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On March 10 2020 02:52 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2020 02:20 Acrofales wrote:On March 10 2020 02:13 JimmiC wrote:On March 10 2020 02:08 Acrofales wrote:On March 10 2020 01:13 JimmiC wrote:On March 10 2020 00:59 Simberto wrote:
Related, i have always found that profoundly weird. I grew up in a pretty rational household, where substantiating your opinions through arguments was the standard way of handling stuff. When i got into university, stuff worked pretty similarly. (Sure, there are preconceived notions and perception biases around, but generally speaking people were open to arguments and at least spend a while to consider them in good faith)
Only recently have i really come into contact with people who just don't do rationality at all. And i have no idea what to do. All of the ways of talking with people which i have learned throughout my life just don't work anymore when people don't care about evidence, arguments or anything along those lines. It is a completely alien way of thinking to me. And it feels very, very strange. I feel as if am talking to caricatures sometimes. I have been having the same experiences more and more lately and think it is only going to be more common. As people have less and less trust in the media, governments and science it becomes almost impossible to agree on the facts let alone move on to interpreting those facts. There seems to be a attitude that different facts are OK and that people should respect peoples different facts. Which I find mind boggling since there should be only one set of facts the correct ones. And on top of that there are more and more people treating their presumptions as facts and then making conclusions based on those. In becomes a lot more to unpack when your not sure what set of facts they are using to get to the conclusion they have come too. To play the devil's advocate here: what is a fact? Something that is known to have happened. The reason for why it happened is usually an assumption. A lot of people, including in the media, are using absolutes to describe possible reasons and outcomes. Okay. But how do we know something happened? And I don't even want to ask how we know *anything*, which is probably too deep. But how do we know stuff that we didn't observe directly ourselves? That is the problem. There used to be a time when a huge % of people would agree that it happened because it was on the news. Or it was true if it was in a text book or encyclopedia. Now there are very few sources that people trust. So your chances of a having a rational based fact based argument become super low. And depending on how you digest your information, CNN, Fox, Facebook, Youtue, Alex Jones podcast, Trumps Twitter, whatever else, people end up arguing about what to do about climate change, when they can't even agree on what is causing the problem or that there is a problem.
That's great. But how do we know people back then agreed on "facts" and not whatever nonsense the TV news was peddling. That's kind of the point here. During the cold war, Russians had a very different set of "facts" to Americans. Now you can say that's because Russians were spoon fed state propaganda, whereas the US had an independent free press. And no doubt the American press was definitely better at "journalistic integrity" than Russian press. However, I think we've all been here long enough to have read plenty of GH's reports on how the "free press" was also not above propaganda.
The very fact that people are looking at journalists and thinking "hey, that is just a dude in a suit with a tv camera pointed at him" is not a bad thing. That's not to say news anchors (or newspaper journalists/editors) are peddling nonsense. It's just that what we think of as "facts" and "ground truth" are not necessarily that. Really they're just a consensus on what we agree on with the people around us. We hope that that is indeed the ground truth, but there are plenty of cases where people think something is factual when it is complete fiction. Take for example, the ample body of research on eye witness reports from crime scenes. And these are direct observations, not stuff that is passed through a journalist and then interpreted by you second-hand (to then be retold at the water cooler).
The fragmentization of what sources people get their "facts" from is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because being exposed to multiple sources means it's more likely that lies are exposed. It is a curse, because it is extremely hard to distinguish between a well told lie and the truth... and that isn't even accounting for confirmation bias that will cause you to have an incredulous stance towards any information that causes cognitive dissonance. In general, it just highlights a problem in education: we barely teach critical thinking. Kids are taught to regurgitate the knowledge teachers impart, without thinking too much about it. They then go home and their parents are watching FOX News/CNN where they learn to do the same. It is thus unsurprising that these same people grow up and believe stuff that comes by on their Facebook feed, especially if it slides neatly into preexisting beliefs.
+ Show Spoiler +
By no means am I claiming all schools are like this. And in general based on personal experience, I'd say northern Europe doesn't work like this for the most part. I have no doubt that better (private) schools in the US also adopt teaching methodologies that encourage independent thought, exploration and discovery, and similar more student-centric methods of knowledge acquisition. But the "mass education" that has a bad name, with its standardized testing, is where the vast majority of children go to school.
