It seems like you chose a weird set of possible motivations. It seems much more likely that power simply supports the status quo, and it's much easier to say "whatever, just wait until the next election cycle" than "hey, we should overthrow this illegitimate government, which I am a part of"
The best a priori argument against the election being stolen is the absurdity of the freaking President of the United States, the most powerful man in the entire world, with enormous intelligence and law-enforcement resources at his fingertips, and a very wealthy man in his own right, (1) being caught by surprise, so that he could not prepare for it in the four long years he had in office, and (2) being unable to do anything about it but sputter and speechify after the fact. For both those things to be true Trump would have to be weirdly smart, so he could realize it was happening earlier and more certainly than anyone, but weirdly stupid, so he would fail to prepare for the possibility over his entire term in office.
I guess the second-best argument is that if someone is *going* to steal an election, they don't do it by razor-thin margins, for the obvious reason that this makes the outcome far more plausibly debatable. Elections *are* stolen in the Third World, and they used to be in the Communist bloc, all the time. But they are stolen by enormous, almost laughable margins. 98% voted for Dear Leader! What an awesome show of support! Et cetera. Nobody steals an election by 0.05% of the vote, that's like going into a bank and doing an armed robbery for $5 to buy a cup of coffee.
It's sort of a never-ending signals-and-detection arms race, true. No stable equilibrium in sight where The Ones Who Understand How To Read The Signs can finally lower their shoulders.
>And that suggests to me that the fact that there is a petition like that signed by climatologists on anthropogenic global warming suggests that this position is actually true.
That they're willing to sign this means that it's both politically correct and true. When the truth isn't politically correct, that's where you get hinting at things without quite coming out and saying them.
By "politically correct" I mean politically correct for the sphere in which these people are operating. By "true" I mean they're sure enough about it to put their professional reputation on the line by endorsing it.
'That they're willing to sign this means that it's both politically correct and true'
'By "true" I mean they're sure enough about it to put their professional reputation on the line by endorsing it.'
I'm not sure there's a difference. If something is politically correct, that means it has taken on the attribute of being True in some layer of the simulacrum. Something being "true" in base-level physical reality has very little bearing on the layer above it, where Truth is decided by "consensus".
I find it highly unlikely that any observations from reality could possibly change the decided establishment position on any issue.
It was a link to a very interesting Nature paper on long non-coding RNA, and some detailed work that suggested it had a *structural* as well as regulatory role to play in the epithelial-cell tight-junctions that keep capillaries from leaking. I did not keep a copy or link, but you can probably find it or related papers again by googling LASSIE (which is an acronym for this particular long non-coding RNA) and tight junctions.
Ivermectin bores me to tears, so not that of course.
I think the problem there is selectiveness. Invermectin might have some vaguely plausible method of action, but so would a thousand other drugs. The question is why are we examining this drug in the first place, and if it's not for a very good reason our prior probability of it being effective should be low
:prepares for comments section filled with people giving counterexamples for all the things Scott just said the media doesn't do:
I think part of the problem is that sufficiently advanced ability to find people who are lying and be unreasonably credulous to them is practically indistinguishable from lying - there's rules, but the rules have exploits so wide that one can reasonably call the game broken.
Haha, yes that’s what I was just doing in another post, running a cruise ship through those exploits. It almost calls for the humour of the original Charlie and the chocolate factory ‘tell me more about…’ head resting on fist meme, not to be mean, but because it fits and is always funny.
It is a game of inverted totalitarianism with examples of all behaviours which are there to fool you, sometimes they lie about, sometimes they make stuff up entirely, sometimes they twist things so far from base reality it may as well be made up. The media do all sorts of lying snd some of it is wink wink ‘business’ news that is just corporate counter intelligence or lies from the government where we pretend unemployment is under 5% when we have a workforce participation rate under 70%, etc. but there are other lies mixed in there and some buried story with a handful of truth is the media’s continual counter example, even if it is only 5% of their stories and never a front page headline.
Turns out they are talented liars and play against our well known strategies to spot the lies. Just like how con artists have an easy time stealing from over confident doctors. Knowing your mark’s weaknesses is essential and a smart con doesn’t mean you have to be smarter than your mark.
You thinking you know what’s going on…is part of their model of propaganda. We can sit and think to ourselves, advertising doesn’t work on me! I know it is a lie. Some of the broader propaganda model is the obvious wink wink nudge nudge game and that exists as a meta layer of lies to lull even the vigilant into complacency so they can slip in other lies through that loosely woven net.
They wouldn’t do that! Dan Rather is just such an upstanding guy and oh so square jawed! They wouldn’t make up stories with no basis in reality, getting actors is hard so they just insert footage of a totally different protest or riot. Which I’ve seen them do many many times with old riot footage from different cities and different countries even! How is doing that on purpose any different from paying actors to do it? Lazier, cheaper, and just as big a lie.
Was that teenage boy with a gun at that BLM protest turned riot an avowed racist doing racist things for racist reason as Biden and every left media outlet said pre trial as he gunned down innocent blacks people?
Do the core events of an armed teenager ‘defending’ a business owned by non whites as he was attacked by a convicted white pedophile matter? When a random group of 3 adult men attack a boy by running him down, saying they want to kill him, smashing him with a skateboard, and trying to take his gun from him…and he shoots and kills 2 of them in the base reality….How far from reality can you get before it just doesn’t even matter what reality was?
There are scare quotes around it, his stated purpose being there was to defend the property of his community (he worked there) as well as provide 1st aid.
He was clearly there in an attempt to provide a positive presence, certainly more positive than those protesting who caused billions in damage.
Who cares what he believed his stated purpose to be? What are you, a Kantian?
He was an untrained guy with a gun at a riot. That’s what police are for, because they’re actually trained in riot management. We don’t want vigilantes roaming the streets during riots, precisely because of the effect it evokes from irrational riotous criminals like those he killed. He was a negative presence at the protest, and it shouldn’t matter than the attempt to provide a positive presence. It should have been obvious to him that what he was doing was reckless and unhelpful, but he certainly doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I wouldn’t be so snarky if their style of argumentation weren’t completely at odds with rationalism. I’m not saying one has to be a fully robotic utilitarian, but to focus entirely on intent means one is biased.
Why? The media company's goal is to reenforce their consumers' worldview by feeding them bullshit; the goal of the media consumer -- maybe not for you, and definitely not for Scott, but the average consumer who is being targeted -- is to find someone who will feed them bullshit that reenforces their worldview. I don't see where there's any conflict of interest that would lead to an arms race.
I guess in exceptional situations, like when threatened by a global pandemic, your average reader might become more interested in knowing the actual truth than in having their pre-existing beliefs reenforced. In those specific cases, the situation might temporarily become very arms race-like. But I don't see any reason for that to be true in the general case.
It's certainly an instrumental goal at least, insofar as the terminal goal for the media company is to turn a profit. Whether it's a terminal goal is more debatable.
Curses! Foiled again. I was about to mention Sixty Minutes manufacturing false data. (Planting an explosive to make a certain car's fuel system look dangerous. )
That was Dateline NBC. Sixty Minutes got taken in by the fake memos, and kept on doubling down until management called in an outside investigator who said "wtf."
Yeah if handled a bit incorrectly it'd result in over prioritizing prior. Seems like an unstable balance (like free speech) while unfortunately, "distrust everything" is a stable balance (like full censorship), just like trapped prior taught us
I had the same thought. I kind of think of it as reading different kinds of graphs. At first, you might look at something and think it looks weird, then it's like "oh the scale is log10" or "x and y are counter to how I would have labeled them" or "the units are weird", etc, and once you know the lay of the land, you can decode the information and learn things.
A big part of the frustration of the moment is how much the rules of the game changed during the Trump presidency, at least for mainstream liberal media, and even for institutions. I thought I was reasonably familiar with the rules of the game, but things like the CDC statement on the BLM protests and the censorship of 'lab leak' theories caught me off guard – I would have previously said those weren't the kinds of lies to watch out for. It's been a difficult and frustrating adjustment.
This post, the attendant discussion, and others like it are valuable historical artifacts. Like the kids in the fairy tale dropping breadcrumbs, leaving a trail, these create markers. Later on we can read it and say “we were at that understanding in January 2022, and now it’s changed to (x).”
Nuclear/toxic exposure is a context where the “good harvest” approach has I think already been in effect. Even in more recent times with the military burn pit exposures - the agency saying there’s no problem, lined up versus thousands of sick people - in those contexts people assume the agency is lying, or a few individuals have prevented the agency from really looking, or even multiple careerist individuals have found it more beneficial not to look.
There’s an amazing research work called Wolves of Water. A guy in the UK was living with his family near a coastal site with some type of nuclear waste disposal in the water. His daughter developed cancer and he launched into a study of the situation and ended up correlating distance from the coast with cancer risk. During the Fukushima accident I wasn’t paying attention but I started noticing a few years later with the starfish die-off. I wound up on internet sites where people were posting their own atmospheric radiation data. A lot of it has been deleted now - the sites deleted - meaning, there went all that data.
The boundaries of what it’s acceptable to say about science have some less obvious frontiers. That’s one of them, the whole climate modification situation is another.
