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No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes. That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Go

No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes. That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline. I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information. It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.

theoreticalmal 2y ago
How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source? I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers Professor Legasov would be disappointed
iambateman 2y ago
You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two… I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
- rhdunn 2y ago
  Part of the problem is that it is difficult/impossible to go through the original sources and verify the claims. Another part of the problem is knowing what biases an outlet/reporter has and what parts of a story/the thing they are reporting on is missing out. It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories. A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong. It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers. Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial. Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds. I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than: 1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources; 2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper; 3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret... [2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy... [3] https://lczero.org/blog/ https://lczero.org/blog/
dimal 2y ago
I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.
- timewizard 2y ago
  TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change. During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications. The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.
xpe 2y ago
> No one cares about facts anymore. There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words... A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
This is dumb. Primary sources aren't available for most of the information types that will affect your life. Surviving in the world requires you to have the ability to judge the reliability of various sources, and enough critical thinking ability to detect both falsehood and likely truths. Telling your kids to "Believe NOTHING" is as dangerous as teaching them to believe everything. You're just handing them over, defenseless, to a different monster.

theoreticalmal 2y ago

How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source? I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers Professor Legasov would be disappointed

iambateman 2y ago

You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two… I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.

rhdunn 2y ago
Part of the problem is that it is difficult/impossible to go through the original sources and verify the claims. Another part of the problem is knowing what biases an outlet/reporter has and what parts of a story/the thing they are reporting on is missing out. It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories. A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong. It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers. Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial. Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds. I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than: 1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources; 2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper; 3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret... [2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy... [3] https://lczero.org/blog/ https://lczero.org/blog/

dimal 2y ago

I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.

timewizard 2y ago
TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change. During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications. The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.

xpe 2y ago

> No one cares about facts anymore. There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words... A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

This is dumb. Primary sources aren't available for most of the information types that will affect your life. Surviving in the world requires you to have the ability to judge the reliability of various sources, and enough critical thinking ability to detect both falsehood and likely truths. Telling your kids to "Believe NOTHING" is as dangerous as teaching them to believe everything. You're just handing them over, defenseless, to a different monster.