And this is not exclusively a problem on the right of the political spectrum. Sure, religion (and particularly organized religion) is more of a thing of conservatives, and actively discourages looking too closely at scripture, and encourages unquestioning obedience to god (and of course, his representatives on earth). But I have seen a similar "faith" in progressives that technology, as the holy grail, will solve all our issues. Such faith is generally unfounded and mercurial: when AI takes too long to solve all the world' problems I'm sure the next buzzword will be dredged up. Probably something with nano or quantum in the name... and definitely don't ask how the technology-of-the-week will magic away all our troubles. Just know that it will (and maybe invest your money in this startup?!).
+ Show Spoiler +
Once again, I am not claiming that technology isn't advancing and won't solve certain problems. But technology isn't a panacea. We're not going to solve climate change with fancy gadgets, nor are we going to solve poverty with AI. These are problems with human greed at their root, and it's a hard *human* battle to fight against our fellows' greed as well as our own.
Hand in hand with critical consumers of information, we need to improve the tools for evaluating them. What tools are out there to distinguish Infowars from the New York Times? Or Tucker Carlson from Stephen Sackur? Obviously those tools are out there. Many of them rely on the very institutions that Infowars (or Tucker Carlson) tell you not to rely on. You'd hope that eventually critical information consumers would recognize the rhetorical fallacies being spouted by Alex Jones, as well as the complete lack of internal consistency (or coherence) of his blather. And that is a skill we really need to teach, but it'd help if people had a little bit more faith in credentials as well. A climatologist from Stanford is simply a better source for information about the climate than James Inhofe bringing a snowball to work. But it only works like that if we agree that Stanford is a trustworthy institution and getting tenure there means you know your shit in that subject area. If people start disbelieving that type of thing then the whole framework for what we can take as "factual" shifts. And there are an alarming number of people (and their number is growing) who don't believe climatologists from Stanford, astronauts from NASA, medics from Johns Hopkins (or just plain your neighbourhood physician) or cybersecurity experts from MIT on the very topics these people have made their career out of trying to understand better... all because some random guy on the internet said it wasn't so.
Having factual information starts with asking yourself why your facts are true, and not truthiness. And accepting that "because someone said so on the internet, and it fits nicely with what I want to believe" is not a good enough answer.
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United States24770 Posts
On March 10 2020 08:02 Xxio wrote:
Fake news thrives in stock market chaos. CNN and MSNBC favorite Rick Wilson:
Can you explain how this is fake news?
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To piggy back off Acrofales' extensive post:
Even though his work is fairly dated at this point ("Personal Knowledge" came out in 1958 lol), Michael Polanyi wrote a lot about how human knowledge necessarily relies on a series of commitments, many of which deal in how to regard the trustworthiness of information based on the qualitative aspects of its presentation, who it comes from, and all that jazz.
Keeping stuff like that in mind when trying to figure out how or why someone can come to so wildly different a conclusion is helpful, particularly in the sense that many people believe what they do without having actually come to a conclusion at all.
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Canada5565 Posts
On March 10 2020 08:19 micronesia wrote:Can you explain how this is fake news? Fake President tweet publicly presented as authentic by famous media figure to discredit President.
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On March 10 2020 08:58 Xxio wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2020 08:19 micronesia wrote:Can you explain how this is fake news? Fake President tweet publicly presented as authentic by famous media figure to discredit President. Thank you for clarifying what was going on. It looks very much like any number of tweets Trump has actually made.
Fake news is wrong no matter who does it.
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United States24770 Posts
On March 10 2020 08:58 Xxio wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2020 08:19 micronesia wrote:Can you explain how this is fake news? Fake President tweet publicly presented as authentic by famous media figure to discredit President.
Okay, now your post makes sense, but your post should have included this perspective from the getgo. As others have mentioned elsewhere, the post doesn't meet the thread guidelines.
