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Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of cours

Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts". [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-trump-cancel/ https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
calculatte 2y ago
[flagged]
- craftsman 2y ago
  I understand you to be saying that these insiders who wanted to remove evidence waited nearly three months after the election, and more than a week after inauguration to do this. Do I understand this correctly?
- honestSysAdmin 2y ago
  [flagged]
- lemon_zest 2y ago
  Wait, so they waited until yesterday to remove incriminating evidence? Just when Trump’s staff also came in to purge data? What a coincidence!
uncomplexity_ 2y ago
lol if you watch zuck's take on it his problem is the fact checkers ended up being biased.
- selfmodruntime 2y ago
  They sometimes are. If you're using a biased source to fact-check, you're just transitively applying that bias.
  - lucb1e 2y ago
    I do feel like there is a limit to how biased a source can be when it tries to be based in evidence, though. Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, the climate has warmed enough that you can dump weather records into a spreadsheet and see the effect without needing to measure CO2 at all. That COVID causes disease and a warming climate causes more extreme weather is also rather easy to corroborate. Accepting the obvious is already a good starting point for deciding whether climate policy XYZ is good or not (combined with other basic facts and every party's proposals), but it seems to me that the current striving for unbiasedness leads to giving lunatics equal air time. Any amount of fact checking would at least remove this level of misinformedness
    - hackyhacky 2y ago
      > Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, But yet people believe these things, and will believe a source that supports them. What's obvious to you is not obvious to others.
      - lucb1e 2y ago
        Nah come on, what you've cited is obvious to everyone but a delusional 0.001%. They do not need a podium for that
        hackyhacky 2y ago
        You're not an American, so maybe you aren't aware how widespread conspiracy theories are in the US and how much they influence the public discourse. As a trivial example, the American Senate is currently interviewing the nominee for the head of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, CDC, and FDA, among other agencies. The nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been very outspoken in his opinions, some of which are: Wi-Fi causes cancer and "leaky brain" Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings AIDS is not be caused by HIV the Covid is designed to target white and black people but not Ashkenazi Jews This nominee will likely be approved. These opinions are shared by a significant body of people who voted for the president who nominated him.
- hackyhacky 2y ago
  Maybe they are. The solution to this is to provide evidence in favor of your argument. That's how we used to resolve conflicting opinions: debates supported by evidence. Now, instead, we're simply getting rid of any attempt to decide what is factual, and instead let demagogues decide for us what is fact and what is not, without any evidence at all. Since evidence is now superfluous, why waste government money by providing it?
  - theGnuMe 2y ago
    The internet was designed to be robust in the event of nuclear war. Maybe it’s time for distributed data caches. Maybe we encode it all in crypto currency.
    - tialaramex 2y ago
      No, it wasn't.
      - theGnuMe 2y ago
        Yes it was. Prove me wrong.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I think the problem there is the powers granted to government rather than how today's people decide to wield it. Facts are never really decided, things can always change if we learn something new or just consider what we know from a different angle. The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
    - hackyhacky 2y ago
      > The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else. Sure, such is the nature of power. Thus has it always been. What's novel is not that people in charge can broadcast their favored view of facts, but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts, which has to led to the current demoralization crisis: in the presence of conflicting authorities, no one believes any facts anymore. Of course, some of the "facts" being broadcast are not, in fact, facts. The problem is that the flood of misinformation is so large, the force of echo chambers so strong, and the cynicism of consumers so great, that it is infeasible to produce persuasive evidence sufficient to make the truth more appealing than lies.
chasing 2y ago
[flagged]
- pphysch 2y ago
  Maybe deep in Bush Jr's admin, when Colbert said this
  - chasing 2y ago
    Certainly this sort of data isn't disappearing because it makes Trump look good. Anyway, he's pissed about COVID-19 and instead of working to prevent future epidemics he's working to retaliate against those who embarrassed him. Pretty simple stuff. The man does not have the depth that he and his followers believe he has.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      It's pretty much as simple as this. Everything he's done so far has been a petty attempt to get revenge on people he perceives as his political enemies. This isn't some vast conspiracy to avoid fact checking. He's got a checklist of the people and institutions who he thinks made him look silly last time, and he's just going down the list. Somehow, none of this vengeance is improving the price of eggs, either.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  If you look at people who have been losing in court for lying recently, such as Rudy Giuliani, InfoWars, Fox news Dominion (settled for $787M), they are all conservatives. Maybe that proves that reality indeed has a liberal bias.
