[HN Gopher] The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution
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The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 61 points
Date : 2020-01-10 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| carapace wrote:
| The "fake news" attack is so devastating because so much of
| Western media is fake news. I read Noam Chomsky's political stuff
| at a tender age, and, while I don't agree with his interpretation
| (TL;DR: "USA is Mordor") it was very eye-opening in re: American
| media.
| webdva wrote:
| In the end--oh so tragic!--such finely dressed intellectual
| literature is naught but sensational marketing for the selling of
| a capitalism induced labor product (the author is selling a book)
| and the fallacious persuasion of a perceived and wishful reality
| that requires you to have "faith" and "certainty" rather than any
| scientific, consistent, and methodical evidence. Oh, but you
| write really well, intellectual soul! So cheer up! What does it
| matter?
| mudil wrote:
| There is still a question about crowd size of Trump inauguration.
| Just because media, and in this case MIT Press, repeats something
| doesn't necessarily make it true.
|
| Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be
| seen by yourself:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inaug...
| khawkins wrote:
| What we're seeing isn't a breakdown in "rationality" or "care for
| truth", we're seeing a global breakdown in the trust of
| authority. Vast numbers of people, including the president of the
| country and his supporters, aren't rejecting truth or
| rationality, they have so little faith in the supposed arbiters
| of truth, the mainstream media and academia, that they're willing
| to accept shoddy reporting that confirms their worldview. Indeed,
| what rational individual would trust a person who regularly shows
| prejudice and open contempt for their political beliefs,
| worldview, and concerns.
|
| Instead of trying to to repair that trust, pieces like this hand-
| wring about "fake news" and the rise of anti-intellectualism:
|
| "Why won't these dumb bigots listen to us? Don't they know we
| have their best interests at heart? If only they were more
| educated, like us, they'd accept our reporting and science
| uncritically!"
|
| People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the
| "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's
| inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when compared to
| issues that really affect people. The fact that so much media
| attention was devoted to such a trivial dispute is a testament to
| the devolution of national dialogue and debate. Instead of
| digging deep into the meat of issues that affect people and
| addressing the central argument, it's a never-ending labyrinth of
| "gotchas":
|
| "So and so was false when he said 64%, it's actually 55%."
|
| "So and so said this, and this group came out demanding an
| apology."
|
| This sort of reporting might be more forgivable if the rest
| didn't read like propaganda, twisting news stories into things
| that are "technically true", but designed to give readers a false
| impression. Media writers have realized that most read only the
| headline and maybe the first few lines before clicking away, and
| the writers see this as an opportunity to inject hyper-partisan
| deception into the minds of their readers this way.
| miscPerson wrote:
| "Technically true"?
|
| The widespread defamation of Covington students makes it clear
| they'll outright lie if those pesky facts don't fit the
| narrative.
|
| As far as anyone can tell, the media opted to re-victimize the
| victims of racist harassment because they don't like White
| people.
|
| That same racist group went on to murder several Jewish victims
| out of racial hatred, recently.
| wahern wrote:
| > People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on
| the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether
| Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when
| compared to issues that really affect people.
|
| I believe the notion is that if people are willing to commit
| themselves to boldfaced, objectively false (by any measure)
| lies, that's exceptionally strong evidence about their honesty
| and sincerity regarding more complex topics--topics that are
| much more difficult to pin down with simple facts.
|
| But you're right--the constant stream of fact checking at this
| point is just exhausting and pointless and merely serves to
| drive ad revenue. Hugo Chavez fairly won election after
| election with endless rivers of rhetoric and excuses every bit
| as bombastic as Trump's. Indeed, Chavez had his own TV program
| during his presidency, something Trump can only approximate.
| I'll bet that most Venezuelan voters never truly believed most
| of what Chavez said; they just didn't care. He embodied a
| fantasy to which they had wedded themselves. Charismatic
| leaders do that, especially populist ones.
|
| At some point the aggregated, revealed concerns of the body
| politic shift from reality (facts, hard-nosed politicking, etc)
| to fantasy. And I don't mean fantasy as in not objective--the
| life of every community is a reflection of various narratives.
| I mean fantasy as in the rules for decision making are
| intrinsically different; consequences become completely
| divorced from causation. America seems to have made that shift.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| > People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on
| the "truth" of trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether
| Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is pointless when
| compared to issues that really affect people.
|
| I expect an administration to be truthful in both important and
| trivial matters. If they lie about trivial ones, folks at the
| time knew they'd lie about important ones (see attack last
| week, child separation, etc)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I think we really need a new understanding of "Truth" and what
| that term really means. Individual facts can be 'true' but can be
| horribly misleading depending on the kind of argument that is
| being made, and the other 'facts' that are being presented with
| it.
|
| Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as
| examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in
| such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are
| designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author
| simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances.
|
| Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no
| universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's
| all about persuasiveness.
| wahern wrote:
| The first episode of the Jerry Brown podcast describes his
| transition from Jesuit seminary into politics and learning to
| come to grips with the difference between the world of ideas
| and absolutes, and the world of politics:
| https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown It'd be banal save for
| the fact that he goes from such one extreme to another.
|
| EDIT: Looks like they haven't posted the first episode yet,
| just the 2 minute preview. I guess they're delaying the podcast
| in favor of the on-air broadcast.
| wahern wrote:
| Apparently the whole series will be published January 11th.
| But they ran the first episode January 9th as a special
| episode of Political Breakdown: https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqe
| d/radio/politicalbreakdown/2020...
| (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown)
| jayd16 wrote:
| We already have the concepts of soundness and validity but no
| one seems to bother these days.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Why does this require a new understanding of truth? That seems
| to me like giving up. We just need to accept that _perception_
| does not always (or even often) reflect the truth, and that
| perception can be easily manipulated.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Ultimately any conclusion has an actual argument and reasoning
| behind it, even if the proponent isn't choosing to share it.
| The reasoning may be faulty, but the proponent is at least
| under the impression that their conclusion is rational from
| their own perspective. The proponent might use the argument
| itself to persuade, or use something other than the argument,
| for instance appealing to authority or emotion.
|
| A fact can't be misleading; it's the argument that uses it that
| might be misleading. So this really just points to us keeping
| up our abilities to ferret out the actual arguments and using
| critical thinking to oppose them if they are invalid.
| qrbLPHiKpiux wrote:
| Dilute this down, the internet and social are merely tools.
|
| Humans are using them for nefarious reasons.
|
| Humans have been dicks from the beginning of time.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Humans have been dicks, but few ever have reach in their
| communications. Now the entire world is inner connected. This
| is kind of like saying people have always had rocks to throw,
| so nuclear weapons aren't anything new.
| mooneater wrote:
| They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of
| "noise" is also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant,
| distracting content, and the popular platforms that do little to
| help us reduce that noise.
| svara wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though.
| Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically
| lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information.
| Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would
| not have been worth the cost in the past.
| ssivark wrote:
| Your point about the distribution costs is true, but
| platforms have a huge role in shaping those costs. If they
| encouraged curation/filtering, the distribution costs of
| unwelcome content would increase. But platforms want to flood
| people with content for two reasons:
|
| 1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing
| "engagement".
|
| 2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that
| they become hard to filter out.
|
| So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the
| blame as any other factor.
| svara wrote:
| True, but you're expecting the platforms to behave
| honorably and not in the way that maximizes their profits.
| My point is the platforms' business model is a consequence
| of the economics of online information distribution.
|
| Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a
| competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content,
| but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on
| a large scale so far.
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(page generated 2020-01-10 23:00 UTC)