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TLADT24920 Posts
On March 10 2020 09:01 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2020 08:58 Xxio wrote:On March 10 2020 08:19 micronesia wrote:Can you explain how this is fake news? Fake President tweet publicly presented as authentic by famous media figure to discredit President. Thank you for clarifying what was going on. It looks very much like any number of tweets Trump has actually made. Fake news is wrong no matter who does it.
Indeed. This tweet reads like a Trump one so naturally, it would be interpreted as such unless it was proven to be fake. Also, micronesia is on point above.
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On March 10 2020 08:53 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2020 08:18 Acrofales wrote:On March 10 2020 02:52 JimmiC wrote:On March 10 2020 02:20 Acrofales wrote:On March 10 2020 02:13 JimmiC wrote:On March 10 2020 02:08 Acrofales wrote:On March 10 2020 01:13 JimmiC wrote:On March 10 2020 00:59 Simberto wrote:
Related, i have always found that profoundly weird. I grew up in a pretty rational household, where substantiating your opinions through arguments was the standard way of handling stuff. When i got into university, stuff worked pretty similarly. (Sure, there are preconceived notions and perception biases around, but generally speaking people were open to arguments and at least spend a while to consider them in good faith)
Only recently have i really come into contact with people who just don't do rationality at all. And i have no idea what to do. All of the ways of talking with people which i have learned throughout my life just don't work anymore when people don't care about evidence, arguments or anything along those lines. It is a completely alien way of thinking to me. And it feels very, very strange. I feel as if am talking to caricatures sometimes. I have been having the same experiences more and more lately and think it is only going to be more common. As people have less and less trust in the media, governments and science it becomes almost impossible to agree on the facts let alone move on to interpreting those facts. There seems to be a attitude that different facts are OK and that people should respect peoples different facts. Which I find mind boggling since there should be only one set of facts the correct ones. And on top of that there are more and more people treating their presumptions as facts and then making conclusions based on those. In becomes a lot more to unpack when your not sure what set of facts they are using to get to the conclusion they have come too. To play the devil's advocate here: what is a fact? Something that is known to have happened. The reason for why it happened is usually an assumption. A lot of people, including in the media, are using absolutes to describe possible reasons and outcomes. Okay. But how do we know something happened? And I don't even want to ask how we know *anything*, which is probably too deep. But how do we know stuff that we didn't observe directly ourselves? That is the problem. There used to be a time when a huge % of people would agree that it happened because it was on the news. Or it was true if it was in a text book or encyclopedia. Now there are very few sources that people trust. So your chances of a having a rational based fact based argument become super low. And depending on how you digest your information, CNN, Fox, Facebook, Youtue, Alex Jones podcast, Trumps Twitter, whatever else, people end up arguing about what to do about climate change, when they can't even agree on what is causing the problem or that there is a problem. That's great. But how do we know people back then agreed on "facts" and not whatever nonsense the TV news was peddling. That's kind of the point here. During the cold war, Russians had a very different set of "facts" to Americans. Now you can say that's because Russians were spoon fed state propaganda, whereas the US had an independent free press. And no doubt the American press was definitely better at "journalistic integrity" than Russian press. However, I think we've all been here long enough to have read plenty of GH's reports on how the "free press" was also not above propaganda. The very fact that people are looking at journalists and thinking "hey, that is just a dude in a suit with a tv camera pointed at him" is not a bad thing. That's not to say news anchors (or newspaper journalists/editors) are peddling nonsense. It's just that what we think of as "facts" and "ground truth" are not necessarily that. Really they're just a consensus on what we agree on with the people around us. We hope that that is indeed the ground truth, but there are plenty of cases where people think something is factual when it is complete fiction. Take for example, the ample body of research on eye witness reports from crime scenes. And these are direct observations, not stuff that is passed through a journalist and then interpreted by you second-hand (to then be retold at the water cooler). The fragmentization of what sources people get their "facts" from is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because being exposed to multiple sources means it's more likely that lies are exposed. It is a curse, because it is extremely hard to distinguish between a well told lie and the truth... and that isn't even accounting for confirmation bias that will cause you to have an incredulous stance towards any information that causes cognitive dissonance. In general, it just highlights a problem in education: we barely teach critical thinking. Kids are taught to regurgitate the knowledge teachers impart, without thinking too much about it. They then go home and their parents are watching FOX News/CNN where they learn to do the same. It is thus unsurprising that these same people grow up and believe stuff that comes by on their Facebook feed, especially if it slides neatly into preexisting beliefs. + Show Spoiler +
By no means am I claiming all schools are like this. And in general based on personal experience, I'd say northern Europe doesn't work like this for the most part. I have no doubt that better (private) schools in the US also adopt teaching methodologies that encourage independent thought, exploration and discovery, and similar more student-centric methods of knowledge acquisition. But the "mass education" that has a bad name, with its standardized testing, is where the vast majority of children go to school.