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    It’s not even a bias in that situation. Conservatives have an interest in denying reality because denying reality lets them have more of what they want. Reality is what it is. Reality isn’t biased. It looks like a bias because of how far conservatives have pulled everyone to the right, by moving further right while demanding that everyone meet in the middle.
SeptiumMMX 2y ago
Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of. But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.
    - margalabargala 2y ago
      As you will see if you ask DeepSeek about notable events which happened in Tiananmen Square, AI systems are perfectly capable of failing to provide impartiality or facts. Any model that claims to do so simply is failing to state the biases of the person who trained it, and the biases of the data upon which it was trained.
    - MrJohz 2y ago
      > Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two plus two equals four. And we know that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing that exists and is likely to have a large impact on our world. There are some things that we're less confident about, such as different projections for exactly how large an impact we're likely to experience, what the most efficient way to limit that impact is, who bears the responsibility for implementing those changes, and so on. Reasonable people can quibble over some of those details, and there are multiple valid ways of interpreting those facts. But we can very definitely - and completely objectively - fact check statements like "anthropogenic climate change does not exist" and "fossil fuels do not have an impact on our climate and environment".
cle 2y ago
> Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is wrong IMO. Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. Cherry-picked data can be worse than no data. The ultimate fact check is a scientific process of collecting data, modeling it, scrutinizing it and its methodology and the entities involved, contextualizing it, cross-checking, replicating, etc. What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  > Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. All true of course. The solution for that is more data, not less.
  - cle 2y ago
    Maybe. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly. More of the wrong data isn't particularly helpful. I think what I'm arguing is that just having data isn't good enough, and it's dangerous to accept data at face value. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Data is always lacking. More data may help you be more confident in your conclusion, but it will never be certain.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Many of us here are engineers. Similar to our work, databcollected by scientists will eventually get to "good enough" in that interpretations are nearly indistinguishable from the truth. We don't need to understand every atom in the atmosphere to predict rain coming soon, for example. We don't need to do a full body scan to see visible breast cancer lumps.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Going out on a bit of a limb here, but I’m guessing the data will find their way to xAI. My hypothesis is Musk is following a South African playbook. That involves, in part, privatising the commons. Hope to be proven wrong.
djfobbz 2y ago
Data isn't the ultimate fact check - it's just numbers waiting to be twisted. Bias, bad sources, and cherry-picking turn 'facts' into fiction. Real fact-checking needs brains, not just bar graphs.
- arunabha 2y ago
  But surely, the answer to 'data can be twisted' is not to remove the data? We have enough of a problem already with wilful misinformation. Having the data is the first step towards a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, you have to resort to 'I feel ....' vs 'Based on this interpretation....' I agree that the first kind of debate is already the dominant form today, however I think we can all agree that it's not been good for society overall.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    This isn't a new problem unfortunately. Data and research during the pandemic response was being horribly mishandled, largely by the Democrats at the time. This isn't a one party or one person problem. It sure seems like a problem more correlated with our government structure and/or climate, or authority structures themselves.
    - marxisttemp 2y ago
      I’m sorry, I’m no fan of the dems but if you think Trump isn’t above and beyond when it comes to lying and twisting truth you’re either a shill or just ignorant
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Oh he is bad about it, don't get me wrong. That doesn't excuse other politicians though, and attempting to weigh and compare the relative lying and truth twisting seems like an extremely difficult thing to do. Bush Jr blatantly lied to the country and rallied us around a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people minimum. How do we weigh that with Trumps ridiculous lies?
    - 2y ago
adamtaylor_13 2y ago
Data is not the ultimate fact check. Data can be skewed in infinite ways to represent whatever you want.
worksonmine 2y ago
During covid links to the CDC that could be used by vaccine skeptics were flagged on Facebook. There was an actual problem with the fact-checking and it was often judged by who benefited from the information rather than the truth behind the information.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

calculatte 2y ago

[flagged]

craftsman 2y ago
I understand you to be saying that these insiders who wanted to remove evidence waited nearly three months after the election, and more than a week after inauguration to do this. Do I understand this correctly?
honestSysAdmin 2y ago
[flagged]
lemon_zest 2y ago
Wait, so they waited until yesterday to remove incriminating evidence? Just when Trump’s staff also came in to purge data? What a coincidence!