Something about COVID, it combined the “tell lies about toxic exposure” tendency within government, with a groundswell of millions of people needing to know the truth. Airborne things were usually radiation before, which “blows away” or dissipates or creates cancer rate spikes three years later when it’s almost impossible to really connect. Plausible deniability was baked in.
The conspiracy theorist gray area around toxic exposure is structured differently from what the post describes, I think. When it’s ideas, yes, it makes sense. When people are amassing competing medical data it gets harder to call it misunderstanding - even when there are plenty of places where reasonable people can disagree.
Epidemiologists found themselves saying things previously reserved for the nuclear folks via Covid, that’s one of the changes, I think.
Yes - Scott is wrong about the 2020 election. The mainstream media are quite capable of outright lying and factual manipulation on that topic. I am also pretty sceptical of any advice from the CDC or other public health authorities on Covid. They are trying to manipulate at the cost of the truth.
This exactly. The media very much, and frankly very openly, tore up the rule book once Trump was elected. They tried to justify it by saying that essentially Trump broke the rules first, in a way that exploited the rules and made it impossible to report on him in a normal way. And I’m actually sympathetic to this! Trump DOES lie in a different, more bald faced sort of way than the average politician.
But the journos did not limit themselves to Trump’s bald faced lies, or even to Trump himself - now their favorite phrase is “said, without evidence” for whenever a GOPer says something they disagree with.
I don't know if I'm sympathetic or not... It seems they (media institutions) were faced with a crisis, and on the whole chose to meet it with the power of the Dark Side.
Bad Politics Man Made it Into Office will happen occasionally , regardless your political affiliation.
The fact that the media treated a *gasp* not-elite *gasp* conservative being elected as a DEFCON 1 event *is* the kind of institutional bias that conservative "conspiracy theorists" are going on about constantly. I think they are wrong on the factual matters, but when *the entire elite establishment* including journalists, researchers, etc have made it transparently obvious that they're in the tank for "whoever isn't Trump" - if you're a Trump supporter, you have been given no actual reason to believe that they're being honest when they said "yeah all these abnormalities in election reporting are normal and happen every year".
They are experts, and as such can craft expert lies vice normal lies.
This is a problem, because the message being sent by anyone with any sort of professional expert credential during the 2016 to 2020 timeframe was "Trump is the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the United States and must be stopped at any cost". Trump supporters, in general - responded with "message received, you will stop at nothing to keep Trump and his politics out".
Yes, I totally agree. I came here to ask for advice on how to adjust better to these (now more common) types of lies. How could we have know that "masks don't work" meant "make sure masks are available for medical personnel"? What's the lesson to make ourselves better at finding the signal in the future?
I don't think this holds up to a close read of history. Media on both sides have covered many issues very poorly. Either because they lied or just weren't knowledgable enough on the subject to understand the truth. Its also a lot easier now to find criticism of all sides of the media as well as easier for topic experts to weigh in directly about topics that they know first hand.
Right - this is what a lot of liberals have missed. I went on a spiritual journey in Asia and tuned out the news from basically right after Trump got elected until Covid arrived. It took me a bit to figure out what was going on, but it ultimately became clear that the rules of the game radically changed during my three year absence. Lab leak and BLM narratives are good examples. We went from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" paradigm, which is the paradigm Scott seems to still be working off here, to a new "Manufacturing Reality" paradigm, in which all bets are off. Yes, it is still possible to glean useful information from sources like mainstream academic journals and the New York Times. But one's level of skepticism has to be taken to another level, particularly in areas where there is a clear and established narrative. In those areas, you should expect to be, at the very least, misled. And, under the new rules, you may well be outright lied to.
That was what took me from the Scott's camp to the "there's no lower bound" camp. There were many other examples - including some things that come very close to what Scott pointed out the press wouldn't do, like once when they showed a foreign hospital with a lot of sick people to imply it is happening right now in the US, another time when they showed fire range in Kentucky and claimed it's a footage of an air raid in Syria (somehow they have to switch countries still - I guess there are *some* rules?)
Even more recently, I've read a history about Supreme Court judges where journalists claimed they said and did something, and all the participants came out and plainly said "we never said and did that!" and the journalists still were "well, we still think you did and you're lying to us because reasons".
Oh yes, and who doesn't know what gave birth to the "Let's go, Brandon" meme?
But for me the trigger moment where I arrived at the realization that there are no rules anymore - or at least there are no rules that I thought there were and none I could figure out. They will say literally anything or do literally anything if they think it'll serve whatever purpose they have. And the number of people among "experts" who are willing to stand up to this is extremely small. The number of people knowing the lies are lies still large, but most of them either don't have voice, or don't want the Eye of Sauron to focus on them for raising it.
The world became much scarier that day. And it's still pretty scary.
"But for me the trigger moment where I arrived at the realization that there are no rules anymore - or at least there are no rules that I thought there were and none I could figure out."
Sorry, what was the trigger moment? Apologies if I'm just selectively blind here, but you seem to have left the actual moment out.
Eh... It was more like if "BLM protest lead to more socioeconomic equity for Black people then they are on net positive for public health". It was obvious Bs at the time but it wasn't an outright lie.
In other words, it asserted that people dying was an acceptable trade-off for people of a certain heredity having it better, while people of differing heredity were being told that their living normally was verboten because more people would die than if it wasn't.
That's not 'BS' though. Whoever has the power to define "public health" can assert such things; whoever has the power to implement policies under the rubric of "public health" has the authority to carry them out.
"Public health" - it's a funny old bird. A little thought will reveal that no gestalt emerges when a great many people's individual healths are assembled. Some people will be poorly, others hale and hearty, and all are wholly unaffected by whatever someone else's summing up of the delusive 'overall picture' might be, until such time as it begins to inform "public policy".
Is mild malnutrition for all an instance of better or worse "public health" than some being well-nourished and some others severely malnourished? Must a doctor be deputised by the public to pronounce on the matter? Do they get to ask for a second opinion?
There is thus no such 'thing' as "public health" in the sense of the notion of something good and objective which the words conjure up, but it is a powerful conjuration, and we have likely not yet seen the greatest works to be done in association with the incantation's utterance.
The weird thing is you now have to go to fringe media to know what is actually going on. That media is often batshit crazy and also has to be heavily filtered - but at least they say what they believe. The way I explained it to a friend is that when I see some new ‘facts’ about Covid on right wing social media - about 50% of the time it turns out to be true and openly acknowledged by the authorities after a long period of being poo pooed as incorrect or exaggerated. Of course 50% of the time it is flat out misinformation. Sadly that is probably about the same as mainstream media on that topic.
Yeah, right now we have basically two kinds of media - one is nicely controlled, polished, has a narrative and will say anything to drive an agenda they are currently driving, and for it you being informed is actually a negative - they want you to arrive at and be secured in an opinion they prescribe, and that's their only goal. They would gladly lie, suppress or distort information, if they think it serves their goals, and they feel zero loyalty to their consumers - which they see as a raw material, not clients.
The other one is actually doing the function that the media is supposed to do - disseminate information about the current events, but they have virtually no quality controls and only very weak and rudimentary reputation mechanisms, so the quality of the information varies wildly. They would never suppress or distort what they think is the truth, but what they say could be true, or it could be figment of somebody's wild imagination.
Somehow one has to maintain sanity and be a responsible and informed citizen in this environment. It's not easy and it's not going to get easier anytime soon.
So many replies, and not a single one mentions that there was no "CDC statement on the BLM protests." A simple Google search reaffirms that I remembered this correctly. In fact, the *only thing* the CDC director said about the protests is that they probably spread COVID, and everyone involved should get tested. That was the director, speaking before Congress; the CDC never made any official statement as an organization.
I’m sure he was referring to the open letter signed by a bunch of self-professed public health experts, which included at least one who claimed to work at the CDC. There were also some tweets from a former CDC head to similar effect. You’re correct that the above commenter has the facts wrong. To the extent that the open letter was co-signed by actual public health experts, which is how it was presented to the public, it made those experts look pretty bad.
This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor. You are picking on a small inaccuracy with words to deflect from the main point which you aren't honestly arguing against.
Yes it's inaccurate to call it a CDC statement. But there was a letter co singned by "public health experts". Now maybe those weren't real experts, or the mainstream consensus was against them? If that's your argument, then make it explicitly.
As I remember it, all sides took the letter at face value as an expression of what mainstream epidemiologists wanted to express publicly. Maybe many disagreed quietly, but I don't recall prominent officials or institutions coming out and saying anything.
I don't think it's a small inaccuracy. If the CDC made that statement, we'd be living in a very different universe.
What actually happened was very much in line with Scott's post. A lot of individual experts beclowned themselves. The media was a bit over-eager to report on this. For political reasons, a lot of people who knew better remained quiet.
You can argue that they should have provided alternative views, and the failure to do so indicates bias on CNN's part. I would agree with this. However:
1) At no point is this explicitly stated to be a consensus view. In fact, the letter itself--as quoted in the third paragraph of the article--claims to have been created "in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health". An astute reader, reading between the lines, would take this as an admission that the letter does not express a consensus view.
2) The article provides actual numbers. 1,200 sounds like a lot, but is really just a tiny portion of the millions of health experts in the US. Many of these 1,200 come from a single university--which is noted early on in the article.