And this is not exclusively a problem on the right of the political spectrum. Sure, religion (and particularly organized religion) is more of a thing of conservatives, and actively discourages looking too closely at scripture, and encourages unquestioning obedience to god (and of course, his representatives on earth). But I have seen a similar "faith" in progressives that technology, as the holy grail, will solve all our issues. Such faith is generally unfounded and mercurial: when AI takes too long to solve all the world' problems I'm sure the next buzzword will be dredged up. Probably something with nano or quantum in the name... and definitely don't ask how the technology-of-the-week will magic away all our troubles. Just know that it will (and maybe invest your money in this startup?!). + Show Spoiler +
Once again, I am not claiming that technology isn't advancing and won't solve certain problems. But technology isn't a panacea. We're not going to solve climate change with fancy gadgets, nor are we going to solve poverty with AI. These are problems with human greed at their root, and it's a hard *human* battle to fight against our fellows' greed as well as our own.
Hand in hand with critical consumers of information, we need to improve the tools for evaluating them. What tools are out there to distinguish Infowars from the New York Times? Or Tucker Carlson from Stephen Sackur? Obviously those tools are out there. Many of them rely on the very institutions that Infowars (or Tucker Carlson) tell you not to rely on. You'd hope that eventually critical information consumers would recognize the rhetorical fallacies being spouted by Alex Jones, as well as the complete lack of internal consistency (or coherence) of his blather. And that is a skill we really need to teach, but it'd help if people had a little bit more faith in credentials as well. A climatologist from Stanford is simply a better source for information about the climate than James Inhofe bringing a snowball to work. But it only works like that if we agree that Stanford is a trustworthy institution and getting tenure there means you know your shit in that subject area. If people start disbelieving that type of thing then the whole framework for what we can take as "factual" shifts. And there are an alarming number of people (and their number is growing) who don't believe climatologists from Stanford, astronauts from NASA, medics from Johns Hopkins (or just plain your neighbourhood physician) or cybersecurity experts from MIT on the very topics these people have made their career out of trying to understand better... all because some random guy on the internet said it wasn't so. Having factual information starts with asking yourself why your facts are true, and not truthiness. And accepting that "because someone said so on the internet, and it fits nicely with what I want to believe" is not a good enough answer. I agree, and this is why people will continue to have conversations where both people think the other person is completely crazy, they both believe completely different underlying facts. And neither will ever change the others mind, or out reason them because the other person likely does not trust the source the other person is using. It didn't help in US when they removed the fairness doctrine + Show Spoiler +The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011. but as you mention it was far from perfect. I also agree that people need to do better and take more time to understand the issues. That schools need to be better at teaching how to do this process and so on. But one thing I don't think gets talked about is lots of people simply do not have enough horse power to make these types of rational decisions. When you consider that roughly half of people have a IQ under 100 it starts to make the question whether it is even possible for them to make these determinations. Quick anecdote, for what its worth, this became something I thought of a lot more after hearing the IQ tests on the stern show and their scores. One of their staff, known in large part for not knowing anything, example thinking the civil war happened when ww2 happened and things like that, scored a 102. You can hear Howard explaining various things to Sal in a very step by step logical matter and it is very funny to hear him confidently continue to get things wrong. While this makes for great radio it is scary to think that people like him are getting all this unregulated, unchecked information and we are expecting them to work through it and come to a rational conclusion. And this is not a small group of people but rather roughly half the population. Sal's job before he joined the staff was a stock broker. So I'm not sure that it reasonable to expect most people to be able to sift through all this and find "the truth" or even a reasonable semblance of it. And I'm not blaming education systems or anything, I'm just talking from a raw horsepower standpoint I'm just not sure its possible. Out of fear of people being seen as elitist we will sometimes not want to discuss that a large portion of the population will never be capable of doing it.
