this kind of statement is usual, but something like Guardian making statements like this continues to reduce the amount of trust we have in supposedly high quality media like Guardian. Personally, I am interested in more media that I can trust to say/report the right thing. And I am still searching.

keewee7 4y ago

Nah, more often than not the "wrongness" is directly harming society or some vulnerable group of people. Shows like Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse are a funnel into a world of conspiracy theories that all end up with anti-semitic conspiracy theories about "Jewish globalist elites" who want to do "white genocide".

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Can you demonstrate why this is? It seems to contradict historical observations. We've had societies based on strong sense of doctrinal orthodoxy before, and this was very limiting. Introducing a sort of right to be wrong has been instrumental to improving society and science.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I think there's a really important distinction between ideas that are simply wrong like phlogiston or perpetual motion, and things like antisemitic/white supremacist conspiracy theories (if you look into this subject you'll find that they're one in the same, with antisemitism being the foundation of white supremacist conspiracy theories) that have evolved to spread virally though a population and perpetuate bigotry and motivate violence. It's a pretty literal form of "mind virus," and they're subject to selective pressures that cause them to literally evolve to be very difficult to discard once you've accepted them. Phlogiston isn't a closed system of ideas that absorbs all criticism of it and inverts it into evidence that "they" don't want you to know about the ideas. Consider flat earth conspiracy theories (which are not nearly as harmful as white supremacist ones and I don't mean to equate them, only to pivot to a different example that's a less touchy subject); it's trivial to debunk FE arguments, and people have, exhaustively. But unlike phlogiston, that didn't make the FE stop having currency in our discourse. It's not just something wrong which will lose out in the marketplace of ideas. In the documentary "Behind the Curve," several of the flat earthers come up with really compelling experiments that debunk the flat earth. But they aren't actually convinced by their own results. A conspiracy theory or system of conspiracy theories survives by being an endless font of explanations that paper over the inconsistencies. Those that are unable to do this either die off or are incorporated into a larger system of theories that have more explanatory power. As a matter of free speech it shouldn't be illegal to hold or to discuss these views, but unlike ideas that are simply wrong they create and enhance hazards as they spread. They isolate people within these communities; I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone who is a hardcore conspiracy theorist, but it can be really difficult to connect and interact with them because they will have really strong responses to seemingly innocuous things, and constantly insist that you're a rube for not thinking along the same lines. This often erodes their relationships with people outside the culture of the conspiracy theory (which are often very loving & supportive places). These communities form a millieu which hate groups and fascist movements can be drawn from, not because these individual people are especially hateful, but because they've been indoctrinated into a cult-like setting where a proposition like, "there are children being held in the basement of this particular pizza parlor, someone needs to step up and save them" is taken quite seriously. You don't have to be a hateful person to show up to a pizza parlor with a gun (or commit other acts of violence) once you've developed the sincere belief that children's lives are at stake and that it's your personal responsibility to defend them. How to properly counter this phenomenon is largely an unsolved problem, and I'm not suggesting that a dictatorial approach is warranted (that'd pretty obviously backfire by seemingly validating the conspiracy), but there's more nuance here than orthodoxy vs. free exchange of ideas. We need to find a way to continue the free exchange of ideas while addressing these dangerous, emergent phenomenon. I'm currently working on software to help people create a personal epistemology, to compare theirs with others, and to collaborate on a shared epistemology. There's various reasons I think this is a good idea, but one of them is that I think being able to demonstrate what you believe and why would be beneficial to our discourse and hopefully counteract conspiracism.

luuuzeta 4y ago

>The constant hurling of these claims also causes people to adopt distorted views about the nature of human disagreement itself. Most disagreement — or most interesting disagreement — can’t be explained solely by the fact that one side is better or smarter or more accurately informed than the other. After reading _The Righteous Mind_, this is something Jonathan Haidt's book drilled down on me. The book focuses on the political and religious divide in the US primarily, and his Moral Foundation Theory shines some light on the issue: In the case of conservatives vs liberals, their moral matrices are vastly different and that's a recipe for disagreement. In Moral Foundation Theory [1], Haidt and a group of social psychologists seek to understand the variability of morality across cultures. Despite this variability, they find there are similarities and recurrent themes. They think there at least are six foundations: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/cheating, 3) Loyalty/betraying, 4) Authority/subversion, 5) Sanctity/degradation, and 6) Liberty/oppression. According to Haidt, liberals (aka leftists, Haidt uses "libertarians" for "classical liberals") respond extremely to the harm/care and liberty/opression foundations, however conservatives do not respond to these foundations as well. In fact, conservatives respond to all the foundations by the same degree while liberals respond to only two foundations. Both liberals and conservatives respond to liberty/oppression but they approach it differently. [1]: https://moralfoundations.org/ https://moralfoundations.org/

ss108 4y ago
Sounds like work that should be built upon, but also, the "both sides" bs it plays to is morally and intellectually weak. I'm pretty moderate (in the sense of having a weird basket of views, some quite "left", some rather "right"). I would vote for a center-right party, if we had one. I can somewhat see where the moral intuitions of both sides of the standard political divide arise from, but it's also pretty clear to me that the American political right is now marked by an almost pathological lack of empathy and compassion, as well as a blatant hatred for truth, fact, intellect, and basic good character. Morally, it's become totally inconsistent with the traditional values I believe in. While liberals definitely over-index on empathy and compassion, it's pretty clear they are more balanced overall. And at the very least, I find them incorrect in a more mundane and acceptable way. They haven't succumbed to evil.
4y ago

thenerdhead 4y ago

What is up with all of the policing of people's entertainment? There's some moral superiority going on with thinking a silly documentary of one guy's life work is going to harm some "vulnerable" population that isn't even statistically significant to begin with nor would cause any long term harm given the attention span on a single topic nowadays is shorter than 24 hours. Will this documentary be relevant in a year? 5 years? 10 years? Probably not. Another way of thinking about it is the show Ancient Aliens has been on air for over a decade. Did you know it is still running after its 15 minutes of fame and memes? Many articles talked about it being "fringe", but rarely did we call it conspiracy. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fabrications-and-lies-of-ancient-aliens-86294030/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fab... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory

nuc1e0n 4y ago

This is a thoughtful critique of the world-view of publications like the guardian. I think there's nothing more dangerous than wanting no viewpoints other than your own to be heard.