3) The very first words of the article are "A group of health and medical colleagues..." A reader with bounded distrust would notice that no major organization gave their blessing to this letter--only a bunch of individual people.
4) The letter itself doesn't actually contain any lies. Just terrible opinions. (In fact, the content of the letter is even worse than I remembered. I would not trust any individual doctor who singed it. Luckily, I'm unlikely to ever interact with these 1,200 people who mostly live in a different part of the country.)
The article doesn't make this clear, but many signatories were not really health experts--some were even students. Yes, the media should have reported this. And, yes, more people should have spoken out. But these are all dynamics Scott mentions in the article. They're all well within "bounded distrust."
Whereas the person I responded to claimed that the rules had completely changed. Which might be true, if the CDC made this statement. But that's not what happened.
I actually agree that institutions generally became less trustworthy over the last 5 years. But I don't think we're in some totally new paradigm.
Thanks for laying this out. "There is no lower bound" type comments are admitting ignorance - which is fine - but some are trying to dress it up as a new knowledge.
Based on the first section, this fatally fails to distinguish between Fox commentary (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Hannity) and Fox NEWS. They are different. Indeed, that's how Tucker beat one lawsuit, by arguing that no reasonable person who see what he does as news.
Yeah it's a cake and eat it too situation. And even though Fox kinda started that model of "news opinion as opinion news", the success of their business guaranteed it would go on to infect virtually everything.
I think it's just "'eating the cake" situation. I mean if you come to a place called "cake eatery", you expect people to eat cake there. And if you come to a place called "Tucker Carlson Tonight", you'd expect that tonight there would be a guy named Tucker Carlson telling how he sees things. I think it's pretty hard to get more "what it says on the can" than it is?
If you make specific false (and defamatory/libellous) factual claims as part of an argument, the fact that other parts of the argument were opinion does not (in my view) make the lies OK. Nor does the fact that a careful observer could figure out that you're a habitual liar, not if your core audience believes the factual claims you're making are true.
I'm not sure what's your point here. Were you trying to impress on me that lying is not OK? I know, but why did you feel the need to explain it to me? I certainly didn't tell anything that may suggest otherwise.
What everybody believes is their personal business, and I am not sure I can make any claims about Carlson's audience beliefs specifically, except to note that it's highly unlikely they'd be in the audience for long if they thought what he says is usually false. Of course, if you do think it is the case, you can always withdraw yourself from that audience.
The point of my comment was, however, that it is strange to imply Carlson is pretending to do something he is not doing when he's running an opinion show specifically marked with his personal brand. What value you attribute to that brand is entirely up to you - but it is what it is, the opinion of a guy named Tucker Carlson, no more, no less. It doesn't make him more right or wrong than anybody else, it just makes claims that he's pretending to do something he's not doing unjustified. If he claims X is a fact and turns out X is not - he's still wrong. That can happen to the best of us - for example, we just witnessed several Supreme Court members openly proclaim wildly fictitious statements directly relevant both to the facts and the law of the case they were deciding. Sad, but that's the world we're living in. At least with Tucker you know what you're getting, and if you don't like it - you can easily stop getting it.
>for example, we just witnessed several Supreme Court members openly proclaim wildly fictitious statements directly relevant both to the facts and the law of the case they were deciding.
See Vox, for that matter. Somewhere in the SSCsphere is a passage complaining about how Vox will hide commentary among its "voxsplainers", where it's hard to notice unless you're paying special attention.
Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too. Everybody knows Carlson is biased, he's an opinion giver. Nobody thinks he "unbiased" in the way news ought to be. They claim that the news presented by Fox news is itself unreliable.
What I thought about the case where Fox is showing the police news conference with a suspect named Abdullah is that I would worry that Fox is showing a news conference with a suspect for an unrelated crime. They won’t make up a news conference, but they will show an unrelated one as if it’s related until authorities explicitly say it isn’t.
Leaving aside multiple cases where media of all stripes have used bad art to illustrate current news, do you have examples of where Fox has presented a conference as addressing one issue when it was about a different one?
The first example that comes to mind is the series of articles about Hillary Clinton’s emails, all presented as if they contained new information, all of which turned out to be about the same emails that had been discussed for months. I think a lot of the Trump Russia stuff was like that too - something about some Russian activity is juxtaposed with some Trump statement to make it look like they were connected, even though there is no specific allegation of connection they are making.
Regurgitating a slightly repackaged old piece of news to keep it in the news cycle is a different thing than showing a news conference for one event and claiming it’s another.
Yeah, I wasn't imagining them specifically *claiming* it's another - I was imagining a situation where there's five suspects and the police holding a conference about all of them but they just show the one, or a situation where it's unclear whether the conference is about a suspect in this case or some other case and them juxtaposing it with this case in a way that makes it seem relevant, or any of a million other similar things.
> Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too.
If I had a nickel for every time someone followed up "Paper XYZ said [outrageous thing]" with a link to something clearly marked as an opinion piece, I'd be a wealthy man. There are claims to be made of bias in actual reporting, but an awful lot of the volume is clearly coming from folks who fail to make the distinction.
> Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too.
I feel like this isn't obviously true! I mean, of course there's people who think all sorts of things, but I'm very often hearing people distinguish between the news side and the opinion side.
One problem, which Fox and MSNBC and CNN have created for themselves, is muddying the distinction between their news and opinion sides. They will have Hannity or Maddow anchor election coverage and give news updates, while also opining wildly, making it harder to parse for a person without a background in news. I don’t think Fox was the first mover on this front, but they are really bad about it, so I understand why people find it so easy to denounce them with blanket statements.
I could be wrong, but I don't think MSNBC has a news side, it's all opinion. Or rather, NBC's news side is just "NBC News", without the "MSNBC" branding.
It’s fuzzy, but there is spillover between MSNBC and NBC, with Lester Holt working at MSNBC first and now anchoring NBC nightly news. NBC News has a lot of arms, and MSNBC is the most clearly editorial, but it’s also marketed as a news network.
This may not be the current status but I hinge my opinion on Fox News coverage on a study rating the ratio of positive to negative news articles about McCain and Obama in their presidential race
CNN et al were in the area of 80% positive Obama stories and 20% positive McCain while Fox had a narrow spread, about 10 points. It was something like 55% positive McCain and 45% positive Obama stories
Much of the 'fake news; THEY are lying' crazy occurs because somehow, we have all apparently abandoned any difference between facts and opinions. "A happened" (such as a mass shooting the FOX example) is an observable, testable fact. "Therefore B should happen/become law/be done" is an *opinion* that we might agree with or disagree with.
Your point about the difference between Fox NEWS and commentary is really IMHO a broader point to much of news, authority, or social discourse.
"I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won't lie directly. They don't go on TV and say "The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives"."
I came to say this exact same thing. I feel Scott is taking the wrong lesson from the current media landscape. He has assumed the old rules still hold sway. But the rules are changing under his feet and his confidence is sorely misplaced.
That letter condemns conspiracy theories and very carefully avoids saying that the virus could not have found its way to humans through research activity. I think it's a pretty good example of the kind of not-quite-lying that experts do all the time.
My point isn't that it's not bad. My point is that you should disbelieve letters like that.
[edited to add]: To be clear, I agree it's really bad for a lot of reasons. The fact that it is political speech is itself bad. I just don't think it's a counterexample to Scott's argument.
I think I agree, but I think there's also an overton window on science communication, and stuff like the letter(tm) pushes everything in an ungood direction. I keep waiting for someone to finally come out and say "Look, it was a crisis moment, there was plenty of reasonable doubt in both directions, and we couldn't afford to have talking heads on the 5 o'clock news impugning the country that not only had the most data on the virus, but also makes a substantial chunk of our meds and ppe based on scant speculation" That to me is a perfectly reasonable defense, if someone would have the guts to say it.
I think one correct takeaway from the letter is that there probably is (or was at the time) some real genetic evidence that rules out or pushes back strongly against at least some varieties of non-natural origin. Another takeaway is that the question of the virus's origin is a politically-charged topic, and that the scientific community is probably going to be pretty biased in how they approach it. When a letter talks about "standing in solidarity" and "fighting disinformation" and only one sentence out of 18 makes a scientific claim, you should assume that it is mostly unreliable.
The elephant in the room is the censorship practiced by the big social media platforms, which spread to a lot of the "blogosphere". So opinions and evidence that ran counter to the guidance from the CDC and WHO was suppressed as "misinformation". The party line was / is that Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin were not only ineffective, but HCQ was dangerous due to a chance for heart issues. Yet there is a study from 2005 published on Pub.Med (an NIH website) that concludes that HCQ is effective against SARS viruses when given early and is well tolerated. The approach of Uttar Pradesh, where teams actively sought positive Covid cases and provided a kit that included Ivermectin and other palliatives, appears to have been quite successful.
The biggest red flag for me, besides the suppression of dialog, is the interference with the doctor / patient relationship. HCQ and Ivermectin, for example, are widely used with little adverse reaction. From the beginning there has been anecdotal evidence from doctors that patients who take HCQ for their autoimmune problems have handled Covid quite well. There is no evidence I've seen that HCQ or Ivermectin cause problems for Covid patients. So what is the justification for the reported suspension of doctors for prescribing them off label?
