7 ms·

Lessons from the past on how to beat disinformation

17 points by a_victorp 3y ago

blowsand 3y ago
I’m not sure what biases the guardian has, but I find it difficult to get past the opening 2 sentence’s casting of 50+ million people as simply delusional. Assessments like this completely miss the mark by disregarding the often reasonable arguments and facts that guide beliefs.
- aebtebeten 3y ago
  Do you have specific examples of reasonable arguments or facts supporting a belief that the last US presidential elections were “rigged“?
rayiner 3y ago
> Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were “rigged“ The election example is a bad one because it’s more about American’s being innumerate. They are incapable of understanding statistical data. E.g. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... (“In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19.”). When understanding “who won the 2020 election” requires understanding why Trump could have been ahead with 80% of the vote counted, but Biden pulled ahead overnight due to mail in votes and urban precincts, Americans are basically unable to understand that result. “Who won the election” is more a question about “who do you trust to report the election results to you?” The approach suggested in the article is unlikely to address the real problem of lack of trust.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. I don't think the article is advocating for Delmer's exact approach ("black propaganda"* in the 1950s parlance), but I find it reasonable that increasing people's agency might could get them to "do the research" and understand (didn't civics classes do this? do they still exist in the States?) how their own election systems work. (I might even hope for understanding of the population structure and MSA breakdown of their own country, but let's not get greedy...) * would you like to know more? see "source attribution" via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294297
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > I might even hope for understanding of the population structure and MSA breakdown of their own country, but let's not get greedy Americans have a wildly inaccurate understanding of who other Americans even are: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m.... For example, “Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population.” Can you imagine the impact of that perception—that black people are a slight majority of the population when in fact they are 12%—on people's political beliefs and trust in the system? I bet if you surveyed people who thought the 2020 election was stolen, they would vastly overestimate the percentage of the population that is rural white people. If you start from that premise, you start to understand how they could be astounded about the results of an election conducted under unfamiliar and quite different rules due to the pandemic.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Wait, what's so hard to understand about that scenario? If a Trump lead at 80% necessarily meant a Trump win, you could just call the election at 80%.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    You don't have to think that whoever is leading at 80% "necessarily" will win. People remember close elections, like Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004, where you couldn't tell until all the votes were counted who had won. But Trump's election-day lead in key swing states was not close. In Georgia, at 10:55 pm, Trump was ahead by 12 points and over 350,000 votes as of 11 pm ET with 72% of precincts reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp_drtD7cMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp_drtD7cMc. As of the next morning, Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania by more than 10 points with 70% of the precincts counted. Then, over the coming days, Biden somehow pulled ahead--not just in one state, but in several. If you go back to the dawn of cable news election coverage, I think you would be hard pressed to find an example where a candidate was behind 10-12 points on election night in key swing states but went on to win those states. My dad and I have been watching CNN election night coverage since the mid-1990s, and we both went to bed thinking that Trump had not only one, but had done so decisively.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      This bounced around in my brain all day yesterday and I think it's a miserable example. You might be right in general, I don't know, but 2020 isn't the right data point to use. The situation in 2020 was unique. If you had tasked state governments with coming up with an election process that would guarantee alarming late-breaking swings, you couldn't have done better than what Pennsylvania did. Because of COVID, mail-in ballots strongly correlated with party affiliation. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania government set up ballot counting rules that ensured those ballots would be counted late. The state literally set up the conditions for one party's results to come in first, and in states like PA (and now GA and AZ) the margins are so thin that any structural effect like that is going to produce the same outcome. You're going to say "well that's my point", but my argument is that 2020 is sui generis, and that states are going to do a bunch of things differently in 2024, beyond just the fact that Democrats are going to vote in person about the same as they did in 2016.
- api 3y ago
  I see very little ink given to your last point, which is the most important. Trust has collapsed. Unaddressed that can’t help but lead to either totalitarianism or collapse. If Trump doesn’t become dictator it’ll be the next demagogue. It could be a much smarter, younger, slicker, and even more ruthless one. Or maybe things will just fall apart gradually until the union fragments.
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    > Trust has collapsed. Agreed — and each side thinks it has good reason not to trust the other. (One side is right about that.)
    - api 3y ago
      The trust collapse came first, the hyper-polarization came second. Trust collapsed in the mainstream following the Iraq War, bank bailouts, etc. in the 2000s. The problem really goes all the way back to Vietnam, Watergate, the credible suspicion around the JFK and MLK assassinations that was never addressed, etc. Things really started to go off the rails in the 1960s but it took until the 2000s for the bottom to fall out. Trump is just an opportunistic grifter taking advantage of this.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      Both sides are correct not to trust each other. If you were an anthropologist studying the differences in moral philosophy and religion of various groups of Americans 1,000 years in the future you’d call the present conflicts different religious sects. These debates about e.g. the nature of gender and when you can kill your offspring, are religious in nature. Islamic sects that are at war with each other have less fundamental doctrinal disagreements. On top of that, the factions have fundamentally divergent views about issues that are weighty in a multi-ethnic country: the nature and desirability of diversity, and multi-culturalism. Overlaid on that is a divergence in economic interests between regions that benefit from globalism/the knowledge economy, and regions that are left behind by those changes. Groups that diverge on fundamental values can’t trust each other. Historically, it just doesn’t work. When such divergences emerge around the world, they almost always result in political schisms.
Gunax 3y ago
It's nice to think that some education will solve conspiracies. But conspiratorial thinking originates in the gut--not the brain. It's not a lack of education (or an excess of stupidity). We become conspiatorial when we feel powerless. Whether that's about elections, or 9/11, or AIDS. And yes, i am susceptible to conspiracy too, and do are you. The cure to conspiracy isn't facts, but empathy.

