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Whatever "news" you get is going to suffer from both conscious and unconscious bias on the part of the reporter(s), editors, et al. You can only accept informa

Whatever "news" you get is going to suffer from both conscious and unconscious bias on the part of the reporter(s), editors, et al. You can only accept information from others as "someone wanted to communicate this to me" and speculate on their real reasons for doing so. We just have to do the best we can with the limited, imperfect information available to us. Our very senses lie to us. If your notion of rationality requires there to be Perfect Truth then you're SOL right at the start.

porkbeer 3y ago
While I agree, we really do THINK in terms of absolute truth, making this type of communication more powerful than it ought be. My observation: We will unconciously take known bs as fact when we see it, unless we reject it soon upon perception and react negatively to it. Our bs detector sucks, and is often stymed by our ocassional mental laziness/exhaustion, and becomes less critical with every repetition until called out and reframed. I observe with myself and others, that first learned bias sticks until challenged. Add the in-group/tribal/social/political/identity bias to that and it becomes even stronger.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  > we really do THINK in terms of absolute truth Who does? Not everybody, everywhere, certainly. Holding fixed abstract ideas in mind for long periods of time, with conviction and a drive to keep them all consistent is a very peculiar, intellectual way of seeing the world, mostly only useful for debate team members, monks, academics, and political pundits. Especially for the countless political and metaphysical ideas that have no relevance to daily actions. Most people don’t need to do that, and many who do it now have learned to perform it because it’s come to seem normal or even celebrated. But even a lot of them are terrible at it, hanging onto all kinds of sloppy beliefs and inconsistencies. By default, most people just do shit and say shit and carry on with their day. Their natural BS detector looks like “God, the news program is awful. Turn it off.” and their natural political orientation is whatever makes for the most satisfying conversation with their neighbors. What you might want to do, instead of all the complexity you’re trying to navigate and systematize, is to just unplug a bit and busy your hands instead of your brain.
RationalDino 3y ago
Oh, it gets worse. One of our biases is towards conservation of mental energy. If we can, we choose the easiest path. Which means that we actively prefer experts who are smart, well-informed, and certain of their beliefs. Because we can then be comfortable handing our thinking over to them. Why bother questioning the expert when we'd surely agree if we just knew enough? And then confirmation bias keeps us from ever questioning their results. The result, as https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... documents, is that our most popular and highest paid pundits have those characteristics. But those experts are ALSO the ones who are worst at making predictions about the world. As I pointed out in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TMgfapzbt5qp4Hszf/doubt-certainty https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TMgfapzbt5qp4Hszf/doubt-cert..., we should really be concluding "likely has cognitive bias" instead of "the expert says it, so case closed". The documented result is that we wind up trusting the experts that we should trust least!
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  "Likely cognitive bias" is not a conclusion, it's an invitation to do more research. The catch is that the amount of research you can do is extremely limited compared to what would be needed to verify the facts you hear, so you can't actually escape the need to trust and manage your trust relationships. An incredibly common mistake is to reject a decent but imperfect source in favor of a bad source, and for this reason I consider "trust less" actively harmful. Trust A over B when C (subject to real time limits on computing C) = ok Trust Less = harmful
  - RationalDino 3y ago
    It is both an invitation and a conclusion. As you note, we need to decide who to trust, and we can't do sufficient research. So we need heuristics. The heuristics that I recommend are these: 1. Certainty, especially if there is debate among experts, indicates likely cognitive bias. 2. The ability to discuss how multiple perspectives would lead different people to different conclusions, suggests good reasoning. 3. A documented history of quantitative reasoning, along with data showing historical accuracy, is the best evidence of a trustworthy source. I base those heuristics on the research in https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d.... Applying this heuristic to "sounds certain" results in a conclusion, that is an invitation to further research that may or may not happen.
WalterBright 3y ago
There's a lot more going on than bias. There's laziness on the part of the reporter, and incompetence in the field they are reporting on. For example, whenever I read a journalist's article about something technical, like airplanes, they screw it all up, simply because they have no idea how airplanes work and how they are designed.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  "News" companies fired all the journalists and replaced them with a quarter as many "writers" instead. Even when these new people have the training and qualifications to actually be a journalist, that's not their job anymore. For the most part, news corporations literally cannot afford to do journalism like they used to, because internet advertising crashed the price of ads in journalism sources, and everyone decided that seeing one inaccurate story meant the entire system should be thrown away and replaced with pundits slinging ass-pulled takes and lines to vaguely apply to whatever happened today, to an audience happy to never self reflect about all the things the pundit gets wrong. One group cannot speak on all things, they just cannot have all the required knowledge, experience, and practice to accurately judge more than a few corners of reality. The modern jack of all trades can only really have a surface level understanding of most things.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I'm not sure modern journalists are any better than the journalists of yore. It was easier for the yore journalists to get away with bias and incompetence, because there wasn't an alternative source of news.