Which leads to the third major problem - the sloppy statistics with poorly documented rules for collection and the lack of granularity. Just today I saw where the stats from Hamburg were grossly wrong in asserting that the majority of recent cases were from the unvaccinated. The handling of Covid 19 by the medical and political establishment has been a hot mess.
> some real genetic evidence that rules out or pushes back strongly against at least some varieties of non-natural origin
That is much more narrow than what was claimed, and a team of scientists writing in a scientific journal know the difference.
> When a letter talks about "standing in solidarity" and "fighting disinformation" and only one sentence out of 18 makes a scientific claim, you should assume that it is mostly unreliable.
This is a strange way of reading that Lancet letter.
- It's in a scientific publication
- Written by scientists
- The only scientific claim made is that "this coronavirus originated in wildlife"
- They pepper that claim with a bunch of citations and erroneously state that those papers "overwhelmingly" support their one scientific claim
- The result of the letter is to push discussion of a legitimate line of scientific inquiry out of serious consideration by both scientists and the general public
Yes, there are the political statements in there. But there was a concrete scientific claim that appeared to non-experts that it was well-supported in the scientific literature. That lie was designed to be persuasive precisely BECAUSE it was made as scientific claim, not because it was an appeal to authority by scientists. That distinction crosses all the lines Scott lays out above.
I get pretty angry when someone does something that obviously serves no purpose except to deceive or confuse, and then it gets defended on the grounds that "everyone" sees through it so it's not really a lie.
Like, there's a price tag that says $9.99, and then someone tries to pay $9 for it, and the clerk scornfully explains that it costs $10, what's wrong with you? The store is engaged in deliberately-engineered psychological warfare to confuse their customers! It's not *especially* effective psychological warfare; most people manage to figure out the actual price (eventually); but it's effective enough that stores are measurably making money from it. Getting angry when a customer is confused by the thing that YOU did with THE EXPLICIT GOAL OF CONFUSING THEM is like beating someone and then complaining that they bled on you.
If the REASON you refer to your tax increases as "revenue enhancements" is that it makes people get less upset about them, then it is obviously a lie, and it obviously matters--otherwise it wouldn't work! Claiming that it's not a lie, or that no one is fooled, or that no one who matters is fooled, is just an attempt to escape responsibility for telling lies.
There are situations where it's legitimately OK to say untrue things because you aren't INTENDING to fool anyone--jokes, sarcasm, fiction, etc. But if the whole point is to profit by impeding your audience's understanding, then this defense is not even slightly available to you.
True, very good point on the 9.99 thing. I never got caught by those cheap tricks, convert them so automatically it does not even bother me. But my GF is often caught, and you just made me realise I should not be mildly annoyed at her for that, but mildly annoyed at the supermarkets...
I think the primary harm is not from people forming inaccurate conscious beliefs about the price, but people having a split-second gut reaction to the first digit before they've even finished reading the whole number.
I suspect a lot of people who believe they are "never caught" by this are nonetheless being influenced to be statistically more likely to buy the thing compared to a counterfactual where the price tag said $10.
But I believe the subconscious nudging is on a continuum with the people who actually try to hand the cashier $9. The $9 people are just the ones where the trick worked better than the store would have preferred.
Even if it truly doesn't work on you, I think you should be upset that they tried. When manipulations work, you often don't notice; if you catch someone in a failed attempt, you should punish them as a deterrent against trying. (Compare: punishing an attempted pick-pocket who didn't manage to get your wallet.)
Unfortunately, many casually-manipulative business practices are so common in our culture that you can't find a competitor who doesn't do them. I don't feel our culture is sufficiently upset about this.
I don't recall seeing any "$X.99" prices in the (Australian) supermarkets for a couple of years. Not sure exactly why they stopped, but they seemingly did.
There's price discrimination via hide-the-cheap-brand, though.
You can also consider it as part of the social lubricant that allows a society of individuals with an enormous range of personal interests to coexist peacefully. In a large number of social transactions, probably most of them, the value received is not exactly balanced -- could hardly *be* exactlyt balanced. A certain amount of genteel obfuscation allows the relative gainer to appear gracious and the relative loser to save some face.
Id est, to take your simple example, when I buy a gallon of gas the cost of the gas is in the present but the value for me is in the future, so I'm a little grumbly about the transaction. Jesus! $70 to fill the tank! Grrr. Putting the price at $4.99 a gallon allows me a tiny bit of psychological self-delusion that I'm paying about $4/gallon instead of about $5/gallon. I *know* the truth if I think about it even for a second, and I've reconciled myself to its necessity, but the "5" is not staring me in the face the whole time I'm at the gas pump, so it's less annoying. The oil company is thus doing itself and me a slight favor by obfuscating the true price very slightly, so that it's less in my face and the transaction takes place with less annoyance.
We do this all through language. It's why the caring physican speaks of your mother's "passing" instead of using the brutal non-euphemistic word "death." It's why the teacher says you "aren't getting a passing grade" instead of the more brutal "you're failing." It's why that girl said "I think we should see other people" instead of "you're boring and I would rather cut my throat than commit to you." These things can be looked upon as "lies" because they are not unvarnished truth, but they also allow us psychological space to accommodate ourselves to some harsh realities. They are a very necessary part of how a species like ours gets along without incessant fighting over small (but painful) gains and losses.
True. Maybe worth to mention that overdoing it makes it a sarcasm, which is worse than brutal truth, it's rubbing in your face that not you are not only the looser in this transaction, but that the winner do not even fear you just a little and make fun of your helplessness. You are not the looser of the transaction, you are a looser.
Like the health minister in my country. I always though that he had a half-smile when he announced the new restrictions, contact limitations or lockdowns, punctuated by "I know it's hard" or equivalent....
Sure, people can be assholes, and power corrupts. I'm just pointing out Chesterton's gate here. Ambiguity in language exists not because generations of humans are too stupid to think up precise terms, or because they are always trying to con each other, but also because we use those ambiguities to help ease social tensions that would otherwise have us at each other's throats more than we are.
I don't disagree with you really, but I want to point out that the clerk isn't the party who is carrying out psychological warfare. They probably didn't even place the price sticker. I think they're justifiably irritated in this case. They're not trying to trick anyone.
If the corporate overlords showed up irritated at the customer, it'd be a different story.
Clerks get berated for a lot of stuff that is not their fault.
It's highly likely that a given supermarket worker has placed at least a few price tags; my understanding is that restocking shelves vs. cashier are more of an as-needed substitution than different job titles.
More generally, you're getting at one of the basic functions of bureaucracy i.e. to conceal the guilty party both in the physical and informational sense from the aggrieved party. "Throw your hands up in defeat" is one response to that, yes, but it's obviously not perfect given that it's literally letting the bad guys win.
Well what else? If as an organism I am not 100% all the time maximizing my personal welfare (or at least that of my genetically or memetically related tribe) then my DNA is nonoptimal and my germ line will be replaced by another that isn't. Or rather, it would already have been replaced a million years ago, so you're only going to find an individual *not* acting that way if they are some weird sport mutant.
Right, you'd need everyone to be completely fair and neutral and then someone else enforcing that.
I apply one filter to politicians and advertisers, where it's generally "I can't prove them wrong in a court of law."
I don't have much choice in politicians and advertisers, but I can choose my news media I listen to. If I get the wrong impression (after applying filter), they're wrong.
I don't think that this reductionist view that all our societal interactions are this strictly determined by genetics is correct. Genetics are certainly a large influence on behaviour, but a) genetics do not get tuned to maximise reproductive success but merely avoid too-serious reproductive failure, and b) our primary means of maintaining social structures is environmental, not genetic. Most humans are certainly capable and often do take short- and long-term actions that are not genetically optimal.
It seems like you chose a weird set of possible motivations. It seems much more likely that power simply supports the status quo, and it's much easier to say "whatever, just wait until the next election cycle" than "hey, we should overthrow this illegitimate government, which I am a part of"
The best a priori argument against the election being stolen is the absurdity of the freaking President of the United States, the most powerful man in the entire world, with enormous intelligence and law-enforcement resources at his fingertips, and a very wealthy man in his own right, (1) being caught by surprise, so that he could not prepare for it in the four long years he had in office, and (2) being unable to do anything about it but sputter and speechify after the fact. For both those things to be true Trump would have to be weirdly smart, so he could realize it was happening earlier and more certainly than anyone, but weirdly stupid, so he would fail to prepare for the possibility over his entire term in office.
I guess the second-best argument is that if someone is *going* to steal an election, they don't do it by razor-thin margins, for the obvious reason that this makes the outcome far more plausibly debatable. Elections *are* stolen in the Third World, and they used to be in the Communist bloc, all the time. But they are stolen by enormous, almost laughable margins. 98% voted for Dear Leader! What an awesome show of support! Et cetera. Nobody steals an election by 0.05% of the vote, that's like going into a bank and doing an armed robbery for $5 to buy a cup of coffee.
It's sort of a never-ending signals-and-detection arms race, true. No stable equilibrium in sight where The Ones Who Understand How To Read The Signs can finally lower their shoulders.
>And that suggests to me that the fact that there is a petition like that signed by climatologists on anthropogenic global warming suggests that this position is actually true.