17 points by a_victorp 3y ago

I’m not sure what biases the guardian has, but I find it difficult to get past the opening 2 sentence’s casting of 50+ million people as simply delusional. Assessments like this completely miss the mark by disregarding the often reasonable arguments and facts that guide beliefs.

aebtebeten 3y ago
Do you have specific examples of reasonable arguments or facts supporting a belief that the last US presidential elections were “rigged“?

rayiner 3y ago

> Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were “rigged“ The election example is a bad one because it’s more about American’s being innumerate. They are incapable of understanding statistical data. E.g. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... (“In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19.”). When understanding “who won the 2020 election” requires understanding why Trump could have been ahead with 80% of the vote counted, but Biden pulled ahead overnight due to mail in votes and urban precincts, Americans are basically unable to understand that result. “Who won the election” is more a question about “who do you trust to report the election results to you?” The approach suggested in the article is unlikely to address the real problem of lack of trust.

082349872349872 3y ago
> Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. I don't think the article is advocating for Delmer's exact approach ("black propaganda"* in the 1950s parlance), but I find it reasonable that increasing people's agency might could get them to "do the research" and understand (didn't civics classes do this? do they still exist in the States?) how their own election systems work. (I might even hope for understanding of the population structure and MSA breakdown of their own country, but let's not get greedy...) * would you like to know more? see "source attribution" via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294297
- rayiner 3y ago
  > I might even hope for understanding of the population structure and MSA breakdown of their own country, but let's not get greedy Americans have a wildly inaccurate understanding of who other Americans even are: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m.... For example, “Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population.” Can you imagine the impact of that perception—that black people are a slight majority of the population when in fact they are 12%—on people's political beliefs and trust in the system? I bet if you surveyed people who thought the 2020 election was stolen, they would vastly overestimate the percentage of the population that is rural white people. If you start from that premise, you start to understand how they could be astounded about the results of an election conducted under unfamiliar and quite different rules due to the pandemic.
tptacek 3y ago
Wait, what's so hard to understand about that scenario? If a Trump lead at 80% necessarily meant a Trump win, you could just call the election at 80%.
- rayiner 3y ago
  You don't have to think that whoever is leading at 80% "necessarily" will win. People remember close elections, like Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004, where you couldn't tell until all the votes were counted who had won. But Trump's election-day lead in key swing states was not close. In Georgia, at 10:55 pm, Trump was ahead by 12 points and over 350,000 votes as of 11 pm ET with 72% of precincts reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp_drtD7cMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp_drtD7cMc. As of the next morning, Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania by more than 10 points with 70% of the precincts counted. Then, over the coming days, Biden somehow pulled ahead--not just in one state, but in several. If you go back to the dawn of cable news election coverage, I think you would be hard pressed to find an example where a candidate was behind 10-12 points on election night in key swing states but went on to win those states. My dad and I have been watching CNN election night coverage since the mid-1990s, and we both went to bed thinking that Trump had not only one, but had done so decisively.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    This bounced around in my brain all day yesterday and I think it's a miserable example. You might be right in general, I don't know, but 2020 isn't the right data point to use. The situation in 2020 was unique. If you had tasked state governments with coming up with an election process that would guarantee alarming late-breaking swings, you couldn't have done better than what Pennsylvania did. Because of COVID, mail-in ballots strongly correlated with party affiliation. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania government set up ballot counting rules that ensured those ballots would be counted late. The state literally set up the conditions for one party's results to come in first, and in states like PA (and now GA and AZ) the margins are so thin that any structural effect like that is going to produce the same outcome. You're going to say "well that's my point", but my argument is that 2020 is sui generis, and that states are going to do a bunch of things differently in 2024, beyond just the fact that Democrats are going to vote in person about the same as they did in 2016.
api 3y ago
I see very little ink given to your last point, which is the most important. Trust has collapsed. Unaddressed that can’t help but lead to either totalitarianism or collapse. If Trump doesn’t become dictator it’ll be the next demagogue. It could be a much smarter, younger, slicker, and even more ruthless one. Or maybe things will just fall apart gradually until the union fragments.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > Trust has collapsed. Agreed — and each side thinks it has good reason not to trust the other. (One side is right about that.)
  - api 3y ago
    The trust collapse came first, the hyper-polarization came second. Trust collapsed in the mainstream following the Iraq War, bank bailouts, etc. in the 2000s. The problem really goes all the way back to Vietnam, Watergate, the credible suspicion around the JFK and MLK assassinations that was never addressed, etc. Things really started to go off the rails in the 1960s but it took until the 2000s for the bottom to fall out. Trump is just an opportunistic grifter taking advantage of this.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Both sides are correct not to trust each other. If you were an anthropologist studying the differences in moral philosophy and religion of various groups of Americans 1,000 years in the future you’d call the present conflicts different religious sects. These debates about e.g. the nature of gender and when you can kill your offspring, are religious in nature. Islamic sects that are at war with each other have less fundamental doctrinal disagreements. On top of that, the factions have fundamentally divergent views about issues that are weighty in a multi-ethnic country: the nature and desirability of diversity, and multi-culturalism. Overlaid on that is a divergence in economic interests between regions that benefit from globalism/the knowledge economy, and regions that are left behind by those changes. Groups that diverge on fundamental values can’t trust each other. Historically, it just doesn’t work. When such divergences emerge around the world, they almost always result in political schisms.

Gunax 3y ago

It's nice to think that some education will solve conspiracies. But conspiratorial thinking originates in the gut--not the brain. It's not a lack of education (or an excess of stupidity). We become conspiatorial when we feel powerless. Whether that's about elections, or 9/11, or AIDS. And yes, i am susceptible to conspiracy too, and do are you. The cure to conspiracy isn't facts, but empathy.