porkbeer 3y ago

While I agree, we really do THINK in terms of absolute truth, making this type of communication more powerful than it ought be. My observation: We will unconciously take known bs as fact when we see it, unless we reject it soon upon perception and react negatively to it. Our bs detector sucks, and is often stymed by our ocassional mental laziness/exhaustion, and becomes less critical with every repetition until called out and reframed. I observe with myself and others, that first learned bias sticks until challenged. Add the in-group/tribal/social/political/identity bias to that and it becomes even stronger.

swatcoder 3y ago
> we really do THINK in terms of absolute truth Who does? Not everybody, everywhere, certainly. Holding fixed abstract ideas in mind for long periods of time, with conviction and a drive to keep them all consistent is a very peculiar, intellectual way of seeing the world, mostly only useful for debate team members, monks, academics, and political pundits. Especially for the countless political and metaphysical ideas that have no relevance to daily actions. Most people don’t need to do that, and many who do it now have learned to perform it because it’s come to seem normal or even celebrated. But even a lot of them are terrible at it, hanging onto all kinds of sloppy beliefs and inconsistencies. By default, most people just do shit and say shit and carry on with their day. Their natural BS detector looks like “God, the news program is awful. Turn it off.” and their natural political orientation is whatever makes for the most satisfying conversation with their neighbors. What you might want to do, instead of all the complexity you’re trying to navigate and systematize, is to just unplug a bit and busy your hands instead of your brain.

RationalDino 3y ago

Oh, it gets worse. One of our biases is towards conservation of mental energy. If we can, we choose the easiest path. Which means that we actively prefer experts who are smart, well-informed, and certain of their beliefs. Because we can then be comfortable handing our thinking over to them. Why bother questioning the expert when we'd surely agree if we just knew enough? And then confirmation bias keeps us from ever questioning their results. The result, as https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... documents, is that our most popular and highest paid pundits have those characteristics. But those experts are ALSO the ones who are worst at making predictions about the world. As I pointed out in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TMgfapzbt5qp4Hszf/doubt-certainty https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TMgfapzbt5qp4Hszf/doubt-cert..., we should really be concluding "likely has cognitive bias" instead of "the expert says it, so case closed". The documented result is that we wind up trusting the experts that we should trust least!

jjoonathan 3y ago
"Likely cognitive bias" is not a conclusion, it's an invitation to do more research. The catch is that the amount of research you can do is extremely limited compared to what would be needed to verify the facts you hear, so you can't actually escape the need to trust and manage your trust relationships. An incredibly common mistake is to reject a decent but imperfect source in favor of a bad source, and for this reason I consider "trust less" actively harmful. Trust A over B when C (subject to real time limits on computing C) = ok Trust Less = harmful
- RationalDino 3y ago
  It is both an invitation and a conclusion. As you note, we need to decide who to trust, and we can't do sufficient research. So we need heuristics. The heuristics that I recommend are these: 1. Certainty, especially if there is debate among experts, indicates likely cognitive bias. 2. The ability to discuss how multiple perspectives would lead different people to different conclusions, suggests good reasoning. 3. A documented history of quantitative reasoning, along with data showing historical accuracy, is the best evidence of a trustworthy source. I base those heuristics on the research in https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d.... Applying this heuristic to "sounds certain" results in a conclusion, that is an invitation to further research that may or may not happen.

WalterBright 3y ago

There's a lot more going on than bias. There's laziness on the part of the reporter, and incompetence in the field they are reporting on. For example, whenever I read a journalist's article about something technical, like airplanes, they screw it all up, simply because they have no idea how airplanes work and how they are designed.

mrguyorama 3y ago
"News" companies fired all the journalists and replaced them with a quarter as many "writers" instead. Even when these new people have the training and qualifications to actually be a journalist, that's not their job anymore. For the most part, news corporations literally cannot afford to do journalism like they used to, because internet advertising crashed the price of ads in journalism sources, and everyone decided that seeing one inaccurate story meant the entire system should be thrown away and replaced with pundits slinging ass-pulled takes and lines to vaguely apply to whatever happened today, to an audience happy to never self reflect about all the things the pundit gets wrong. One group cannot speak on all things, they just cannot have all the required knowledge, experience, and practice to accurately judge more than a few corners of reality. The modern jack of all trades can only really have a surface level understanding of most things.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I'm not sure modern journalists are any better than the journalists of yore. It was easier for the yore journalists to get away with bias and incompetence, because there wasn't an alternative source of news.