That they're willing to sign this means that it's both politically correct and true. When the truth isn't politically correct, that's where you get hinting at things without quite coming out and saying them.
By "politically correct" I mean politically correct for the sphere in which these people are operating. By "true" I mean they're sure enough about it to put their professional reputation on the line by endorsing it.
'That they're willing to sign this means that it's both politically correct and true'
'By "true" I mean they're sure enough about it to put their professional reputation on the line by endorsing it.'
I'm not sure there's a difference. If something is politically correct, that means it has taken on the attribute of being True in some layer of the simulacrum. Something being "true" in base-level physical reality has very little bearing on the layer above it, where Truth is decided by "consensus".
I find it highly unlikely that any observations from reality could possibly change the decided establishment position on any issue.
That is a very interesting paper indeed, thank you for the link. RNA just keeps getting more and more interesting, and hard to pin down.
What was posted there? About Ivermectin or mRNA?
It was a link to a very interesting Nature paper on long non-coding RNA, and some detailed work that suggested it had a *structural* as well as regulatory role to play in the epithelial-cell tight-junctions that keep capillaries from leaking. I did not keep a copy or link, but you can probably find it or related papers again by googling LASSIE (which is an acronym for this particular long non-coding RNA) and tight junctions.
Ivermectin bores me to tears, so not that of course.
I think the problem there is selectiveness. Invermectin might have some vaguely plausible method of action, but so would a thousand other drugs. The question is why are we examining this drug in the first place, and if it's not for a very good reason our prior probability of it being effective should be low
I just read the "History" section of the town's wikipedia article. What in particular should be of interest?
Because of the weird Kellogg stuff, or why?
:prepares for comments section filled with people giving counterexamples for all the things Scott just said the media doesn't do:
I think part of the problem is that sufficiently advanced ability to find people who are lying and be unreasonably credulous to them is practically indistinguishable from lying - there's rules, but the rules have exploits so wide that one can reasonably call the game broken.
Haha, yes that’s what I was just doing in another post, running a cruise ship through those exploits. It almost calls for the humour of the original Charlie and the chocolate factory ‘tell me more about…’ head resting on fist meme, not to be mean, but because it fits and is always funny.
It is a game of inverted totalitarianism with examples of all behaviours which are there to fool you, sometimes they lie about, sometimes they make stuff up entirely, sometimes they twist things so far from base reality it may as well be made up. The media do all sorts of lying snd some of it is wink wink ‘business’ news that is just corporate counter intelligence or lies from the government where we pretend unemployment is under 5% when we have a workforce participation rate under 70%, etc. but there are other lies mixed in there and some buried story with a handful of truth is the media’s continual counter example, even if it is only 5% of their stories and never a front page headline.
Turns out they are talented liars and play against our well known strategies to spot the lies. Just like how con artists have an easy time stealing from over confident doctors. Knowing your mark’s weaknesses is essential and a smart con doesn’t mean you have to be smarter than your mark.
You thinking you know what’s going on…is part of their model of propaganda. We can sit and think to ourselves, advertising doesn’t work on me! I know it is a lie. Some of the broader propaganda model is the obvious wink wink nudge nudge game and that exists as a meta layer of lies to lull even the vigilant into complacency so they can slip in other lies through that loosely woven net.
They wouldn’t do that! Dan Rather is just such an upstanding guy and oh so square jawed! They wouldn’t make up stories with no basis in reality, getting actors is hard so they just insert footage of a totally different protest or riot. Which I’ve seen them do many many times with old riot footage from different cities and different countries even! How is doing that on purpose any different from paying actors to do it? Lazier, cheaper, and just as big a lie.
Was that teenage boy with a gun at that BLM protest turned riot an avowed racist doing racist things for racist reason as Biden and every left media outlet said pre trial as he gunned down innocent blacks people?
Do the core events of an armed teenager ‘defending’ a business owned by non whites as he was attacked by a convicted white pedophile matter? When a random group of 3 adult men attack a boy by running him down, saying they want to kill him, smashing him with a skateboard, and trying to take his gun from him…and he shoots and kills 2 of them in the base reality….How far from reality can you get before it just doesn’t even matter what reality was?
surely you understand that by using the term "defending", you're unnecessarily biasing your supposedly objective retelling of the story
There are scare quotes around it, his stated purpose being there was to defend the property of his community (he worked there) as well as provide 1st aid.
He was clearly there in an attempt to provide a positive presence, certainly more positive than those protesting who caused billions in damage.
Who cares what he believed his stated purpose to be? What are you, a Kantian?
He was an untrained guy with a gun at a riot. That’s what police are for, because they’re actually trained in riot management. We don’t want vigilantes roaming the streets during riots, precisely because of the effect it evokes from irrational riotous criminals like those he killed. He was a negative presence at the protest, and it shouldn’t matter than the attempt to provide a positive presence. It should have been obvious to him that what he was doing was reckless and unhelpful, but he certainly doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I wouldn’t be so snarky if their style of argumentation weren’t completely at odds with rationalism. I’m not saying one has to be a fully robotic utilitarian, but to focus entirely on intent means one is biased.
The situation can be analysed as an forever-ongoing signals-and-detection arms race between actors in informed and uninformed information positions.
...a general characteristic of much human interaction, really.
Why? The media company's goal is to reenforce their consumers' worldview by feeding them bullshit; the goal of the media consumer -- maybe not for you, and definitely not for Scott, but the average consumer who is being targeted -- is to find someone who will feed them bullshit that reenforces their worldview. I don't see where there's any conflict of interest that would lead to an arms race.
I guess in exceptional situations, like when threatened by a global pandemic, your average reader might become more interested in knowing the actual truth than in having their pre-existing beliefs reenforced. In those specific cases, the situation might temporarily become very arms race-like. But I don't see any reason for that to be true in the general case.
"The media company's goal is to reenforce their consumers' worldview by feeding them bullshit;"
Why would that be their goal? Is that one of their behaviours or effects instead perhaps?
It's certainly an instrumental goal at least, insofar as the terminal goal for the media company is to turn a profit. Whether it's a terminal goal is more debatable.
Curses! Foiled again. I was about to mention Sixty Minutes manufacturing false data. (Planting an explosive to make a certain car's fuel system look dangerous. )
That was Dateline NBC. Sixty Minutes got taken in by the fake memos, and kept on doubling down until management called in an outside investigator who said "wtf."
Yeah if handled a bit incorrectly it'd result in over prioritizing prior. Seems like an unstable balance (like free speech) while unfortunately, "distrust everything" is a stable balance (like full censorship), just like trapped prior taught us
Man, every day I discover/someone points out some finely tuned heuristic I have running all the time.
I had the same thought. I kind of think of it as reading different kinds of graphs. At first, you might look at something and think it looks weird, then it's like "oh the scale is log10" or "x and y are counter to how I would have labeled them" or "the units are weird", etc, and once you know the lay of the land, you can decode the information and learn things.
This is a really good comparison. I'm reading the article & frowning & suddenly I'm like "oh wait the dancer is going the *other* way!"
A big part of the frustration of the moment is how much the rules of the game changed during the Trump presidency, at least for mainstream liberal media, and even for institutions. I thought I was reasonably familiar with the rules of the game, but things like the CDC statement on the BLM protests and the censorship of 'lab leak' theories caught me off guard – I would have previously said those weren't the kinds of lies to watch out for. It's been a difficult and frustrating adjustment.
This post, the attendant discussion, and others like it are valuable historical artifacts. Like the kids in the fairy tale dropping breadcrumbs, leaving a trail, these create markers. Later on we can read it and say “we were at that understanding in January 2022, and now it’s changed to (x).”
Nuclear/toxic exposure is a context where the “good harvest” approach has I think already been in effect. Even in more recent times with the military burn pit exposures - the agency saying there’s no problem, lined up versus thousands of sick people - in those contexts people assume the agency is lying, or a few individuals have prevented the agency from really looking, or even multiple careerist individuals have found it more beneficial not to look.
There’s an amazing research work called Wolves of Water. A guy in the UK was living with his family near a coastal site with some type of nuclear waste disposal in the water. His daughter developed cancer and he launched into a study of the situation and ended up correlating distance from the coast with cancer risk. During the Fukushima accident I wasn’t paying attention but I started noticing a few years later with the starfish die-off. I wound up on internet sites where people were posting their own atmospheric radiation data. A lot of it has been deleted now - the sites deleted - meaning, there went all that data.
The boundaries of what it’s acceptable to say about science have some less obvious frontiers. That’s one of them, the whole climate modification situation is another.
Something about COVID, it combined the “tell lies about toxic exposure” tendency within government, with a groundswell of millions of people needing to know the truth. Airborne things were usually radiation before, which “blows away” or dissipates or creates cancer rate spikes three years later when it’s almost impossible to really connect. Plausible deniability was baked in.
The conspiracy theorist gray area around toxic exposure is structured differently from what the post describes, I think. When it’s ideas, yes, it makes sense. When people are amassing competing medical data it gets harder to call it misunderstanding - even when there are plenty of places where reasonable people can disagree.
Epidemiologists found themselves saying things previously reserved for the nuclear folks via Covid, that’s one of the changes, I think.
You mean the “bald faced” kind?