uncomplexity_ 2y ago

lol if you watch zuck's take on it his problem is the fact checkers ended up being biased.

selfmodruntime 2y ago
They sometimes are. If you're using a biased source to fact-check, you're just transitively applying that bias.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  I do feel like there is a limit to how biased a source can be when it tries to be based in evidence, though. Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, the climate has warmed enough that you can dump weather records into a spreadsheet and see the effect without needing to measure CO2 at all. That COVID causes disease and a warming climate causes more extreme weather is also rather easy to corroborate. Accepting the obvious is already a good starting point for deciding whether climate policy XYZ is good or not (combined with other basic facts and every party's proposals), but it seems to me that the current striving for unbiasedness leads to giving lunatics equal air time. Any amount of fact checking would at least remove this level of misinformedness
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    > Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, But yet people believe these things, and will believe a source that supports them. What's obvious to you is not obvious to others.
    - lucb1e 2y ago
      Nah come on, what you've cited is obvious to everyone but a delusional 0.001%. They do not need a podium for that
      - hackyhacky 2y ago
        You're not an American, so maybe you aren't aware how widespread conspiracy theories are in the US and how much they influence the public discourse. As a trivial example, the American Senate is currently interviewing the nominee for the head of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, CDC, and FDA, among other agencies. The nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been very outspoken in his opinions, some of which are: Wi-Fi causes cancer and "leaky brain" Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings AIDS is not be caused by HIV the Covid is designed to target white and black people but not Ashkenazi Jews This nominee will likely be approved. These opinions are shared by a significant body of people who voted for the president who nominated him.
hackyhacky 2y ago
Maybe they are. The solution to this is to provide evidence in favor of your argument. That's how we used to resolve conflicting opinions: debates supported by evidence. Now, instead, we're simply getting rid of any attempt to decide what is factual, and instead let demagogues decide for us what is fact and what is not, without any evidence at all. Since evidence is now superfluous, why waste government money by providing it?
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  The internet was designed to be robust in the event of nuclear war. Maybe it’s time for distributed data caches. Maybe we encode it all in crypto currency.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    No, it wasn't.
    - theGnuMe 2y ago
      Yes it was. Prove me wrong.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I think the problem there is the powers granted to government rather than how today's people decide to wield it. Facts are never really decided, things can always change if we learn something new or just consider what we know from a different angle. The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    > The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else. Sure, such is the nature of power. Thus has it always been. What's novel is not that people in charge can broadcast their favored view of facts, but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts, which has to led to the current demoralization crisis: in the presence of conflicting authorities, no one believes any facts anymore. Of course, some of the "facts" being broadcast are not, in fact, facts. The problem is that the flood of misinformation is so large, the force of echo chambers so strong, and the cynicism of consumers so great, that it is infeasible to produce persuasive evidence sufficient to make the truth more appealing than lies.

chasing 2y ago

[flagged]

pphysch 2y ago
Maybe deep in Bush Jr's admin, when Colbert said this
- chasing 2y ago
  Certainly this sort of data isn't disappearing because it makes Trump look good. Anyway, he's pissed about COVID-19 and instead of working to prevent future epidemics he's working to retaliate against those who embarrassed him. Pretty simple stuff. The man does not have the depth that he and his followers believe he has.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It's pretty much as simple as this. Everything he's done so far has been a petty attempt to get revenge on people he perceives as his political enemies. This isn't some vast conspiracy to avoid fact checking. He's got a checklist of the people and institutions who he thinks made him look silly last time, and he's just going down the list. Somehow, none of this vengeance is improving the price of eggs, either.
breadwinner 2y ago
If you look at people who have been losing in court for lying recently, such as Rudy Giuliani, InfoWars, Fox news Dominion (settled for $787M), they are all conservatives. Maybe that proves that reality indeed has a liberal bias.
- naikrovek 2y ago
  It’s not even a bias in that situation. Conservatives have an interest in denying reality because denying reality lets them have more of what they want. Reality is what it is. Reality isn’t biased. It looks like a bias because of how far conservatives have pulled everyone to the right, by moving further right while demanding that everyone meet in the middle.