That's why politics discussions should actually be philosophical discussions. It will be technocrats executing the orders afterwards anyway. For exemple I don't think I'm stupid but I don't know anything about economics, except the "lower taxes, more government services" from the French far right, nothing seems out of the realm of possibilities. The fact politics are discussing precise measures which I absolutely can't gauge eventually prevents me from taking a decision according to my beliefs.
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Voted in the Michigan primary, and my takeaway is that federal primary and general election baseline standards are sorely needed.
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On March 10 2020 22:04 farvacola wrote:
Voted in the Michigan primary, and my takeaway is that federal primary and general election baseline standards are sorely needed.
You don’t trust the election process there?
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I don’t know about not trusting it, but it’s unnecessarily clunky and error inviting. They combined two districts at one polling spot with separate areas for each, the poll workers would not assist with identifying which of the two districts one should vote in, I had to fill out a lengthy card to match my voter registration, and then the paper ballot I had to submit used this weird folder-feeder thing that basically guarantees that many voters will need poll worker assistance when submitting. It just seemed extremely antiquated.
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I think Biden's mental acuity is an interesting topic right now. It isn't a major issue yet, but Biden basically can't screw up for the next 8 months.
Personally, I think Biden needs to put on his Trump mask and go nuts. Trump has masked his own mental deficiencies by changing the way he speaks. Biden should do the same. Get wild. Stop being reserved. Fuck up sentences and say "you get it". If Biden tries to be the adult in the room, he's gonna lose.
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On March 11 2020 00:30 Mohdoo wrote:
I think Biden's mental acuity is an interesting topic right now. It isn't a major issue yet, but Biden basically can't screw up for the next 8 months.
Personally, I think Biden needs to put on his Trump mask and go nuts. Trump has masked his own mental deficiencies by changing the way he speaks. Biden should do the same. Get wild. Stop being reserved. Fuck up sentences and say "you get it". If Biden tries to be the adult in the room, he's gonna lose.
That would partially run counter to his promise of a return to normalcy, and I'm not even sure he could outdo Trump on that. Far as I see it, there's not really a winning move here.
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On March 11 2020 00:30 Mohdoo wrote:
I think Biden's mental acuity is an interesting topic right now. It isn't a major issue yet, but Biden basically can't screw up for the next 8 months.
Personally, I think Biden needs to put on his Trump mask and go nuts. Trump has masked his own mental deficiencies by changing the way he speaks. Biden should do the same. Get wild. Stop being reserved. Fuck up sentences and say "you get it". If Biden tries to be the adult in the room, he's gonna lose.
Wow. This is a great plan. You can replace one demented lunatic with another demented lunatic. I am starting to see GH's point of just not voting at all.
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I don't see why Biden would need to get "wilder" than he is now. He's already pretty aggressive. I wouldn't be surprised to hear stuff like "No Bernie, that's bullshit and you know it. Here's what we can do and I promise to GET IT DONE" from him. What else do you want him to do? Tell Trump he will lock him up if he wins?
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On March 11 2020 01:58 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2020 00:30 Mohdoo wrote:
I think Biden's mental acuity is an interesting topic right now. It isn't a major issue yet, but Biden basically can't screw up for the next 8 months.
Personally, I think Biden needs to put on his Trump mask and go nuts. Trump has masked his own mental deficiencies by changing the way he speaks. Biden should do the same. Get wild. Stop being reserved. Fuck up sentences and say "you get it". If Biden tries to be the adult in the room, he's gonna lose. Wow. This is a great plan. You can replace one demented lunatic with another demented lunatic. I am starting to see GH's point of just not voting at all.
Supreme court too big to ignore. Regardless of everything else, the supreme court is a huge part of our current government. RBG is very likely not gonna make it to 2024.
Imagine Matt Gaetz sitting in RBG's seat. That's why I'm voting.
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Assuming things continue this way, I'm very glad I'm not american. I would have a very tough decision between not voting and voting for Biden.
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EPT