The trump presidency def seems to have created an inflection point in the truth/BS data stream.
Yes - Scott is wrong about the 2020 election. The mainstream media are quite capable of outright lying and factual manipulation on that topic. I am also pretty sceptical of any advice from the CDC or other public health authorities on Covid. They are trying to manipulate at the cost of the truth.
I am far from a Trump fan, but I found it fascinating how the press stopped even pretending to be objective once Trump rolled around.
This exactly. The media very much, and frankly very openly, tore up the rule book once Trump was elected. They tried to justify it by saying that essentially Trump broke the rules first, in a way that exploited the rules and made it impossible to report on him in a normal way. And I’m actually sympathetic to this! Trump DOES lie in a different, more bald faced sort of way than the average politician.
But the journos did not limit themselves to Trump’s bald faced lies, or even to Trump himself - now their favorite phrase is “said, without evidence” for whenever a GOPer says something they disagree with.
I don't know if I'm sympathetic or not... It seems they (media institutions) were faced with a crisis, and on the whole chose to meet it with the power of the Dark Side.
Were they faced with a crisis?
Bad Politics Man Made it Into Office will happen occasionally , regardless your political affiliation.
The fact that the media treated a *gasp* not-elite *gasp* conservative being elected as a DEFCON 1 event *is* the kind of institutional bias that conservative "conspiracy theorists" are going on about constantly. I think they are wrong on the factual matters, but when *the entire elite establishment* including journalists, researchers, etc have made it transparently obvious that they're in the tank for "whoever isn't Trump" - if you're a Trump supporter, you have been given no actual reason to believe that they're being honest when they said "yeah all these abnormalities in election reporting are normal and happen every year".
They are experts, and as such can craft expert lies vice normal lies.
This is a problem, because the message being sent by anyone with any sort of professional expert credential during the 2016 to 2020 timeframe was "Trump is the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the United States and must be stopped at any cost". Trump supporters, in general - responded with "message received, you will stop at nothing to keep Trump and his politics out".
Very nicely put. I feel this way, too.
Yes, I totally agree. I came here to ask for advice on how to adjust better to these (now more common) types of lies. How could we have know that "masks don't work" meant "make sure masks are available for medical personnel"? What's the lesson to make ourselves better at finding the signal in the future?
I don’t know. I often wonder what ‘facts’ I believe that are total nonsense or outright lies.
I don't think this holds up to a close read of history. Media on both sides have covered many issues very poorly. Either because they lied or just weren't knowledgable enough on the subject to understand the truth. Its also a lot easier now to find criticism of all sides of the media as well as easier for topic experts to weigh in directly about topics that they know first hand.
Right - this is what a lot of liberals have missed. I went on a spiritual journey in Asia and tuned out the news from basically right after Trump got elected until Covid arrived. It took me a bit to figure out what was going on, but it ultimately became clear that the rules of the game radically changed during my three year absence. Lab leak and BLM narratives are good examples. We went from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" paradigm, which is the paradigm Scott seems to still be working off here, to a new "Manufacturing Reality" paradigm, in which all bets are off. Yes, it is still possible to glean useful information from sources like mainstream academic journals and the New York Times. But one's level of skepticism has to be taken to another level, particularly in areas where there is a clear and established narrative. In those areas, you should expect to be, at the very least, misled. And, under the new rules, you may well be outright lied to.
That was what took me from the Scott's camp to the "there's no lower bound" camp. There were many other examples - including some things that come very close to what Scott pointed out the press wouldn't do, like once when they showed a foreign hospital with a lot of sick people to imply it is happening right now in the US, another time when they showed fire range in Kentucky and claimed it's a footage of an air raid in Syria (somehow they have to switch countries still - I guess there are *some* rules?)
Even more recently, I've read a history about Supreme Court judges where journalists claimed they said and did something, and all the participants came out and plainly said "we never said and did that!" and the journalists still were "well, we still think you did and you're lying to us because reasons".
Oh yes, and who doesn't know what gave birth to the "Let's go, Brandon" meme?
But for me the trigger moment where I arrived at the realization that there are no rules anymore - or at least there are no rules that I thought there were and none I could figure out. They will say literally anything or do literally anything if they think it'll serve whatever purpose they have. And the number of people among "experts" who are willing to stand up to this is extremely small. The number of people knowing the lies are lies still large, but most of them either don't have voice, or don't want the Eye of Sauron to focus on them for raising it.
The world became much scarier that day. And it's still pretty scary.
"But for me the trigger moment where I arrived at the realization that there are no rules anymore - or at least there are no rules that I thought there were and none I could figure out."
Sorry, what was the trigger moment? Apologies if I'm just selectively blind here, but you seem to have left the actual moment out.
The moment was described in the parent comment - when the "health experts" came out and said BLM protests are good for public health.
Eh... It was more like if "BLM protest lead to more socioeconomic equity for Black people then they are on net positive for public health". It was obvious Bs at the time but it wasn't an outright lie.
In other words, it asserted that people dying was an acceptable trade-off for people of a certain heredity having it better, while people of differing heredity were being told that their living normally was verboten because more people would die than if it wasn't.
That's not 'BS' though. Whoever has the power to define "public health" can assert such things; whoever has the power to implement policies under the rubric of "public health" has the authority to carry them out.
"Public health" - it's a funny old bird. A little thought will reveal that no gestalt emerges when a great many people's individual healths are assembled. Some people will be poorly, others hale and hearty, and all are wholly unaffected by whatever someone else's summing up of the delusive 'overall picture' might be, until such time as it begins to inform "public policy".
Is mild malnutrition for all an instance of better or worse "public health" than some being well-nourished and some others severely malnourished? Must a doctor be deputised by the public to pronounce on the matter? Do they get to ask for a second opinion?
There is thus no such 'thing' as "public health" in the sense of the notion of something good and objective which the words conjure up, but it is a powerful conjuration, and we have likely not yet seen the greatest works to be done in association with the incantation's utterance.
The weird thing is you now have to go to fringe media to know what is actually going on. That media is often batshit crazy and also has to be heavily filtered - but at least they say what they believe. The way I explained it to a friend is that when I see some new ‘facts’ about Covid on right wing social media - about 50% of the time it turns out to be true and openly acknowledged by the authorities after a long period of being poo pooed as incorrect or exaggerated. Of course 50% of the time it is flat out misinformation. Sadly that is probably about the same as mainstream media on that topic.
Yeah, right now we have basically two kinds of media - one is nicely controlled, polished, has a narrative and will say anything to drive an agenda they are currently driving, and for it you being informed is actually a negative - they want you to arrive at and be secured in an opinion they prescribe, and that's their only goal. They would gladly lie, suppress or distort information, if they think it serves their goals, and they feel zero loyalty to their consumers - which they see as a raw material, not clients.
The other one is actually doing the function that the media is supposed to do - disseminate information about the current events, but they have virtually no quality controls and only very weak and rudimentary reputation mechanisms, so the quality of the information varies wildly. They would never suppress or distort what they think is the truth, but what they say could be true, or it could be figment of somebody's wild imagination.
Somehow one has to maintain sanity and be a responsible and informed citizen in this environment. It's not easy and it's not going to get easier anytime soon.
It's the Party of Evil and the Party of Stupid, although they might've switched valences.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803704-we-have-two-parties-here-and-only-two-one-is
Right, but Trump himself is no innocent man in this matter. He has a skill in being able to shamelessly tell any lie with a straight face.
So many replies, and not a single one mentions that there was no "CDC statement on the BLM protests." A simple Google search reaffirms that I remembered this correctly. In fact, the *only thing* the CDC director said about the protests is that they probably spread COVID, and everyone involved should get tested. That was the director, speaking before Congress; the CDC never made any official statement as an organization.
yeah, distrust of commenters isn't bounded for me.
Ha ha
I’m sure he was referring to the open letter signed by a bunch of self-professed public health experts, which included at least one who claimed to work at the CDC. There were also some tweets from a former CDC head to similar effect. You’re correct that the above commenter has the facts wrong. To the extent that the open letter was co-signed by actual public health experts, which is how it was presented to the public, it made those experts look pretty bad.
This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor. You are picking on a small inaccuracy with words to deflect from the main point which you aren't honestly arguing against.
Yes it's inaccurate to call it a CDC statement. But there was a letter co singned by "public health experts". Now maybe those weren't real experts, or the mainstream consensus was against them? If that's your argument, then make it explicitly.
As I remember it, all sides took the letter at face value as an expression of what mainstream epidemiologists wanted to express publicly. Maybe many disagreed quietly, but I don't recall prominent officials or institutions coming out and saying anything.
I don't think it's a small inaccuracy. If the CDC made that statement, we'd be living in a very different universe.
What actually happened was very much in line with Scott's post. A lot of individual experts beclowned themselves. The media was a bit over-eager to report on this. For political reasons, a lot of people who knew better remained quiet.
But, for example, look at how CNN reported on it: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
You can argue that they should have provided alternative views, and the failure to do so indicates bias on CNN's part. I would agree with this. However:
1) At no point is this explicitly stated to be a consensus view. In fact, the letter itself--as quoted in the third paragraph of the article--claims to have been created "in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health". An astute reader, reading between the lines, would take this as an admission that the letter does not express a consensus view.