SeptiumMMX 2y ago

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of. But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.

mcmcmc 2y ago
Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.
- roenxi 2y ago
  Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    As you will see if you ask DeepSeek about notable events which happened in Tiananmen Square, AI systems are perfectly capable of failing to provide impartiality or facts. Any model that claims to do so simply is failing to state the biases of the person who trained it, and the biases of the data upon which it was trained.
  - MrJohz 2y ago
    > Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two plus two equals four. And we know that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing that exists and is likely to have a large impact on our world. There are some things that we're less confident about, such as different projections for exactly how large an impact we're likely to experience, what the most efficient way to limit that impact is, who bears the responsibility for implementing those changes, and so on. Reasonable people can quibble over some of those details, and there are multiple valid ways of interpreting those facts. But we can very definitely - and completely objectively - fact check statements like "anthropogenic climate change does not exist" and "fossil fuels do not have an impact on our climate and environment".

cle 2y ago

> Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is wrong IMO. Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. Cherry-picked data can be worse than no data. The ultimate fact check is a scientific process of collecting data, modeling it, scrutinizing it and its methodology and the entities involved, contextualizing it, cross-checking, replicating, etc. What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.

breadwinner 2y ago
> Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. All true of course. The solution for that is more data, not less.
- cle 2y ago
  Maybe. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly. More of the wrong data isn't particularly helpful. I think what I'm arguing is that just having data isn't good enough, and it's dangerous to accept data at face value. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Data is always lacking. More data may help you be more confident in your conclusion, but it will never be certain.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Many of us here are engineers. Similar to our work, databcollected by scientists will eventually get to "good enough" in that interpretations are nearly indistinguishable from the truth. We don't need to understand every atom in the atmosphere to predict rain coming soon, for example. We don't need to do a full body scan to see visible breast cancer lumps.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Going out on a bit of a limb here, but I’m guessing the data will find their way to xAI. My hypothesis is Musk is following a South African playbook. That involves, in part, privatising the commons. Hope to be proven wrong.

djfobbz 2y ago

Data isn't the ultimate fact check - it's just numbers waiting to be twisted. Bias, bad sources, and cherry-picking turn 'facts' into fiction. Real fact-checking needs brains, not just bar graphs.

arunabha 2y ago
But surely, the answer to 'data can be twisted' is not to remove the data? We have enough of a problem already with wilful misinformation. Having the data is the first step towards a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, you have to resort to 'I feel ....' vs 'Based on this interpretation....' I agree that the first kind of debate is already the dominant form today, however I think we can all agree that it's not been good for society overall.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  This isn't a new problem unfortunately. Data and research during the pandemic response was being horribly mishandled, largely by the Democrats at the time. This isn't a one party or one person problem. It sure seems like a problem more correlated with our government structure and/or climate, or authority structures themselves.
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    I’m sorry, I’m no fan of the dems but if you think Trump isn’t above and beyond when it comes to lying and twisting truth you’re either a shill or just ignorant
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Oh he is bad about it, don't get me wrong. That doesn't excuse other politicians though, and attempting to weigh and compare the relative lying and truth twisting seems like an extremely difficult thing to do. Bush Jr blatantly lied to the country and rallied us around a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people minimum. How do we weigh that with Trumps ridiculous lies?
  - 2y ago

adamtaylor_13 2y ago

Data is not the ultimate fact check. Data can be skewed in infinite ways to represent whatever you want.

worksonmine 2y ago

During covid links to the CDC that could be used by vaccine skeptics were flagged on Facebook. There was an actual problem with the fact-checking and it was often judged by who benefited from the information rather than the truth behind the information.