2) The article provides actual numbers. 1,200 sounds like a lot, but is really just a tiny portion of the millions of health experts in the US. Many of these 1,200 come from a single university--which is noted early on in the article.
3) The very first words of the article are "A group of health and medical colleagues..." A reader with bounded distrust would notice that no major organization gave their blessing to this letter--only a bunch of individual people.
4) The letter itself doesn't actually contain any lies. Just terrible opinions. (In fact, the content of the letter is even worse than I remembered. I would not trust any individual doctor who singed it. Luckily, I'm unlikely to ever interact with these 1,200 people who mostly live in a different part of the country.)
The article doesn't make this clear, but many signatories were not really health experts--some were even students. Yes, the media should have reported this. And, yes, more people should have spoken out. But these are all dynamics Scott mentions in the article. They're all well within "bounded distrust."
Whereas the person I responded to claimed that the rules had completely changed. Which might be true, if the CDC made this statement. But that's not what happened.
I actually agree that institutions generally became less trustworthy over the last 5 years. But I don't think we're in some totally new paradigm.
Thanks for laying this out. "There is no lower bound" type comments are admitting ignorance - which is fine - but some are trying to dress it up as a new knowledge.
Thanks for this. It does fit within what Scott's point was.
Yeah >2020 I found mainstream media is capable of lying much more than I used to
Based on the first section, this fatally fails to distinguish between Fox commentary (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Hannity) and Fox NEWS. They are different. Indeed, that's how Tucker beat one lawsuit, by arguing that no reasonable person who see what he does as news.
Rachel Maddow used the same reasoning in a lawsuit against her.
Yeah it's a cake and eat it too situation. And even though Fox kinda started that model of "news opinion as opinion news", the success of their business guaranteed it would go on to infect virtually everything.
I think it's just "'eating the cake" situation. I mean if you come to a place called "cake eatery", you expect people to eat cake there. And if you come to a place called "Tucker Carlson Tonight", you'd expect that tonight there would be a guy named Tucker Carlson telling how he sees things. I think it's pretty hard to get more "what it says on the can" than it is?
If you make specific false (and defamatory/libellous) factual claims as part of an argument, the fact that other parts of the argument were opinion does not (in my view) make the lies OK. Nor does the fact that a careful observer could figure out that you're a habitual liar, not if your core audience believes the factual claims you're making are true.
I'm not sure what's your point here. Were you trying to impress on me that lying is not OK? I know, but why did you feel the need to explain it to me? I certainly didn't tell anything that may suggest otherwise.
What everybody believes is their personal business, and I am not sure I can make any claims about Carlson's audience beliefs specifically, except to note that it's highly unlikely they'd be in the audience for long if they thought what he says is usually false. Of course, if you do think it is the case, you can always withdraw yourself from that audience.
The point of my comment was, however, that it is strange to imply Carlson is pretending to do something he is not doing when he's running an opinion show specifically marked with his personal brand. What value you attribute to that brand is entirely up to you - but it is what it is, the opinion of a guy named Tucker Carlson, no more, no less. It doesn't make him more right or wrong than anybody else, it just makes claims that he's pretending to do something he's not doing unjustified. If he claims X is a fact and turns out X is not - he's still wrong. That can happen to the best of us - for example, we just witnessed several Supreme Court members openly proclaim wildly fictitious statements directly relevant both to the facts and the law of the case they were deciding. Sad, but that's the world we're living in. At least with Tucker you know what you're getting, and if you don't like it - you can easily stop getting it.
>for example, we just witnessed several Supreme Court members openly proclaim wildly fictitious statements directly relevant both to the facts and the law of the case they were deciding.
To what do you refer?
See also: Alex Jones.
See also the Jon Stewart “clown nose on / clown nose off” behavior.
See Vox, for that matter. Somewhere in the SSCsphere is a passage complaining about how Vox will hide commentary among its "voxsplainers", where it's hard to notice unless you're paying special attention.
Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too. Everybody knows Carlson is biased, he's an opinion giver. Nobody thinks he "unbiased" in the way news ought to be. They claim that the news presented by Fox news is itself unreliable.
What I thought about the case where Fox is showing the police news conference with a suspect named Abdullah is that I would worry that Fox is showing a news conference with a suspect for an unrelated crime. They won’t make up a news conference, but they will show an unrelated one as if it’s related until authorities explicitly say it isn’t.
Leaving aside multiple cases where media of all stripes have used bad art to illustrate current news, do you have examples of where Fox has presented a conference as addressing one issue when it was about a different one?
The first example that comes to mind is the series of articles about Hillary Clinton’s emails, all presented as if they contained new information, all of which turned out to be about the same emails that had been discussed for months. I think a lot of the Trump Russia stuff was like that too - something about some Russian activity is juxtaposed with some Trump statement to make it look like they were connected, even though there is no specific allegation of connection they are making.
Regurgitating a slightly repackaged old piece of news to keep it in the news cycle is a different thing than showing a news conference for one event and claiming it’s another.
Yeah, I wasn't imagining them specifically *claiming* it's another - I was imagining a situation where there's five suspects and the police holding a conference about all of them but they just show the one, or a situation where it's unclear whether the conference is about a suspect in this case or some other case and them juxtaposing it with this case in a way that makes it seem relevant, or any of a million other similar things.
> Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too.
If I had a nickel for every time someone followed up "Paper XYZ said [outrageous thing]" with a link to something clearly marked as an opinion piece, I'd be a wealthy man. There are claims to be made of bias in actual reporting, but an awful lot of the volume is clearly coming from folks who fail to make the distinction.
That's true, but it's kind of a subcategory of "knowing the rules."
> Except the people who accuse fox news of bias are talking about the actual news too.
I feel like this isn't obviously true! I mean, of course there's people who think all sorts of things, but I'm very often hearing people distinguish between the news side and the opinion side.
Maybe I'm just in a bubble, but maybe you are!
One problem, which Fox and MSNBC and CNN have created for themselves, is muddying the distinction between their news and opinion sides. They will have Hannity or Maddow anchor election coverage and give news updates, while also opining wildly, making it harder to parse for a person without a background in news. I don’t think Fox was the first mover on this front, but they are really bad about it, so I understand why people find it so easy to denounce them with blanket statements.
I could be wrong, but I don't think MSNBC has a news side, it's all opinion. Or rather, NBC's news side is just "NBC News", without the "MSNBC" branding.
It’s fuzzy, but there is spillover between MSNBC and NBC, with Lester Holt working at MSNBC first and now anchoring NBC nightly news. NBC News has a lot of arms, and MSNBC is the most clearly editorial, but it’s also marketed as a news network.
This may not be the current status but I hinge my opinion on Fox News coverage on a study rating the ratio of positive to negative news articles about McCain and Obama in their presidential race
CNN et al were in the area of 80% positive Obama stories and 20% positive McCain while Fox had a narrow spread, about 10 points. It was something like 55% positive McCain and 45% positive Obama stories
Much of the 'fake news; THEY are lying' crazy occurs because somehow, we have all apparently abandoned any difference between facts and opinions. "A happened" (such as a mass shooting the FOX example) is an observable, testable fact. "Therefore B should happen/become law/be done" is an *opinion* that we might agree with or disagree with.
Your point about the difference between Fox NEWS and commentary is really IMHO a broader point to much of news, authority, or social discourse.
"I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won't lie directly. They don't go on TV and say "The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives"."
A possible exception to this rule: https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1481176891998490624
Emails from the start of the pandemic show that some of the leading scientists working on emerging viral diseases thought that a lab leak was reasonably likely but then they signed a letter in the Lancet saying the exact opposite (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext).
I came to say this exact same thing. I feel Scott is taking the wrong lesson from the current media landscape. He has assumed the old rules still hold sway. But the rules are changing under his feet and his confidence is sorely misplaced.
That letter condemns conspiracy theories and very carefully avoids saying that the virus could not have found its way to humans through research activity. I think it's a pretty good example of the kind of not-quite-lying that experts do all the time.
That letter should be read as political speech, not science.
My point isn't that it's not bad. My point is that you should disbelieve letters like that.
[edited to add]: To be clear, I agree it's really bad for a lot of reasons. The fact that it is political speech is itself bad. I just don't think it's a counterexample to Scott's argument.
I think I agree, but I think there's also an overton window on science communication, and stuff like the letter(tm) pushes everything in an ungood direction. I keep waiting for someone to finally come out and say "Look, it was a crisis moment, there was plenty of reasonable doubt in both directions, and we couldn't afford to have talking heads on the 5 o'clock news impugning the country that not only had the most data on the virus, but also makes a substantial chunk of our meds and ppe based on scant speculation" That to me is a perfectly reasonable defense, if someone would have the guts to say it.
To elaborate a little bit more:
I think one correct takeaway from the letter is that there probably is (or was at the time) some real genetic evidence that rules out or pushes back strongly against at least some varieties of non-natural origin. Another takeaway is that the question of the virus's origin is a politically-charged topic, and that the scientific community is probably going to be pretty biased in how they approach it. When a letter talks about "standing in solidarity" and "fighting disinformation" and only one sentence out of 18 makes a scientific claim, you should assume that it is mostly unreliable.
The elephant in the room is the censorship practiced by the big social media platforms, which spread to a lot of the "blogosphere". So opinions and evidence that ran counter to the guidance from the CDC and WHO was suppressed as "misinformation". The party line was / is that Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin were not only ineffective, but HCQ was dangerous due to a chance for heart issues. Yet there is a study from 2005 published on Pub.Med (an NIH website) that concludes that HCQ is effective against SARS viruses when given early and is well tolerated. The approach of Uttar Pradesh, where teams actively sought positive Covid cases and provided a kit that included Ivermectin and other palliatives, appears to have been quite successful.
The biggest red flag for me, besides the suppression of dialog, is the interference with the doctor / patient relationship. HCQ and Ivermectin, for example, are widely used with little adverse reaction. From the beginning there has been anecdotal evidence from doctors that patients who take HCQ for their autoimmune problems have handled Covid quite well. There is no evidence I've seen that HCQ or Ivermectin cause problems for Covid patients. So what is the justification for the reported suspension of doctors for prescribing them off label?
Which leads to the third major problem - the sloppy statistics with poorly documented rules for collection and the lack of granularity. Just today I saw where the stats from Hamburg were grossly wrong in asserting that the majority of recent cases were from the unvaccinated. The handling of Covid 19 by the medical and political establishment has been a hot mess.
> some real genetic evidence that rules out or pushes back strongly against at least some varieties of non-natural origin
That is much more narrow than what was claimed, and a team of scientists writing in a scientific journal know the difference.
> When a letter talks about "standing in solidarity" and "fighting disinformation" and only one sentence out of 18 makes a scientific claim, you should assume that it is mostly unreliable.
This is a strange way of reading that Lancet letter.
- It's in a scientific publication
- Written by scientists
- The only scientific claim made is that "this coronavirus originated in wildlife"
- They pepper that claim with a bunch of citations and erroneously state that those papers "overwhelmingly" support their one scientific claim
- The result of the letter is to push discussion of a legitimate line of scientific inquiry out of serious consideration by both scientists and the general public
Yes, there are the political statements in there. But there was a concrete scientific claim that appeared to non-experts that it was well-supported in the scientific literature. That lie was designed to be persuasive precisely BECAUSE it was made as scientific claim, not because it was an appeal to authority by scientists. That distinction crosses all the lines Scott lays out above.
But when scientists use their authority to peddle politics, they hurt their science a lot more than they help their politics.
But it was published by scientists, speaking as scientists, in a scientific journal.
The same letter had the chutzpah to claim "We declare no competing interests."
I get pretty angry when someone does something that obviously serves no purpose except to deceive or confuse, and then it gets defended on the grounds that "everyone" sees through it so it's not really a lie.
Like, there's a price tag that says $9.99, and then someone tries to pay $9 for it, and the clerk scornfully explains that it costs $10, what's wrong with you? The store is engaged in deliberately-engineered psychological warfare to confuse their customers! It's not *especially* effective psychological warfare; most people manage to figure out the actual price (eventually); but it's effective enough that stores are measurably making money from it. Getting angry when a customer is confused by the thing that YOU did with THE EXPLICIT GOAL OF CONFUSING THEM is like beating someone and then complaining that they bled on you.
If the REASON you refer to your tax increases as "revenue enhancements" is that it makes people get less upset about them, then it is obviously a lie, and it obviously matters--otherwise it wouldn't work! Claiming that it's not a lie, or that no one is fooled, or that no one who matters is fooled, is just an attempt to escape responsibility for telling lies.
There are situations where it's legitimately OK to say untrue things because you aren't INTENDING to fool anyone--jokes, sarcasm, fiction, etc. But if the whole point is to profit by impeding your audience's understanding, then this defense is not even slightly available to you.
True, very good point on the 9.99 thing. I never got caught by those cheap tricks, convert them so automatically it does not even bother me. But my GF is often caught, and you just made me realise I should not be mildly annoyed at her for that, but mildly annoyed at the supermarkets...
I think the primary harm is not from people forming inaccurate conscious beliefs about the price, but people having a split-second gut reaction to the first digit before they've even finished reading the whole number.
I suspect a lot of people who believe they are "never caught" by this are nonetheless being influenced to be statistically more likely to buy the thing compared to a counterfactual where the price tag said $10.
But I believe the subconscious nudging is on a continuum with the people who actually try to hand the cashier $9. The $9 people are just the ones where the trick worked better than the store would have preferred.
Even if it truly doesn't work on you, I think you should be upset that they tried. When manipulations work, you often don't notice; if you catch someone in a failed attempt, you should punish them as a deterrent against trying. (Compare: punishing an attempted pick-pocket who didn't manage to get your wallet.)
Unfortunately, many casually-manipulative business practices are so common in our culture that you can't find a competitor who doesn't do them. I don't feel our culture is sufficiently upset about this.
I don't recall seeing any "$X.99" prices in the (Australian) supermarkets for a couple of years. Not sure exactly why they stopped, but they seemingly did.
There's price discrimination via hide-the-cheap-brand, though.
You can also consider it as part of the social lubricant that allows a society of individuals with an enormous range of personal interests to coexist peacefully. In a large number of social transactions, probably most of them, the value received is not exactly balanced -- could hardly *be* exactlyt balanced. A certain amount of genteel obfuscation allows the relative gainer to appear gracious and the relative loser to save some face.
Id est, to take your simple example, when I buy a gallon of gas the cost of the gas is in the present but the value for me is in the future, so I'm a little grumbly about the transaction. Jesus! $70 to fill the tank! Grrr. Putting the price at $4.99 a gallon allows me a tiny bit of psychological self-delusion that I'm paying about $4/gallon instead of about $5/gallon. I *know* the truth if I think about it even for a second, and I've reconciled myself to its necessity, but the "5" is not staring me in the face the whole time I'm at the gas pump, so it's less annoying. The oil company is thus doing itself and me a slight favor by obfuscating the true price very slightly, so that it's less in my face and the transaction takes place with less annoyance.
We do this all through language. It's why the caring physican speaks of your mother's "passing" instead of using the brutal non-euphemistic word "death." It's why the teacher says you "aren't getting a passing grade" instead of the more brutal "you're failing." It's why that girl said "I think we should see other people" instead of "you're boring and I would rather cut my throat than commit to you." These things can be looked upon as "lies" because they are not unvarnished truth, but they also allow us psychological space to accommodate ourselves to some harsh realities. They are a very necessary part of how a species like ours gets along without incessant fighting over small (but painful) gains and losses.
True. Maybe worth to mention that overdoing it makes it a sarcasm, which is worse than brutal truth, it's rubbing in your face that not you are not only the looser in this transaction, but that the winner do not even fear you just a little and make fun of your helplessness. You are not the looser of the transaction, you are a looser.
Like the health minister in my country. I always though that he had a half-smile when he announced the new restrictions, contact limitations or lockdowns, punctuated by "I know it's hard" or equivalent....
Sure, people can be assholes, and power corrupts. I'm just pointing out Chesterton's gate here. Ambiguity in language exists not because generations of humans are too stupid to think up precise terms, or because they are always trying to con each other, but also because we use those ambiguities to help ease social tensions that would otherwise have us at each other's throats more than we are.
I don't disagree with you really, but I want to point out that the clerk isn't the party who is carrying out psychological warfare. They probably didn't even place the price sticker. I think they're justifiably irritated in this case. They're not trying to trick anyone.
If the corporate overlords showed up irritated at the customer, it'd be a different story.
Clerks get berated for a lot of stuff that is not their fault.
It's highly likely that a given supermarket worker has placed at least a few price tags; my understanding is that restocking shelves vs. cashier are more of an as-needed substitution than different job titles.
More generally, you're getting at one of the basic functions of bureaucracy i.e. to conceal the guilty party both in the physical and informational sense from the aggrieved party. "Throw your hands up in defeat" is one response to that, yes, but it's obviously not perfect given that it's literally letting the bad guys win.
Right, I wasn't advocating for throwing your hands up in defeat, I was advocated getting mad at the appropriate party.
I expect people to describe things in the way most beneficial to them, and trying to move away from this local maximum is near impossible.
Well what else? If as an organism I am not 100% all the time maximizing my personal welfare (or at least that of my genetically or memetically related tribe) then my DNA is nonoptimal and my germ line will be replaced by another that isn't. Or rather, it would already have been replaced a million years ago, so you're only going to find an individual *not* acting that way if they are some weird sport mutant.
Right, you'd need everyone to be completely fair and neutral and then someone else enforcing that.
I apply one filter to politicians and advertisers, where it's generally "I can't prove them wrong in a court of law."
I don't have much choice in politicians and advertisers, but I can choose my news media I listen to. If I get the wrong impression (after applying filter), they're wrong.
I don't think that this reductionist view that all our societal interactions are this strictly determined by genetics is correct. Genetics are certainly a large influence on behaviour, but a) genetics do not get tuned to maximise reproductive success but merely avoid too-serious reproductive failure, and b) our primary means of maintaining social structures is environmental, not genetic. Most humans are certainly capable and often do take short- and long-term actions that are not genetically optimal.
Agree. Good points. But instead of getting angry, I want to do as Scott suggests and figure out how to get better at finding the signal.